by Alex Capus
Young Wendt felt embarrassed that a man should have made his bed. He would have felt less so had the steward been a woman, but this man was elderly into the bargain - at least twice Wendts age. He was old enough to be his father, or possibly his grandfather. It was unthinkable that his father should ever make his bed. No one in Papenburg would ever polish his shoes as the steward had done earlier. Wendt knew that, once he returned from Africa, he would never again sleep between starched cotton sheets. Never again would he stay in a hotel room provided with running water, electric light and bedside telephone. Never again would he be served his breakfast in bed, never again would chambermaids shuffle around on their knees before him or people in
4i
the street lower their eyes and step aside to let him pass. At home in Papenburg he would no longer be a rich and powerful man who casually, while taking his postprandial stroll, saved whole families from starvation with the small change that jingled in his pocket. Nor would he ever again be a distinguished foreigner whose noble birth entitled him to the favours of any local girl he fancied. At home in Papenburg he would simply revert to being young Wendt, who did a bit of reading at the Workers’ Cultural Association and had a tidy sum of money put aside for a man of his age. He realized that his ascent into the moneyed class was valid only in Africa, and that the journey back to Papenburg would entail a return to the proletariat. He also grasped the injustice of both processes: his temporary social advancement and his inevitable relapse. You didn’t have to have completed a basic course in the Marxist theory of history - Rolecke the mechanic gave one at the youth centre every winter - to know that. Although he had no idea whether or how the Governor’s golden helmet fitted into the conceptual edifice of historical materialism, or whether the female chain gang’s chafed and bleeding collar bones constituted an essential step on the road to overcoming capitalism, he did know what his own attitude to all those things would be from now on: henceforward, he would clean his own shoes. He wouldn’t soil his hands by becoming a slave owner. He would make his own bed and cook for himself and keep his hut clean himself. He wouldn’t change sides. That he was earning more money out here than he’d ever earned at the Meyer Werft shipyard was perfectly in order; after all, he was giving up a year of his life and braving dangers far from home, and he would be working long days under the most arduous conditions. That entitled him to quid pro quo. Just then he noticed that the steward was still hovering over him, wanting to know if he should bring him a wheat beer. Wendt got to his feet.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, resting a hand on the man’s shoulder, ‘I’ll get one myself. Where do you keep them?’
5
The Long-Awaited Telegram
when lieutenant commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simsons life at last took the turn he had so ardently desired, he was sitting in a cane chair on the veranda of his bungalow in Bathurst, in the delta of the Gambia River. It was Monday, the first day of his monthly week off. The night of 11 May 1914 was moonless but clear and the worst of the mosquito hour was over. Spicer-Simson had poured himself a sherry and propped his mosquitobooted feet on the verandas balustrade. His wife Amy, seated beside him, was knitting her husband a cardigan in defiance of the tropical climates prescribed order of dress. The couples two houseboys were stationed on either side of them, flapping big palm-leaf fans to create the illusion of a breeze. Millions of frogs were croaking in the surrounding waterways and the friendly glow of the lighted windows in nearby bungalows could be glimpsed through the banana trees. The other bungalows’ occupants were British colonial servants, almost all married and roughly on a par with the Spicer-Simsons in terms of age and seniority. Since the majority were childless or had consigned their offspring to English boarding schools because of the climate, the government quarter maintained an active social life that included frequent invitations to barbecues and tea and cocktail parties - a social life from which the Spicer-Simsons were sadly excluded, however, because their neighbours had gradually severed contact with them. The reasons for this were many and various, but all stemmed from prejudices and mutual misunderstandings.
Their neighbour on the left, for instance, had taken exception to Spicer-Simsons habit of bathing in the river stark naked, not only in the middle of the residential quarter but under the gaze of numerous
British housewives of Calvinistic prudishness. When the neighbour requested him at least to dispense with his preliminary callisthenics on the river bank, which displayed his liberally tattooed anatomy to particular advantage, Spicer-Simson coolly replied that maintaining his physical fitness was in the overriding interests of the Royal Navy and thus of more importance than the sensitivities of underemployed colonial servants’ wives. Momentarily taken aback, the neighbour suppressed his mounting fury and requested Spicer-Simson never to darken his door again, not under any circumstances, and to steer clear of himself and his wife in public.
