“I feel really bad,” Frans said, ruefully. “You have all been through enough already, what with your ma and everything else.”
Otto frowned at Dieter as if to say what’s he talking about?
“I want you to know, Ingrid, that I keep Inez’s grave neat and tidy with fresh flowers every year,” Frans added, trying to elicit Ingrid’s gaze. “I’m sure you’ll want to go and visit.”
Ingrid sat frozen. Otto was confused. Dieter’s eyes moved, though his face did not flinch.
“Inez?” Otto said.
“I have to go!” Ingrid blurted out, standing suddenly and grabbing her coat in one movement. Her chair fell over backwards, clattering loudly on the tiled floor.
Frans glanced from Otto to Dieter. “There’s a fog, Ingrid. Where are you going?”
“To my hotel.”
“I’ll give you a lift, if you like.”
Ingrid pulled her coat tightly around herself and began to walk to the telephone. “It’s OK, I’ll call a cab.”
“Actually, Frans, I need to send an urgent fax to Hong Kong,” Dieter said, standing up.
“At the library?” Frans said.
“Unless there’s somewhere else.”
“Dieter! You promised you wouldn’t this time,” Otto protested.
“What? I’ll be quick. I have to keep in touch, Otto, I’m running a business.”
“No problem, Dieter, come with me,” Frans said. “Are you sure, Ingrid – the hotel is on the way?”
“Yes.” Ingrid was not easily dissuaded. “I’m used to cabs in Manhattan.”
Within minutes Otto was left standing in the empty house all alone, staring out at the cloying fog that smothered the small coastal town. It was a truly surreal sight: dense coastal fog colliding with barren, rocky desert terrain. The small, colourful, colonial–styled Bavarian buildings of Lüderitz seemed incidental, immersed in a titanic struggle between the two great forces of nature. Why on earth had his parents chosen this forsaken little town to settle in, Otto wondered? What lured them to build this grand house in 1946 and never leave it again?
Seven
The journey from the Adermann house on Bülow Street to the library on Ring Street was short, even for the modest proportions of Lüderitz. A pair of fluffy dice, red with white polka dots, dangled from the rear–view mirror of Frans’ rusting yellow Toyota. Even they smelled strongly of cigarette smoke.
“It’s great having you guys back in town after all these years,” Frans said with boyish excitement as he caressed the car along at a walking pace.
Dieter stared out of the grimy window at the enveloping greyness that reached down to touch the rivers of sand flowing into every crevice in the barren little town. “Yeah.”
“You know, I retire in a few months.”
Dieter’s eyes wandered across Frans’ profile. Yes, he thought, imminent retirement would fit with Frans’ bloated and weathered appearance. He didn’t imagine that being a policeman in a small, close community like Lüderitz would be very onerous, but living in this extreme climate could take its toll on a man.
“This will probably be my last case,” Frans mused with a little smile.
“Get many dead bodies around here?”
Frans shook his head wistfully. “Not exactly.”
Dieter hesitated as he thought back to Frans’ remarks about Inez and her grave. “Who was Inez?” he asked.
“Inez?” Frans repeated, frowning deeply.
“Yes, you mentioned her back at the house.”
Frans stared at Dieter with a puzzled look in his divergent eyes, for so long that the car began to veer towards the sand–smothered kerb.
“Your sister? Inez?”
Dieter felt a shiver. “I only have one sister: Ingrid.”
“Now, yes. Inez died a long time ago; you were very young then. It was tragic, she was such a beautiful woman.” Frans shook his head and sighed deeply. “She’s buried just outside town.”
Dieter felt a pang of sweaty nausea, his bladder dragging in his pelvis as though he was guilty of something. Was he guilty of something, he wondered, thinking about the dream that haunted him? He stared out of the window, stroking his puckered lips with an index finger.
After a few moments of this unexpected silence the car stopped and Dieter became aware of Frans’ eyes staring at him.
“We’re here, Dieter – the library.”
“Oh… er… thanks.” Dieter fumbled with the door. “Where is the cemetery?” he asked, turning to face Frans.
