less than three hours later they were meekly seated in the Governors carriage, suffering from the hangover of a lifetime. They made the interesting discovery that every heartbeat caused their eyes to protrude from their sockets and the long-closed fontanelles in their skulls to split open for seconds at a time. The road to the harbour was still damp after last nights downpour, so the carriage bowled smoothly along past the government offices and colonial servants’ residences, through the palm grove and past the five unoccupied gibbets, executions having been suspended for three days on either side of the Kaiser’s birthday. Ada Schnee charitably kept her unspoken promise and refrained from talking throughout the drive. The Governor, being indisposed himself, was shading his bleary eyes beneath the rim of his golden sun helmet. In a low voice, he offered the Papenburgers a headache remedy containing opium, which they gratefully accepted. Only then did his wife laugh with merciless gaiety and remark that the African hangover was to the European variety as felis leo to felis domestica, in other words, as the African lion to the European pussycat. This, she said, was because profuse sweating made one even more dehydrated after consuming alcohol in the tropics and caused one’s body cells - notably the brain cells - to shrink to unusual extent, leading to a reduction in the total volume of the brain. The result of this shrinkage was that the meningeal membranes became detached from the cranium, which inevitably occasioned the exceptionally violent headaches from which the four gentlemen were quite clearly suffering. The four gentlemen nodded, murmured their thanks for this information, and longed for the opiate’s anaesthetic properties to take effect.
The wide sweep of the bay lay still in the golden morning light, but the station forecourt just inland of it was thronged with a dense, vibrant, buzzing horde of Africans. Men, women and children of all ages were talking, laughing, shouting and shuffling around in the dust. Gesticulating hands held high above their heads, they swayed to and fro, back and forth, but remained on the spot like grain undulating in the wind. Anton Riiter, who was put in mind of an insurrection, a general strike or civil war, cast a startled, enquiring glance at the Governor’s wife.
‘People from the African part of town,’ she explained brightly. ‘They’ve spotted the smoke from the locomotive and are eager to earn some tips from the passengers. It’s an ordeal you’ll have to undergo.’
The coachman lashed out with his whip a couple of times, clearing the way for them. The horses walked on, but the carriage came to a full stop after only a few metres and they had to get out. Riiter, Wendt and Tellmann had scarcely set foot on terra firma when they were mobbed. Naked children plucked at their trouser legs and begged for small change, half-naked women pulled their lower lips down with one finger and bared their teeth, muscular men, stripped to the waist, jostled for the privilege of holding the door for them, carrying a suitcase, showing them the way to the train. All were yelling and laughing and shoving and sweating and smelling of the spicy foods they must have eaten the previous day, and all combined to form a teeming human kaleidoscope: dangling limbs in every stage of decay, immodestly bobbing breasts, unabashedly bulging buttocks, shuffling bare feet, folds, furrows and wrinkles, lips and nipples, swelling muscles, sweating brows, quivering nostrils, pierced ears with wooden plugs in them, bared teeth filed to a point, weals covered with scar tissue, eyes oozing pus, suppurating tropical sores, crippled limbs.
The Governor and his wife, who had more experience and fewer scruples about forging a path through this throng, reached the train well before the Papenburgers. They took up their positions on either side of the carriage steps and bade their guests goodbye. Governor Schnee shook hands with them, wishing them a good journey and lots of luck. Ada Schnee insisted on giving each of her proteges some tailor-made
advice. Rudolf Tellmann she warned never to drink unboiled water or go hunting by himself. She impressed on Anton Ruter that physical exertion under the tropical sun could very quickly prove fatal to the European organism, and that native labourers must always be treated firmly but fairly. When young Wendt’s turn came, however, she merely cocked her right eyebrow, looked into his eyes for two or three seconds, and said: ‘Take good care of yourself.’
The train pulled out punctually on the last stroke of eight by the clock on the Roman Catholic church. The askari band under the direction of Oberleutnant Goring struck up a farewell rendering of Hail to Thee in Victor’s Crown, Ada Schnee waved and revealed a last glimpse of her incomparably white teeth while the Governor stood beside her, wearily waving until the train disappeared into the coconut plantation that lay beyond the railway workshops and the power station.
