1
When Mpumi was making plans to study in Germany, everyone warned her about the cold. You’re an African, they said, a warmblooded creature. You’re going to freeze your tail off. But she loved the winters of her student years. The place was made for snow. The first time she saw snow falling on München (she’d quickly learned not to say ‘Munich’ like a tourist) she thought it looked like a Christmas card. People were ready for winter too: they had double glazing and central heating, down jackets and fur-lined boots, and flaps on their hats to cover their ears. They had chains for their tyres and ploughs to clear the streets, and men were employed to strew gravel on the sidewalks so you didn’t slip on the ice. There were little metal hurdles at the doors of the apartment blocks where you could scrape the mud off the treads of your boots before you went inside and there were hooks and shelves in the hallways for gloves, scarves, caps, jackets, boots. It was all very organised and sensible. The exact opposite of Joburg where people felt it necessary to pretend, despite the evidence of numb fingers and chattering teeth, that the winters were mild, and sat in their lounges in jerseys and coats, shivering stoically. Even when it was icy outside in Germany, you could always warm up in a café or on a tram. If the winter became unbearable, a student counsellor had told her, she could go to the wellness centre and lie under a sunlamp, and her scholarship would cover it. But it never got that far. Just when the winter wore her down, spring came, a proper change of season, leaves of a green that was new to her fuzzed out on every grey stem, people went into the parks to bathe their startlingly pale bodies in sunshine, and everyone seemed happy to be alive. Frühling. It was a good word, one that sounded like how it felt.
No, it wasn’t the Germans’ weather she couldn’t adjust to, it was their ways. Mpumi had a suspicious mind. Honesty did not come naturally to people, she thought, they were as likely to lie as tell the truth. So she appreciated people who were frank, who did not stand on ceremony and spoke their minds, and she aspired to be like that herself. This was unwise in her new environment, where social interaction was layered with protocol and decorum, and titles and formalities counted for something. Many subjects made people uncomfortable and she needed to master an idiom of silence and suggestion to avoid giving offence. It amazed her that people who seemed so free in the moment, the grey-haired women leaning against the stone embankments by the river with their long breasts bared to the sun, the naked young men chasing after frisbees in the Englischer Garten, were so ill at ease with the past. The word ‘Jew’ was enough to make them squirm. She had to learn to watch her tongue.
Alex was a relief. She met him in her sociology class at the university. He offered to help her with her German, but he had a different course of study in mind. She did not usually fall into bed with a man she’d just met, but she felt out of her natural habitat and in need of an ally, and his attentions were reassuring. He proved to be an enthusiastic lover, always willing and able enough, if a little self-regarding.
Alex’s other pastime was arguing. He was interested in many things, architecture, art, new music, frogs, glass-blowing, mountaineering, and he had strong opinions on most of them. They argued constantly and disagreed often. He drove her mad and in return she did her best to provoke him. He was not quick to take offence, like many of the people she met, and so their love affair lasted. In fact, this passionate sparring, which was the very opposite of the bickering some couples fell into, bound them together.
The elephant in the room, Mpumi said one evening as they walked home from a concert, is that this beautiful city was the cradle of Nazism. (There were elephants in every room that summer: no conversation was complete without one.)
That was a long time ago, said Alex. I don’t mean to say that we shouldn’t be vigilant, but we’ve moved on.
They’ve still got swastikas on buildings, but you’re not supposed to notice. And if you do, you’re not supposed to say anything. She’d been walking in the city with another university friend a few days earlier, and as they passed down the colonnaded portico of some public building, he’d told her to look up, and there in relief on the ceiling was a swastika.
I know exactly what place you’re talking about, said Alex, and I happen to think it’s a good thing that symbol is still there. People forget too easily. There should be at least one reminder.
But isn’t it illegal?
It’s the only one of its kind. You can see how it was overlooked. Do you know what’s hanging over your head at this moment?
She couldn’t help looking up and of course found nothing but sky, which made them both laugh.
