At the Edge of the Desert

by Basil Lawrence

  It was dark when I woke up. No sign of my host. My neck hurt because I was on the floor, using a settee cushion as a pillow. I returned it, flipping it over before Jago could see the faint watermark left by my wet hair. I’d only had a towel for cover, and my muscles ached. My throat was sore from too much weed, or I was coming down with the flu.

  Jago had left a Post-it on the fridge saying he’d gone to buy milk, and that I should shower in his guest bathroom. I complied, and dried myself with the fresh towel with a note of its own: ‘Use this.’

  I took advantage of his absence to have a quick look around his bedroom and to touch the pristine white cotton duvet. An old Leica lay on his bedside table. Jackets, trousers and jerseys, in various shades of grey and khaki, hung in the cupboard. All his work shirts were white with French cuffs, and each had its own wooden hanger. Taped inside the door were photocopied instructions for tying a Windsor knot.

  Jago had brewed a pot of coffee by the time I came downstairs. We sipped it, not talking, in his back yard, where the temperature was still in the high twenties.

  —————

  On my long trek south from Windhoek I endured many unhappy hours speeding past the dense, thorny blur that crowded both sides of the highway. I overtook convoy after convoy of cattle trucks bound for slaughter and passed karakul farms that killed newborn sheep for their soft pelts. The railway line proved an inconstant companion and abandoned me. It veered unexpectedly into the veld, leaving me to fend for myself below the enormous sky, wondering if the track would succeed in finding me again. For my parents, that line was a gift the Germans generously bestowed upon our country. For me, it funnelled German troops inland to execute their commander’s order.

  Just beyond the town of Mariental, a row of Cyclopses watched me from their parked bus. The tourists lowered their telephoto lenses, less interested in me – a man in a Toyota bakkie – than a faraway thunderstorm, its dark columns of dancing legs evaporating before they touched the veld.

  I’d downloaded an audio clip of Mitch Danker, the Brit who’d emigrated to South Africa, to hear him tout his new flick about Nelson Mandela’s final year. His previous doc about Mandela’s childhood had won him a Sundance, and online buzz suggested that his new film might be up for another. Danker certainly knew his way around an edit suite: there wasn’t a moment’s rest in what I’d seen, but the critics loved him. He had a slick, Hollywood style that let his audience glide through his films.

  ‘What inspires you?’ the interviewer said.

  ‘I’ve cwafted a visual ode to Madiba,’ Mitch Danker said, ‘of multiple, interwoven, but seemingly unconnected, nawwatives.’ He continued at length, explaining how his film was an attempt to build a holistic picture of Mandela. ‘Forgive me if I sound pwetentious,’ the documentarian said conspiratorially, ‘but I pwefer thinking of The End of Nelson Wolihlahla as a many-voiced paean to the gweat man.’

  ‘Visual odes’ he could keep. Give me a linear narrative any day. Give me Fred Wiseman’s relentless exposure of abuse at Bridgewater State, or Little Edie’s growing infatuation with David Maysles.

  My headlights lit the old Kolmannskuppe sign but not its dark, dead houses. I braced myself for what I’d find at the end of the highway. Without warning, the Diamantberg rose up to engulf the road like a giant, patinated wave as I entered Lüderitz. Had my aunt known about the concentration camp, and was she implicated in the town’s past?

  I’d returned to a foreign Lüderitz. A historic Lüderitz. One I couldn’t unsee. Buildings constructed by slave labour for administering the concentration camp could no longer hide among the pitched roofs or the dormer windows or the fading paint. Everything beautiful had fallen away.

  On Shark Island, where camp inmates once wore hessian, where the colonial army worked people to death building Lüderitz harbour’s new quay, where seventeen died in one night, where the expansion project was abandoned, unfinished, with two-thirds of the prisoners dead, I drove all the way to the very edge of the earth where the sea plunged into the void.

  And when at last my lights picked out Quinty’s platform capsizing and righting itself among the dark waves, my memory of him out there filled me with something akin to relief.

