Parts Unknown. Zirk van den Berg
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the minister beckoned Siegfried into a side room, where the registry would be signed. He was needed as a witness, along with the Jürgenses.
Inside the small room, Herr Kamke shook his hand, his palm greasy from something he had applied to soften its roughness. While the couple were going through the legalities, Siegfried stood back and stared at the back of Herr Kamke’s neck, how rough the skin was there compared to the smooth patches right behind his ears. Tonight, this hard body, he could not help but think, would press down on top of Lisbeth Löwenstein, on top of Frau Kamke. The prospect bothered him. It wasn’t jealousy, he decided, but a violation of his sense of justice. This is not what the woman wanted. He saw this happen, and could not stop it.
At this point his lungs rebelled, intent on ejecting real or imagined phlegm. He felt the scratching in his chest, tried to stifle it, made noises in his throat. The others turned towards him, Lisbeth included. They probably think I’m overcome by emotion, he thought, which is even more embarrassing. The struggle was useless anyway. He grabbed his handkerchief and let the coughing break free. When he had his breathing under control again and his sense of the outer world returned, everyone was looking, waiting. ‘My apologies,’ he mumbled. ‘Go ahead.’
When the time came, he signed his name below that of the new Frau Kamke.
With the formalities complete, the Jürgenses congratulated the couple and the minister clucked with jollity. Siegfried forced a smile. Then the bride turned, put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
* * *
Exactly twenty-four hours after his arrival, Albert Pitzer was back at the station to collect his second trunk, the one the railwayman in Swakopmund had said he would send along. He did not want to stay in Windhoek one day longer than necessary. Already he had bumped into someone who knew him, a fellow student who had finished his degree, now an army doctor. Heinrich Salzwedel had many questions for him, and did not seem to believe all his answers.
They were taking an awfully long time to unload his equipment from the goods wagon. He watched the door as more baggage appeared, was claimed by officials and carried off by young black men who chattered joyfully, as if they were the ones receiving things. Most wore hats, but a few went bare-headed. Their tufts of hair did little to obscure the shape of their skulls, which he observed with great interest.
Eventually there were only two porters left. They disappeared into the goods wagon and he found himself standing on his toes in anticipation; surely, they would come out with his trunk at any moment. He waited, but nothing happened. He looked around, hoping to catch the station master, but even he had apparently found somewhere else to be. In fact, there was nobody else around at all, he realised with some alarm. There was just himself, an emaciated brown dog sniffing the train wheels and then squirting drops of urine onto them, and a woman sitting against the wall of the station building, her legs stretched out flat and a baby lying on her thighs, kneading her stomach with its feet. Even the engineers had left the locomotive, and were probably off somewhere, guzzling beers. Pitzer stepped towards the goods wagon and hesitantly peered inside. It was gloomy, and it took a while to be sure of what he saw. The two porters were asleep, or trying to sleep. Apart from these two figures, the carriage was completely empty.
It sounded like a hollow drum when he banged on the wood next to the door, and the porters sat up wide-eyed.
‘Where is my trunk?’
They looked at him, then at each other, and back to him. Comprehension, he thought, came slowly to these creatures.
‘What happened to my trunk? It was supposed to come from Swakopmund.’
The porters – one younger and stronger, the other older and thinner – looked at him with such bewilderment that he wondered if he was the one going crazy. He should have known things would go wrong. The other day in the desert when a hundred trained and armed soldiers failed to catch a single unarmed fugitive, he should have known things wouldn’t go as planned. Pitzer didn’t share his nation’s usual reverence for men in uniform, but those soldiers’ failure had suggested that things might be even worse than he had imagined. Now this confirmed it. The younger porter trotting off to call the station master did not fill Pitzer with confidence.
When the station master finally turned up, he looked upset at having been interrupted in whatever he had been doing. He was a big, muscular man with wide-set grey eyes like a shark, and small yellow teeth. The hair on his temples was matted with sweat.
‘What’s the problem with your trunk?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with it, except that it’s not here.’
‘What did you do with it?’ asked the station master, who looked as if he really struggled to come to grips with what was going on.
‘The question is what you did with it. I had it sent from Swakopmund.’
‘Well, then maybe we have to ask the people in Swakop where it is.’
‘It has to be here, I need it.’ Pitzer was doing his best to keep his agitation under control.
‘You need it? I need a willing white woman, but do you see any around?’
Pitzer found men who revert to talk of sex to find commonality with others the lowest of the breed. His contempt must have showed.
‘Look, just try to relax and we’ll see what we can do,’ said the station master. ‘Come to the office, and I’ll take down your details, telegraph the stationmaster at Swakop, find out what’s going on.’
* * *
Lisbeth found the experience interesting, like acting in a play she didn’t know, but she said all the right words and the man she had promised to obey seemed very pleased with her performance. He kept trying to sneak glances at the people in the pews, but did look at her at the end, long enough to press his chapped lips against hers.
After the formalities, they posed for a photograph – one with just the two of them, and one with the witnesses too. Then her bridegroom took her by the arm and led her outside.
The guests surged forward, impatient to slap the groom on the back and shake his hand. Lisbeth wasn’t quite the centre of attention, but she was beside him, and that was special too. After congratulating her husband, people smiled politely and tried to say encouraging or amusing things to her. Most of the women said she looked lovely. She believed them, and wished her mother could see her. She had never had a dress this beautiful.
They thronged to the garden behind the Südwester Hotel, where tables had been set out on the swept earth, with white tablecloths and pitchers of beer and platters with dauerwurst and leberkäse, pumpernickel bread, pickles and cheese. Ribbons of different colours were strung between the trees and the yellow birds were around too. In the coolest spot, a band in Bavarian dress had set up, the men in lederhosen and a woman, who proved to be the singer, wearing a dirndl. Maybe her fantasy in Karibib wasn’t that far-fetched after all, Lisbeth thought, that version of Germany really did exist here. The band started to play. Herr Kamke took Lisbeth’s hand and led her to the dance floor. He counted eins, zwei, drei, and off they went. Every time her dance partner turned her so that she faced away from the building, she saw a group of black children in the distance, sitting under a tree, watching the white people cavort. Around her there was clapping and cheering, and a great deal of happiness. Another couple joined them on the floor, and then more. Soon they were dancing in a cloud of dust. The hotelier sent out porters with buckets of water. They cleared everyone off the dance floor and sprinkled water, dipping their hands in the buckets and sowing water drops like seeds. When the dancing resumed, there was less dust, but mud caked their shoes.
Between two dances, Lisbeth sat down on a folding stool and accepted a mug of beer from her bridegroom. She put dauerwurst and cheese on a bread roll, nibbled at it, meat and milk together. She hadn’t bothered to be kosher since leaving home.
Siegfried Bock sat quietly, off to the side, his chair pushed a step or two back from the table. He looked a bit lost. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked. ‘Why aren’t you dancing?’