by Paul Twivy
Sam Nashandi was tall, elegantly dressed and clearly ambitious. He appeared in the pages of ‘The Namibian’ newspaper more often than the Prime Minister. This didn’t go unnoticed amongst his superiors. Indeed, it was just one of the many ways in which he caused resentment. Ralph understood his ambition, disliked his arrogance, but found him extremely charismatic. He was sure that he was a future President. Nashandi found Ralph as polished and urbane as his predecessors but much less stuffy which he welcomed.
‘I hear you got caught in that freak sandstorm in Swakop,’ Nashandi said as he offered Ralph a seat opposite him. Nashandi sat behind his desk rather than at his meeting-table. It was a declaration of power and distance.
‘I did indeed,’ Ralph replied. ‘It was like a swarm of locusts… rather Biblical in fact.’
‘Yes, well there was a lot of nonsense linking it to the unearthing of those genocide bodies. This country will never progress until it stops being yoked to superstition.’
‘All countries have their superstitions. How are relations with the German government? Are you any closer to getting your apology…or even, dare I say, reparations?’
Nashandi laughed.
‘We can go fish for our reparations. I don’t see those ever happening. You clearly haven’t heard the latest. The Germans claim that the mine shaft was too far west to have contained the victims of the 1904 genocide. They have compiled, as only they can, an 80-page report with detailed maps, reproducing every journal entry made, and telegram sent, by von Trotha. It all concludes with a detailed map of all German troop movements made that year.’
‘Ah, the use and abuse of maps… how many wars has that started? It sounds very Germanic. It also sounds pointless, insulting. All the evidence, including the carbon dating of the skeletons, points to 1904.’
Nashandi lifted a dossier from his desk and opened it on a page, much of Ralph could see he had angrily highlighted in yellow and red. The colour had seeped through to the back of the page, making it bulge with indignation.
‘According to them, carbon dating is inaccurate enough to be out by ten years. The worse thing is that they have described Namibia at the time, and I quote… “as being awash with inter-tribal warfare and massacres in the 1900’s, as typifies Africa to this day.” Nothing makes me angrier than this condescending….’
Nashandi searched for expletives in both his head and his mouth.
‘Pap!’ he finally exploded, which was not the word Ralph was expecting. ‘This rubbish that is spouted about Africa as ‘The Dark Continent’. The place from which civilisation set out, but to which it has never returned. For a start, lumping us all together is as insulting as saying Britain is identical to Luxembourg. Secondly, Namibia is a modern democracy and that should be respected.’
‘What will you do?’ Ralph asked, absorbing Nashandi’s rage. ‘I mean, even if they’re right about the carbon dating, there is no doubt that the genocide took place.’
‘We will do nothing. Other than write a polite and firm diplomatic response. Which is exactly what we will do with the Chinese government who did not respect our sacred ancestors.’
‘Well, one Chinese individual acting alone. I know the man who was in charge at the mine. He was absent when the decision was taken.’
‘Li Chiang? Yes, he’s a good man, He’s been in here to explain and apologise. We are a tiny country, Ralph. A ‘David’ between two ‘Goliaths’, with no sling. So, we’ll “suck it up” as the Americans so charmingly say.’
Ralph remembered the Minister’s request to stir up trouble about the Chinese in order to move Britain’s place forward in the uranium queue. The most he was prepared to do, however, was push Britain’s friendship and ‘integrity’.
‘Well, if there’s anything that the British Government can do to help, we’d be delighted,’ Ralph offered. ‘We’re a friend to Namibia as I hope you know. Influencing the Germans behind the scenes, that sort of thing.’
Nashandi put down the dossier, got up from his chair, walked round to Ralph’s side of the desk and half-sat across its corner keeping one leg on the ground. The height difference between them now felt uncomfortable, almost threatening.
‘The problem, Ralph, is that Britain no longer has any influence over Germany. Brexit has put pay to that. And you never had any influence over China. Our main trade is with the EU, and the biggest economy in the EU is Germany. You may have more than 25 times our population, but Britain, my dear friend, in the new world we find ourselves in, is just another small country.’