“You really didn’t know about Inez?”
Dieter raised his eyebrows and shook his head slowly.
“It’s not far, along Bay Road heading south. Do you want me to take you there?”
“Maybe later,” Dieter said, pushing the protesting door open.
“I admire your ma, Dieter, and Ingrid as well,” Frans said.
“Why?”
“Your ma was that sort of woman, kind and thoughtful but strong too, always putting her children first. I mean, that she would protect you from all that pain, just carrying it herself all these years… you know, bearing the burden. Ingrid too.”
Dieter contemplated Frans’ words as he stood beside the car, smelling the ripeness of the South Atlantic.
“Thank you for the lift, Frans.”
Eight
Otto willingly let his mind wander back in time as his fingers brushed over objects familiar to his past. Sometimes it was the smell, sometimes the texture, but mostly it was associations that triggered within him waves of nostalgia.
For instance, the lead soldiers that he and Dieter had played with in their sandy garden: he measured the weight of a Napoleonic infantryman in his palm, turning it over softly. They had all been beautifully hand–painted once, in reds, blues and blacks, but their glossy finish was now chipped and worn from hours of imaginative play. These memories were predominantly pleasant: he and Dieter had been good companions as children, despite their age difference, though Otto did recall the instances when Dieter would torment him intellectually with highbrow conversation beyond his comprehension.
“They would never be friends, Otto: the Cossacks are from Russia, and these blue and white soldiers are French – Napoleon’s troops,” Dieter taunted his younger brother. “Don’t you know anything?”
“But they are both fighting against the Turks… together.”
“You dig the trenches, Otto, and I will decide which ones are friends with the Cossacks.”
Otto smiled, remembering that his only form of retaliation to these mounting frustrations had inevitably been physical, and this would land Dieter in hot water when he reciprocated, because of his sizeable somatic advantage.
Otto turned a Cossack over in his fingers. Both brothers had harboured great admiration for the bravery and endurance of the Cossacks – why, he had no idea, but they were seldom the villains in any of their fantasy battles. The one he held, mounted on a black stallion, had lost the tip of his curved shashka.
His eyes fell upon a handmade sash of diaphanous white ribbon edged in red. On it, in Father’s black Gothic handwriting, the words Mein erstes Auto had bled and faded into the adjacent material.
It had been wrapped around Otto’s first car, a camel–brown Morris Minor, presented by proud parents to transport him back and forth the seven hundred miles to medical school in Cape Town. Otto swallowed a surge of nostalgia. He had loved that car, rattling along at a top speed of fifty–five miles per hour on straight roads that bisected the arid and hostile landscapes of the Namib, the Richtersveld and the Karoo before finally being welcomed by the sight of Table Mountain, an oasis in the wilderness at the southern tip of Africa. And to have a car as a student in Cape Town in the 1960s – what a prestige that had been. But that Morris had created great discontent in his family too.
“I was never given a car,” Ingrid said, eyes downcast, lips pressed together.
“Otto has to get to medical school in Cape Town, Ingrid,” Mum repl
ied, “and he has to get between hospitals for his tutorials.”
“Yes, of course, Otto is going to be a doctor like Daddy.” Ingrid’s voice was laced with sarcasm.
“You went to secretarial college in Swakopmund. That’s what you wanted.”
“It’s all about the boys in this house. Always the boys,” Ingrid said.
“You didn’t need a car, Ingrid, you didn’t choose to study far away.”
“Oh, so it was my choice, was it?”
“Your father and I have never prevented you from following your dreams.”
Ingrid always rolled her eyes, shaking her head in utter disbelief as she sighed deeply.
“Dieter went to fancy Schloss Gracht in Cologne to study business, Otto to medical school in Cape Town and I stayed behind in bloody Lüderitz.”
“But you have Frederick,” Mum argued, referring to the wealthy businessman that Ingrid had been dating for some time.