Then Alex gave her a lecture. His grandparents’ generation, he said, and even some of their children, had been unwilling or unable to confront the past. Just look at the case of Günter Grass. But his own generation, young people in general, had risen to the challenge. They wanted to know their history, so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past, and this meant they had to confront what was unpleasant and accept responsibility. If anything, they assumed too much responsibility. After all, someone of twenty-five or thirty could hardly be held to account for things that happened decades before they were born. Yet they thought about injustice every day and tried to make reparation. It was this sensitivity towards the past, almost an overcompensation for the cowardly forgetfulness of previous generations, that might create the impression people were reluctant to talk about their history, that doing so made them uneasy. It was out of concern for the feelings of the other. For her feelings. What she saw as avoidance was in fact a sign of deeply felt acknowledgement.
You know I’m not Jewish, right? Mpumi said.
As the months went by, and they spent more time together, Alex made it his business to learn about South Africa. His knowledge of apartheid had been evident from the start, but now he often surprised her by referring to historical events and topical debates.
The elephant in the room, she said one evening after a lecture at the Pinakothek der Moderne, is that West Germany colonised the GDR. The poor East Germans opened their borders and their arms, and the West Germans marched in and took everything and put half of them out of a job. And then they tried to make them feel better by selling them last season’s clothes and the season before’s furniture.
No, no, said Alex, you’ve been listening to Dagmar who is full of resentment. It’s not like that. You don’t understand how difficult it is to put a country back together after so many years of division. There were imbalances, economic and otherwise, it was only to be expected after years of stagnation in the East. People became dispirited, demoralised, you could even say lazy. The wealth and enterprise were all on one side.
They were waiting for a tram and now one approached and he had to pause while they climbed on and found a seat. Then the lesson continued.
You of all people should understand this, coming from South Africa where all the development was in the white suburbs and the black townships were places of poverty and hardship. And what do we see now, nearly twenty years after the dawn of democracy, this pattern still exists. Even after the Reconstruction and Development Programme it exists. Poor people, black people are still living mainly in the townships like Gugulethu. And certainly white people, rich people are still to be found mainly in the suburbs.
Why, out of a sea of possibilities, she wondered, had he chosen Gugulethu? And why hadn’t he mentioned a random white suburb to balance the argument?
Of course there are exceptions, he went on, like you, people who have moved from the townships to the suburbs. Although I would be surprised indeed if many people have moved the other way, from the suburbs to the townships. Not so? Whereas in East Germany now the standard of living is ten times higher than it was under the Communists. As one would expect. And so it’s strange to me that you view the application of West German money, expertise and innovation as colonisation. This is when a territory is appropriated and the indigenous people do not benefit at all.
There were many arguments like this—many elephants, they joked—about inequality and entitlement. The Germans think they own everything, she said once. You should see them when they’re on holiday—and when are they ever at home?—they strut around in other people’s countries as if the place belongs to them. These observations were based on a single encounter with a busload of German tourists at Cape Point, but she kept that to herself.
We Germans are fascinated by the other, he said. That’s why we are always travelling. We cannot get enough of this otherness.
You value difference, she snapped, only to the extent that it reinforces your unshakeable sense of yourself.
They had an argument about Leni Riefenstahl, of all people, when Mpumi found her book about the Nuba on his shelf. It’s terrible, she said, it’s like wildlife photography.
But she’s celebrating these people, Alex protested, celebrating their beauty. How can this be wrong? You can see how much she loves them.
Alex loved the colour of her skin. If only he would make less of it, she thought. He liked to watch their bodies in bed, pushing himself away from her to gaze at the convergence of their hips, the coming together, entranced, she thought, by the contrast.
When they were walking in the city, and he put his arm around her waist, she could feel his pride. He was showing her off, as if he’d brought her back from a faraway land.
2
Tell me about Alex, Beth said. He must have meant something to you.
Why do you say that?
You talk about him a lot.
I don’t think so.
Mpumi and Beth had been friends for a year. They’d got talking after a Pilates class when Beth lost her keys and needed to borrow a phone. It was an odd connection, Mpumi thought, they came from completely different worlds, yet they discovered that they had much in common. They were both stay-at-home mums, with a toddler at nursery school and a husband in property, and they lived in the same suburb. They could have walked over to one another’s houses for tea and a chat, if they’d formed that kind of friendship and Joburg was that kind of town. Instead they met in coffee shops in out-of-the-way places, like this one in the Pool and Patio Centre, where she could imagine she was in another time zone.
Does Phil know about your German? Beth asked.