Their neighbour on the right, too, had been prompted by a trivial difference of opinion to break off relations with the Spicer-Simsons. It all went back to one Sunday teatime, when Spicer-Simson was recounting his adventures in China and quoting whole pages from the writings of Confucius - not in English but in an idiom he referred to as Chinese. It so happened, however, that the neighbour had also served in China - for fifteen years, no less - and had acquired a good knowledge of Cantonese during his time there. When he looked puzzled and asked Spicer-Simson what language he was employing for his lecture on Confucius - Cantonese, East or West Mandarin or some other Chinese idiom - SpicerSimson merely gave him a weary, condescending smile. And when the neighbour additionally pointed out that China didn’t possess a national language any more than Europe did, Spicer-Simson turned to the ladies without a word and launched into a lecture on Chinese medicine.
His quarrel with their neighbour on the opposite bank was particularly unfortunate because the latter was the Governor himself, a whitehaired gentleman who wore strong glasses and walked with a stick but had once, many decades ago, been Oxford University’s middleweight boxing champion. In all innocence, Spicer-Simson had made an enemy of him on New Year’s Eve 1911 by rolling up his sleeves and demonstrating how to deliver a technically correct uppercut. He continued to lecture his listeners with such persistence that, just before midnight, the Governor lost patience, laid aside his stick and glasses, and offered to give SpicerSimson a technically correct uppercut if he didn’t stop blathering at once.
So Spicer-Simson had been subjected to gradual ostracism, not only in the Gambia but wherever else in the world he had come to rest. Yet he was a fundamentally honest individual who had never betrayed, cheated or seriously lied to anyone in his life. Narrow-minded people were turned against him by mere trifles. In the Gambia, however, as elsewhere in the world, the narrow-minded enjoyed such overwhelming numerical superiority that, by their second year there, the Spicer-Simsons had no social contact with any living soul. Amy bore her lot with stoical serenity. A lawyer’s daughter from Victoria, British Columbia, she had never dreamed that she would one day live in a bungalow built on piles, or that she would ever go shopping in a dugout canoe paddled by young blacks, but she preserved her composure and upheld the British way of life in a world populated by howler monkeys and crocodiles. She not only cooked a bacon-and-egg breakfast every single day of the year but continued to serve afternoon tea and biscuits on the veranda long after visitors had ceased to call on her. Her dresses and her husband’s uniforms were always freshly ironed, and she defended the bungalow against lianas, cockroaches and termites with the aid of two native maidservants. When she made her daily excursion to the butcher and baker in the covered market, she nodded amiably to left and right and was amiably greeted in return, for the ladies and gentlemen of the colonial community made it clear to her that social ostracism applied only to Lieutenant Commander Spicer, not to his wife. The colonial servants’ wives, in particular, were happy to pass the time of day with Amy while waiting at the post office or the hairdresser’s. They called h
er ‘my dear’ and asked how she was, interpolated needle-sharp allusions to her unfortunate situation, and promised in a sadistically sympathetic manner, ‘just between friends - you only have to tip me the wink’, to lend her any, absolutely any, assistance she might ever stand in need of. And, when Amy feigned loyal incomprehension, they smiled sweetly and suddenly remembered an important engagement.
Amy stood by her husband like a faithful friend. Having got to know him thoroughly after five years of marriage, she was steadfastly devoted to him because she knew there wasn’t a bad or evil bone in his body. He
was, of course, a vain, conceited coxcomb, but only because he refused to surrender to the banality and boredom of everyday life. To that extent, Amy was proud of her husbands eccentricities. She construed them as a fundamentally noble souls refusal to compromise, to come to a convenient accommodation with force of circumstance and surrender to the creeping cretinization that overcomes most people in their middle years. Spicer-Simson’s eternal recalcitrance made their lives considerably harder, it was true. On the other hand, he was a relatively undemanding husband because, in his childish egocentricity, he had only simple and straightforward needs which Amy found it easy to fulfil. She appreciated this. It sometimes gave her the shivers to think of the bizarre sexual practices reputedly engaged in by other womens husbands who were outwardly the most respectable of men and, for that very reason, devised the most outre enormities in order to make themselves feel alive. If her marriage had hitherto been childless, it was only because she wanted it so. Amy had firmly resolved not to bring her children into the world in the Gambia, but to wait until she and Geoffrey returned to London. Until then she would not find it difficult to attune her husbands male desires to the cycles of the moon and her female body.