Otto remembered that Dad never had the patience to listen to Ingrid’s discontent, reminding her always about the hardships he had endured to provide her with a good home, schooling and all the clothes she could possibly dream of. Dad also disapproved strongly of Frederick, regarding him as too old for Ingrid, and of course he had also been married before. They fought terribly, Ingrid and Dad. Mum always said they were too similar: strong–willed, proud. Neither ever liked to apologise.
The foghorn sounded in the murky distance through the brume, snapping Otto back. He pushed the ribbon back on the shelf, as if banishing the dark emotions that it had aroused in his family. His eyes gazed across the dusty boxes of items that safeguarded the remnants of his childhood. Mum, it seemed, had never disposed of anything. He sneezed from the musty odours and shook his head as he chuckled. Then his eyes fell upon a large worn box marked Bell & Howell.
His eyes lit up instantly and he bent down to retrieve the box. Here was something that used to give them hours of pleasure as youngsters: the old family cine projector. He recalled how he used to set it up, threading the film around the toothed sprockets and through the gate, watching the large metal reels turn synchronously as the images flickered onto a white sheet tacked to the living room curtains. It had been utterly magical when he was a child.
Somewhere there would be an old box containing reels of home movies, filmed mainly by Dad who had enjoyed brandishing his black Agfa cine camera whenever family events occurred, like when Otto had been presented with the Morris Minor. Otto smiled and hoped that the films had survived, for they would be an excellent icebreaker when Dieter and Ingrid returned. There were bound to be many happy and amusing moments captured for eternity on grainy black and white celluloid.
Nine
The white taxi stopped outside the Hotel Zum Sperrgebiet, which was almost engulfed in swirling, dense sea fog. Being slightly elevated above the harbour, the views over the water, pier and sailing vessels were pleasant and bestowed upon the little human enclave of Lüderitz a quality far grander than reality. At that moment, though, the thick fog rebalanced the illusion.
Ingrid hesitated, her lower lip furled as she ran her teeth over it. “How far is it to the cemetery?” she asked.
The taxi driver turned his burly frame through forty–five degrees in the front seat, a deep frown etched into his unshaven melon of a face.
“You ever been to the cemetery in a fog, Fräulein?”
Lüderitz residents had a curious tendency to use Germanic expressions as liberally as colloquialisms in their everyday conversations. Many were fluent in a dialect quaintly time–locked in its century–old colonial past.
“Not for a long time,” Ingrid said. “Take me there, please.”
The driver shrugged and ground the vehicle into gear as he turned to grapple with the steering wheel. The ageing Mercedes wound its way back along Woermann Street in the embrace of the smoking fog, illuminated like phosphorous by the yellow headlights. Then the driver turned into Bay Road, the main route through Lüderitz, entering from the arid and stony south–east before disappearing once again beneath the shifting sands of the Namib Desert just beyond Robert Harbour.
Lüderitz Cemetery was not far out of town, though hidden as it was within the curtains of fog, it was impossible to discern the extent of its geometric format.
“Wait here, I won’t be too long,” Ingrid said, opening her door.
“It’s your money, Fräulein.”
Once she was crunching her way along the vapid pathways between rows of granite headstones, Ingrid found her bearings coming back to her quickly. She had walked this way many times before, though not for a very long time indeed. She found the headstone with relative ease, surrounded, as Frans had rightly declared, by colourful wreaths of flowers. Most were plastic, sun–baked and leeched of their colour, but there were also small bundles of fresh flowers tied together with string, thoughtfully placed facing the headstone as if in homage.
Ingrid knelt down and rearranged the flowers, many of them dried by the desiccating desert wind, the wetness of the fog simply too little, too late.
The inscription on the small headstone was facile: Inez, gone too soon, 19.06.1927-11.09.1948.
Ingrid touched the cold granite, damp from the cloying fog, surprised that the headstone seemed smaller to her than she recalled. Compared to those around Inez, with their elaborate designs, polished slabs and plinths, marble vases and ostentatious inscriptions boasting scrolls and flowers, it was clear that little money had been spent on her memorial. On the plot adjacent to Inez’s grave a fresh hole had been excavated, the mound of unearthed sand and stony rubble piled high just a few feet away. The depth of the hole surprised Ingrid and she found herself mesmerised by its fathomless permanence.
