by Katie Crouch
“Sounds so fucking Indiana Jones,” Jaime had said. “I say go for it. A few thousand bucks? Chump change.”
Mark hadn’t corrected Jaime by telling him that a few thousand was very much not chump change to his family, especially since he’d insisted that Amanda leave her job and follow him here for a small government stipend. But he didn’t need to tell his blatantly competitive best friend everything, did he?
Anyhow, Anna seemed to have things under control. She was much more sophisticated than her years should have allowed; her manner was all business. Their routine was to meet at the transport stop. Each time she alighted from her combi, she always looked as if she had been magically beamed from the streets of Manhattan. Heels, tight jeans, some sort of blouse in an African print. She wore her hair tied in a chic turban. She was undeniably pretty, but were anyone to approach her, she cut them to the quick. Unless, of course, you were a gem dealer. Then you had every opportunity for her attention.
Their other trips had been to Karibib and Maltahöhe in order to meet gem dealers and exchange cash. It was easy to convince Amanda he was away on research. And by now Anna and Mark had a rhythm. Mark would pick her up, then take her to lunch at whatever place in town seemed decent, usually a coffee shop at a guesthouse. Anna would inevitably look at the menu with disdain.
“No, I do not want that,” she’d say, flicking a painted fingernail against the page. “No, I do not want that.”
In the end she would settle on two to three large plates of food—chicken schnitzel or pasta—and wolf them down like a football player. It had been a while since Mark had been around a girl so young. He appreciated the unguarded way she devoured her food, as well as her assumption that everything in the world should be available to her.
“Look at that car,” she said today as a shiny Land Rover drove past. “I’ll have one of those someday.”
“There’s more to life than fancy cars,” Mark couldn’t help saying.
“Really?” Anna tilted her head. “Like what, Mr. Rich American?”
“I’m not rich.”
“You had a thousand dollars in your pocket to just hand over without a problem,” Anna said. “You’re rich.”
Clearly he was just the moneyman. Which seemed fine for the moment.
“We need to go to Klein Aub now.”
“What?” Mark reached for his battle-worn map. “Why?”
“We’re getting some rocks polished ourselves. Claus will do it. We can sell them for more that way.”
“Claus?”
“In Klein Aub, Richie. I just told you.”
“Okay.” He flipped the map open. “Klein Aub is, like, four hundred kilometers away.”
“Four hundred kilos. That’s close in Nam,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Mark let out a sharp sigh. He wanted to press her further, but she obviously wasn’t having it. They got into the car, and after punching the buttons on his radio to look for a decent station, Anna settled for a playlist on her phone. They seemed to be coming into a particularly cruel section of country; the road provided little hope, as it humped ahead, revealing more and more dust. The settlements they did pass were just clusters of crouching houses, children and chickens clawing about in the yards. As Mark drove on, the uneasy feeling in his stomach spread to his chest, then to his groin. It had been hours. He needed to pee.
“I’m making a pit stop,” he said, spying some dilapidated buildings on the horizon.
“No,” Anna said. “We’re here.” Mark glanced at her in surprise. He’d thought Klein Aub would be an actual town, but it was little more than a string of tin shacks and a low-slung school dotted with bullet holes. “There,” she said, pointing to an ancient corner store. He parked in front, and they got out. His legs felt as if they were filled with plaster, and he did some quick stretches while Anna smirked. “It’s not the Olympics, hey.”
“I’m old,” he apologized. She didn’t disagree, and together they surveyed the place. The building looked as if it had once been green before being covered under decades of white dust. A man leaned in the doorway, and behind him Mark could make out the usual sundries—canned vegetables, beer, long-life milk. The only thing in the window that wasn’t covered in dust was a lovingly kept royal portrait of Princess Diana in a gilt frame.
“Claus is a royalist?”
“She wore an emerald he cut, once,” Anna said, starting up a rickety staircase clinging to the side of the building. “Come on. It’s up here.”
