by William Boyd
Von Bishop left to supervise the loading of her luggage into a rickshaw.
“And what are you doing in Dar?” Frau von Bishop asked abruptly.
“I’ve come down to buy coffee seedlings,” Temple explained. “We have nothing like your botanical garden in British East. But, I must confess I wanted to see Dar and, um, your splendid new railway.” He wondered why he was talking in this ridiculous manner. It was something to do with the almost permanent mood of censure that seemed to emanate from the woman.
“You are not English, I think?” she said, cocking her head to one side, as if she had caught him out in some way.
“No,” Temple confessed. “I’m American. From the United States of America. I came over in ‘09 with President Roosevelt on his hunting trip. And I, ah, decided to stay on.”
“I see,” she said. There was an awkward pause. “What is Erich doing? Would you like a peppermint?” She offered Temple a paper bag.
“Why, thank you.” He put the sweet in his mouth. He didn’t like peppermint that much.
“For…mal de mer. How do you say it?”
“I’m sorry? What’s maldermare?” To Temple’s surprise Frau von Bishop energetically mimed a vomiting motion, complete with noises.
“Sick,” she said. “At sea.”
“Oh. Sea-sick. Yes, mmm.”
“Sea-sick?” She seemed irritated at the simple logic of the word. “It’s for sea-sick. Peppermint.”
Temple nodded his comprehension vigorously. There was another pause. “Well,” Temple began uneasily, “it must be nice to be back.”
She seemed about to make an answer but was interrupted by the return of her husband.
“They have it all,” von Bishop announced cheerily, referring to the luggage. “Shall we go?”
He and his wife climbed into a rickshaw.
“We are guests of the Governor,” von Bishop said. “Can we take you anywhere?”
“No thank you,” Temple said thankfully. “I think I’ll observe the pomp and circumstance a little longer. Then I intend to sample some of your German beer.”
“Of course, good-bye then.”
“Good-bye, Mr Smith,” Frau von Bishop said with impressive finality. “A pleasure to meet you.”
“Good-bye,” said Temple, raising his hat.
“Wait!” squeaked von Bishop. “When are you going back to Taveta?”
“Well…tomorrow.”
“Excellent, excellent. We can travel together. ‘Till tomorrow, Smith.”
As they drove off Temple saw Frau von Bishop snapping harshly at her husband. What strange people, Temple thought. He watched the small caravan of rickshaws—the von Bishops leading three others carrying luggage—move along the gentle are of the harbour front, past the Catholic church, the post office and the European club towards the Governor’s palace nestling in its grove of palm and mango trees at the mouth of the lagoon. He let his gaze swing round to the crowded flotilla on the sparkling water, then he turned away. He moved through the crowd and walked to the back of the Port Offices. He called a rickshaw over and climbed in. The half-naked African pulling it looked round for instructions.
“Die Brauerei,” Temple said. If he was going to be travelling back with the von Bishops he’d better make the most of his last day.
Later that same evening Temple slipped out of the Kaiserhof. It was half past ten and the moonless sky was filled with stars. Unthinkingly his eye picked out the constellations and stars as it always did: Orion’s Belt, the rest of Orion scattered vaguely about, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Venus. The streets around him were empty and dark. Electric light shone from the windows of the Kaiserhof and from the lounge came the tinkling of a pianola. The night was very warm. From the warren of the Indian town sweet smells wafted and there were shouts and drum beats, as if someone were having a party. Temple walked a few yards up Unter den Akazien. He didn’t want to go into the Indian town on foot on his own. He saw a rickshaw and called it over. He gave the name of a hotel on Marktstrasse. The rickshaw boy pulled him swiftly through the dark lanes. Temple sat back on the hard wooden seat and enjoyed the slight breeze.
“Here, bwana,” said the rickshaw boy. Temple got down and paid him. ‘Kitumoinee Hotel’ it said, in faded painted letters above the door. Temple walked in. Oil lamps set up a soft inviting glow. There was a babble of muted conversation.
