16mm of Innocence

by Quentin Smith

  “That must be the Elbe River in Hamburg,” Dieter remarked. “Didn’t we used to live there?”

  “Hamburg?” Otto repeated. Having been born in Lüderitz their former life in Germany was wholly unfamiliar to him.

  “Uh–huh,” Dieter mumbled, staring at the grainy, scratched images on the screen. “Those people are starving – look at their faces, their necks.”

  “I didn’t know there were camps in Hamburg,” Otto said.

  “There were camps everywhere, Otto,” Dieter replied.

  Another rough jump splice and the image is suddenly one of several little kittens climbing in and out of a pair of large, leather shoes on a wooden floor, grabbing at the laces with their claws, watched over lazily by an adult cat in a wicker basket. The boundless energy of the kittens is delightful as they jump on each other, chasing their tails and cavorting tirelessly.

  “That was my cat, she was called Flaumschen,” Ingrid said, unexpectedly, her face lighting up and softening as she stared at the images.

  “What kind of a name is that?” Otto asked.

  “She was very fluffy, you see.”

  The kittens are soon joined by a small brown Dachshund who stands tolerantly amongst them, seemingly reluctant, as though placed there deliberately for the camera.

  “Oh God, I’d forgotten the dog… what did we call him again?” Ingrid said. “Kaiser, that was it – the king – because he was treated so royally in the house by Dad. He loved that mutt.”

  The toddler is back onscreen, seated in front of a large glass bowl, holding a long wooden spoon that seems to dwarf the little child. The toddler’s face is smeared with dark smudges, presumably chocolate, emanating from the wooden spoon that is being ineffectually scraped in the bowl to remove every last tempting vestige of cocoa. Even the toddler’s white nappy is smeared in chocolate. The child’s face concentrates intensely on manoeuvring the cruelly long, flat spoon into its mouth, tongue snaking disobediently about. Suddenly the spoon drops to the floor, eliciting a silent howl of dismay from the toddler. A young girl steps forward, wearing a dress and ribbons in her hair, retrieves the spoon and hands it back to the toddler with a reassuring pat on the head, instantly quelling the tears. The girl looks straight into the camera and smiles. She looks remarkably like Ingrid, with similar facial bones, a pudgy nose and lightly freckled cheeks.

  “My God she looks just like you, Ingrid. Is that you?” Otto said.

  Ingrid did not look away from the screen.

  The scene changes abruptly to the garden, where the older girl is propelling herself on a scooter with bulbous white tyres, one foot on the running board and the other pushing the scooter around in wide circles on the lawn in front of the hydrangeas. The younger girl stands behind her, grasping her waist tightly, and every time the scooter passes close to the camera the younger girl falls off the scooter in a controlled dive, rolling onto the grass. Then she smiles at the camera, revealing her missing two front teeth and hair covered in dried grass, before dashing back to hitch a lift from the older girl again. The theatrical dive is repeated over and over in front of the camera. The image begins to jump and heavy lines scrape across it as the quality deteriorates sharply. Suddenly it ends and the screen reflects clear white light.

  Otto switched the projector off and the lights on. A silence beyond the sudden cessation of the rhythmic ticking and mechanical noise of the Bell & Howell projector engulfed all three Adermann children. Outside they could hear the howl of the south–wester as it gusted and swirled around the house, occasionally blasting the windows with a spray of desert sand that sounded like static electricity.

  Otto was the first to break the silence. “We cannot go on ignoring what we’re seeing in these images.” He was perched on the edge of the dining table, swinging one leg absently, watching his pendulous foot in preference to looking at Dieter or Ingrid’s averted faces.

  “Will someone please tell me what’s going on?” Otto said quietly.

  Seventeen

  “I need a bourbon,” Ingrid said, holding out her glass as though she was at the Ritz Carlton in Manhattan. “Scotch, I mean.”

  Dieter moved thoughtfully through to the kitchen and sat down at the table, his head in his hands, leaving Otto to tend to Ingrid. Otto half–filled her glass and then his own, standing over her.

  “Who is the baby?” Otto asked.