And Spicer-Simson himself? He gave little thought to all these matters. Who were these neighbours, to forbid him to swim in the river? People who wore sleeve protectors, people with hairdryers and pension rights, starched collars, haemorrhoids and beetling eyebrows - that was who they were. It didn’t surprise him that they weighed every word he uttered, nor did he care. East or West Mandarin, Cantonese, uppercut - they were just words. If that was what counted with these people, so be it; what mattered to him was something quite else. Exactly what it was he couldn’t say because it wasn’t available to him under present circumstances. How could he have defined that greater, finer, nobler ambition with both feet embedded in the stinking mud of the Gambia River, on which nothing had happened since the beginning of time but the everlasting, monotonous round of procreation, childbirth and decay? He couldn’t say what mattered to him while he was stuck out here. His only recourse was to await the hour of deliverance and trust that it would strike ere long.
The moment came that Saturday evening, n May 1914, while Geoffrey Spicer-Simson was sipping sherry on the veranda of his bungalow and Amy knitting him a cardigan. His decrepit steam launch was tied up in the harbour, the four black crewmen were with their wives and children, and the two fever-ridden Irishmen were probably getting drunk somewhere. It was the end of a peaceful, uneventful day. The Spicer-Simsons had spent many such days in the Gambia delta and would, in all probability, spend many more. In the outside world, however, dramatic events were unfolding of which Spicer-Simson could know nothing. Karl Liebknecht had attacked the German government’s military preparations in the Berlin Reichstag. Albania had mobilized and was girding itself for war with Greece. A hundred thousand Bolshevik workers were on strike in St Petersburg. In Paris the socialists were celebrating their election victory in the National Assembly, and in London Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, was discussing the need for further naval expansion with King George V.
On the evening of that day, therefore. Lieutenant Commander Spicer-Simson was seated in his cane chair sipping sherry when a figure emerged from the darkness of the nearby avenue of palm trees and came hurrying towards him. It was a black youngster whom Spicer-Simson knew by sight, a post office messenger boy who sometimes delivered the mail. This was odd because no mailboat had arrived that day; nor, to the best of Spicer-Simsons knowledge, had any ocean-going steamer.
‘Massa,’ the boy said breathlessly as he got to the foot of the steps, ‘telegram for you!’
Spicer-Simson gave a start.
‘From London,’ the boy added.
Spicer-Simson reached the top of the steps in two long strides, seized the envelope and tore it open. It was a telegram from the Admiralty. Confidential, utmost urgency. He was to discontinue his hydrographic work forthwith and return to London as soon as possible. He told the boy to wait and hurriedly drafted a telegram announcing that he would arrive in London within the next ten days.
6
Wendt’s Beer Garden
five thousand five hundred and thirty-three kilometres to the east, in Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, Anton Ruter was also busy with pen and paper. He was writing a letter to his boss, Joseph Lambert Meyer, in Papenburg.
‘...inform you that our work is progressing well. All the ribs are up and the deck stringers and sheer strakes are also in place. We started to lay the A plates on 19 April, or the Sunday after Easter. Meantime, all the B and C plates have been laid and the D plates are all installed bar two on each side. You’ll be glad to hear that everything has gone well so far, which makes us very happy. Were getting on fast with the riveting. The bulkheads will soon be finished, and we’ve also done a lot of riveting on the bottom. I can’t yet tell you if we’ll be finished by August, it depends on the riveting.’