About a dozen sailors from the Königsberg sat around tables in the large ground floor room. Some civilian engineers from the railway played cards. In one corner was a small wooden bar in front of some shelves with bottles of alcohol on them. Behind the bar stood a swarthy Goanese.
“Bitte, mein Herr?” he said as Temple approached. Temple walked over and placed his hands carefully on the bar surface. He swallowed.
“Guten Abend,” he said. “Do you speak English?” Some of the sailors looked round at the unfamiliar accent. Temple felt the close heat in the room cause his clothes to stick to his body. He wondered why he was bothering to go to all this trouble.
“Englisch?” said the Goanese. “Nein.”
Shit, Temple swore to himself. “Upstairs?” he said, pointing at the ceiling.
The Goanese smiled his comprehension. “Oh ja,” he said. Then indicated the sailors. “Ein Moment, ja?”
Temple sat down and drank two glasses of beer. Three sailors clattered down the wooden stairs from the first floor, smiling and grinning. and immediately went into a huddle with their friends.
Temple smoked a cigarette. He tried to keep his mind empty of thoughts. He concentrated on the taste of the beer. It was good beer, he said to himself, brewed right here in the city, as good beer as he’d tasted in Africa…He looked round the bar. For a bar it was decidedly quiet, he observed. A muttering of conversation from the sailors, a flip of cards from the engineers, the occasional scrape of a chair on the paved floor. It was as if everyone were afraid of drawing attention to himself, wanted to be as unobtrusive as possible.
Two more sailors descended the stairs. The Goanese proprietor came over and took away his beer glass. He smiled and nodded at Temple, shooting his eyes in the direction of the floor above. Temple stood up. He was about to walk over to the stairs when the proprietor touched his elbow.
“Vier Rupee, bitte,” he said. Temple paid him the money.
He climbed the stairs, acutely aware of the clump of his boots on the wood. On the first floor landing were three doors. Gently he tested the first, but it seemed locked. He was about to open the second when a German sailor came out. Temple stood to one side and the sailor moved past. He said something to Temple in German but Temple didn’t understand, but he smiled wryly, shrugged his shoulders and gave a chuckle. He sensed it had been that sort of remark. Temple moved to the third door, pushed it open and went inside. The room was small and bare except for an iron bed. In one wall was a small window which overlooked Marktstrasse. The shutters of this window were open a few inches and a native woman stood in front of them looking down on the street. On a ledge above the bed was a crude lamp, a burning wick in a bowl of oil.
The woman by the window was chewing something vigorously. She was wearing a rough cotton shift and had a bright fringed shawl loosely about her shoulders. With the toes of her right foot she scratched the back of her left calf.
Temple cleared his throat and shut the door behind him. The woman looked round.
“Abend,” she said dully and went over to the bed. She looked a strange mixture of Arab, Indian and Negro, Temple thought. Her hair was long and wiry and tied up in a complicated knot. Around her neck she had ropes of beads and metallic neck-laces. On her thin arms she had a large collection of bracelets. The bed was covered in a grey blanket. Temple moved closer. He saw that her hair was thickly oiled, and indeed that her entire body was covered in a thin layer of shiny grease. Dark blue tattoo marks stood out against the dark brown skin of her forearms. Set in her nose was a brass stud of a simple flower shape. Her middle parting had been smeared with a rusty,
ochrous unguent. A cloying, oddly farinaceous smell came from her body. Temple wondered how many races, cults, theologies and customs were meeting in this small room tonight, and what little portion he would add to the mix.
He looked around him and became suddenly aware of the accumulated filth of the place. He saw the rickety bedstead strengthened with wire, saw the flies and insects buzzing and crawling round the flame of the lamp. He could sense the blanket alive and twitching with bed bugs.
He scratched his head. He’d been in some fairly primitive whore-houses in his time, but this won first prize. Still, he thought, he’d come all this way: it seemed pointless not to see the thing through.