She did not hear the footsteps on the gravel, nor sense the dark presence behind her as the fog curled around his head and shoulders.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
Ingrid straightened and spun around. She swallowed. It was Dieter. She breathed a little heavily but remained silent. Dieter took a step forward and bent over to study the inscription.
“How did you get here?” Ingrid said tersely.
“Inez,” he read. “1948. I was – what – five years old.” He turned to face Ingrid whose eyes were open wide, like a startled rabbit’s.
“Who told you?” Ingrid said.
“He must have been in love with her,” Dieter replied, gesticulating at the fresh flowers and wreaths scattered across the humble white marble chippings on the grave.
Ingrid nodded. “Frans.”
“Was he?”
“He adored her, took her to his final school dance, not me, but that was all.”
Dieter shook his head, glancing again at the neatly tended grave and its decorations. “Why the big secret?”
It was hard maintaining eye contact with Dieter. They had spoken so little in such a long time that he felt somewhat like a stranger to her, and yet he wasn’t. The intensity of this encounter was heavily inflected with the awkwardness of unfamiliarity, like former lovers with intimate carnal knowledge of each other forced into each other’s personal space again after too many years apart.
“It is so complicated… you were too young. You were both too young.”
“You mean Otto?” Dieter bent down and picked up a bunch of wilting lavender, turning it over in his hand.
“Her favourite colour,” Ingrid said, and then her face hardened as déjà vu flashed before her eyes. “I would watch out for scorpions if I was you.”
“Scorpions?”
Ingrid nodded subtly. “Black and hairy, with yellow legs. They crawl under the flowers.” She paused.
“Are they poisonous?” Dieter asked.
“They’re deadly. One sting.”
Dieter dropped the flowers and stood up, frowning. “I’ve never seen those.”
“I have,” Ingrid said icily.
They stood in silence for a moment, staring at the dropped bunch of flowers.
“You cannot tell
Otto about this. I promised,” Ingrid said.
Dieter turned to face her squarely, hands on his hips. “Promised who?”
Ingrid sighed and looked down. “Mum.”
“Mum’s gone, Ingrid.”
Ingrid shook her head animatedly. “This will not go away, Dieter; it is far better to forget what you have seen here today and leave Otto out of it. For his sake, trust me.”
“Who are you to decide this?” Dieter said, angling his head accusingly.
“Who am I?” Ingrid returned with a sharp tone. “You boys have always lived a charmed life, been in the spotlight, Mum and Dad’s favourites, had everything you ever wanted…”
“Oh, knock it off, don’t bring that old nugget up again.”
“You don’t know anything about what is buried with her in that grave,” Ingrid hissed, pointing with a dagger–like finger at Inez’s headstone. “Believe me, Mum was right – leave it in there and go back to living your comfortable life in Hong Kong when this is over.”
Dieter stood stiffly, feet slightly apart and hands on hips as Ingrid began to walk away, swirling the fog around the swishing tails of her fur coat.
“Otto was her brother too – he deserves to know,” Dieter said.
Ingrid stopped and turned to face Dieter, raising a finger in the air menacingly. “I will only say it once more, Dieter: if you want what’s best for your beloved Otto, then keep your mouth shut.” She stared at him. “This is one of the reasons I didn’t want to come here again – ever – because you boys always think you know best, that you know everything.” She stopped to breathe deeply. “But let me tell you, you don’t.”
Dieter watched Ingrid disappear into the yawning fog, heard the taxi start up and drive off. He turned to look at the headstone again. Inez – she was twenty–one and he was only five when she died, but he remembered nothing about her at all, had never even heard her name mentioned. Otto would certainly never have remembered her for he was only an infant in 1948.
Why had Mum never mentioned this? And Dad, well Dad had passed away a good ten years back and was never much for talking about family things anyway.
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