  All night I lay awake intending to pack up everything I owned and drive away. I couldn’t surrender myself to sleep, and in the morning I went to my aunt’s bedroom hoping to find answers. In that quiet room I stood at the foot of her bed as if summoning her ghost to appear. Just as I’d waited in the harbour parking lot on the morning of her eightieth birthday while a group of African-American Methodists – on their third verse of an ‘Amazing Grace’ / ‘This Land is Your Land’ medley – offloaded picnic baskets and cooler boxes from their bus. I’d hoped that my aunt would be in time to hear their singing.

  The mission team was from Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts. Lüderitz was the penultimate stop on their return home via Cape Town, and their minister asked if I could tell him about the South African border post because Angolan officials had delayed his group by a whole day.

  The Methodists began carrying their provisions to the Zanzibar – the double topsail schooner moored alongside the local fishing boats at the far end of the dock – as my aunt arrived. She leant on my supporting arm as we followed the singers down the wooden walkway. It is a heaviness that stays with me.

  Until today I hadn’t been able to contemplate ridding myself of her belongings, but now I had no difficulty sorting through her things. I put her German and Namibian passports along with her photo album on the counterpane.

  I piled her clothes on the floor and told Rupertine to take whatever she liked. By the afternoon, the cupboard and chest of drawers were empty, the black rubbish bags loaded onto my bakkie and ready for delivering to my sister’s charity.

  Bolted to the cupboard’s rear wall was a safe the size of a microwave oven, which I tried opening with a combination of birthdays and telephone numbers. I called a locksmith who crouched to study the black box, feeling all around with both hands before confirming, with a gap-toothed smile, that he’d easily cut it open.

  In addition to the old bank statements and my aunt’s birth certificate, we found two wills, the most recent naming me her primary beneficiary. There was also a small Manila envelope containing an uncut diamond and a wedding ring I’d never seen before. Nothing else related to her past, or linked her to the town’s history.

  The locksmith offered to unbolt the safe from the wall now that it was a useless piece of metal. Only after he’d taken it away could I bear going back into the empty room, shutting the door behind me, to I consider what I should do with the house.

  All week I worked on my fine cut of the Windhoek interviews. I kept the segments uncomplicated: a title card displaying each person’s name followed by their talking head, a fade-out to the next title card, another face and so on. Apart from eliminating the occasional visual or audio distraction, along with a few minor repetitions, I stayed true to the material. Afterwards I filled two discs – one with my edit; the other, the original footage – which I left at Chesley’s office. He was in Cape Town.

  That weekend I attempted to engage in a thorough review of my prison documentary but found myself unable to concentrate on the rushes. Monday was the end of the month, and Chesley’s firm paid me. I had more money in my bank account than ever before.

  When the lawyer returned to Lüderitz, he invited me to review my recent work with him. It was a warm morning – nothing like Windhoek’s furnace, but hot enough for the road to become a silver moat reflecting the colonial architecture.

  On my way, I happened to pass Quinty sitting in the Krabbenhöft & Lampe guesthouse’s sheltered garden. There were two coffee cups on his table, and a leather satchel over the back of the other chair.

  He appeared to be staring in my direction, but even though I waved he didn’t seem to recognise my bakkie or me in it. A tall man came out of the guesthouse, attracting Quinty’s attention (and mine with it) by calling ‘Michael
!’ as I coasted down the berg.

  A few unemployed labourers dressed in overalls were waiting in the shade near the first stop sign I came to. They must have assumed I wanted to offer them piecework because I stopped there for longer than I’d intended, and as soon as I realised this I set off again.

  Thankfully my cousin only asked me to shorten a few interviews, to tighten them up. He assured me that his colleagues loved my work.

  ‘We need more people like Gendredi Mahahero,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll keep working through your list, and let’s hope for the best. I’d be happy to do my own research to find other people to talk to, if you’d like?’

  He shook his head. ‘We have to follow our process or else it will get out of hand.’ I wasn’t to film anyone he hadn’t approved; his team must first vet everyone, full stop.

