V. (33 page)

Van Wijk appeared in the doorway. "Now listen to me, younker, if I were you I would go to Warmbad and stay there until this blows over."

"What's happened."

"That was the location superintendent at Guruchas. Apparently they caught up with Morris, and a Sergeant van Niekerk tried an hour ago to get him to come in to Warmbad peacefully. Morris refused, van Niekerk placed his hand an Morris's shoulder in token of arrest. According to the Bondel version - which you may be sure has already spread to the Portuguese frontier - the Sergeant then proclaimed 'Die lood van die Goevernement sal nou op julle smelt.' The lead of the Government shall now melt upon you. Poetic, Wouldn't you say?

"The Bondels with Morris took it as a declaration of war. So the balloon's gone up, Mondaugen. Go to Warmbad, better yet keep going and get safely across the Orange. That's my best advice."

"No, no," Mondaugen said, "I am something of a coward, you know that. But tell me your second-best advice, because you see there are my antennas."

"You worry about your antennas as if they sprouted from your forehead. Go ahead. Return - if you have the courage, which I certainly don't - return up-country and tell them at Foppl's what you've heard here. Hole up in that fortress of his. If you want my own opinion it will be a blood bath. You weren't here in 1904. But ask Foppl. He remembers. Tell him the days of yon Trotha are back again."

"You could have prevented this," Mondaugen cried. "Isn't that what you're all here for, to keep them happy? To remove any need for rebellion?"

Van Wijk exploded in a bitter fit of laughing. "You seem," he finally drawled, "to be under certain delusions about the civil service. History, the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history. He doesn't fight it, he tries to coexist with it.

"Die lood van die Goevernement indeed. We are, perhaps, the lead weights of a fantastic clock, necessary to keep it in motion, to keep an ordered sense of history and time prevailing against chaos. Very well! Let a few of them melt. Let the clock tell false time for a while. But the weights will be reforged, and rehung, and if there doesn't happen to be one there in the shape or name of Willem van Wijk to make it run right again, so much the worse for me."

To this curious soliloquy Kurt Mondaugen flipped a desperate farewell salute, climbed into his Cape cart, and headed back up-country. The trip was uneventful. Once in a great while an oxcart would materialize out of the scrubland; or a jet-black kite would come to hang in the sky, studying something small and quick among the cactus and thorn trees. The sun was hot. Mondaugen leaked at every orifice; fell asleep, was jolted awake; once dreamed gunshots and human screams. He arrived at the recovery station in the afternoon, found the Bondel village nearby quiet and his equipment undisturbed. Working as quickly as he could, he dismantled the antennas and packed them and the receiving equipment in the Cape cart. Half a dozen Bondelswaartz stood around watching. By the time he was ready to leave the sun was nearly down. From time to time, at the edges of his field of vision, Mondaugen would see small scurrying bands of Bondels, seeming almost to merge with the twilight, moving in and out of the small settlement in every direction. Somewhere to the west a dogfight had started. As he tightened the last half-hitch a pennywhistle began to play nearby, and it took him only a moment to realize that the player was imitating sferics. Bondels who were watching started to giggle. The laughter swelled, until it sounded like a jungleful of small exotic animals, fleeing some basic danger. But Mondaugen knew well enough who was fleeing what. The sun set, he climbed on the cart. No one said anything in farewell: all he heard at his back were the whistle and the laughter.

It was several more hours to Foppl's. The only incident on route was a flurry of gunfire - real, this time - off to his left, behind a hill. At last, quite early in the morning, the lights of Foppl's burst on him suddenly out of the scrubland's absolute blackness. He crossed a small ravine on a plank bridge and drew up before the door.

As usual a party was in progress, a hundred windows blazed, the gargoyles, arabesques, pargeting and fretwork of Foppl's "villa" vibrated in the African night. A cluster of girls and Foppl himself stood at the door while the farm's Bondels offloaded the Cape cart and Mondaugen reported the situation.

The news alarmed certain of Foppl's neighbors who owned farms and stock nearby. "But it would be best," Foppl announced to the party, "if we all stayed here. If there's to be burning and destruction, it will happen whether or not you're there to defend your own. If we disperse our strength they can destroy us as well as our farms. This house is the best fortress in the region: strong, easily defended. House and grounds are protected on all sides by deep ravines. There is more than enough food, good wine, music and -" winking lewdly - "beautiful women.

"To hell with them out there. Let them have their war. In here we shall hold Fasching. Bolt the doors, seal the windows, tear down the plank bridges and distribute arms. Tonight we enter a state of siege."

