“Here it is,” he said, extracting one and inserting it into the scanning tray of the microfiche reader.
With the lamp switched on, a grainy and marked image of each page of the Lüderitzbuchter was projected onto the display screen. Dieter moved the tray around until he found what he was looking for.
Lüderitzbuchter 13.9.1948 Donnerstag/Thursday
Local doctor’s daughter found shot in Kolmanskop
Yesterday the bodies of a young man and woman were found in an abandoned house in Kolmanskop. They had both been shot in what local police chief Andre Strydom called apparent suicide. Though no note was found police have said they do not suspect foul play.
Willem Laubscher, security officer at the diamond company responsible for patrolling the Sperrgebiet, made the discovery. He also found a revolver, from which two rounds had been fired, beside the bodies.
The woman, Inez Adermann (21) is the eldest daughter of local doctor Ernst Adermann, and had only lived in Lüderitz for two years since emigrating from Germany.
The man has been identified as Neil Solomon (23) from Keetmanshoop. His father, Jacob Solomon, is a prominent member of the South West African Transport Company and has been credited with developing rail links between Windhoek and the southern towns of Keetmanshoop and Oranjemund, as well as into the Union of South Africa. This is a project that his late father, Isaac Solomon, was involved with under German colonial rule in the early 1900s. Isaac Solomon was honoured for his services to Deutsche–Südwestafrika by Governor Lothar von Trotha.
Neil Solomon was buried in the Keetmanshoop cemetery yesterday and Inez Adermann’s funeral will take place in Lüderitz on Saturday 15th September.
The shootings have shocked residents of Lüderitz, who are unaccustomed to such tragic events in their quiet community. Willem Laubscher said it was not unknown for lovers to meet up in the abandoned houses in Kolmanskop, though he admitted that in this particular case this was mere speculation.
Police are not investigating.
Dieter looked up at Otto, who was reading over his shoulder.
“Jesus,” Otto whispered.
“The old man was right: Inez’s boyfriend was from Keetmanshoop. Sounds like he came from an influential family.”
“Neil Solomon,” Otto mused. “I wonder how Dad felt about this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, Dad had a surgery in Keetmanshoop. They must surely have met through his association with the town. After all,” Otto shrugged, “it’s isolated, over two hundred miles away in the desert.”
Dieter and Otto locked eyes. “You thinking what I’m thinking?” Dieter said.
“Do the Solomons still live there?”
Dieter nodded, glancing back at the dimly illuminated screen. “Would you want to go there?”
Otto thought about this. Did he want to know more about his dead sister: about what happened to her and possibly why; about the reasons why Mother and Ingrid had conspired to keep not only her death but indeed her life secret, long after Father passed away?
“Absolutely,” Otto said.
Strangely, it felt to Otto as though this journey might represent an opportunity for some closure after the tumultuous events of the day. Burying Mother had left him very unsettled, struggling with more questions than answers, and it was not an enviable position to be in.
“How would we get there?” Otto said.
“I’ll speak to Frans,” Dieter said.
“And Ingrid?”
Dieter shrugged indifferently. “She leaves tomorrow anyway.”
The sounds of papers being shuffled and keys jangling echoed across the room. Eva was closing up. Otto looked up at the wall clock: 5pm.
“Let’s go home and watch the last reel of film.”
Twenty–Eight
For the first time that he could recall Otto was apprehensive as he lifted the heavy steel reel laden with hundreds of feet of film onto the spindle. Lacing the film leader through the projector, over sprockets and around rollers, filled him not with the customary anticipation and excitement, but with anxiety. What further dark secrets might await them, captured in moments of apparent innocence and wholesome intentions, etched frame by frame onto celluloid for the unsuspecting eyes of subsequent generations to scrutinise and question?
He checked the sprockets, the loop of film preceding and following the film gate, repeatedly, stalling the inevitable moment of truth.
“Are you ready yet?” Dieter called back over his shoulder from a sofa in the darkened room.
Otto drew breath slowly. No, he was not, he thought to himself. Closing his eyes momentarily he tried to reassure himself: surely there could not be any more shocking surprises.
