Ghosts of the Past

by Tony Park

  Appleton, who Claire suspected had taken something of a shine to her, organised his men to ready one of Nathaniel’s horses for her. They set off, Claire’s mind racing as the column trotted across the open veld under the warm morning sun. She was acutely aware of Walters’ eyes on her from behind. She assumed she and Nathaniel had been compromised, but she wondered how much the captain and the two Australians really knew.

  The major’s arrival had been a stroke of good fortune for her. She wondered if she could have resisted interrogation as Nathaniel had – if he had indeed kept silent. She told herself she could be strong, but just the sight of the blood on Walters’ gloves – not to mention those reptilian eyes – had made her feel faint.

  She didn’t believe Walters’ story, either. She had heard Nathaniel’s piercing scream before the sergeant had entered the barn. The oafish Australian had apologised to her horse for putting it out of its misery, so he was hardly the kind of man to torture and execute a prisoner of war in cold blood. He had nice eyes, she recalled, for a colonial lackey.

  Claire looked at him slumped across the horse next to her. He seemed at peace, like he was sleeping. His face and hands were deeply tanned, his chin covered in black stubble. She guessed him to be no more than thirty, perhaps around her age, and his thick hair was still jet-black. She wondered what would happen to him. She doubted the British military would take the word of an Australian sergeant over an upper-class English gentleman, and that boded badly for her.

  ‘Major Appleton,’ Claire said, as sweetly as she could.

  He looked back at her. ‘Miss Martin?’

  ‘This is most delicate, Major, but I must answer the call of nature.’

  He reached for his moustache with a free hand. ‘Of course.’

  He slowed his horse and ordered his men, and Walters, to carry on, as he led Claire and her horse towards a large anthill. ‘You may dismount, Miss Martin, but please do not try to escape.’

  ‘You have my word, sir,’ she said.

  Claire dismounted and went behind the anthill. She had thought about trying to gallop away, but the horse they had chosen for her, perhaps deliberately, was in poor condition, so she did not think she could outrun the mounted troopers. Nonetheless, she needed to escape as soon as she could, and to get word to German Naval High Command and her cousin Fritz that the armaments deal was now compromised. That would free her up to pursue her own mission, which would ensure she would make far more than a commission fee for shipping a load of used artillery to some doomed rebels. She squatted down and removed the ceramic bottle.

  She uncorked the little flask and upended it. A piece of thin paper, tightly rolled, slipped out and Claire quickly flattened it. As she had hoped, it was the map Nathaniel had mentioned. She took in the town of Komatipoort, which she knew to be on the border of Portuguese East Africa, to the southeast, and a squiggly line with crosshatching, which she was sure was a railroad.

  ‘Miss Martin?’ Major Appleton called.

  ‘Coming, Major.’ She quickly re-rolled the map, put it back in the little bottle and hid it again. She stood, and as she walked around the anthill she was confronted with the sight of Captain Walters, on horseback, blocking her path. Appleton was waiting politely out of sight, through the trees. The captain had obviously carried on, as ordered, but then doubled back through the bush to catch her unawares. A few seconds earlier and he would have seen her hiding the map. Her cheeks burned.

  Walters looked down at her. ‘I know you’re working for the Germans, Claire. I know what you’re up to and I’m watching you.’

  Walters pulled on his horse’s reins, put the spurs to the animal, and rode off. Claire shivered.

  Chapter 8

  Munich, Germany, the present day

  The page of the scanned letter Anja was reading was a fragment, its edges burned, and the damage showed as black on her photocopy.

  I was not sure how much Captain Walters knew of my mission or my meeting with Kommandant Belvedere, but the raid on the trading post had been deliberately planned to capture the American and, presumably, myself. This meant there was most likely a traitor within the ranks of the Boers. The captain had only spent a short amount of time with Kommandant Belvedere, yet I can only assume Belvedere held his tongue. This, I knew, meant that the captain would be seeking an opportunity to question me about the mission at his earliest convenience.