  Ingrid looked up at him, eyes heavy and apprehensive. “Your brother.”

  “Dieter?” Otto said, raising his eyebrows.

  She nodded and looked away. Otto glanced through the open doorway and saw Dieter sitting in the kitchen, elbows on the table, cupped hands over his nose and mouth, staring straight ahead.

  “And the younger girl is… you?” Otto said, softly.

  Again Ingrid nodded but would not meet his eyes. “If you hadn’t insisted on showing these fucking movies everything could have stayed as it had been.”

  “It would have come out eventually, Ingrid.” Dieter could be heard from the kitchen, muffled, but dissenting.

  Otto’s head turned from one to the other as he clenched his jaw muscles. He felt as though he was being toyed with, and it irritated him.

  “Who is the older girl? Where is she now?” Otto said.

  Ingrid looked up and took a gulp of scotch. “I’m sorry, Otto, I made a promise to Mum, many years ago, and as time passed by everything seemed less and less relevant and… well… of no significance to us anymore.”

  “Mum?” Otto’s face twisted in anguish. “She kept this from us?”

  Ingrid nodded. “I did warn you, brother. I said, leave things be.”

  Otto sat down beside her on the couch. Dieter remained in the kitchen.

  “I had an older sister – we had an older sister. Her name was Inez. She was born seven years before me, in Hamburg.” Ingrid paused, looking down, unable to meet Otto’s eyes. “For God’s sake, have some scotch, Otto!” she said harshly, as though reprimanding him.

  “I don’t believe this!” Otto said, barely audibly. “Why the hell am I only finding out about her now?” He took a generous mouthful of the scotch from his tumbler, frowning.

  “When we first arrived in Lüderitz in 1946, a year after Dad, I was very lonely at school, hated the local kids, couldn’t make friends…” Ingrid stared ahead, her eyes reddening. “Inez was my soul mate, my friend, she understood my pain and my bewilderment. She was eighteen going on nineteen, and I was twelve, hormonal, misunderstood, angry. Dad was so busy establishing his medical practice, not just here in Lüderitz but another one in Keetmanshoop, five hours away in the…” Ingrid gestured aimlessly out of the curtained windows with an outstretched arm.

  “Mum was… she tried to understand but I think she was also struggling. Imagine coming from a smart house along Schöne Aussicht, overlooking the lake, to this.” Ingrid looked up and Otto saw that her eyes were moist, revealing the pain that they had held back for so long, silently, invisible to the world beyond her strictly controlled emotional borders.

  Ingrid cleared her throat. “Inez was only in school for one year here, but everyone liked her and she made friends easily. She was confident, outgoing, beautiful.” She chuckled. “Frans was smitten by her. He took her to a school dance… but Inez could do so much better.”

  Otto was impatient to get to the point – where was Inez; what became of her? – but he sensed the need to let Ingrid tell her story in her own way, releasing her burden at a pace and tempo that she could manage. Ingrid’s composure was melting, her chin quivering slightly and her eyes puffing up and brimming with tears.

  “And then suddenly, two years later, just after her twenty–first birthday, she… umm… took her life.”

  Otto recoiled from this unexpected disclosure; felt the breath escape from his lungs, leaving him gasping. He didn’t know where to look, what to say. The disclosure, first that they had a sister whom he had never known about, and then that she had died – tragically – was overwhelming.

 
“I missed her so – she was my everything here; she helped me to stay sane in those first two years. Yet, I couldn’t help her when she needed me, I did nothing to make her happier, to address her own pain and loss.” Ingrid covered her mouth with a cupped hand and drew short, gasping breaths.

  Otto didn’t know what to do. Should he comfort her? This seemed somewhat insincere given their relative lack of familiarity and the fact that he was angry that she had colluded to keep this from him his entire life. He just sat, unmoving, staring ahead, trying to believe that the young girl he had been watching on the screen, so full of life, just minutes before, was no more; snuffed out before her time.

  “What happened?” Otto managed eventually.

  Ingrid looked up, mascara melting, nose wet, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “She shot herself.”

  “Wha…? But…” Otto stumbled. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, Otto, it was long ago.”

