A Matter of Time

by Alex Capus

  ‘Six-thirty sharp tonight!’ he called after them with mock severity. ‘And don’t be late!’

  Riiter and Tellmann obeyed their young workmate without demur and resumed the ritual as if nothing had happened. But it had, of course. Wendt, who was very relieved that his friends had reappeared at the beer garden, was especially hospitable to Riiter to convey that he didn’t consider himself the winner of their unspoken altercation. On the other hand, he refused to feel guilty. He was genuinely fond of plump, cheerful Samblakira. She happily attended to his physical welfare, her laughter was unfeigned, and at night she preserved him from the loneliness a young man far from home for a year might well have found unbearable. She didn’t play-act or simulate erotic ecstasy, as the Papenburg girls often did, but helped herself to his body and offered him her own as a matter of course, because man and woman need each other like food and drink and seven hours’ sleep. He naturally realized that she didn’t love him, and that her main incentive for keeping him company at night was the money he gave her. For all that, he couldn’t see anything wrong in lying awake beside this roly-roly creature who smelt unfamiliar, made unfamiliar movements, emitted unfamiliar sounds, and even lay unwontedly still when he gingerly, with a vague sense of guilt, ran his hands over her body.

  For some time now, Anton Riiter had also felt that he’d lost his innocence. He no longer looked askance at Wendt - he even made friends with Samblakira and allowed the naked, wizened old woman to sweep his hut now and then - but he never really recovered the sense of blithe unconstraint he’d experienced during the first few days, when he still believed that Africa would enable him to do an honest job of which he could feel proud for the rest of his life. It could not be denied that, in a very short space of time and against his will, he had become a slave-owning exploiter of prostitution and adultery. He was not, of course, responsible for young Wendt’s pragmatic menage, nor for Governor Schnee’s tearful sadism or the askaris’ brutality, and it would certainly have been quite futile for him to combat force of circumstance on his own, but he was haunted day and night by the feeling that his mere presence made him complicit, and that nothing he did during his remaining months in Africa would alter this. He had long ago realized that this shipyard

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  wasn’t his shipyard, that the tools weren’t his tools, that the workers were under the soldiers’ orders, not his, and that the Gotzen wasn’t his ship, just a ship he’d been ordered to build. Oh, he would build her all right, and she would be the finest, handsomest vessel in the whole of Africa. But then - this much was certain - he would return home to Papenburg as fast as he could.

  Tellmann was equally unable to recover the peace of mind he had enjoyed in the early days. Although he dependably turned up for work and their communal suppers, he was withdrawn and silent the rest of the time and hardly uttered a word except to Veronika, his young cheetah, with whom he held long conversations, tickling the back of her neck and whispering the silliest endearments into her fluffy ears, over and over again. Unlike Ruter, he refused to let the wizened old crone sweep his hut; five times she tried to storm his fortress and five times he’d resisted her sarcastic remarks, won the battle of the broom and put her to flight. He had created a little garden behind his hut and sown it with seeds brought from Papenburg; one row each of potatoes, carrots, beans and marrows. He also made two or three attempts to grow lettuces, but unidentified nocturnal thieves had always devoured the seedlings as soon as they showed. When his carrots or beans were ready he took them over to Wendt’s beer garden and, with an air of sheepish pride, handed them to Samblakira, who prepared them for the table on the spot.

  Tellmann always went hunting early on Sunday mornings. Accompanied by his cheetah, he would make his way out into the bush and sit down in some secluded spot, rest his gun on his lap and, thoughtfully scratching his neck, picture what was happening at that moment back home in Papenburg. Half past seven where he was meant half past six in East Friesland. Soon his wife would get up, stir the embers on the hearth and fetch a pail of water from the well outside. Then Veronika, his eldest daughter, would brush the white pillow fluff from her dark hair and the three younger children, who shared a little room at the back beside the woodshed, would wake up one after another and appear in the kitchen, barefoot and bleary-eyed. Meanwhile, Tellmann was sitting on a termite hill somewhere in Africa, blinking at the golden glow of

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  dawn and resolving to write his wife a long letter as soon as he got back from hunting. He would write about nice things, things that would give her pleasure, and she would keep his letter in the pocket of her apron and take it out again and again and read it until it was all tattered. He would write about nice things only, leaving out all that was nasty, ugly and vile. He would write her letters she could read aloud to the children from beginning to end. They would always ask to hear his letters before going to sleep, and would brag about their father’s adventures at school the next day.