II

Thus began Foppl's Siege Party. Mondaugen left after two and a half months. In that time no one had ventured outside, or received any news from the rest of the district. By the time Mondaugen departed, a dozen bottles of wine still lay cobwebbed in the cellar, a dozen cattle remained to be slaughtered. The vegetable garden behind the house was still abundant with tomatoes, yams, chard, herbs. So affluent was the farmer Foppl.

The day after Mondaugen's arrival, the house and grounds were sealed off from the outside world. Up went an inner palisade of strong logs, pointed at the top, and down went the bridges. A watch list was made up, a General Staff appointed, all in the spirit of a new party game.

A curious crew were thus thrown together. Many, of course, were German: rich neighbors, visitors from Windhoek and Swakopmund. But there were also Dutch and English from the Union; Italians, Austrians, Belgians from the diamond fields near the coast; French, Russian, Spanish and one Pole from various corners of the earth; all creating the appearance of a tiny European Conclave or League of Nations, assembled here while political chaos howled outside.

Early on the morning after his arrival, Mondaugen was up on the roof, stringing his antennas along the iron fanciwork that topped the villa's highest gable. He had an uninspiring view of ravines, grass dry pans, dust, scrub; all repeating, undulating east to the eventual wastes of the Kalahari; north to a distant yellow exhalation that rose from far under the horizon and seemed to hang eternally over the Tropic of Capricorn.

Back here Mondaugen could also see down into a kind of inner courtyard. Sunlight, filtered through a great sandstorm far away in the desert, bounced off an open bay window and down, too bright, as if amplified, into the courtyard to illuminate a patch or pool of deep red. Twin tendrils of it extended to a nearby doorway. Mondaugen shivered and stared. The reflected sunlight vanished up a wall and into the sky. He looked up, saw the window opposite complete its swing open and a woman of indeterminate age in a negligee of peacock blues and greens squint into the sun. Her left hand rose to her left eye, fumbled there as if positioning a monocle. Mondaugen crouched behind curlicues of wrought iron, astonished not so much at anything in her appearance as at his own latent desire to see and not be seen. He waited for the sun or her chance movement to show him nipples, navel, pubic hair.

But she had seen him. "Come out, come out, gargoyle," she called playfully. Mondaugen lurched vertical, lost his balance, nearly fell off the roof, grabbed hold of a lightning rod, slid to a 45 degree angle and began to laugh.

"My little antennas," he gurgled.

"Come to the roof garden," she invited, and disappeared then back into a white room turned to blinding enigma by a sun finally free of its Kalahari.

He completed his job of setting up the antennas, then made his way round cupolas and chimney pots, up and down slopes and slates till at length he vaulted clumsily over a low wall and it seemed some tropic as well, for the life there he found too lavish, spectral, probably carnivorous; not in good taste.

"How pretty he is." The woman, dressed now in jodhpurs and an army shirt, leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette. All at once, as he'd been half-expecting, cries of pain lanced a morning quiet that had known only visiting kites and wind, and the dry rustling of the exterior veld.

Mondaugen knew, without having to run to see, that the cries had come from the courtyard where he'd seen the crimson stain. Neither he nor the woman moved. It somehow having become part of a mutual constraint that neither of them show curiosity. Voila: conspiracy already, without a dozen words having passed between them.

Her name proved to be Vera Meroving, her companion a Lieutenant Weissmann, her city Munich.

"Perhaps we even met one Fasching," she said, "masked and strangers."

Mondaugen doubted, but had they met: were there any least basis for that "conspiracy" a moment ago: it would surely have been somewhere like Munich, a city dying of abandon, venality, a mark swollen with fiscal cancer.

As the distance between them gradually diminished Mondaugen saw that her left eye was artificial: she, noticing his curiosity, obligingly removed the eye and held it out to him in the hollow of her hand. A bubble blown translucent, its "white" would show up when in the socket as a half-lit sea green. A fine network of nearly microscopic fractures covered its surface. Inside were the delicately-wrought wheels, springs, ratchets of a watch, wound by a gold key which Fraulein Meroving wore on a slender chain round her neck. Darker green and flecks of gold had been fused into twelve vaguely zodiacal shapes, placed annular on the surface of the bubble to represent the iris and also the face of the watch.

"What was it like outside?"

He told her the little he knew. Her hands had begun to tremble: he noticed it when she went to replace the eye. He could scarcely hear her when she said:

"It could be 1904 again."