Nashandi smiled and Ralph shifted uncomfortably in his seat, hoping to change the conversation.
Clara was entranced. How could she not be?
She was standing at the Post Street Mall in Windhoek, with her school class, looking at meteorites. Rather strangely, they were displayed in a very ordinary shopping mall, almost as if they weren’t from outer space at all, but a shop just around the corner. Mounted on steel pedestals of different heights, you could view them from different angles, and get a sense of their striking, organic shapes. Some of them looked to Clara like metal brains. Each meteorite fragment was suspended on small steel tendrils and so they floated at their various heights as if still showering the Earth.
Their Geography teacher continued, standing in front of the display, holding aloft a large-scale map that Clara guessed had been used many times. It had a battered appearance, slightly torn along its folds.
‘The Gibeon meteorite shower is the most extensive meteorite shower known on Earth,’ she explained.
Clara’s mouth fell open, until she worried she might swallow an insect, and shut it tight.
‘The meteorites fell across a large area which I have marked here. It measures two hundred and seventy-five by one hundred kilometres. That’s bigger than many islands. Most fragments fell just southeast of Gibeon, the town after which they were named. So far, a hundred and twenty meteorites with a weight between them of almost twenty-five tons have been found.’
Clara’s hand shot up, unprompted but irresistible to her teacher. One day, she would teach a whole class of Clara’s.
‘If there were a hundred and twenty, Miss, where are the rest of them?’
‘That’s a very good question, Clara. Well sadly, some of them have been stolen.’
Some of the class burst out laughing and Dinari, one of her friends and the class joker, added ‘But how would you fit one in your pocket, Miss!?’
‘Well, Dinari, the last one to be smuggled out, weighed a ton and went to America. So, you’d need the pockets of a giant.’
‘Or metal trousers,’ Clara suggested.
Once the giggling subsided, which including their teacher’s, she continued.
‘A lot of them have been sent around the world to be studied. In 1838, a British explorer called Captain Alexander sent some samples to a chemist in London who confirmed that they were meteors.’
‘Miss, did you say Captain Alexander?’
‘Yes, do you know him, Clara?’ the teacher teased.
‘I feel as if I do, yes, Miss,’ said Clara.
‘I see,’ said the teacher, dismissing it as one of Clara’s fantasies. Clara made a mental note to message Freddie as soon as she could.
‘Since then, samples have been sent all over the world. Now, I want you to imagine what it would have been like to see these meteors arrive. Something the size of a double-decker bus entered the Earth’s atmosphere travelling at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Yes Grace?’
‘Miss, is that faster than Usain Bolt?’
‘Yes, it is, Grace. Thousands of times faster. It came in at a low angle and it fragmented high up in the atmosphere, breaking into many parts, all of them glowing like fireballs or like shooting stars. We know from their shapes that they travelled through intense heat for a long time.’
‘Wow!’ Clara mouthed to herself.
‘Shooting stars are not in fact stars at all. That’s just a name. They are dust and rocks like these meteorites, falling to Earth. Most of them are burned up completely in our atmosphere. It’s our shield. Now, who has seen a shooting star?’ the teacher asked.
All the hands in the class shot up except for Clara’s.
‘Well, I am not surprised. It’s the best free fireworks show on Earth and you can see it every night, over Windhoek.’
‘I think this is mad,’ Joe said, out of breath at the top of the final staircase.
‘We know you do,’ Hannah said, ‘but you have to keep an open mind.’
‘Most seances have been fakes,’ Joe said. ‘Anyway, it’s dangerous to meddle with the spirit world.’
‘You can’t have it both ways,’ Freddie protested. ‘If seances are fakes, then people aren’t contacting the spirit world, are they?’
This wasn’t the first time that Freddie had exposed Joe’s lack of logic and Joe couldn’t help resenting it. Sometimes, he felt it might be better to have less perceptive friends.