  ‘My dearest wife,’ he wrote her in his head as a herd of giraffes filed past on the skyline, ‘the most amusing creatures here are the kassukas, grey parrots with red tail feathers, hundreds of which come flying across Lake Tanganyika from the jungles of the Congo. The natives sometimes catch these birds and offer them for sale because they’re the best talkers of all, and very quick to learn. If people come visiting and talk a lot they keep quite still, listening intently, and the next day you can be sure they’ll imitate one or two keywords they’ve memorized. Curses and words of command are the things they pick up quickest, but they also have a particular fondness for imitating people spitting, cleaning their teeth, clearing their throats, gargling, and so on. Parrots can live to a great age, as I’m sure you know. In Dar-es-Salaam an army officer told me that there’s a parrot alive in Budapest which used to belong to one of Queen Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting, and it still comes out with the French swearwords it must have learnt a hundred and thirty years ago, uttered in a very charming Viennese accent.

  ‘As far as hunting goes, anyone so inclined could really have a field day out here, but you know me - I don’t really enjoy killing things. What I do enjoy doing - and what I’ve just done again for my own amusement - is this: I creep out into the bush, find myself a spot with a good allround view, and fire a single shot in the air. Then I watch the wonderful spectacle that unfolds when the plain comes to life in a flash and hundreds if not thousands of antelopes, zebras, giraffes and gnus go galloping off - ostriches too, sometimes. On the subject of giraffes, you have to have a big-game licence to shoot them, which is why their numbers have

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  recovered strongly in recent years and they pull down telegraph wires with their long necks. Eight-metre telegraph poles are now being put up all over the country, so giraffes can gallop under them without doing any damage. In many places the poles are made of finest Mannesmann steel, on account of the termites, but there’s a shortage of ceramic insulators, so they often substitute empty whisky bottles, of which there are plenty out here. Since telegraph lines tend to follow the old caravan routes, travellers can wend their way along for hours beneath a sky filled with empty bottles, like an alcoholics nightmare.

  ‘Hare hunts are a heart-rending sight. The natives run out across the savannah, yelling blue murder, and the hares are so transfixed with fear that they freeze. They just don’t budge, simply there as if hypnotized and wait to be clubbed to death, one after another. The hunting techniques of the German NCOs stationed here are positively civilized by comparison. They fire their shotguns at trees they know are full of guinea fowl and pick up anything that falls to the ground.

  ‘Incidentally, while I’m sitting here some leopards are mewing in the undergrowth nearby. The big cats are smart enough to know that I could be as much of a danger to them as they could to me, so we leave each other in peace. You can establish diplomatic relations of that kind with most wild animals, but not with all of them. Lions, for instance, often take no notice of human being
s. If they bump into you unexpectedly, they look as startled as you do and slowly and cautiously back off. But you shouldn’t rely on this. As long as lions are young and strong they leave our kind alone and prefer to hunt antelope and other game. But if they’re starving because they’re too sick or old to hunt any more, they’ll seize a human being, sometimes from a caravan or even out of a hut. And once they’ve found that human beings are easier to catch than antelope and taste almost as good, they become genuine man-eaters.

  ‘The vultures here are awful creatures. A whole flock of them attacked me once. They fluttered around my head and shoulders, croaking in a loathsome way and flapping their huge wings. It would have been pointless to shoot a couple, there were far too many of them. I only managed to hold them off by using my shotgun as a club and flailing away. That

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  battle must have lasted an hour. The one thing to be said for vultures is that they dispose of spitting cobras. Did I already tell you about those? They’re very dangerous. Their bite is absolutely lethal, and they also have a very unpleasant habit: they spit venom into the eyes of people and animals from quite a distance. This either blinds you or, at the very least, causes you severe pain. There’s only one remedy: rinse your eyes out at once with fresh mother’s milk. The only trouble is, you don’t always have a wetnurse or a young mother handy when you’re out hunting. And even if you did, it’s doubtful whether the woman would understand your request and consent in time to save your sight.