The woman folded her shawl carefully over the end of the bed. With a single movement and a clank of bangles she removed her shirt. She was now wearing only her jewellery collection. More strings of beads were wrapped round her waist, Temple noticed. It would be like going to bed with the bric-a-brac counter at a dime store. He wondered vaguely if the beads were talismen of some kind.
The woman sat down and with an innocently lewd gesture parted her legs in order to examine more closely the irritation on the back of her left calf. To his annoyance, Temple realized he was smoothing down his hair. The woman’s breasts were low slung and oddly pointed. The tattoos he’d seen on her forearm were extended over portions of her torso.
Unhappily he unbuckled his belt and undid the buttons on his trousers. He was wearing no drawers but the woman didn’t spare him a glance. She only looked up when he stumbled as he tried to step out of his trousers. He’d forgotten, in his absorption with the exotic, to remove his boots.
“Moment,” the woman said, and strolled languidly to the window, her low breasts swaying and juddering. She chewed fiercely for a second or two then spat something out into the night. There was a dull clang as whatever it was hit a tin roof below.
That does it, Temple thought. My God, this is depressing.
Tonight was his last night: he was meant to be having fun. He pulled up his trousers.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Nothing personal, lady. But goodnight.” As he left he heard her bangles rattle—it sounded like a kind of laughter, he thought—as she pulled her shirt back on.
Chapter 2
8 June 1914,
The Northern Railway, German East Africa
Liesl von Bishop stared out at the towering green humps of the Usambara hills as the train slowly chugged alongside them on its way north to the terminus at Moshi. Her eyes barely registered the movement of game, deer and antelopes, bounding away from the track. She felt an intense boredom settle on her. The air in the compartment was hot and muggy despite every available window being opened wide. She pressed her forehead against the warm glass and shifted her position on the shiny leather seat. She felt her buttocks begin to itch. A fly buzzed somewhere above her head. She rubbed her stinging eyes. Erich and the fat American had smoked continuously, it seemed, ever since they had left Tanga. Why, oh why had she come back to Africa? She wondered for the hundredth time since her arrival three days ago. A night in Dar, suffering the condescension of Governor Schnee and his opinionated milkmaid of a New Zealander wife. Then a heaving, wallowing sea journey in a filthy tramp steamer from Dar to Tanga, the luggage reloaded and unloaded yet again. A troubled stay at the Deutsche Kaiser Hotel in Tanga; Erich and the fat American up all night joking and drinking with red-faced farmers and Schutztruppe officers. Erich drunkenly whispering to her as he climbed unsteadily into the creaking bed, then falling into a crapulous sleep almost immediately.
It started again in the morning: three hours in the dust and stink of Tanga station, hot, thirsty, surrounded by piles of luggage. The fat American running about worriedly, looking for water to moisten his wretched coffee seedlings. Erich was sullen and sore-headed. She walked about Tanga’s station buildings searching for cool shade, fanning herself with a silk fan her mother had given her as a leaving present. She noticed that all three clocks on Tanga station told a different time.
Finally the ancient train backed arthritically into the station. The luggage and crates were loaded on board and they secured their seats in a first class compartment. There was another unaccountable wait of forty minutes before the train pulled out of Tanga on its daily run to Bangui, midway between Tanga and Moshi. At Bangui they would have to spend another night as trains between Bangui and Moshi only travelled twice a week. Liesl sighed, thinking of the speed and efficiency of travelling in Germany. From her family home in Koblenz to her sister in München in under one day!
She turned her head and flipped open her fan. For some reason the American was standing up, swaying dangerously to the motion of the train. A small black buckled cheroot poked from between the bristles of his moustache and he was rubbing his buttocks vigorously, pummelling them with his fists as if he were plumping cushions.
He smiled, but his moustache still obscured his mouth, only the changing contours of his cheeks and the disappearance of his eyes in deltas of wrinkles indicated this new facial expression.
He spoke, without removing. his foul-smelling cigar from his mouth—a very common man, she thought, having noticed earlier his appalling table manners at the hotel: a common man indeed.