They had climbed up to the attic floor of the boarding-house. The low ceilings made it feel claustrophobic and added to their nervousness. There was a small room under the eaves that was occasionally used for private study, or homework supervision, but which had largely fallen into disuse. They felt reasonably sure they wouldn’t be found or interrupted.
One of the cooks had lent them two candles stored in the kitchens in case of a power-cut. They’d claimed it was for a science experiment they were conducting in the gardens.
‘Don’t for heaven’s sake, light these anywhere other than outside,’ she’d said, handing them over. ‘If you light them in here, and one of them catches a curtain, this whole place could go up. I am trusting you.’
They had nodded, looked suitably serious, and felt guilty as hell underneath.
They had decided to hold a séance to see if they could contact the spirit of Captain Alexander, to extract his secrets from beyond the grave. Hannah had made an improvised Ouija board by writing all the letters of the alphabet, the numbers 1 to 10, and the words ‘Yes’, ‘No’, ‘Hello’ and ‘Good-bye’ on individual pieces of card. Joe had sneaked a water glass, into his rucksack, at dinner.
There was no light shining out from under the closed door of the room, but to be sure, they knocked lightly and waited to hear if anyone was inside. After a few seconds there was a knock back. Hannah jumped with fright.
‘Oh my God,’ she said, clinging to both the boys, ‘let’s not do this.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Joe said, ‘that came from downstairs. There’s a bathroom below us, remember. It’s from one of the pipes.’
Joe opened the door, peered in and switched on the light.
‘All clear,’ he said.
The room looked as if hadn’t been cleaned for weeks. Freddie ran his finger over the surface of the round table that occupied the centre of the room. His finger left a slug-like trail.
‘No wonder no-one uses this space. It’s positively spooky,’ Joe said.
‘At least it’s quiet,’ Freddie observed.
‘I’m sure Selima wouldn’t approve of us doing this,’ Hannah said, ‘It’s basically witchcraft.’
‘Probably. Look, if we’re going to do it, let’s just get on with it,’ Joe said impatiently.
They dusted down three chairs and the table and laid out the cards in a semi-circular arc on the table. Freddie placed the water glass upside down, whilst Hannah lit the candles and placed them on a side-table. Joe switched off the light.
They all sat next to each other on one side of the table, the arc of cards sprayed in front of them. Lit by the candles, their silhouettes flickered on the wall like a shadow puppet play.
‘How do we do this?’ Joe asked.
‘We each put a finger on top of the up-turned glass,’ Hannah explained, ‘but gently. Then one of us asks the questions of … the spirit. We wait to see if the glass moves. If it does, it will move to each letter or number in turn, spelling out the answer.’
‘Why are we using the candles?’ Joe asked.
‘Spirits hate harsh light,’ Hannah answered.
‘Honestly, Joe, I’m amazed you had to ask that,’ Freddie said giggling.
Joe caught the giggle like an infection.
‘Stop it you two,’ Hannah pleaded. ‘Nothing will happen if you don’t believe. Freddie, did you bring the picture?’
Freddie cast his mind back and then remembered it was in his trouser pocket. He fished out and smoothed down a creased black and white photocopy of a painting of Captain Alexander, placing it in front of them.
‘It’s supposed to help… to look at the image of the person who are trying to contact,’ she explained.
They each put a finger gently on the cold glass.
‘Captain James William Alexander,’ Hannah intoned gravely, ‘we want to speak with you.’
They waited, staring at the glass. It didn’t move.
Hannah repeated herself and they each stared intently into the dark eyes of Alexander’s portrait. One of the candles flickered, stirred by a current of air from the window, bending their shadows on the wall.
They sat silently for two minutes, their arms slightly trembling with the effort of holding their fingers on the glass.
The glass edged slowly sideways to the word ‘Hello’, making a slight scraping noise as it did.
‘You’re moving it,’ Joe accused Freddie, ‘I can see your arm twitching.’