  Anja smiled at the formal turn of phrase. Claire, clearly a formidable woman, was expressing fear. This Captain Walters had proved himself to be completely ruthless, assuming it was he and not the Australian sergeant who had executed the American colonel in cold blood.

  Anja set the paper down and wondered what bearing this information might have on her own studies. Here was a man whose name she had heard before, Sergeant Cyril Blake, entering Claire Martin’s life in 1902 and reappearing four years later at the height of the Nama rebellion as a horse trader and rebel sympathiser.

  Anja had heard of Blake from a South African journalist, Susan Vidler, who had contacted her after she had found, courtesy of Google, an article on Anja’s research in Namibia’s New Era newspaper. A young Namibian woman had struck up a conversation with Anja on a previous trip to Namibia while they had both been viewing the desert horses from a hide overlooking the waterhole at Garub near Aus in the country’s south. Anja had not realised the woman was a journalist and had been surprised to read a week later about her thesis concerning the origins of the horses. She had learned, since then, to keep her work largely to herself.

  Vidler was running to an agenda, to make a name for herself writing a feature that would put pressure on the German government at a time when the Nama and the Herero were renewing their campaign for the Germans to pay reparations for the harm inflicted on their people during and after the colonial uprisings. A class action had even been lodged in the courts in the United States against the German government by expatriate Hereros living in America. The woman had discovered that Edward Prestwich, an Australian mentioned in a couple of history books as having fought on the side of the Nama people, was an alias. The man’s real name, Susan Vidler had disclosed, was Cyril Blake and she wanted to know if he had come up in Anja’s research. At that time, he hadn’t.

  In any case, Anja was not interested in politics, nor in sharing her research or findings just yet with another journalist. Her thesis would eventually be in the public domain for anyone to see, but for now she wanted to take her time preparing it and not be led about by a pushy reporter.

  Anja heard footsteps coming down the stairs and the door to her father’s underground study creaked open.

  ‘Supper will be ready in ten minutes,’ her mother said.

  ‘Coming, Mama.’

  Anja closed her folder of papers and went upstairs to supper, where her mother served up the plain meal of chicken and potatoes, just the way she liked it.

  ‘I don’t know why you need to keep going back over there,’ her mother said as they sat down to eat. Anja had wondered how long it would take for her mother to object to her impending trip back to Namibia. ‘You should find a nice man here, in Germany, and settle down. Do you know Mrs Mueller’s son, Hans, got divorced? He’s a catch, no kids, and he works in a bank. You could give up your part-time tutoring job.’

  Anja groaned inwardly. She liked her job and her father had left money specifically in his will to allow her to continue her studies for as long as she wished. Neither she nor her mother wanted for much.

  ‘Anja?’

  ‘Yes, Mama?’

  Her mother looked down at her food, and then minutely adjusted the cutlery around the plate. She seemed reluctant to meet Anja’s gaze. ‘You do like men, don’t you?’

  Anja rolled her eyes and that was enough to settle her mother. They were similar people, both quick to anger. ‘I know, you are worried that I am going to stay at university all my life. As I have told yo
u, I do not plan on doing so.’

  ‘Then what will you do? Get a job here? Or are you going to leave me for good and stay in Namibia forever?’

  ‘You know I’m only going for a month, Mama, to do some of my own research and help out with the wild horses monitoring project. As I told you, the horses are at risk of dying out; the spotted hyenas have been taking their foals before they can reach maturity. It’s important work and –’

  Her mother banged the table in an uncharacteristic show of active aggression. ‘No! Your father did not work his whole life to pay for your schooling and your years of university so that you can spend your time sitting alone in the desert without a man or a proper job, counting horses.’

  Anja clenched her fists.

  ‘It’s time for you to come home, for good,’ her mother said.

  ‘I have a home,’ Anja said quietly, but forcefully. ‘It is Namibia. I have citizenship there because that is where you gave birth to me, whether you like it or not, and that is where I want to live.’