He switched the projector on. The screen lit up as the Bell & Howell’s mechanical purr filled the silence, effortlessly transforming twenty–four individual images every second into fluid movement on the screen.
Grainy, lined black and white images of Lüderitz town fill the screen from left to right, the view panning from the rocky and desolate Diaz Point with its beacon, right around to the unspoilt kelp–strewn Agate Beach north of the town. The image dwells on the small fishing harbour in which half a dozen wooden vessels gently pitch and roll on the swell. A rough splice flashes and the screen fills with Felsenkirche and its imposing tall Victorian Gothic steeple. In the background the uninviting emptiness of rolling sand dunes appear stark and uninhabitable.
“Dad taking in his new home,” Dieter mused.
“I wonder if we were here yet?”
The image of a rusting shipwreck partially submerged in the consuming sands of a beach appears. Most of the keel and lower hull is covered with sand and the rest has been devoured by the elements. Reaching up like a clawed hand, frozen in rigor mortis, or perhaps resembling a Blue Whale’s skeleton, remnants of arched bulkheads and hull beams create a vague impression of the past solid grandeur of the vessel. The camera passes in between the rusting steel girders that tower above the viewfinder. In the background the steeple of Felsenkirche can be seen.
Another messy splice smears the screen and then a new wreck comes into view, far less corroded and more intact than the first one. It lies stricken on a narrow beach nestling at the foot of an immense ellipse of barren rock forming a bay, like a gigantic crab’s pincer. The camera zooms in to the bow, revealing the word Otavi in rusted white letters. The hull is clearly breached, its keel broken, yet it looks as though it has not been long on the sand.
“I remember the Otavi!” Dieter said. “We saw it on a boat trip up the coast.”
“I’ve never seen it.”
“It was amazing. It didn’t look like that when I saw it, though, it was far more rusted and falling apart.”
“Why did we never go there?” Otto asked.
“It’s in the Sperrgebiet – I’m pretty sure.”
The diamond company controlled almost everything that surrounded Lüderitz, Otto reflected. “What was the name of that bay again?” he asked.
He could see Dieter scratching his head. “Spencer Bay,” he said, raising an index finger in triumph.
“I wonder if the wreck’s still there? I’d love to see it,” Otto said, with a slight surge of boyish enthusiasm.
“We should ask Frans.”
The image changes abruptly to a barren piece of rocky land forming a slope. It looks like any other undeveloped area of Lüderitz: black rock smothered by invading sand. A small huddle of people stand together on the rocks. The camera zooms in on their faces. Mother, windswept and unsmiling, failing to keep her curly hair out of her eyes. A tall, slender young woman in a skirt, short socks and black shoes; pretty, smiling face with sharp features. Beside her an unhappy–looking adolescent girl with pouting lips and arms folded stares away into the distance, one leg pointing to the side, while a small boy, barefoot and dirty, holds onto Mother’s leg and sways around it as if testing its strength.
“Christ,” Dieter exclaimed, “that’s us here
in Lüderitz. I would guess that must be Mum, Inez, Ingrid and me.” He sounded quite excited, sitting forward in his seat, gesticulating at the screen as he picked out each family member.
Otto’s heart jumped – it was a strange thing seeing images of the family from so many years back, captured in pure naive innocence, a moment never to be repeated but preserved in time forever. Who could have known on that windy day when Father filmed the family that Inez would not endure in its bosom for very long? What was it that had ripped this cohesive family image apart, consigning it to wilful deception, buried secrets and years of accumulated resentment?
The next image shows the little boy clamouring over brickwork and into foundation trenches, smiling into the camera lens at every opportunity when he is not checking his footing on the hazardous building site. In the background African labourers with bared torsos swing pickaxes above their heads and smash them into the unforgiving rocky ground, others mix cement and water in great volcanic heaps, while a solitary European man, smoking a pipe beneath a straw fedora, lays bricks amidst a cloud of white smoke.
“Hey, I bet they’re building our house!” Otto said, studying the shaky images carefully, looking for something that he might recognise as familiar and be able to place in the finished home in which they now sat.
