At the Edge of the Desert Read online

  ‘As I say, the Namibian government isn’t exactly supportive of our claim. They’ll do anything to make it go away. They don’t want to alienate German Namibians living here, or Germany itself. We’re the largest African recipient of German development aid. Consider what that means. Plus they send us 100 000 tourists who spend millions of euros every year. Our politicians are concerned that money will be used as a bargaining chip, or as punishment.’

  ‘My sister’s charity relies on European finance,’ I said.

  ‘Ja, and it’s primarily German money if I’m not mistaken.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You see what I mean?’ he said. ‘Listen, I’ll understand if you don’t want to get involved with this project because of your sister. Because if the Germans find out you’re working for us, it won’t take much for them to put two and two together and realise that Lucia’s your sister.’

  ‘I’ve spent my life being discreet, Chesley.’

  ‘But they’ll make it difficult for her. Please think about it. My mother says that as far as she’s concerned you’re the right man for the job. So if it’s a no, you’ll have to go and speak to her.’

  ‘You can count me in. Do you think they’d stop my sister’s funding?’

  ‘They won’t go out of their way to target her directly, but it wouldn’t be too difficult for them to find a dozen ways of withdrawing their support. Budgets shift around and get cut all the time, and there are a million and one legitimate reasons behind changing priorities. I’ve heard from at least one Windhoek charity that after their involvement in this case they’ve been subjected to a full-scale review. I think it’s called “soft pressure”. So I’ll understand if you prefer not to be involved. But then all I ask is that you make good with my mother, and keep this confidential.’

  I mentioned my sister’s recent meeting with Jago, and her concerns about money for next year.

  ‘Ja,’ Chesley said, ‘that’s what I’ve heard. It’s already precarious. But it’s the same for almost every other Namibian charity. And even if they don’t receive direct funding, there’s usually a link, complicated or otherwise, to Germany. And that’s the problem.’

  ‘Maybe Germany’s already paid its reparations in all this money it’s sent us over the years?’

  ‘No. A country doesn’t get to buy its way out of genocide.’

  —————

  I sped out of Lüderitz past the excited tourists scrabbling up the hot sand to Kolmanskop’s dilapidated houses. I escaped via the highway with the railway line racing alongside me for company. That track escorted me through the erg where shaded ogees and tawny cymas extended all the way to the horizon. It was my only companion through the broad parkland covered with soft blonde grass. It abandoned me when the rock, worn smooth by ancient water, rose up to create hills on either side of the road, thrusting themselves heavenward to become shale-topped mountains that plunged me into a deep valley. Quiver trees stood like guardians on the steep slopes, each grey trunk tapering up to clumps of sharp, thick leaves like a thousand starfish. And above these spikes, as far away as a distant galaxy, was the chalky sky.

  Namibia’s capital city Windhoek is almost equidistant between the country’s western seaboard and its Botswanan border in the east, Angola up north and South Africa to the south. Due to its omphalic position, the city served as an ideal basecamp for my interviews. Chesley’s assistant had booked me a quiet guesthouse, with secure parking, near the central business district.

  For two weeks, Windhoek’s daytime temperature exceeded forty degrees Celsius. The whole region was unseasonably hot: a dramatic change from Lüderitz’s low twenties.

  I spent most of that fortnight on the road. Two weeks of no morning swims, and of much back-ache.

  I quickly realised that my role wasn’t so much ‘filmmaker’ as ‘filmmaker-driver’ because of the long distances I had to travel. The Herero are scattered throughout northern Namibia all the way into Botswana, a legacy of their ancestors’ escape from General von Trotha and his army. My budget didn’t allow me to travel to Botswana, but Chesley indicated that, depending on how useful his partners deemed my footage to be, they might fund an excursion to the neighbouring country. (I’d decided that, even without their help, I’d one day travel to Gaborone’s National Archives to film the last surviving copy of the extermination order.)

  I resolved not to contact Jago even though he’d messaged me. (Lucia had let slip that I was working up there.)

  A few of the names on Chesley’s list didn’t check out, but for the most part I filmed relatives with complicated relationships to the concentration-camp inmates – second cousins at a third remove, that sort of thing – because the Germans had exterminated their direct ancestors. The interviews were frustrating for their vagueness, and yielded little about the genocide.

  I encouraged my Herero subjects to tell me anything that may have survived in their collective family memory, but without wanting to pressure them. However, it soon became clear that most knew little about their slaughtered ancestors, and I found myself asking questions about the dead who, until recently, may well not have existed.

  Shakes of the head invariably met my requests for photos of the deceased, but I kept asking each person I met in the hope that, by some miracle, one might surface. Occasionally they’d hand me a pair of shoes or some other object that may well have belonged to a dead ancestor, or perhaps to someone else who was also long gone.