‘I swear I am not. It’s twitching from the effort of holding my finger up.’
They could both tell from his indignance that Freddie was telling the truth. Joe looked at Hannah inquiringly, implying the same question of her. She shook her head.
The room felt colder.
‘Will you talk to us about the burial site?’ Hannah asked.
The glass moved to ‘Yes’.
They all had the same queasy feeling. The glass was moving as if it had a definite force behind it. Yet it also felt too smooth to be pushed by any of their arched and aching arms. This oddly smooth motion left them hovering between scepticism and belief.
The glass now moved between letters. Hannah said the letters out loud as it touched each one and confirmed the words after each one.
‘I W-I-S-H-E-D I H-A-D N-O-T F-O-U-N-D T-H-E B-O-D-I-E-S. I S-H-O-U-L-D H-A-V-E L-E-F-T T-H-E-M I-N P-E-A-C-E’
They stared at each other, still wondering if this was real.
Hannah decided to continue.
‘Can you tell us where they are buried?’
Two minutes passed without the glass moving.
‘Perhaps, we shouldn’t ask any more questions,’ Freddie suggested.
Before his sentence had even finished, the glass jolted and started to move between the letters, as if it were hovering on a tiny bed of air.
‘Y-O-U K-N-O-W W-H-E-R-E T-H-E B-O-D-I-E-S A-R-E.’
‘He thinks we have already deciphered the map,’ Freddie said in a whisper that rasped his throat in frustration.
‘We cannot decipher your map. Can you help us?’ Hannah pleaded.
The glass stuttered along the table as if it were an extreme effort to push it
‘T-E-L-L M-Y W-I-F-E I A-M S-O-R-R-Y’
They looked at each other baffled.
‘But he never married,’ Joe said, ‘at least according to his journals.’
‘Perhaps, there was another wife,’ Hannah suggested.
‘It makes no sense,’ Freddie added.
They all sat, forefingers resting on the glass, pointed and aching like God’s fingers reaching out to Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
‘Perhaps, this is not the same Captain Alexander,’ Joe suggested.
‘When did you die?’ Hannah asked
.
The glass moved slowly, as if in pain.
‘L-A-S-T W-E-E-K’
They looked at each other in a mixture of astonishment and frustration.
‘What is your name?’ Hannah asked, when she had regained some composure.
The glass sat stubbornly still, as if glued to the table.
Freddie decided to see if he could move it, and to his amazement, found it resisted his finger. He gazed at Joe’s finger with its cracked and dirty nail, and Hannah’s soft and manicured, and then back up their bare forearms, trying to detect if there was any sign of a muscle twitching or contracting. There was none.
Suddenly, the glass flew around the table at an alarming speed, dragging their arms with it.
What it spelt out, froze their blood.
‘S-H-E-N C-H-I’
Then the glass flew off the table and smashed against the wall, shattering and splintering as it fell to the floor.
‘Who is Shen Chi?’ Joe asked.
‘My father’s deputy,’ Hannah said. ‘He hung himself on the back of the laundry door.’
Freddie’s mobile rang insistently on his dormitory bed. He ran but just missed it. He looked at the screen. Drops spattered onto the screen from his wet hair. Five missed calls from his mother.
He delved into ‘Recents’ and pressed her number.
‘Mum? Sorry, I was in the shower. Is everything all-right?’
There were a few moments of silence, during which Freddie though he detected a rasping sound.
‘Freddie, has Clara been in touch with you?’
‘No, why?’
He heard her mouth go dry and her tongue stick.
‘She’s disappeared, Freddie.’
His breathing stopped. Every protective moment, every anxiety he’d ever felt about Clara seemed rolled up into one, all-consuming panic.
‘What do you mean she’s disappeared? When? How?’
‘Dad and I hosted a drinks reception at the High Commission…’
‘You didn’t leave her alone,’ he said.
‘Of course, we didn’t. Erva was babysitting. She was doing some ironing…’