  Her mother’s body heaved, as though she was sobbing, even though Anja detected no tears. ‘It is true, my worst fear. You would abandon me?’

  Anja sighed. ‘I don’t want to leave you, Mama, but I have a right to decide my own future, what I do with my life, and where I want to live. I’m a grown woman, not a child any more.’

  ‘But don’t you see,’ her mother reached across the table, ‘you are my child and I just want you close as I get older and as my time . . .’

  Anja felt trapped, as she always did when her mother went down this path. She knew how much her mother missed her father and she was such a prickly old woman that she had few friends. There was that word again, she thought, ‘prickly’. A psychotherapist friend had told her that what people disliked in others was sometimes a reflection of their own issues. She felt like a prisoner. She wanted to scream.

  ‘You like those horses more than you like human beings,’ her mother said. ‘You’d be more at home with them than you would be with a man or your own mother.’

  On that, Anja reflected she and her mother had finally reached a point of consensus.

  Chapter 9

  North Sydney, Australia, the present day

  Nick woke with a trace of a hangover that was quickly diminished with a smile as he thought back over his evening with Susan.

  He showered and dressed in a polo shirt and jeans and walked from his one-bedroom flat to North Sydney station, eschewing the bus in order to clear his head. He caught the train to Granville, in Sydney’s west. The two suburbs in which he and his aunt Sheila MacKenzie lived were about as different as two places could be and still be in the same city or country.

  In half an hour he had swapped the high-rise office blocks and expensive harbourside properties of where he lived for the factories and terraced houses of the landlocked suburbs which had traditionally been a first stop for the waves of immigrants who had sought a new start in Australia. As Nick walked through Granville he saw almost the full spectrum of Australia’s multicultural society in shopfronts, cafes and takeaway joints and in the faces of the people going about their Saturday morning business.

  He had been to his aunt’s place only once before – she had bought it after her last divorce when she and her ex-husband had sold their shared house and both had to downsize. The street was leafy and the early twentieth-century terraces and Federation houses were mostly in good condition or being renovated. He knocked on the door.

  ‘Ah, my favourite nephew.’ Sheila, a foot shorter than him, got up on her toes to kiss him on the cheek.

  ‘Your only nephew.’

  ‘Ever the realist.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said, forcing a smile, ‘it gets worse.’

  ‘Come in and tell Aunty all about it.’

  ‘I lost my job.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that, Nick, darling, especially after, well . . . Want a beer?’

  He checked his watch. It was eleven thirty in the morning. ‘Sure. What are you having?’

  ‘Bubbles. It’s Saturday.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He went to the refrigerator in the kitchen. Sheila had four cold bottles and he selected one and opened it. She found the glasses, in a box, and he popped the cork and poured.

  Sheila raised her glass. ‘To the future. May it be better for both of us.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ he said. ‘But today it’s the past I’m interested in.’

  ‘Come outside.’ Sheila led him through the small kitchen to a narrow yard shaded by a pergola festooned with passionfruit vines. ‘I was intrigued by your call. Whenever I’ve tried to talk to you about family history in the past your eyes just glaze over.’

  ‘Guilty as charged. I met a woman.’

  ‘Aha. I thought you were too handsome to stay single.’

  Nick laughed. ‘It’s not like that. She’s a South African journalist. She’s asking about a great-great-or-whatever uncle of ours who fought in the Boer War.’

  She nodded. ‘Cyril Blake.’

  ‘You’re amazing,’ he said.

  ‘You didn’t think so at my birthday party,’ she sipped her champagne, ‘when I tried to educate you about our family.’

  ‘Well, I’m interested now.’

  ‘Pretty, is she?’

  Nick smiled. ‘Maybe. But I’m interested in Cyril Blake in any case. Did you know he fought against the Germans as well as the Boers?’

  ‘Yes, nephew, as a matter of fact I did. I actually spoke to your grandmother about him before she died. The dementia was already setting in, but she was able to tell me a bit about him. She told me he’d fought the Germans and gone missing.’