The stairs groaned and bent under his weight. Anna banged on the door, holding her hand out at Mark to stay back. They could hear shuffling inside, and the door creaked open.
“Goeiemiddag!” Anna crowed.
“Guten nachmittag.”
“Ek het my vriend gebring.”
A man emerged into the sunlight, shrunken and gray. He peered at Mark and backed inside again.
“Good, yah. Come, come.”
Mark shuffled behind Anna, elbowing into the tiny space. Claus’s apartment was minuscule and cramped, every surface crammed with rocks and books in German. A tattered German flag hung above the stove. Even in the dim light, Claus looked close to a hundred; Mark could only guess he had come to Namibia during World War II. He hoped Claus wasn’t a Nazi. Though his research had slowed down a bit, he’d done enough to know there were plenty of bona fide ex–SS troopers in Namibia, and, even as a lapsed Jew, he didn’t particularly care to hang out in the house of a Nazi all day.
The apartment smelled of decades of cooked meat; the air was so thick with it Mark could taste the char on his tongue. He claimed a wooden chair, trying his best to look like Anna’s heavy. The ancient man was in no hurry. He puttered around, making tea and extracting an ancient tin of cookies. Following his initial greeting, he didn’t speak again. After he had set the tea in front of them, he took the bag into a closet off the kitchen and shut the door.
For the next three hours, Anna and Mark waited, listening to the sawing sound of the polisher in the next room. Every once in a while, Claus would come out of his hole and pour himself some more tea before giving them a distracted wave and returning inside.
“Should we go for a walk or something?” Mark asked, getting up to stretch again. He did some light lunges, pumping up and down.
“This is weird, this thing you are doing,” Anna said. “Can you not wait until you go gyming?”
“Gyming?”
“That’s what we call it.”
“We are gemming. Get it?”
Anna rolled her eyes and picked up her phone again.
“I used to be a coach. That’s why I stretch all the time.”
“I hate sport,” Anna said.
“This was rowing,” Mark said. “You might like it.”
“I would not.” She looked up at him. “Anyway, you never leave your rocks. Claus is good, but someone else might come in.”
“Really? What would we even do if that happened?”
“Claus has a rifle somewhere.”
“Toto,” Mark muttered, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
“Are you fine?” Anna looked at him dubiously.
“Sure.” They were silent for a few minutes. Other than the grinder, there was only the clicking of Anna’s fingernails on her phone.
“Anna, you’re twenty, right?”
“Twenty-one.”
“And how did you learn to do all of this?”
She tossed her phone in her bag and sat back, crossing her arms, as if resigned to the fact that at the moment there was nothing better to do than talk to Mark. “I had a boyfriend. A gem dealer.”
“He got you in?”
“No. He was killed, and I got his contacts.”
“He died?” Mark felt an acute prickle on the back of his neck. “From this?”
“No, Coach. Relax. He got a Boer girl pregnant, and they killed him.”
“Excuse me?” This explanation wasn’t making him feel any better. “Who killed who?”
“The father, we think. He’s gone, hey. All his stuff was at his place, but he was gone. Even his phone was there. No one leaves their phone, not in the Location. Your phone might cost more than your house.”
“So you don’t know.”
“Oh, he’s dead. Or else I would have heard from him when I started using the contacts in his phone.”
Mark looked out at the miles and miles of rolling sand. The prickling he’d been experiencing on the back of his neck had morphed into a burning.
“Didn’t you tell the police?”
Anna smiled a bit sourly and got up to put the kettle on again.
“The other girl got his baby, and I got his gem contacts. It worked out okay.”
Mark swallowed, trying to force whatever was happening to his nervous system down his throat. “Did your parents know about the boyfriend?”
Anna poured the water into the pot. “They don’t know what I do.” She looked at him sideways. “What about your family? They know you’re here?”
“No.”
“I thought so.” She brought the teapot over and refilled his cup. “Why?”
