by Matt Killeen
Clementine looked agitated. She sat up.
“Are we heading east now?” Clementine asked.
“Still north,” Claude replied, looking at his compass.
“Then why is the dawn light ahead of us?” she inquired.
As they drew nearer they could see that the light was reflecting off a column of black smoke, then they could see the flames, and finally they rounded the last corner to see a blazing truck blocking the track.
Fanned out around the burning vehicle were a dozen bodies. There wasn’t enough left of the truck to identify it, but most of the surrounding corpses had survived the inferno. Even in the dark and at this distance, they could tell it was a squad of French troops, maybe the same Free French squad that had visited the mission earlier that night.
Sarah had the door open and was leaping out before Claude had even stopped.
“It could be an ambush—” he shouted.
“Yes, and we’ve missed it,” Sarah called back as she hit the ground.
The fire was still intense enough that it hurt to approach it, but Sarah pushed through this, through her own fear. Back into Schäfer’s burning lab, looking for the ax to break down the door.
She identified one of the white officers, the surly, obnoxious one, and knelt down next to him. Like his subordinates around him, he had a neat hole in his face and lay in a pool of black liquid. Someone had walked through the wounded and dying, and shot each one in the head.
“I’d say this was some locals panicking, but look,” Claude said, gesturing to the ground under the truck. “Landmine . . . then they gunned down the survivors as they left the truck.” He bent down and picked up a spent cartridge case. “It’s all French ammo, nothing unusual there. It doesn’t tell us anything. Troops loyal to Vichy, or . . .”
“Bofinger did this?” Sarah wondered.
“But why torch the village, why leave at all if they were going to stop them like this? They’ve taken their weapons . . . it could be bandits.”
“Or it could be Hasse. Protecting the mission from the authorities,” Sarah said quietly.
They looked at each other and into the thick jungle on every side, suddenly feeling very vulnerable. They started to back away.
“We should go,” Clementine called from the truck.
“Yes, yes we should,” Sarah replied as Claude nodded.
* * *
It took five days to cross into Gabon, taking a long route through Cameroon, recently pledged to de Gaulle. They practically begged for morphine from the few hospitals, towns, and missions they passed, but that process was hideously expensive. Persuading people to part with medicine as the Free French troops were mobilizing and war was coming to the AEF took almost every franc they had brought. Their Reichsmarks were worthless. The Captain was managing, but each dose made him sleepy for hours after, and the window of useful, calm wakefulness was hopelessly narrow.
French tanks and troop transports were gathering on the new frontier, blocking the roads and swamping the small settlements with excitable soldiers—almost exclusively Africans led by a tiny minority of white officers. Whenever they were stopped, their French passports should have been enough to continue their journey, but the question was asked over and again: Vichy or de Gaulle? They found noncommittal smiles and shrugs the most politic response when talking to troops barely able to answer that question themselves.
Claude always found a way through. God willing there would be no bloodshed, and we’ll be together with our brothers again, was the sermon he preached as they went.
Finally they were past the last Gaullist pickets and into Gabon.
The soldiers on the Vichy side this far north were fewer in number and less tolerant of alternative viewpoints. France was France and anyone who supported de Gaulle was a traitor, a warmonger. But in the end they were more concerned about their identically dressed and equipped counterparts over on the Congo side of the line than in cross-examining some traveling missionaries. Their passports were undeniably French, and they were in French territory.
Sarah was weary. They hadn’t had a hot meal for days, and sleeping in the truck was no substitute for a bed; even a cot in a tent had been preferable. There were no rest stops to be had on this leg of the journey. The churches and missions on Claude’s list were now full of billeted troops.
The jungle was thinning out as they moved into Gabon and climbed out of the Congo basin, but if it were possible, the weather had grown more oppressive, more humid, and darker, even at midday. There was a constant vibrating tension in her jaw and at the top of her belly. Every limb felt heavy.
The Captain had once talked about war, about the days and hours before a battle you knew was coming. She recognized this pause. At the end of this road would be Bofinger and the decisions they would have to make. Complex problems with consequences unfolding like a Himmel und Hölle paper fortune-teller. But until then there was nothing but cold meat and discomfort, haunted by the idea of Hasse in pursuit . . . or maybe waiting for them along the way.
Sarah was desperate for the Captain to wake, to return to normal, to take some charge.
Clementine slept. She seemed to be able to sleep anywhere, at any time.
* * *
Sarah was getting a headache. She reached for a canteen to slake her thirst but found it nearly empty. She couldn’t figure out how she could still be thirsty.
Clementine offered hers. “Little Eva, you look like crap,” she said. “Like someone is putting you back on a plane.”
“Well, thank you. I’m sure you look equally unpleasant.”
“Am I still getting paid?” she asked. It took Sarah a good few seconds to start laughing, joined by Clementine. “That was the deal, you know, I’m not in it to save the world . . .”
But Clementine seemed chastened by their experience somehow. Quieter, less acerbic. They leaned into each other by choice as well as necessity and took comfort from it.