  ‘But most of the relatives I’ve spoken to don’t have much to say. There were a few names that nobody had heard of, so I doubt I could do much worse. If everyone else is as boring as the majority of people I’ve spoken to, your Cape Town office might decide that Ouma Gendredi is the only person with a story to tell.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘If you want me to find another Ouma Gendredi, I’ll ask around the next time I’m up there. I think it might be worth me paying her another visit. There’s more she can tell me, I’m sure of it.’

  He bit the side of his thumb, and only took it out his mouth to say, ‘If you find someone, Henry, you must tell me before you speak to them. We must keep this under control, or else we might as well buy classified ads in The Namibian offering money to whoever makes up the best story. If you find me another Ouma Gendredi I’ll personally double your budget. Visit her again next month, but right now I need you to work through the list.’

  On my third trip to Windhoek I dutifully set about interviewing everyone on Chesley’s next list. I rang him in the first week to tell him how a local chief and his village elders had insisted I talk to their adviser, a young man who presumed to know what Cape Town lawyers wanted to hear. The man attended the shoot and kept interrupting the two nervous Herero men who were attempting to tell me about their relatives. At the end of the interview, my young monitor lost no time raising the question of money. His scepticism met my reassurances that Chesley’s firm would see to it: ‘You must pay him and this one too now,’ the fixer insisted. ‘These men walked far for your meeting.’

  ‘Should I worry about him?’ Chesley said on hearing all of this.

  ‘I don’t know. But you should tell your colleagues that my presence here has been noted.’

  After some thought, I reordered Chesley’s list so that I could use the town of Grootfontein as a temporary base for the next Monday to Wednesday. Every night up there I filled my bakkie with petrol and checked the oil, water and tyre pressure, including the spare. Every day I bought padkos from the local supermarket, and spent my time avoiding the young auditor.

  I’d heard about a butcher who sold kudu biltong, and on my final morning I parked between a snazzy top-of-the-range Toyota Hilux and an old Mercedes outside the slaghuis with a sturdy mesh door keeping out flies. The air inside was sweet and sweaty from fresh meat. Resplendent T-bones and sirloins waited under the glass while row upon row of thick biltong hung from S-shaped hooks on the back wall. The butcher spoke no English and I was about to switch to Afrikaans when he looked past me to serve the white farmer who’d just come in. After this customer paid for his sausages, the butcher inspected the dry meat I pointed to before instructing his son to slice and bag two strips. Other than telling me how much I owed, he didn’t speak to me.

  I ate handfuls of the salty meat in my bakkie while preparing for my day. There were two remaining names on my Grootfontein list, and as tempted as I was to abandon them to revisit Ouma Gendredi, I decided I had best fulfil my obligations.

  My first destination was a hunting lodge a few minutes outside town, but it was a wasted trip because the lodge owner sent word, via his foreman, that he’d cancelled my interview. His man shooed me off the property because he said I was distracting people with work to do. Word of my presence was presumably making the rounds among the local whites. My second appointment lay north of Tsumeb, the mining town.

  For the most part, the road was an uninterrupted straight line all the way to the horizon. I’d covered my passenger window with a towel to reduce the afternoon glare, but even with it flapping beside me the bright landscape was painful to my eyes. The side of my face tender to my fingertips.

  Listless from red meat and the long journey ahead, my mind found its way back to the photo of Shark Island and the dumbstruck boy staring at the camera. I switched on the radio, skipping over an Angolan station broadcasting in Portuguese, to distract myself with the BBC’s quarter-hourly news bulletins. Eventually the World Service’s short-wave signal grew weak and lost itself in static, and I had to suffer the Voice of America where two academics gleefully discussed Failing Europe until a praise-the-Lord nut took to the air. I opted for silence instead.

  An hour from my destination I found a copse of thorn trees where I parked with both doors wide open. I ate my sandwiches, I gulped the still-cold supermarket water because I was thirsty from the biltong. I couldn’t bear to look at the half-empty bag perspiring on the seat beside me.

  At Tsumeb I interviewed a bemused farmworker who said nothing worth filming, but all the same I recorded his words until it was time for me to pack up.