  “Where?”

  “She’s buried just out of town in the cemetery. It’s not far.”

  Otto recalled Frans speaking about keeping her grave neat and placing fresh flowers on it.

  “I meant where did she die?” Otto said.

  Ingrid gulped at her scotch thirstily and waved one hand distractedly in the air. “Here around Lüderitz, somewhere.” She sounded tired all of a sudden, all the vitality gone from her body, the spark extinguished.

  “Kolmanskop,” Dieter said, his voice echoing from the kitchen.

  Otto stiffened.

  “I’ve arranged with Frans to visit the place where she was found,” Dieter said.

  Otto felt his pulse quicken and frowned. “You knew?”

  “Only recently. I asked Frans who she was the day he mentioned her grave.”

  “What!”

  “The day he first came here.”

  “And he told you, just like that?” Otto said sharply.

  “He was surprised we didn’t know. It seems it was a family secret only because Mum and Dad wanted it to be.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Dieter?”

  Silence from the kitchen.

  “We’ve got a dead child to identify in our back garden, Mum to bury – we don’t need any more secrets between us! Christ, let’s just talk to each other!” Otto erupted. “What’s wrong with you people?”

  Ingrid looked up, perhaps somewhat relieved that Dieter had not divulged their meeting at the cemetery. “Please Otto, this is no easier for us than it is for you.”

  Otto felt his face throbbing with blood. “For us! Where the hell did that conspiracy come from? You two don’t even talk to each other, for God’s sake.”

  Dieter appeared in the doorway. “Calm down, Otto. Frans will take us to where Inez died tomorrow. He has to arrange permits and stuff. I think we will all benefit from going there, letting this all out in the open, and moving forward… constructively.” He studied Otto and Ingrid, who listened without protest.

  “A permit? Where is this place?” Otto asked.

  “Kolmanskop, in the Sperrgebiet,” Dieter said, leaning his shoulder against the doorway, arms folded. “Look, we can’t question Mum about why this was kept a secret, about who made the decision, but I assume it was to protect us from unnecessary distress.” He shrugged and looked over at Ingrid. “It is really unfortunate that you have had to carry this burden alone, all these years, Ingrid.”

  Appearing somewhat surprised by his compassionate remark, Ingrid looked up at Dieter with a teary, puffy face. She said nothing. Silence was perhaps just what they needed for a moment’s private reflection, Otto thought. Then Ingrid stood up.

  “I’m going back to the hotel now.” She placed her tumbler on the dining table beside the projector and straightened. “I’d very much like to come with you tomorrow. Could you ask Frans to pick me up at the hotel on your way out?”

  “Sure,” Otto said distractedly.

  Ingrid paused beside Otto, ignoring Dieter. “I’m sorry, Otto, you were never meant to find out about this.” She looked immensely sad, and tired.

  “Why ever not?” Otto said.

  Ingrid patted his shoulder gently and walked away.

  “Ingrid?” Otto called out more forcefully, turning his head.

  The front door closed, signalling Ingrid’s defiant departure. Otto and Dieter sat in silence in the living room.

  You were never meant to find out. Otto heard Ingrid’s apologetic words echoing in his bruised mind, over and over.

  “What does she mean by that: I was never meant to find out about this?” Otto asked.

  “I honestly don’t know, Otto.”

  “They certainly buried her both literally and metaphorically, didn’t they, completely erased from the family memories?” Otto met Dieter’s searching eyes. “Why?”

  This was not the childhood that he so warmly remembered. Childhoods are naive; childhoods are fond; they are not supposed to be filled with buried sisters and ominous secrets, Otto thought to himself.

  Surely, there could be no more. Then his mind briefly returned to the unanswered questions that had been only temporarily cast aside to allow him time to deal with the emotional shock of Inez: who had been buried in the back garden, and what was the significance of those harrowing images of Neuengamme revealed in the home movie?

  Eighteen

  Bay Road ascended the hill behind Lüderitz, exiting the town in a south–easterly direction and becoming the B4 to Keetmanshoop, over two hundred miles away through the sand of the Namib and the barren black rock of the aptly named Schwarzrand. Frans collected everyone in his yellow Toyota police car at 10am, the vestiges of an overnight fog still clinging to the land in the mid–morning sunshine.