* * *
They were sitting in the truck as Claude haggled noisily with a roadside trader for gasoline. They needed more and more, with less and less, and Claude had grown louder with every last franc. Sarah wondered if, when all the money was gone, he could buy fuel and food with the power of his voice alone.
She was ever so tired but incapable of sleep. Her body ached, and she couldn’t focus on anything. She felt bloated, and her belly was cramping up.
Sarah watched Clementine fussing over her camera. Something bothered Sarah, and she couldn’t put her finger on it. Clementine noticed Sarah’s attention.
“That Zicke broke it, I think. Just can’t get it to work.”
“Do you have any of your photographs with you?” Sarah asked.
“None of mine,” she said, then she brightened. “I have my father’s album, though. Would you like to see it?”
Clementine dug deep into her pack and pulled out a thin, creased, and flaking photo album. Within it, in blurry monochrome, a series of vignettes revealed a white mother and black baby outside a modest house. Clementine burbled about focal lengths and f-stops. There was a dull Rhineland landscape, a group of Tirailleurs Sénégalais looking glum or bored in their light uniforms and floppy fezzes, and at the back a family portrait. Serious soldier, proud mother, small child. A toddler. No, older.
“When did your parents leave Germany?”
“I don’t remember exactly,” Clementine said, shrugging.
“The last of the French left in 1925.”
“If you knew, why ask me? I’m the one that sets traps to make you look stupid, thank you.”
“So you’re three in that photo? Four? In 1925. How old are you? Really?” Sarah asked, gripping the photo album tightly.
Clementine looked back and said nothing, the look of fear, fury, and the trapped back in her eyes.
“1925 . . .” Sarah thought out loud, something else
crystallizing through the fatigue, its corners becoming clearer. “But that camera was made in 1932,” she finished. “Lisbeth said it’s a Leica II—”
“It’s not my father’s camera, all right?” Clementine snarled. After a moment she flung it at Sarah. It hit her arm and spun into the footwell. “And that’s not my family.” Clementine was almost spitting the words. “Are you happy now, you screwed-up Jewish Nazi lunatic? Is that what you wanted to hear?”
Sarah sat stunned by the revelation she had stumbled into without even looking for it. She had no idea what to do next.
“I’m a real, genuine Rheinlandbastard,” Clementine cried. “The French troops were little darlings and courteous and well behaved, but not my father, oh no, whoever the hell he was. He had my mother and then disappeared back to Africa. Is this what you wanted to hear? That Morel was right about blacks in the Rhineland? Pleased that I grew up in an orphanage after all? Does that make you feel superior at last?”
Sarah waited. The Captain hadn’t even moved. Claude was staring at the cab of the truck, unable to see inside.
“I don’t care about any of that.”
“Everybody cares about that. And now I’m angry and feral and uncontrolled, which is just typical of people like me,” she snarled.
“I knew you were a liar. And a thief. Why would any of this make me think of you differently?” Sarah ventured a small, at-the-edges-of-the-mouth smile. “You want sympathy for this, is that it? What would you say if I said, ‘Oh, how terrible, I’m sorry’?”
“I’d tell you where you could stick it,” Clementine said softly.
“Exactly. I’m a Jew, pretending that a gottverdammten British spy is my Nazi uncle, because my drunkard mother got herself shot. I’m also a liar and a thief. Why would I judge you? How could I? There’s a queue of miserable life stories and you’re clearly ahead of me, but you are not in this line alone. I am right behind you.”
Clementine said nothing. Which was as close to an apology, truce, or admission of defeat as Sarah was likely to get, but she didn’t want any of those things. She tried to hand the photo album back, but Clementine shook her head.
* * *
By the time the truck rolled into Libreville, the rains had finally come. The water fell, heavily and unceasingly in sheets that kept the streets empty. The town announced itself with a painted water tower, just visible in the fading light. This promised running water, and Sarah could think of nothing else but getting clean.
This capital city was more of a small town, and Libreville felt less like an imposition than Fort-Lamy. Its colonial buildings nestled among the palm trees as if they belonged there, something Sarah had to remind herself wasn’t really true. It seemed as if the gardens and flowers had been there all along, not a frontier town but a collection of Berlin lakeside properties.
The three-story Central Hotel was different and promised all kinds of luxuries. It hadn’t been built for expediency—the large double staircase to the veranda on either side of the entrance was a statement of wealth and permanency.
“This is the best hotel in Libreville. Even has indoor plumbing,” Claude said, handing Sarah and the Captain room keys. “We don’t have money for it, but I’m heading back inland to round up some funds. Tip well and hopefully they won’t figure out that you’re broke until it’s time to pay the bill. Try not to attract attention. You,” he said, turning to Clementine and handing her an older, rougher key. “You go to the back door.”
“You didn’t use the back door,” she snarled.
“Because I sound like a middle-class West African. You sound like a German from the gutter when you speak French. You’re supposed to be a servant, so play your part, girl.”
“She can help my uncle in and then find her quarters,” Sarah said gently.