Curious: van Wijk had said that. What was 1904 to these people? He was about to ask her when Lieutenant Weissmann appeared in mufti from behind an unwholesomelooking palm and pulled her by the hand, back into the depths of the house.

Two things made Foppl's a fortunate place to be carrying on sferic research. First, the farmer had given Mondaugen a room to himself in a turret at one corner of the house; a little enclave of scientific endeavor, buffered by a number of empty storage roams and with access to the roof through a stained-glass window portraying an early Christian martyr being devoured by wild beasts.

Second, modest though their demands were, there was an auxiliary source of electric power for his receivers in the small generator Foppl kept to light the giant chandelier in the dining hall. Rather than rely, as he had been doing, on a number of bulky batteries, Mondaugen was sure it wouldn't be too difficult simply to tap off and devise circuitry to modify what power he needed, either to operate the equipment directly or to recharge the batteries. Accordingly, that afternoon, after arranging his effects, equipment and the attendant paper work into an imitation of professional disorder, Mondaugen set off into the house and down, in search of this generator.

Soon, padding down a narrow, sloping corridor, he was brought to attention by a mirror hung some twenty feet ahead, angled to reflect the interior of a room around the next corner. Framed for him there were Vera Meroving and her lieutenant in profile, she striking at his chest with what appeared to be a small riding crop, he twisting a gloved hand into her hair and talking to her all the while, so precisely that the voyeur Mondaugen could lip-read each obscenity. The geometry of the corridors somehow baffled all sound: Mondaugen, with the queer excitement he'd felt watching her at her window that morning, expected captions explaining it all to flash on to the mirror. But she finally released Weissmann; he reached out with the curiously gloved hand and closed the door, and it was as if Mondaugen had dreamed them.

Presently he began to hear music, which grew louder the deeper he descended into this house. Accordion, fiddle and guitar were playing a tango full of minor chords and an eerie Ratting of certain notes which to German ears should have remained natural. A young girl's voice was singing sweetly:

Love's a lash,

Kisses gall the tongue, harrow the heart;

Caresses tease

Cankered tissue apart.

Liebchen, come

Be my Hottentot bondsman tonight,

The sjambok's kiss

Is unending delight.

Love, my little slave,

Is color-blind;

For white and black

Are only states of mind.

So at my feet

Nod and genuflect, whimper for me:

Though tears are dried

Their pain is yet to be.

Enchanted, Mondaugen peered round the door jamb and found the singer to be a child of not more than sixteen, with white-blond, hip-length hair and breasts perhaps too large for her slender frame.

"I am Hedwig Vogelsang," she informed him, "and my purpose on earth is to tantalize and send raving the race of man." Whereupon the musicians, hidden from them in an alcove behind a hanging arras, struck up a kind of schottische; Mondaugen, overcome by the sudden scent of musk, brought in a puff to his nostrils by interior winds which could not have arisen by accident, seized her round the waist and wheeled with her across the room, and out, and through a bedroom lined with mirrors round a canopied four-poster and into a long gallery, stabbed at ten-yard intervals down its length by yellow daggers of African sun, hung with nostalgic landscapes of a Rhine valley that never existed, portraits of Prussian officers who'd died long before Caprivi (some even before Bismarck) and their blond, untender ladies who'd nothing now but dust to bloom in; past rhythmic gusts of blond sun that crazed the eyeballs with vein-images; out of the gallery and into a tiny unfurnished room hung all in black velvet, high as the house, narrowing into a chimney and open at the top, so that one could see the stars in the daytime; finally down three or four steps to Foppl's own planetarium, a circular room with a great wooden sun, overlaid with gold leaf, burning cold in the very center and round it the nine planets and their moons, suspended from tracks in the ceiling, actuated by a coarse cobweb of chains, pulleys, belts, racks, pinions and worms, all receiving their prime impulse from a treadmill in the corner, usually operated for the amusement of the guests by a Bondelswaartz, now unoccupied. Having long fled all vestiges of music Mondaugen released her here, skipped to the treadmill and began a jog-trot that set the solar system in motion, creaking and whining in a way that raised a prickling in the teeth. Rattling, shuddering, the wooden planets began to rotate and spin, Saturn's rings to whirl, moons their precessions, our own Earth its nutational wobble, all picking up speed; as the girl continued to dance, having chosen the planet Venus for her partner; as Mondaugen dashed along his own geodesic, following in the footsteps of a generation of slaves.