  Only my last interview of an elderly Herero man near a game lodge, on the outskirts of Omaruru in the north-west, was an interesting, if frustrating, experience. He kept touching my camera – wanting to peer through its viewfinder – and with the help of his family I explained that he had to look at the camera’s glass eye for it to see him, and to talk loudly so the machine could hear him.

  ‘You see me,’ were his first words upon settling down. He rebuked the lens: ‘I wait for your answer because you forgot us.’

  ‘This machine isn’t a telephone,’ his daughter interjected, and I motioned for her to be quiet. Meanwhile the old man’s grandchildren, who were watching, began to giggle.

  Despite agreeing to talk some more, the man merely said, ‘I wait,’ and folded his arms, as if preparing to outsit, outwit and outlast his one-eyed opponent.

  ‘This machine will listen, Tate,’ his daughter said and for a second time I asked her not to interfere.

  ‘We always praised you and gave thanks,’ he said. ‘We follow our mothers and our fathers, and their mothers and their fathers, in praising you. It is a lesson we obey, and a lesson we teach our children. Every mouthful of food and every sip of drink comes from you. The rain and the animals. And you help us receive it. But you also turn silent, and make us wait. What father ignores his children?’

  His last words appeared to be directed at something unseen. Such were my thoughts on my return journey to Lüderitz.

  —————

  I’d no sooner arrived back home than I was on the road again, travelling to Kolmanskop. Only this time I was one of nine people in Will’s Volkswagen minibus. We left Lüderitz at sunrise. Our destination was the ghost town, a few kilometres away, at the edge of the desert.

  Amanda was busily telling Sixten – a tall Scandinavian, who held his head to one side so that it wouldn’t hit the van’s leatherette roof – how she’d trained as a concert pianist and that her repertoire once included FX Mozart. (She called this composer, son of the more famous father, ‘Wolfgang Amadeus Jr’.) Also listening to her was a goateed Zimbabwean in possession of the darkest eyes I’ve ever seen, beside me. At the same time Keanu had asked Will why he wanted to film in Kolmanskop, and the Brit was replying that the idea had come to him in a dream, which made me smile. We were speeding along the section of highway that cuts through a field of crescent-shaped dunes when Will shouted, and flung all of us forward as he braked to avoid rear-ending a yellow excavation machine.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said as we shuddered to a halt.
‘Sorry about that.’

  Amanda asked if anyone was hurt.

  Sixten rubbed his neck. ‘Just a bit sore,’ he said.

  Will restarted the engine on his second attempt.

  ‘Keanu, I’ve told you not to distract Will when he’s driving,’ Amanda said. ‘Don’t ignore me when I talk to you.’

  Will said, ‘Be gentle with him. I wasn’t concentrating.’

  I glanced at my sister, who was behind me, and she shook her head.

  ‘Let’s all take a deep breath,’ Will said. ‘Let’s remember to have a bit of fun while we create something special. We’re going to build ourselves a beautiful place to live, and somewhere pleasant to work.’

  Oblivious to the excitement behind it, the yellow sweeper continued its slow journey clearing the desert sand that had blown across the tarmac overnight. We inched forward past the old Kolmannskuppe sign pointing to the abandoned settlement. Blue no-entry warnings, posted at intervals along the perimeter fence on the other side of the road, separated the ghost town from the desert. Will made a slow right onto a gravel path that took us to Kolmanskop’s entrance, where a black-and-white board hailed us in English, Afrikaans and German:

  WARNING.

  PENALTY £500 OR ONE YEAR’S IMPRISONMENT.

  THE PUBLIC IS WARNED AGAINST

  ENTERING THE PROHIBITED

  DIAMOND AREA WITHOUT PERMITS

  Welcome to the sperrgebiet: the prohibited diamond zone. Trespassing without a licence means arrest or imprisonment, if the guards find you. Those who escape detection are the unlucky ones: lost, they won’t survive more than a few days.

  Apart from the refurbished casino with its café and gift shop, the town’s ruined buildings lie disused. A long time ago, before the First World War, rich diamond miners and merchants lived and prospered here until the plunging commodities market sank their fortunes. Empty shells are all that remain of the belle époque. The undulating desert sand slowly softens the brick walls and will come to inundate the spectral houses.

  Will led us into the restored theatre. The auditorium was about four storeys high and painted with a line of theatrical masks along each wall. He was wanting me to film him on the empty stage, but the glare from its giant windows, where the backdrop should be, would reduce him to a silhouette. I told him we’d have to use the back of the hall instead. He wasn’t entirely happy with my suggestion, perhaps because it didn’t align with his new-found aesthetic vision, but short of him conjuring up a few blackout curtains there was nothing to be done about it.

  I assembled my tripod behind the last row of plastic chairs while Keanu found two small tables for my equipment. The lanky Scandinavian came to help. (And reminded me his name was Sixten.)

  ‘You shouldn’t allow Mrs Mozart to talk to you like that,’ I told Keanu as we worked.

  ‘Amanda?’ Sixten said because he was close enough to overhear me.