“Must be about 1946, I guess. Isn’t that when the house was built?” Dieter said.
“Uh–huh.”
The panoramic view from the house, over Felsenkirche’s steeply gabled Teutonic roof, reveals the entire little port town of Lüderitz, the contained harbour with moored fishing vessels and the finger of Shark Island protruding into the bay.
“Dad sure chose a great spot for the house,” Dieter said.
The unfinished walls of the house are now near roof height, the unpainted concrete shell clearly identifiable as their future home. The camera pans from one side of the new house to the other, revealing the early stages of construction work on the brick wall that will surround the property, and the rocky garden that is devoid of any plant life.
“Do you see that?” Otto said, feeling a shiver run down his spine.
“What?”
Otto felt slightly queasy. “There is no camelthorn tree.”
Otto’s eyes were drawn to the relatively flat patch of sandy soil near what appeared to be the incomplete kitchen window, still just a raw square space in the wall. He wondered if the soil beneath the builder’s feet had been violated yet and transformed into a grave.
Father stands, smiling demurely, beside a gleaming plaque bearing his name in Gothic script: Dr Ernst Adermann. The shaky image reveals a doorway and the facade of a typical German colonial building in Lüderitz. He lifts his homberg and enters the building, large black doctor’s bag in hand. Suddenly the little boy, wearing a striped short–sleeved shirt, runs into view and disappears through the darkened doorway behind Father. The image begins to jump, blurring the picture on the screen beyond recognition.
Otto leapt into action and depressed the loop restorer. The jarring noise in the projector subsided and the steady picture returned.
Mother smiles thinly at the camera. She looks tired, and when the camera angle changes the reason becomes clear. She is pregnant.
“That must be you, Otto,” Dieter chuckled, gesticulating at the screen excitedly.
Otto smiled – his first appearance in the family home movies. There was Mum, young, full of life and bearing another child, her life ahead of her. It reminded him painfully of the inexorable bond between a mother and child: had it not been for her, captured forever in those few seconds of film, her immortality preserved in celluloid for eternity, he would not have life. He would not have the capacity to question what she had done, what decisions she had made while raising her family – the consequences of which they were now unravelling, slowly, painfully.
Her chapter in the book of their family had ended that morning when they watched her sink down into the rocky soil of Lüderitz, not dissimilar to that she was standing on in the film. Yet for a few moments longer she lived on in black and white in their living room, fresh, youthful and energetic.
“Strange thought, isn’t it?” Otto said, tapping his lip with a finger.
The scene jags to a celebration in their house, revealing the living room, the kitchen, the entrance hall with gleaming herringbone flooring. Heavily framed paintings of German scenes adorn the walls: Hamburg; Freiburg; Pomerania. Men are dressed in suits and narrow ties, wearing hombergs and trilbies, and women glide about in long dresses with brooches and gloves, smiling and chatting in small groups, drinking tea and eating cakes.
Mother appears, smiling and holding a baby swaddled in long white baptism robes in her arms. All the women hover like bees and lovingly touch the baby’s cheeks repeatedly.
“Lüderitz welcomes Otto Adermann,” Dieter said in a mock announcer’s voice.
Otto smiled involuntarily. There he was, a bouncing baby boy of not very many months old, in his mother’s arms. The trickery of film made it seem as though it was yesterday.
Suddenly Father is holding the baby, smiling proudly, homberg still firmly on his head, a thin and manicured moustache across his upper lip. Then another jump change to the family gathered in the living room in front of the window, the image unsteady and angled. Father and Mother stand in the centre holding the baby; the pouty face of a smartly dressed adolescent girl beside Father, tolerating the attention but not smiling; and the little boy in shorts, a jacket and tie, hanging onto his mother’s leg.
“It’s weird, but I think they were filmed standing exactly where the screen is now,” Dieter remarked, pointing to the sheet suspended in front of the living room curtains.
Otto nodded. But for the passage of four decades the whole family could just as well have been standing there at that very minute.
“Where is Inez?” Otto asked.
“Haven’t seen her yet.”
