Aus prisoner of war camp, the former colony of German South West Africa, now a British protectorate, 1915
On this cold night in the desert I have come to the end of our tale.
Colonel von Deimling heard from the Boer, du Preez, that he had left Blake wounded, to die in pain like a dog in the desert. The colonel was a man driven by efficiency and wanted proof that Blake, the man also known as Edward Prestwich, was dead. He ordered a patrol under his aide, Leutnant Kurtz, to go into the desert to where the ambush had taken place and ascertain that Blake had indeed perished.
As the Landespolizei doctor, I was ordered to accompany the patrol and ensure that Blake did not return alive. Von Deimling was furious that Claire had escaped and Kurtz and I were told that unless we confirmed Blake was dead he would have both our heads.
I confess I was surprised to find Blake still alive. How he survived nearly twenty-four hours in the desert, under the burning sun and through the freezing night, blood oozing from the hellishly painful wound in his belly, I have no idea.
Perhaps it was his innate strength. Perhaps it was love.
The members of our little patrol that set out from von Deimling’s forward headquarters at Klipdam Farm that day were hard men, many of whom had lost comrades to the Nama. I am sure they felt little if any sympathy towards Blake, who had run guns and horses to the rebels and killed his fair share of German boys. However, it is thankfully a rare breed of soldier who has the stomach to shoot an unarmed wounded man in the head.
Although I was ‘only’ the doctor, and a mere police reservist, I outranked Kurtz, so I was able to announce to the patrol that I would check on Blake and do what needed to be done. The other Schutztruppen talked among themselves and lit pipes and cigarettes and looked away from the deed that was about to be done, but they were close enough to hear my conversation with Blake.
He was delirious from pain and fever but the first word he said to me was ‘Claire’.
For the benefit of my military comrades, listening in, I told him Claire was dead, that she had drowned.
I told him I had come to kill him. I confess, dear reader, that for a moment I thought of doing just that. I loved Claire, just as Blake did, and my career, possibly my life, were in jeopardy from my superiors if they found out I had assisted the Nama and facilitated my wife’s escape to the coast. Kurtz, too, would have suffered if it had come to light that he had helped us.
However, I had developed a grudging respect for Blake and I was, in truth, envious of the love he and Claire shared. At the same time, I was falling in love with someone else and I could not go to her in the knowledge that I had executed a man she had once cared for deeply. There had been enough killing in my beloved corner of Africa.
My anger at everything that had happened was real, but my aim was not true. I fired a bullet into the sand next to Blake’s head. I surreptitiously reached into my medical bag and took out a dressing, which I put into Blake’s hand and had him press against the bullet hole. Young Kurtz came over and he clearly saw that Blake was still alive, yet he simply told his men to ‘mount up’, and he and I both told Colonel von Deimling what our commander wanted to hear.
That night I stole out of camp, with the ambulance cart drawn by two horses and two spare mounts tethered behind us. I would not have been surprised to find Blake dead for real, but he had managed to hang on through the rest of the day. Though Blake had lost a good deal of blood the bullet had, miraculously, missed his vital organs and exited out his side. I cleaned his wound as best I could and laid upon it a poultice made from the kraalbos plant. The bushman healers I had met used this to good effect in the treatment of skin conditions and wounds that were putrefying.
The horses that Blake and his dead comrade had brought with them were grazing on desert grass nearby, as was Blake’s faithful mount, Bluey. I could not take the animals with me and it seemed cruel to leave them tethered to each other. I unsaddled Bluey and untied the rest of the animals. One-by-one, they galloped off. Bluey seemed at first unwilling to leave Blake and trotted along behind the wagon for the first hour or so. The other horses had formed a loose herd and moved parallel to us. Eventually Bluey left us to join the others and they drifted away. I am sure that at least some of them survived and bred as, occasionally, over the years since, I have seen wild horses and foals at a distance in the desert.
I partially dressed Blake in German uniform and the two of us journeyed once again across South West Africa, westwards, towards Lüderitz. I scrounged food and water for us and the horses at Aus and told my story, several times over, that I was taking the wounded son of a prominent German politician to Lüderitz for treatment and a ticket home to the Fatherland.
The decay had begun to set into Blake’s wound and he cried and yelled through two nights, most often calling the name of the woman he loved. It wasn’t Liesl, it was Claire.
In time the bushmen’s herb worked its magic; Blake’s fever broke and the stitches I had placed in his wound looked clean. When Blake was lucid I told him that I had lied about Claire’s death, and spread the word through Keetmanshoop that she had drowned at sea. Blake cried and, I think, would have hugged me if he’d had the strength.
On our journey I quizzed him, as I had Claire, about his recollection of events in South Africa and in our colony, about Walters and his love for my wife. He told me everything, just as Claire had explained her relationship with the American, Belvedere, and her motivation for stealing the gold. Claire had also told me where the gold was buried, on Shark Island, though at that time it was clear that I could not very well start digging up the causeway leading to the concentration camp. I told Claire that if I ever did find the gold I would keep it for her. Well, some of it.
The next day the billowing curtains of sand and dust gave way to the sparkling icy blue of the Atlantic.
I found Claire in hiding in one of the warehouses her first husband had once owned, down by the docks in Hafen Street. She used the last of her gold from the farm, other than what she had given Blake to purchase the horses, to buy the yacht and had spent time with a couple of old salts who ran the warehouse, relearning how to sail it. The two sailors, friends of her first husband, who were hiding her on the promise of gold, had reported her disappearance to the port authorities and a search had been mounted.
Claire ran to Blake and enfolded him in her arms when we arrived. ‘You made it,’ she said, after she had finished kissing him.
‘Thanks to Peter,’ Blake said.
I gave my wife a sad smile and a hug and she kissed me goodbye.
I asked Blake if he had an address in Australia, so that I might write to him and Claire one day, when the war was over. He gave me his mother’s details and while I never did write I will send her a copy of these scribblings, just in case she never heard from her son again.
The yacht was a fine ketch whose owner had been killed in the fighting against the Nama and Claire said she could sail it single-handedly, although once Blake made a full recovery the job would be easier.
I bade farewell to Claire and Blake that night and tossed the mooring line onto the deck. The yacht slipped away on a mercifully calm sea and I never saw nor heard from either of them again.
After the war against the Nama and the Herero ended and the death camp on Shark Island closed, my new wife, Liesl, and I discussed what to do about the gold buried beneath the causeway.
‘Nothing,’ Liesl told me. ‘The ghosts of too many of my people haunt that place, Peter, and they cannot be disturbed in the name of something as trivial as greed. Gold is a metal, cold and unfeeling, and pursuit of it brings only tears and death.’
She is a good woman, as brave and as principled as her uncle Jakob was. Her people’s rebellion was crushed, but she lived and bore me three fine children, two boys and a girl. They are all safely out of this war, being cared for by her family. At the time we discussed the gold Liesl was pregnant with our first son and I remember she put my hand on her swollen belly. ‘This is what is most important, Peter.’
‘Life?’ I asked her.
‘Love.’