It was swelteringly hot inside the carriage, but the mosquito netting over the windows filtered the glaring sunlight into a pleasant penumbra. On the left-hand or shadier side of the carriage, Anton Ruter sank back against one of upholstered seats - they could be converted at night into comfortable beds - and focused his opium-weary gaze on the palm trees gliding past. Before long, as Governor Schnee had predicted, the palms gave way to an almost homely-looking broad-leafed forest which German colonists had christened the Sachsenwald. Then the train turned inland and climbed into the Pugu Hills not far from the coast. A black steward in a white uniform entered and silently placed glasses and carafes of water on the little tables beside Ruter, Wendt and Tellmann, all of whom were now seated on the shadier side of the carriage. The three men thanked him and poured themselves some water. The better to rehydrate their shrunken brain cells, they drained glass after glass until the carafes were empty, then tipped back their seats and proceeded to catch up on the sleep they’d missed because of the Kaiser’s birthday.
Anton Riiter’s headache was gone when he awoke. The train had left the coastal hills behind and was traversing the endless expanse of the Mkata steppe. Ruter admired the graceful curves the track described as it crossed the hilly terrain. He put the radii of the bends at a minimum of
two hundred metres and the trains average speed at a respectable twentyfive kilometres an hour. He also noted that the track had been well ballasted throughout, and that there was an adequate number of points, water towers and sidings. Whenever they crossed a trestle bridge a hundred or two hundred metres above a swamp or river, he calculated the cost of the materials and the size of the workforce required to construct it. And, because he himself was an experienced worker, he could sense in his own arms and legs what an inhumanly strenuous job it must have been to build this railway. When the track cut through a hill he estimated how many thousand labourers must have toiled there with pick and shovel and for how many months. The very thought caused his fingers, shoulders and back to ache. He gloomily surmised that, in this climate and devoid of medical attention, the men must have died like flies from exhaustion, cholera, malaria, sleeping sickness and blackwater fever - that the fields around their depopulated villages must have lain fallow and the old men, women and children left at home have starved to death. He could hear the crack of whips and the rattle of chains, the words of command in German and the groans of men being flogged, the grunting of oxen and the creaking of wooden wagon wheels on stony ground, the dull thud of sledgehammers and the rasping hiss of shovels, the thunderous roar of exploding dynamite and the wailing of widows. All these sounds mingled with the pounding of the locomotive and the two-four rhythm of the wheels speeding along the track as Riiter relapsed into a gratifyingly innocent sleep.
The train entered a sparse tract of umbrella acacias just as the deliquescent red sun went down over the plain. Riiter slept on. Wendt, sitting back against his upholstered seat, swigged at a bottle of Dar-es-Salaam wheat beer the steward had brought him. Rudolf Tellmann was standing on the platform outside, sniffing the breeze and gazing out across the endless expanse of undulating savannah from which jutted isolated, sharply defined clumps of elephant grass taller than a man. Here and there the chalk-white bones of dead animals lay mouldering on the luminous, brick-red soil. Sometimes a massive baobab tree would loom above the plain, or an immensely tall, incredibly slender palmyra palm, or an occasional squat sycamore.
Tellmann had seen a great many animals that day. The first thing he intended to do when he got to Lake Tanganyika was to write his wife a long letter about them. He had also seen a great many people, but he wouldn’t write about them for the time being. Up to date he had sighted sixty-one giraffes and more zebras than there were seagulls in Papenburg. He had seen hartebeest and ostriches, brown hyenas and Swalla antelopes, and he had been able to identify them all with great accuracy thanks to Petermann’s Afrikanisches Tierlexikon, which his wife had given him as a leaving present. He had seen Grants gazelles and crowned cranes, duikers and warthogs and countless vultures - even five marabous and an African fish eagle, and then at last, just before sunset, a first herd of elephants. But the most colourful sight of the day had been a flock of pink flamingos many hundreds strong. He would also be sure to tell his wife about the millions of fireflies that had lit up the plain since nightfall, and, possibly, about the baboons which, with glinting eyes and in weirdly human postures, threw stones at the passing train and grimaced in a way that left you uncertain whether they were amused or infuriated. He would describe all of these things to his wife to the best of his ability, to give her pleasure and prevent her from fretting about him. Other things he would pass over in silence, at least for the present. The naked women in chains, the coachmans use of the whip, the five gibbets - no, he would spare her those. Nor would he write about the Governor and his golden helmet, or the chadless Governors wife, or the pear brandy. He might tell her about them later, when he was sitting at the kitchen table back home, but he would probably keep mum about them even then. Two months gone, another ten to go. A year passed quickly, especially at his age. He would do his job and then go home; nothing else concerned him. He had to ensure that 160,000 rivets were properly in place so that the ship was watertight and seaworthy. Once that was done he would politely take his leave, return home and draw the money due to him. People could use the Gotzen to transport their goods, sail the lake and earn her keep. The rest was none of his business or responsibility. He wanted no part of it.