“This is obviously 1948, it’s the year she died,” Otto said, painfully aware that his entrance into this world had almost simultaneously marked Inez’s departure, as though in accordance with a divine plan to maintain equilibrium. Yet he had been utterly unaware of this until last week.
Baby Otto’s face fills the screen. His eyes dart about and then settle in fascination on the camera, staring straight ahead. He has a small upturned nose above a long philtrum, and grasping hands that plunge in and out of his yawning mouth.
Otto stared at himself, captured on film thirty–seven years ago. He tried to imagine what those undeveloped eyes might have seen, what his immature brain might have been thinking.
The screen fills with a sports field resembling a dustbowl, flat and grassless, across which twenty–two children swarm after a football. Netless goalposts, like leafless trees, stand guard on each end of the forlorn scene. The camera pans up and down the field, trying to keep up with the haphazard action around the ball. One team of boys wears white and the other striped jerseys. The image zooms in on a boy kicking the ball only for it to rebound straight back at him. He hesitates, then dribbles the ball left of his opponent and, as an opposition player stumbles over his own feet leaving the goalposts unprotected, the boy kicks a goal to the delight of his teammates and supporters around the field.
“Did you see that, Otto?” Dieter said, turning around in his seat. “Left foot, edge of the penalty box. I used to have it.”
“That was you?” Otto said.
“Uh–huh. Top goal scorer in my senior year.”
The camera zooms in on the spectators. Mother stands at the halfway line cradling an infant. Beside her, looking away, is a solitary, gangly adolescent girl with her arms folded.
“Mum with me, Ingrid next to her, and you on the field, Dieter. No Inez,” Otto observed.
“No Inez,” Dieter said.
A messy splice is followed by an image of the harbour, a group of adults and children embarking a small seagoing vessel. Mother is there, Ingrid with her hair in a ponytail, Dieter wearing a sp
orts cap, and a toddler waddling beside them with a broad gait, holding Ingrid’s hand. The next scene is of the bay, light reflecting sharply off the water and dancing in the camera lens while seagulls, oystercatchers and flamingos swoop around the boat. The camera leans over the boat revealing seals playing in the water, following the boat like dolphins. An island comes into view, its rocky shoreline smothered in penguins. Several people on the boat pull out cameras and take snaps of the undisturbed fauna teeming in its thousands.
“I think it was on this trip that Dad nearly lost the camera overboard,” Dieter reminisced.
The boat turns away from the island, exposing on the port bow the panoramic view of Lüderitz town across the bay. The tip of Shark Island comes into view and beyond this, on a desolate stretch of rocky shoreline, an abandoned whaling station. A rusted white sign is visible on the beach as the camera zooms in: Sturmvogel Bucht.
Mother sits on the wooden bench seat keeping Otto within her range as he waddles around unsteadily on the deck, occasionally thrown to his knees by the sudden movement of the small vessel. Ingrid sits on the opposite side beside Dieter, looking around with apparent disinterest, while Dieter is delighted by the occasional spray of seawater as it aerosolises off the bow, trying to catch it in his hands. Otto swaggers over to Ingrid and lurches forward, falling onto the wooden slatted deck. She bends forward and picks him up, placing him on her lap.
“I look about two years old there,” Otto said as he watched his infantile image on screen.
“I remember this trip,” Dieter said. “Well, parts of it anyway.”
The boat sails around a peninsula of boulders that yields to a bay guarded by a steep rock face. On the narrow beach lies the wreck of the Otavi, battered and broken by the waves, the corrosive salt and the south–wester, reducing its once proud structure to fragmented scrap.
“Spencer Bay!” Dieter said, pointing at the screen. “This must have been the boat trip I remembered.”
A jagged splice introduces an image of a mountainous sand dune with a family on its crest, standing around a wicker basket on a picnic blanket. Mother looks older, lines on her face and grey streaks in her fringe. Ingrid is present, sitting beside a man with a receding hairline and silver temples. They each hold a wine goblet; she rests her head against his neck. A tall Dieter and a younger Otto are sliding down the steep face of the rippled dune on square boards, kicking up arcs of sand amidst broad smiles.
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