  ‘I can only enjoy Nature in relative safety within my own four walls. At precisely quarter past six every evening, for instance, a flock of hornbills flies over my hut, squawking pathetically like a horde of little children. And twice a day - also around the same hour - a million-strong army of ants makes its way across my floor. They enter through a crack at the front of the hut and march straight across it. Nothing will divert them from their route, neither sugar nor flour nor mango puree: they disappear down a crack at the rear. Curiously enough, they always migrate in the same direction. I’ve often wondered where their return route is. I spent a long time looking for it without success, so I now tend to think that they aren’t the same ants at all, but a different colony each time. But if so, how do the various colonies agree to cross my hut twice a day at the same hour?

  ‘I often think of you and the children and am glad I’ve already completed half my year’s exile. A year goes by quickly, especially at our age. My one regret is that it’s three months since I received a letter from you. I’m sure you write to me often - I’m not worried on that score - but your letters must simply be lying around somewhere, maybe Hamburg or Marseille or Dar-es-Salaam. Either that, or the mailboat took them around the Cape of Good Hope and on to Windhoek by mistake. Who knows? They may all arrive here at once, possibly after I’ve left. You have to take these things in your stride. Anyway, I can tell you that I’m still hale and hearty, and I hope you’re all the same, and I look forward to gathering mushrooms with you on the moor before long. Do you know

  something? When I sit here like this, watching all the colourful creatures around me, I cant help reflecting that our grey-and-brown Papenburg Moor was just as colourful and varied ten thousand years ago, and that the East Frisian peat beneath our feet consists of the remains of reeds, bullrushes, horsetail, giant ferns and milk-white water lilies the size of dinner plates, and that hairy palm trees overlooked by mist-laden skies jutted from marshes and muddy waterways in which long-legged, brightly coloured birds with misshapen bills strutted around, and that the air hummed with billions of mosquitoes, flies, butterflies and dragonflies of every size, and that primeval forests of alders and birch trees were grazed and browsed by mammoths, rhinos and giant deer, and that sabre-toothed tigers slunk through the bush, lions roared, hyenas laughed, and giant lizards sunned themselves on sandy river banks. So you see, there’s just as much poetry in our marshy Papenburg Moor as there is in the jungles of Africa, and its waterways are just as precious as the fever-ridden canals of Venice. Here a fern sprouts, there everything sinks into the mud. Then only a thousand years have to pass, and where once was a desert, everything teems with life; and where once the jungle flourished, death reigns supreme. It’s all just a matter of time.’

  The words - his own and those he’d read - came pouring effortlessly out of Tellmann as he sat there on his termite hill. In his head he never tired of filling page after page with them. The only problem was, he couldn’t for the life of him remember any of them later on, when he sat down at his table with pen and paper to hand. Either that, or they all came back to him at once and he hadn’t the courage to opt for one of them, write it down, and let the rest fall into line after it. And so, after chewing his pen in despair, he eventually gave up and limited himself to saying that he was well, and that he hoped everyone at home was too.

  When Rudolf Tellmann returned from hunting on the evening of Sunday, 9 August 1914, he found Kigoma teeming with soldiers - not black askaris but red-faced Germans. Their boots stirred up the dust,

  their equipment jingled, their NCOs bellowed orders. The place was unrecognizable. Children wailed, women scooped them up and hurried off, men folded their arms and scowled. Trenches were being dug in the station forecourt, trees felled and guns deployed. Standing beside the platform was a train that must have arrived a short time ago, because it still had steam up. A company of askaris was busy unloading wooden crates from the goods wagons. Tellmann was unnerved by all this activity. He simply wanted to go home and change his shirt in time for supper in Wendts beer garden at half past six. He made a big detour round the harbour because it was seething with men in uniform. Many were laying sandbags and building gun emplacements, others unrolling coils of barbed wire or setting up latrines, pitching tents and digging drainage channels. Ten of them were trying to manhandle a gun off the quayside and on to the deck of the Hedwig von Wissmann. Rocking as violently under their weight as if she were in a heavy sea, the little steamer kept bumping into the wall sideways-on until an officer gave orders for the mooring ropes to be tightened. Just as Tellmann set off along the path that led across the headland to the Papenburgers’ three huts, his route was barred by two corporals with bayonets levelled.