Anton Ritter was sitting at a home-made table outside his house. Built for him by the German East African Railway Company, it was little more than a wooden shack with a corrugated-iron roof, mosquito screens over the windows and a door that could be locked. Darkness was falling. He thought of lighting the paraffin lamp but laid his pen aside and resolved to finish the letter tomorrow because the next train to Dar-es-Salaam would not be leaving until Tuesday. He sat back on the folding chair young Wendt had made for him and gazed out across Lake Tanganyika, which lay before him like a sea, unfathomably peaceful. His house
occupied a slightly elevated position on a promontory that jutted into the lake for half a kilometre. To the north, west and south the lake’s greenish, shimmering waters stretched away to the horizon. The opposite shore, which belonged to the Belgian Congo, was over fifty kilometres away and shrouded in mist, and the two extremities of the lake were 700 kilometres apart. An Arab dhow could be seen far out across the water, black and silent, while a pirogue propelled by eight native paddlers was darting along close inshore. Soon, when the fishing boats set off in search of their nightly catch, the lake would be brilliantly illuminated by the countless grass torches the fishermen lit to lure the fish from its dark depths. A flock of flamingos was flying east towards the mountains, which glowed red in the light of the setting sun. Riiter shivered and went inside to fetch his jacket. He was still surprised how cold it could get in the heart of Africa. He knew, of course, that the lake lay 800 metres above sea level, and that the eternal snows of Mount Kilimanjaro were not far away, but he would never have thought it possible that an African evening in May could be quite as cool as a spring evening in Papenburg.
A stone’s-throw further inland stood Tellmann’s house, an exact replica of Riiter’s wooden shack, and on the other side, towards the end of the promontory, was young Wendts hut, a scene of constant activity. But the most important thing lay at Riiter s feet: the dock and shipyard which the railway company had constructed to accommodate the Gotzen. A couple of sailing boats were moored to the quay, together with a worn-out old steamer named the Hedwig von Wissmann. Anton Riiter had looked down at the latter with a tenderly compassionate eye ever since going for a trial run aboard her. Only twenty metres long and four metres wide, she bobbed like a cork and started to pitch and toss appallingly in the slightest sea. Her hull leaked in every seam and was in urgent need of a thorough overhaul, but she tirelessly performed
her duties as a freighter for sisal growers, a ferry for German colonial servants, and - more and more often in recent times - a troop transport for the imperial forces. Despite her inadequacies, therefore, the Wissmann controlled Lake Tanganyika’s full length of 700 kilometres, the Belgian and British shorelines as well as well as the German, because the British had
no self-propelled vessel at all on the lake and the Belgians only an even sorrier little steamer named the Alexandre Delcommune. Anton Riiter had grasped one thing: finish building the Gotzen, which was ten times as big and twice as fast as the Wissmann, and Kaiser Wilhelm would command not only Lake Tanganyika but the whole of Central Africa.
Beside the harbour was the shipyard, the recently completed dock, the brand-new forty-ton electric luffing-and-slewing crane, the railway tracks leading to the dock, the stocks and steel slipway, and the cradle that supported the Gotzen s proud black skeleton. Riiter, Wendt and Tellmann worked from sun-up to sunset six days a week. There being a time and place for everything, Sunday was a rest day. The keel had been laid, the stem and sternpost attached, all the ribs and stringers installed, and the bulk of the steel outer skin riveted on. Anton Riiter never tired of the sight. This was his shipyard, and his ship was taking shape once more beneath the African sky. That shed over there was his machine shop. Beside it was his joiners workshop and his storage depot. Over there was his wood store for his generator, and his native labourers lived in the village beyond the hill. There were no black Benz limousines or white lace parasols or pink muslin gowns within a 1000-kilometre radius, nor was there anyone to give him a condescending pat on the arm and leave him standing at the gangway. There were only the lake and the ship and two hundred workers of whom Riiter himself was one. Together they would build the finest, handsomest ship in all of Africa, and Riiter would take care never to pat a worker on the arm or leave anyone standing at the gangway. On arrival he had been highly relieved to be spared the job of recruiting a workforce, having found a hundred eager black men awaiting him at the yard. They worked well and fast and reliably, and many of them had even learnt German at mission school. Riiter was extremely satisfied. All that had surprised him was that every evening a squad of askaris turned out to escort the workers from the shipyard to the native village, and that every morning a Corporal Schaffler came to attention in front of him and demanded a written receipt for them.