Of course, Mpumi said, we share everything. Not the gory details, that would be a bad idea. But we’ve never pretended that our lives began the day we met.
She and Phil were happily married. Whereas Beth and Leonard had issues and were seeing a counsellor. Could that be why she was asking these questions? Being frank was a good thing, she knew, but it did no harm to have boundaries.
I’ve been thinking about Germany, Mpumi said. There’s a lot of tension there now with migrants, you know.
Beth did not know. I don’t have a political bone in my body. I’m only interested in people.
It’s scary what’s going on. When I lived there it was very unusual for a black person to be harassed on the street and now it’s starting to happen all the time. The right wing are getting stronger all over Europe. Germany is holding the line, that’s what the commentators say. Who would have imagined? I saw a documentary the other day about these houses in small towns where they put refugees from Syria and Somalia and places like that. So the locals can get to know them and their ways of doing things. It was quite inspiring. Maybe we need something like that here.
Beth shrugged. I just noticed that this Alex features in your animal stories.
My animal stories!
What a ridiculous idea. She could barely tell one animal from another. She used to think it was because she never went to the game reserve as a child, where she might have picked up this knowledge, but lately she’d decided that she simply had no feel for the natural world. Phil had taken her to the Kruger Park a few times before the baby was born, and she’d tried to memorise the markings and the shapes of the horns, but they always slipped away. She hardly knew the difference between a springbok and an impala. Are you supposed to be an expert on wildlife just because you live in Africa?
I don’t even like animals, she said to Beth.
Well, when you tell stories about those years, you go on about the weather and this guy Alex, and there’s always a big ugly animal.
Mpumi looked into her coffee cup where a linden leaf, or could it be a heart, was buckling in the froth.
3
In autumn Mpumi went to Paris for a week. It was an objective of the scholarship that she travel and broaden her horizons. Alex was supposed to go with her, but then his mother took ill and he rushed home to Bielefeld. Mpumi was relieved. She wanted to discover the city on her own.
Elation. That was the only word to describe it. She walked everywhere, to all the places she thought she should go, to Montmartre, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries. She ate crêpes and croissants and sat in pavement cafés with an overpriced glass of burgundy and an unread newspaper. She felt elated.
On the third day, she spent the morning in the Sociology Library at Paris Descartes and her mood began to shift. Perhaps it was dealing with the staff in her broken French. She was doing quite well, she thought, until the librarian, having solved a perplexing pronunciation, gave a weary smile and switched to English.
In the afternoon she went to the Museum of World Cultures. Her student card got her a discount on the ticket and she sat in the lobby to look at the floorplan. Weapons, tools, skeletons. Now that she was here the rooms full of artefacts disheartened her. But it felt good to be out of the chill and the atmosphere was soothing. It was an old-fashioned museum, all polished wood under a coating of dust instead of the plate glass and bare concrete she’d become accustomed to. A temporary exhibition in a distant annex caught her eye: the musical instruments of Vanuatu. She had no special interest in music and only a vague sense of where Vanuatu was, but she needed a goal, one that avoided mummies and shrunken heads. For an hour or so she wandered like a sleepwalker between cultures, gazing into cabinets containing headdresses and trinkets and bones.
She was on the point of turning back when a step through a doorway brought her to a sunlit corner of a tropical forest. The sound of running water and the smell of vegetation were so surprising that she thought she’d strayed into a research facility. She was on a small viewing platform with boards on either side displaying pictures of plants and their botanical names. She stepped up to the railing and looked down. A pool of clear water lined with pebbles shimmered among sandy banks and reeds, surrounded by a profusion of shrubs and trees, and creepers hanging down from the branches, with glimpses between them of a sky she knew must be artificial only because of the angle.
Half-submerged on the banks, two crocodiles lay still as stone. She leaned there for a few minutes gripping the cold metal rail. What were living creatures doing in a museum? She had just begun to think they were made of cement when one of them stirred and sank deeper into the water. These crusty reptiles slumbering on the edge of their artificial swamp brought tears to her eyes.