Mark shook his head. “Never mind.”
“A secret!” Anna said, grinning. Her smile was crooked, but she was truly lovely when she showed her teeth. She looked like a child who’d gotten away with something. “Thank God. I was beginning to think you were boring.”
“I am boring.”
“Not anymore. Now there’s something to find out.” She sat back down in her chair, looking at him. “Didn’t you say you were here before? You were some kind of do-good missionary, right?”
“The Peace Corps.”
“Missionaries, Peace Corps. They’re all the same. White Americans, sticking out like bad thumbs.”
“You mean sore. Sore thumbs.”
“Sore and bad, Coachie. Why did you come back? When people leave Namibia, and they go to South Africa or America or what-what-what, they don’t come back. Not if they’re clever.”
“I…” Mark paused. Behind the closed door, Claus cleared his throat violently, spat, and started up the grinder again. “Something happened. Something I had to fix.”
Anna narrowed her eyes. “What?” she taunted. “Did you kill someone?”
Mark looked out the window again, biting the sorest hangnail on his thumb until it stung, then filled his mouth with the flat, metallic taste of blood.
* * *
The combi stopped, and everyone exploded out, pent up for too long in the too-hot van. Mark got the bags, and the girls swam through the heat down Nujoma Street, straining their necks to see the ocean. Amber and Esther stared at the German houses the color of icing, the restaurants with their wooden benches and polished brass signs. He followed them carrying their small sacks of clothes. He couldn’t stop looking at Esther, her polished calves, at the way her hips swayed their pendulum beat.
She still wasn’t talking to him; his hope was that she’d be pushed into friendliness by the sight of the sea. But it was all wrong, somehow. In fact, Esther didn’t like the water at all.
“The waves are just snakes,” she complained. “Look at how they whip and spit.”
They sauntered down the boardwalk anyway, looking at the fishermen. The girls linked arms and walked ahead, only talking to each other. Mark was split off by the heavy burden of what he was doing there, why he was with them.
“We need a hotel,” Mark said at last. His gut rolled at the very suggestion, but he was tired of carrying their bags. “We’ll get two rooms. It can’t be that much.”
“Sure,” Amber said.
“How about there?” He pointed to a huge, ornate pink building squatting next to the ocean.
Amber and Esther exchanged glances. This was independence, yes, but the Germans and Afrikaners didn’t think so. There were stories, bad stories of Blacks being thrown out of high windows after checking into formerly all-white hotels.
“Ovambos stay in Walvis,” Amber said. “And we can’t afford that place.”
“Let me just go ask. I bet it’s not as much as you think.”
“We cannot stay there, meneer,” Esther insisted. He felt a blade of desire slice through his skin. The way she said meneer out loud. The way her mouth and tongue curled around the words. The way she delicately rubbed the top of her Tab can with a napkin before drinking. The way her ill-fitting dress fluttered around her legs. He couldn’t have her; he knew he couldn’t. It made him want to gnaw wood.
“I’ll just go in and ask,” he said. “See what the price is.”
“I’ll go with you,” Amber said, trailing after him. He watched Esther walk to the pier, standing as close as she dared to the edge in order to study the white foamy waves that licked the pilings.
“She likes you,” Amber said as they ambled toward the hotel.
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Don’t be stupid, meneer. She does. You’ll see.”
The lobby was shabby enough, but to his twenty-two-year-old eye it seemed pretty fabulous, with its mahogany walls, peeling paint, and weathered fixtures that could be yanked off by any halfway determined child. Old chandeliers hung from the ceiling, dim with the preponderance of burned-out bulbs. The German reservationist was spectacularly unfriendly, particularly as he eyed Amber, who was making herself comfortable in one of the lobby’s cracked leather easy chairs.
“Two rooms will be five hundred U.S. dollars,” he said.
“Wait,” Mark said. “Hold on. That can’t be the locals’ rate. I have a Namibian visa.”