  “Is the cemetery out of our way?” Otto asked from the back seat beside Ingrid, who sat with her hands clasped tightly in her lap, lips pressed together and eyes unfathomable.

  “We drive right past it along this road,” Frans said.

  Dieter was wearing a dark burgundy shirt and chinos, Otto a sports jacket and striped tie, while Ingrid was elegantly framed in a demure dark grey – almost black – ensemble, befitting their journey of belated respect for their lost sister.

  “It’s so small,” Otto remarked after they stopped in front of Inez’s neat but humble grave. He glanced at Dieter and Ingrid in turn, but they did not respond. Otto bent down and aimlessly rearranged the shrivelled and crumbling bunches of flowers. “I should have brought flowers.”

  “There’ll be fresh ones today with the weekly vegetable delivery,” Frans said.

  Otto and Ingrid looked up at him in puzzlement. Beside Inez’s grave the freshly excavated hole in the arid earth yawned and beckoned ominously.

  “Could this be Mum’s grave?” Dieter said to no–one in particular.

  Otto stared at the new hole, his emotions in turmoil. By rights he, like any grieving child, should have only to deal with the loss and emptiness associated with burying his mother, not the unexpected loss of an unknown sister as well. Yet the reality that he was in Lüderitz to bid his mother farewell seemed furthest from his mind at that moment, as though he had almost forgotten his primary mission in returning to his childhood home.

  “I don’t believe what I am seeing here,” he said, running his fingers across the lettering on the headstone. “And I don’t understand why Mum would never have told me… told us.” He looked up at Dieter.

  Frans shuffled self–consciously on his huge feet. “Do you want me to wait in the car?”

  “No, Frans, it’s OK,” Dieter said. He touched Otto on the shoulder. “I think we should get going.”

  Otto straightened up. “I’ll come back later with flowers.”

  The journey to Kolmanskop continued in silence, Otto leaning against the side window as he stared out at the endless rolling sand dunes, resembling desiccated ocean swells. Ingrid sat like a nun, knees and arms pressed together tightly, lips closed, eyes devoid of expression.

  “Why is this town out here in the m
iddle of nowhere, Frans?” Dieter asked to ease the policeman’s evident discomfort.

  “Diamonds.”

  “But why was it abandoned?”

  “Ja, it was built in the early 1900s after enormous diamonds were found around here – unimaginable wealth. Back then they said one in five of the world’s diamonds came from Lüderitz. After the First World War the diamond market collapsed and of course Germany lost this colony to the British. Within forty years this booming town was dead and abandoned.” He looked into the rear view mirror, meeting Otto’s eyes. “Now the desert is slowly taking it back.”

  On the roadside they passed a sign warning in large red lettering that they were entering the Sperrgebiet, and that unauthorised access was forbidden and punishable by the full force of the law.

  “So this whole area was out of bounds to everyone?” Dieter said.

  “Absolutely, still is.” Frans chuckled and readjusted his meaty hands on the steering wheel. “The first X–Ray machine in the southern hemisphere was in Kolmanskop – to make sure nobody swallowed diamonds.”

  The road was quiet and they did not pass another vehicle. In the distance a small group of brown horses stood and watched them from the crest of a dune.

  “Horses – out here?” Otto asked.

  “Ja, wild horses. They live out here on the Garub Plains.”

  “How did they get here?”

  Frans shrugged. “Probably the German settlers.”

  Kolmanskop was six miles out of Lüderitz and within ten minutes they were greeted by its ghostly visage. An extensive area spaciously occupied by double–storey houses and larger buildings in two neat rows along the ridge of sandy rock, all relentlessly and helplessly being reclaimed by the advancing Namib Desert. The dry, burning heat engulfed them as they disembarked from the air conditioned car.

  Diminutive swirls of sand snaked across the landscape, driven by the gentlest of breezes. Sand seemed to be in constant motion out here, perpetually being blown from one location to another, stopping only to collect against immovable obstructions.