  My bakkie kicked up a cloud of dust that chased after me through a crossroads, and kept following until I turned onto the tarred Grootfontein–Windhoek road. A flash in my rearview mirror – sunlight streaking across a windshield far behind me – revealed a distant trickle of sand trailing a Hilux, similar to the bakkie I’d seen outside the butcher. Farmers travelled these dirt roads all the time, and this one followed me to the highway.

  ‘Unfortunately they could have been better,’ I said in response to Chesley’s inquiries about my Grootfontein interviews. He called when I was on the main road.

  ‘Ja, I just had a look at your recent message,’ he said while typing on his keyboard. ‘Still no luck?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘Jirre, man, that’s no good.’ His breath grew loud as he presumably cradled his phone with his shoulder.

  ‘Maybe I should stay here a bit longer,’ I said, taking advantage of his inattention. ‘Another week or two, and I’ll get through everyone on your next list and hopefully find someone good.’

  ‘What? Has there really been no one?’

  ‘Not like Ouma.’

  ‘You told me you were doing your own investigation. How’s that coming along?’

  His question surprised me: ‘I thought you said I must wait.’

  ‘No, you must start looking, Henry. I need you to find good stories.’

  ‘OK, in that case I won’t drive back to Lüderitz this weekend. I’ll start asking around. I want to see if Ouma Gendredi or Zacharias know anyone else I can talk to.’

  In Windhoek I set about cleaning up my latest interviews. My anxiety increased as it became clear that none of them would be much use to the lawyers. On Saturday, I bought two bottles of wine and stopped by Jago’s place. He was equally frustrated with his work, and kept vowing to move back to Germany. Dumme bureaucrats repeating the same mistakes! Idiotisch politicians doing likewise! All of which made the prospect of returning to Chesley’s unproductive list next week somewhat easier for me to bear, but which didn’t create the relaxed evening I craved.

  I took Jago’s Californian dope back to the guesthouse with me, and worked through Sunday until I shut my laptop at midnight to prepare my equipment for the next day. I set all the spare batteries to charge as I familiarised myself with my routes, before giving my camera and lenses a thorough clean. And then I lay awake. At 3 a.m. I got up and copied Ouma Gendredi’s interview onto a memory stick and slipped it into my bag, and I was rewarded with a brief sleep before the alarm woke me.

  J
ust before sunrise, having driven for an hour on the B1 highway, I came to the town of Okahandja, north of Windhoek, where I filled up with petrol. As the pump attendant gave me my credit card, a bakkie pulled onto the forecourt behind me. Even through my dirty window, I merely had to glance at my mirror to see my old friend, the Toyota Hilux.

  Instead of continuing north along the B1, as I’d intended, I took a left onto the B2 in the direction of the coast. This meant that the sun was rising behind me, so I couldn’t tell if anyone was following or not. I left the highway at the first opportunity, cutting through the veld on a secondary road, until I reached the settlement of Kalkfeld. All this time I wondered how many locals could afford a top-of-the range Hilux.

  I found the kraal on the outskirts of a cattle farm and parked under an acacia for a few puffs of the American weed. It soon put me in the right frame of mind for the interviews. I toyed with the idea of calling Chesley to tell him about the Hilux, but if he suspected that someone might be keeping tabs on me, it’d give him a reason to cut my trip short. For all I knew, every farmer north of Windhoek owned a Hilux. The region might well be teeming with them. And I was here to film Bushman paintings, after all.

  Saul Tjetjoo and his nephew Samuel led me to their modest dwelling. The older farm labourer was forty whereas his nephew had just turned eighteen. Thankfully there were no elders or fixers to interfere with my shoot.

  The two men had dressed for the occasion. Both wore military-style ‘phantasy uniforms’ I’d seen on television news reports of Herero Day commemorations. The uncle’s was a khaki jacket with three-starred crimson epaulettes on its shoulders. I recognised the Sam Browne belt, hung around his midriff, from my research into the British officer corps for my prison documentary. His military cap had a scarlet band; his nephew wore the same colour with a beret. They didn’t remove their knock-off Chanel sunglasses throughout my visit, and I intentionally didn’t ask them to.