A woman and a little boy came up beside her. She could tell from the child’s excitement as he ran to the railing that this was a familiar stop. Maman brought out her purse and emptied her change into his cupped palm. Choosing carefully, he began to hurl the coins at the crocodiles on the sand below. Was such a thing allowed? Before she could look for a prohibitory notice or a custodian, she saw with surprise that what she’d taken for pebbles or flecks of golden light in the water were coins, hundreds, thousands of coins. The crocodile habitat was a wishing well. After a few near misses, the boy struck one of the crocodiles, and he and his mother gave a cheer, although the animal did not stir. Is this what makes your wish come true? Mpumi wondered. Striking the beast?
As she walked back to her hotel, a seed of anger germinated in her heart. How lightly the woman’s sleek leather purse lay in her grasp. How perfectly the boy’s beret—yes, he was a French boy and he wore a beret—sat on his beautiful head of brown hair. No child should be so stylish, Mpumi thought. Then the stylish little boy had leant over the railing and skimmed a coin down through the warm air, and it had bounced off the crocodile’s scaly back. A murderous rage uncoiled in her chest. She should have slapped his sweet white face. Pushed him over the railing. Let him take his chances in the swamp.
The more she thought about these people and their confident certainties, the angrier she became. Not just the boy and his mother, but the people striding past her, the women who could walk in high heels down a cobbled street, planting their pointy shoes in the centre of every stone without a wobble or a downward glance, the men who sat at little tables observing these women with such calm appraisal. It reminded her of the connoisseurs in the museums, the real art lovers, those who skirted the huddles of tourists pressing handsets to their ears, and headed for some small brown rectangle in a corner that deserved their attention. She hated them too.
Her anger reached out into the crooked streets like a burgeoning vine, pushing tendrils under doors and through postboxes. By the time she got home, she was ready to strangle someone. She thought of calling Alex, who could put this in perspective for her, but her feelings seemed too childish, too outlandish to share, so she argued with herself all night. The whole city was built on plunder, that was the heart of the problem. It was grand and glorious, everyone agreed, but it had got this way through theft. They had gone out, the French, the Belgians, the Spanish, the English, the Dutch and taken what they wanted, animal, vegetable or mineral, by force and subterfuge. And their heirs were these self-assured, refined Europeans, with their overstocked markets and museums, their progressive constitutions and liveable cities, their libraries full of books, their banks full of cash.
She had two more days in Paris. She could not face the Sociology Library again, but she went to the Musée d’Orsay and the Rodin Museum. In Notre Dame her nose began to bleed and she lay down in a wooden pew and looked up at the stained glass windows. It was very comfortable. When a custodian came to tell her to sit up, she thrust out her wad of bloody tissues and the woman hurried away. Once the bleeding had stopped, she lit a candle for her mother and went back into the streets. She walked along the Seine as the sun went down and ate in a brasserie, and her good temper returned.
By the time she got back to Munich, she could joke about the whole episode with Alex. My postcolonial meltdown, she called it.
I’m glad you’re angry with the French too, he said. In the grand colonial scheme, we Germans were not very successful. We were good at organising conferences, not so good at scrambling for the spoils. If we’d had more Lebensraum in Africa, perhaps we would not have gone looking for it in Europe. Not so?
Her crocodile story fascinated him. Are you sure you were in a museum? he asked. I cannot imagine it. I think you must have wandered into the zoo by mistake.
I don’t care what sort of place it is. The poor things shouldn’t be there at all. Lying about all day like housewives at the wellness centre. Having money thrown at them. They should be in the wild. Hunting. Swimming.
Later Alex said: It’s obvious that you’re projecting onto the animals. Being here among the Bavarians—I didn’t say barbarians—out of your usual environment, you feel uncomfortable, and so you imagine that these crocodiles feel it too. They must also be homesick. But you know very well that they are incapable of reflecting on such things. As far as they’re concerned, they might be living in paradise. It’s always warm, the pond never dries up, and piles of fish fall from the heavens at noon. They do not need to hunt; they cannot be hunted. They must be the luckiest, happiest crocodiles in the world.
Even later he said: Crocodiles. It’s so komisch. A little monkey I would understand—but a crocodile? Such a big ugly thing.
Alex decided they should get married and go to Italy. Mpumi wanted to go home. After the arguments for and against, the angry outbursts and tearful reconciliations, when it became clear that she would not change her mind, he remembered her trip to Paris and tried to have the last word: What kind of African are you anyway? Your friends at the museum are not even crocodiles. They’re alligators.