At bedtime the steward reappeared. He took the three hitherto unused
seats on the right-hand side of the carriage apart, spread white sheets over them and carefully smoothed them out, plumped up the pillows and deposited a red hibiscus blossom on each. Then he suspended mosquito nets from the hooks provided and arranged them around the beds, making sure that the weights sewn into them were resting neatly on the floor. Each of the three window tables was allotted a bottle of water and a glass, a banana and a small tin of biscuits.
Hermann Wendt stared out of the window rather than watch the steward at his work. He saw sparks spew from the locomotives funnel and go whirling off into the darkness as if keeping an assignation with the fireflies. From time to time, when the train halted to take on water or firewood, the air was filled with the endless, monotonous whine of cicadas. When they stopped abruptly, as though in response to some unspoken command, he could sometimes hear the sound of distant drums or, on one occasion, a muffled, spine-chilling roar that might have been made by a lion. Reflected in the window Wendt could see the steward pad softly to and fro, climb over sleeping Riiters outstretched legs and silently busy himself with bottles and glasses. The reflection of his swarthy face could not be seen against the darkness outside, nor could his hands and trousers, so his white tunic and cap seemed to float through the air in ghostly isolation. At length the tunic and cap approached and came to a halt. When Wendt turned to look, the steward enquired - in a heart-warming Swabian accent - whether ‘master’ would care for another bottle of beer.
Young Wendt felt embarrassed that a man should have made his bed. He would have felt less so had the steward been a woman, but this man was elderly into the bargain - at least twice Wendts age. He was old enough to be his father, or possibly his grandfather. It was unthinkable that his father should ever make his bed. No one in Papenburg would ever polish his shoes as the steward had done earlier. Wendt knew that, once he returned from Africa, he would never again sleep between starched cotton sheets. Never again would he stay in a hotel room provided with running water, electric light and bedside telephone. Never again would he be served his breakfast in bed, never again would chambermaids shuffle around on their knees before him or people in
4i
the street lower their eyes and step aside to let him pass. At home in Papenburg he would no longer be a rich and powerful man who casually, while taking his postprandial stroll, saved whole families from starvation with the small change that jingled in his pocket. Nor would he ever again be a distinguished foreigner whose noble birth entitled him to the favours of any local girl he fancied. At home in Papenburg he would simply revert to being young Wendt, who did a bit of reading at the Workers’ Cultural Association and had a tidy sum of money put aside for a man of his age. He realized that his ascent into the moneyed class was valid only in Africa, and that the journey back to Papenburg would entail a return to the proletariat. He also grasped the injustice of both processes: his temporary social advancement and his inevitable relapse. You didn’t have to have completed a basic course in the Marxist theory of history - Rolecke the mechanic gave one at the youth centre every winter - to know that. Although he had no idea whether or how the Governor’s golden helmet fitted into the conceptual edifice of historical materialism, or whether the female chain gang’s chafed and bleeding collar bones constituted an essential step on the road to overcoming capitalism, he did know what his own attitude to all those things would be from now on: henceforward, he would clean his own shoes. He wouldn’t soil his hands by becoming a slave owner. He would make his own bed and cook for himself and keep his hut clean himself. He wouldn’t change sides. That he was earning more money out here than he’d ever earned at the Meyer Werft shipyard was perfectly in order; after all, he was giving up a year of his life and braving dangers far from home, and he would be working long days under the most arduous conditions. That entitled him to quid pro quo. Just then he noticed that the steward was still hovering over him, wanting to know if he should bring him a wheat beer. Wendt got to his feet.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, resting a hand on the man’s shoulder, ‘I’ll get one myself. Where do you keep them?’
5