“All this sitting down,” he said. “Kinda makes a man stiffen up.”
What was he talking about? Liesl asked herself. She could hardly understand a word he said—his whining, droning accent—and she prided herself on her English. She smiled tightly back and resumed her hill-watching out of the window.
“Tell me, Erich,” she heard the American say, softening the ch to a sh. “What’s all this talk about war between England and Germany?”
She closed her ears. War war war. She was tired of hearing men talk about war. They were like children. Her father, her brother-in-law, her nephews. War, politics, war, politics. She sighed again, quietly so Erich wouldn’t hear, and she thought about her sister’s home in München. Electric lights, water closets, beautiful furniture, the richness and variety of the food. She’d forgotten what it was like: all those years with Erich on the farm, she’d forgotten about the choice and the succulence. She’d eaten so much on this last trip home, as if she were storing it up, like some animal about to go into hibernation. She could feel her hips and belly bulging beneath her corset, loosened to the full extent of its ties. None of her African clothes fitted her any more. She could feel her blouse cutting into her armpits, sense its material stretched—tight as a goose-berry—across her broad shoulders.
Itches ran down the back of her thighs. The heat rash was starting, after only three days! She needed to bathe every day, and she hadn’t had a proper opportunity since she’d left the Tabora. She cursed her fair complexion, her soft moist skin, suddenly envying the American his freedom to stand up and scratch.
To take her mind off her discomfort she opened her travelling bag and took out the thin wooden box. Turkish Delight, bought in Port Said, her last box. She had bought five, meaning to hoard them, but she had eaten her way greedily through the lot on the voyage out as if it were the last time she’d ever taste it.
She took off the lid. There were three pieces left, like large chunks of uncut precious stone, pale pink, seeming to glow beneath their dusting of powdered sugar. She picked up the little wooden prongs and stabbed them into the largest piece and popped it into her mouth. Saliva flowed. She chewed slowly and carelessly, allowing bits of the sweet to become lodged in her teeth. Two pieces left. She shut her eyes, relishing the pleasure, forgetting her itches for a moment.
“Must be good stuff,” she heard the American say. And then Erich’s false machine laugh.
“Ah, you see Liesl has developed a sweet tooth.”
She opened her eyes and saw them grinning at her like two idiots. She offered Erich the box. He waved it away, accompanying the gesture with a little snort of air through his nostrils. She held it out to the American. He peered in, almost timidly.
“I don’t think I’ve ever come across
this before. What’s it called?”
“Turkish Delight,” she said flatly.
“Hey. All the way from Turkey.” Two blunt and calloused fingers plucked a piece out. Only one left.
“An exotic experience,” the American said. “Light shines through it too. That’s nice.”
She watched him as he bit the delicacy in half, raised his eyebrows in approval, then finished it off, licking his fingers. Icing sugar whitened the ends of his moustache.
“Now that’s what I call a sweet,” he said, relighting his cheroot. “Very nice indeed.”
Liesl knew she had been sulking and in a bad mood all day, but she didn’t care. And once they arrived at Bangui there was little chance of an improvement. The guest house was small and dirty and kept by a taciturn railway engineer’s wife. Liesl slept fitfully for two hours in the afternoon saying she had a headache. As dusk gathered outside she got up, washed her face and went downstairs to the bar-cum-dining room that occupied most of the ground floor. She strolled outside to the verandah. Erich and the American sat on cane chairs looking out over the dusty main street. She joined them, assuring her husband she was feeling much better. She asked a native servant to bring her a cup of coffee.
“Here they come again,” Temple Smith said, looking up the street.
A squad of about sixty askaris was being drilled by a German NCO. They marched briskly down the street, halted, ordered arms and stood at ease. Then they shouldered arms and marched off followed by a crowd of small boys.
“Now why,” Temple said, wagging a forefinger at von Bishop, “why are your askaris being drilled like this? It looks like you’re expecting trouble.”