“There is no manner in which you can take two rooms for one local.” He nodded at Amber. “And she is not a local.”
Mark looked around. He could make a scene about segregation being illegal. Or he could just get on with it.
“Okay. One single room, please, then,” he said. “For one local.”
“Our bachelor rooms are in the back, overlooking the parking. The local rate is seventy-five U.S. And they are single. So your friend must find a different … hotel.”
It was a lot to him, seventy-five dollars. Yet being broke for a month seemed worth it, particularly when he walked back to the pier where Esther was iridescent—a true Aphrodite—hovering in her own blaze.
Their room overlooked the parking lot, and was decorated grimly with orange carpet and green-and-orange wallpaper. There was a battered dresser with what looked to be actual bullet holes in the side and a tilted bed covered in a spread spotted with waxy-looking stains. Mark went to the store and bought a pack of Tafel, then they walked down away from the hotel and spread out a blanket stolen from the room over the sand.
It was dusk now, the sky caught between blush-pink and a blue Esther said she found sad. Mark begged the girls to swim, but they refused. Esther’s cousin, Leva, had gone over the falls at Epupa, they said. Water was not their friend.
They wouldn’t drink, either. At least not at first. Esther was steadfast, shaking her head no. She seemed happy to watch Mark dive into the waves, and he spread his arms so that the muscles in his back formed a satisfying V. Amber threw rocks at the water. When Mark came up, dripping, she had him open a beer for her.
“You shouldn’t,” Esther said.
“You’re just boring,” Amber taunted.
“I’m not.”
“Then have one.” Amber put her head on Esther’s shoulder. “Just one, omumwamemekadona.”
“Fine,” Esther said, letting out a defeated sigh. Before she could change her mind, Mark opened one for her. She straightened up at the crisp sound of the cap flying into the air. By dark, Amber had drunk three of the beers. She announced that she was going to find the bathroom.
“I’ll go with you,” Esther said.
“No,” Amber said. She leaned over and whispered something in Esther’s ear, then stood up and brushed the sand off her legs. “And don’t come looking. You, either, meneer,” she said loudly. “I’m going farther down the beach, where the other Ovambos are. I’ll see you all
later.” She waved, then tripped away.
Esther had her hands on her hips. She was frowning. He knew he should tell her that Amber would be okay, but he didn’t actually know if she would. He felt incredibly stupid. He should never have brought them here.
“Don’t worry. She’s like this,” she said after a moment, surprising him. She seemed to have decided something; the tone of her voice had completely changed. “Shall we get something to eat?”
To be twenty-two, walking down a foreign sidewalk next to this perfect creature! He could die from happiness. He tried to imprint every detail in his brain, so as not to forget any of it, as surely it was the peak of his life. He wasn’t hungry, as he could live forever on the very swish of her skirt. They didn’t talk, because when he did, his words dropped heavily, awkward as stones. She seemed happier with silence, and all he wanted was to please her. The Germans had been drinking since the middle of the afternoon, and their slurred voices ricocheted off the walls of the beer halls. At the end of the boulevard, Mark motioned for Esther to follow him into one, where the tables spilled out into the streets. A few Afrikaner tables looked them over and then turned decidedly away.
“I don’t want to go here, meneer,” Esther said at the door.
“Why?” he asked, a note of impatience coloring his voice.
He hadn’t meant to do it; the word had just slipped out. Yet her lack of response was as loud as a yawp of anger. It was natural for him not to notice the white men staring at them. What did he care? He was the same as them, protected from poverty, illness, death. If he was robbed, he would call his bank and get more money. If he contracted malaria, he would go to an expatriate clinic and heal. If a man pulled a knife on Esther, he could rape her, and no one would care. There was no more money just sitting somewhere behind the ATM. Malaria would likely cause her to die. All of these things, Mark knew, meant he would never, ever understand Esther. And also they were why she would never, ever let him near her.