“Oh, can I? Really? Why, thank you, Miss Eva.” Clementine spat the words.
“I’ll walk myself and everyone can shut up,” the Captain growled. He opened the truck door and unsteadily climbed down.
Clementine watched him, then sighed and slid out of the door in his wake. Sarah watched her try to help the Captain and his efforts to fend her off.
“What will we do with him?” Sarah said to Claude.
“He goes . . . cold turkey . . . isn’t that what the Americans say? Lock him in his room. He can sweat it out. Tell the staff he has malaria. He’ll be human again in a week or so.”
“Or so?” Sarah howled.
“What do you want from me? We’ve no money, there’s a civil war about to kickoff, I’m two thousand kilometers from home. This is the best I can do. They’ll bring you food, and when I return I’ll find a boat to get you back to Germany.”
“What do I do about Bofinger?”
“Screw your mission, girl. It’s over.”
Sarah opened her mouth to argue, but she was just too tired.
* * *
Sarah closed the door to her room and leaned back on the door. This was no palace of fantasy like the Grand Hotel, or fading threadbare artifice like the Hotel Victoria, but it had been swept and had a clean-looking double bed and mosquito net. It was the best hotel room Sarah had ever seen.
Too tired to find a bath, she staggered to the bed, and barely opening the net, she fell onto it. It was cool and smelled of soap powder. She lay in silence, listening to the rattle of heavy rain filter in through the window. She knew she had to use the latrine before sleeping but couldn’t face moving another centimeter. Not just yet. She also had to close the window, because she was beginning to get cold. She rolled over and dragged a blanket over her. Fixed.
The final stages of the seemingly endless journey had been beyond uncomfortable. She had been constipated after weeks of diarrhea. The cramping in her belly had gotten more intense, until she couldn’t sit properly, and no matter how much water she drank she felt dehydrated. The headache just wouldn’t go away.
Even now it wouldn’t leave her alone . . . and she was still cold. She really had to get up, just for a second . . .
TWENTY-SEVEN
October 23–28, 1940
SHE WOKE, BLINDED by the dull dawn light that shimmered on the ceiling. The noise of the rain extinguished all other sound. She was freezing and found her body was soaked in sweat. The clothes and bedding felt like they had been hanging in the rainstorm. She tried to move her head and found that any change in its orientation felt like a series of punches. The fever was back. This time there was pain in her chest and belly, where . . .
She had to make it to the toilet.
She sat up and a wave of nausea overcame her, her mouth filling with cold saliva. She tried to pull herself off the bed, but something was holding her back and she couldn’t figure out what it was. Like ropes, flat ropes, material—
She thrashed her way out of the mosquito net with arms that felt like lead weights and fell off the bed onto the floor. She was gasping now for breath and couldn’t focus on the commode in the corner of the room. Quick, screamed her mind.
She crossed the floor on all fours . . .
She was sitting on the toilet bowl, but she couldn’t remember how she had got there. Her body was clearing itself out, the rushing, pouring, painful satisfaction of passing water. She was breathing heavily and holding herself up using the wicker armrest.
She looked at the floor.
There was a long dark smear leading to the bed, all the way from the latrine. There was a handprint on the wall next to her. Her right handprint.
She turned her right hand over. It was stained red. She looked at her knees and her feet for scratches, but there were none. Her thighs were covered in brown dusty smears and drips of something—
She slowly opened her knees, feeling the pain in the joints, the shivers of her fever, and the pounding of her head.
Her underwear was soaked in blood, and the toilet bowl was splashed in red liquid.
/> She heard Clementine’s voice like she was in the room.
“You know what they’re calling this disease? L’hémorragie . . . the Bleeding.”
* * *
She got back to the bed, but first she managed to lock the door. If the others weren’t already sick, then she wouldn’t knowingly infect them. She looked at the sliver of Libreville visible through the open shutters and the rain. How many people lived here? Ten thousand? Twenty?
No, she wasn’t leaving this room anytime soon.
She wasn’t leaving this room.
Her canteen was full, as was the jug on the nightstand. Enough for . . .
You’re not leaving this room.
The headache, the cramps, the constipation and then diarrhea. Now she was bleeding. She’d been sick for days and hadn’t realized.
She pulled her wet outerclothes off and wrapped herself, shivering, in the blankets, ignoring the bloodstains she had missed earlier. She closed her eyes and let go, momentarily wistful as to whether she might open them again . . .
* * *
She opened her eyes. She was still alive.
It hurt to move, and moving made her shiver, so she lay listening to the rain. She wasn’t bleeding from her mouth or nose—she assumed that would come later. But she could feel her insides dissolving. How long did Lisbeth say her patients lasted?
She didn’t.
There was a hammering on the door.
“Ursula!” It was Clementine.
Sarah sat up and immediately wished she hadn’t. The motion made her vomit water through her hands and into her lap. No blood, yet.
“Go away,” she croaked.
“I need your help with your uncle. He’s screaming the house down. Threatening to leap out of the window if we don’t let him out. The staff are . . . upset.”