  ‘Halt!’ said one.

  ‘Password,’ said the other.

  ‘I’m Rudolf Tellmann,’ said Tellmann.

  ‘Your papers,’ said the first.

  ‘What kind of beast is that?’ asked the other, indicating Veronika.

  ‘I don’t have any papers on me,’ said Tellmann. ‘And that’s my pet cat. Now let me pass’

  ‘Your gun is confiscated,’ said the first.

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ said Tellmann.

  ‘What was your name again?’ asked the other, who was now holding a sheaf of envelopes in his hand. ‘Tellmann, was it?’

  ‘That’s me,’ said Tellmann.

  ‘In that case, carry on,’ said the other. ‘The gun is your personal equipment. Here, this is for you.’

  Tellmann was handed an envelope. It bore a big official seal and the

  words ‘Imperial District Commissioner’s Office, Kigoma’. Tellmann was surprised. He hadn’t known that there was an Imperial District Commissioner’s Office in Kigoma. He opened the letter and read:

  You are hereby requested, within twenty-four hours of receiving this communication, to present yourself at the office of the undersigned and submit your passport, or, if a German national, your military papers.

  For your information, the German Empire and its colonies have, since the beginning of this month, been in a state of war with Russia, France, Belgium and Great Britain.

  Kigoma, 9 August 1914.

  (signed) Gustav W. von Zimmer Imperial District Commissioner

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  When the Lime Trees Lose Their Leaves in Autumn

  lieutenant commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simson was on shore leave when newspapers headlined the announcement that Great Britain had declared war on Imperial Germany. After breakfas
t he got into his number ones, put his briefcase full of papers ready beside the door, and waited for a summons from the Admiralty. That their Lordships would send for him, Spicer-Simson felt quite certain. He considered it out of the question that they would continue to employ him to hunt brandy-smuggling trawlers when the future of the British Empire was at stake. Now that the Royal Navy was mobilizing every reasonably seaworthy ship and mustering every experienced officer available, they couldn’t possibly forget, pass over, reject and defraud him yet again. Spicer-Simson knew that his hour had struck, and that he was in the right place at the right time in his life. If there was a vestige of justice and common sense left in the world, he would now, at long last, be assigned a task commensurate with the magnitude of his ambition.

  The situation was genuinely grave. The German army, which had overrun neutral Belgium within days of the outbreak of war, controlled the ports of Antwerp, Ostend and Zeebrugge. German sailors were boarding neutral merchantmen and trying to run the British blockade. British and German gunboats were engaging in preliminary skirmishes in the Channel, British cruisers bombarding German positions among the Belgian sand dunes. And in Belgian ports almost within sight of the English coast, German U-boats were preparing to support an invasion.

  It was inevitable, under these circumstances, that the Royal Navy would call upon Spicer-Simson’s services. Although he had to possess his

  soul in patience awhile longer and continued to serve aboard the Harrier, his prayers were answered on Monday, 2 November 1914- The Admiralty gave him command of a flotilla comprising two minesweepers and six tugs. His task was to check shipping for enemy activity and comb the Thames Estuary for mines. At first sight, this mission seemed equally unlikely to assuage his thirst for adventure and posthumous fame, for in November 1914 the Thames Estuary was probably the most closely guarded stretch of water in the world, and it seemed highly questionable that an enemy squadron would turn up there in time to provide him with scope for heroism. However, Spicer-Simson was experienced enough to know that dramatic events in world history can sometimes occur at surprising moments and in the most unexpected places. So he remained on his toes and performed his duties conscientiously, circumspectly, and with great personal commitment.