  ‘In Africa,’ Nick said.

  Sheila looked surprised. ‘No, I don’t think any Australians were involved in the fighting against the Germans in Africa during the First World War, but there were Boer War veterans who signed on again and fought on the Western Front, so I assumed Cyril was one of them.’

  Nick shook his head. ‘No, this was in 1906 or some time like that, in the war between the German colonial powers in South West Africa – Namibia – and the local people.’

  Sheila set down her champagne. ‘But Australians didn’t fight in that war. This is amazing stuff, Nick, and really interesting.’

  For the first time, when it came to family history, he had to agree with his aunt. ‘I don’t suppose you have any really old family stuff, do you?’

  Sheila put a finger to her lips. ‘Maybe. I don’t know. I did get a box of stuff from your grandmother, just before she went into the nursing home. There are all sorts of papers in there and I haven’t been able to go through them all. While I’m trying to put together the whole family history, I’m only up to the mid–nineteenth century at the moment.’

  ‘What sort of stuff was there?’

  ‘Letters, old photographs, keepsakes. There are your grandfather’s medals as well.’

  ‘Really?’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘Yes really, Nick. This family history stuff is not all about me trawling the internet for birth and death certificates.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’ve learned that you have to do some real detective work and that it’s not just a mouse-click away.’

  ‘That’s true, but that’s not what I mean, darling,’ she said. ‘There are real, tangible links to our past, a lot of them in cardboard packing boxes in this house, you know? This is our history, Nick, our people, not just a family tree on a piece of paper.’

  He felt bad, now, that he had tuned out of so many discussions his aunt had tried to start with him about where they came from. He was genuinely interested in Cyril Blake, and he was beginning to get an inkling of how his aunt had become addicted to researching their family history. Having lost the person he was closest to he wondered if it was also about having family to cling to.

&
nbsp; ‘So are there any papers that might have belonged to Blake?’ Nick asked.

  Sheila pursed her lips. ‘I’m not sure. There is one bundle that could be of interest.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Why don’t I show you instead? Pour us another drink, and if you want to eat, maybe order us a pizza? There’s a menu on the fridge.’

  They got up and Nick found himself a beer at the back of the fridge. He saved the champagne for his aunt and poured her another glass, then found the menu on a magnet and called and ordered a supreme pizza and some garlic bread. They met in the lounge room; she came down the stairs carrying a cardboard removalists’ box.

  ‘Can I help you with that?’

  ‘I’m not that old.’

  They each took a seat in armchairs and Sheila put the box on the coffee table between them. ‘I think this is the one.’

  Sheila opened the box, set the lid down and then carefully began unpacking it. There were black and white photographs, some tied in bundles with string, others in old brown leather frames. Nick saw envelopes with faded elaborate copperplate on them, and folded certificates.

  Sheila dug deeper into the box, but she took the time to reverently stack all the items she removed. Nick took a handful of pictures. There were stiffly formal wedding shots and a man in what looked like a light horseman’s uniform, with a bandolier strung across his chest and a slouch hat with an emu feather in it.

  ‘Your great-grandfather, in Palestine.’

  Nick stared into the innocent face, still untouched by war, and thought that Sheila not only knew these people’s names, it was as if she knew them personally.

  ‘Here we are!’

  He set down the pictures and looked up. Sheila was smiling, her eyes glittering. ‘This was what I was thinking of.’

  She passed a manila folder to him and Nick opened it. Inside were pages of flimsy writing paper, and as soon as he tried to read them he realised they were not in English.

  ‘German,’ Sheila said. ‘I went through this stuff with your grandmother years ago,’ she continued, sipping some champagne, ‘and that’s when she mentioned about your great-great-uncle who had been in the Boer War and then gone on to fight the Germans – I assumed in France. She told me she thought those pages were letters or military documents that Cyril might have taken from a dead German. She said she’d found them among her own mother’s possessions.’