  I ignored the Scandi: ‘You shouldn’t let her belittle you in front of the others, Keanu. Will is responsible for driving his van.’

  ‘Ag, she’s OK,’ Keanu said.

  ‘Stand up to her, or she’ll get worse.’

  ‘She’s stressed,’ Sixten interrupted.

  Neither of them, nor any of the others who were also listening, would look me in the face.

  ‘Make her apologise the next time she talks to you that way,’ I said softly. ‘You’ll be surprised by the results. And even if she gets cross, which she will, you’ll have shown her that you’re prepared to stand up for yourself.’

  ‘But I want to join the group.’

  ‘Surely not if it means her making your life hell.’

  I was ready to start shooting.

  I found Will drinking coffee with my sister in the café. There was no sign of Amanda.

  ‘How about we film outside today?’ he suggested chirpily.

  ‘I’ve just set up in the hall, Will.’

  ‘Give us a few minutes, Henry,’ my sister said quickly because she could read my irritation.

  I left them and went through the auditorium, past its adjoining two-lane bowling alley, out the back door to get some fresh air. It was good to be away from everyone. In no way did I feel a part of them, and I would have preferred to be exploring Kolmans by myself today, or at home on my veranda with Dollar on my laptop.

  I was sure Chesley would have read the mail I’d sent him with the interviews by now. If only I could know what he thought about them. They’d lacked compelling testimonies, and if the next lot were as uninteresting there was a good chance he might reconsider my role in all of this. It was only a matter of time before he called. I found myself absent-mindedly patting my pockets even though I didn’t have any dope on me.

  The dull light was a bit flat for filming. It softened the sharp-edged dunes and the row of broken-down Jugendstil houses ahead of me. The culprit responsible for the gloomy morning was a cumulonimbus cloud that had engulfed most of the horizon and was set on obliterating the rest of the sky. If the giant kept growing it’d soon be on us.

  A person was making slow progress up the sandy hill ahead of me to the abandoned houses. I peered through my viewfinder for a closer look and recognised Amanda. On reaching the first empty building, she turned and shaded her eyes. She waved at me, oblivious to the apocalypse above her.

  Will and my sister were in the small bowling alley outside the auditorium.

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ he was saying.

  ‘We’re losing light,’ I warned. ‘We should start before the cloud hits.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can go through with this,’ he said.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ I said.

  ‘You’ll have to tell everyone I simply can’t do this. I’m in such a state that I couldn’t even drive us back to Harmony if my life depended on it. It’s another of my migraines.’

  My sister was doing her best to reassure and soothe him, but he became increasingly frantic and uncooperative: he couldn’t talk today, the location was all wrong, this was much too difficult for one person to have to deal with.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘It’s only a bit of nerves.’

  ‘Then why does it feel like the fucking world’s about to end?’ he shot back. ‘Does it really have to be this difficult?’

  I leant a hand on the theatre’s swing-doors so that they opened slightly.

  ‘Let’s have one of our conversations,’ I said as warmly as possible. ‘All you need do is talk to me. Leave the rest to me. If you’re worried about the group, we can clear the hall, but I think an audience will help you pace your delivery. And you’ll be able to gauge if they understand you or if you need to explain things differently.’

  ‘I don’t think—’

  My sister shushed him. ‘You’ll be fine, Will.’ She smiled at me. ‘Henry, give us five minutes. We’re doing this,’ she said with conviction. ‘Will just needs to catch his breath …’

  ‘Where’s Amanda?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Outside,’ I said.

  ‘Please call her. Bring her to me.’

  I made to move towards the rear door, but my sister said, ‘I’ll find her. Go and get ready.’

  When at last Will came into the auditorium, he only had eyes for my camera. He was seemingly unaware of my sister and Amanda on either side of him, and his group before him.

  ‘Right …’ he said to my expectant lens. ‘Let us consider society.’

  Will spoke about envy and the need for humility, pausing to write notes on a flip chart. The paper sheets soon filled with his neat handwriting: ‘576 SOLITONES’, ‘VOLTAIRE’, ‘LEIBNITZ’, ‘NELSON MANDELA’, ‘CAESAR’ (the last word circled and ‘HEPTATONE’ and ‘SEVEN DOMINANT PASSIONS’ written alongside it); ‘BONAPARTE’, ‘IDI AMIN’, ‘WINNIE MANDELA’ and, of all people, ‘FREDERICK THE GREAT’, the four of them grouped under the heading ‘HEXATONE’ and ‘SIX DOMINANT PASSIONS’. In my viewfinder, his head appeared bigger and more insect-like than in lif
e.

  The light hadn’t improved – if anything it was growing steadily worse – so I kept making slight adjustments to the iris as the cloud hid the sun.

  To begin with, Will’s plummy accent was quite lyrical, but seventy minutes of him lingering on random syllables – elongating his vowels – made him sound increasingly pretentious and affected. And he kept rubbing the tip of his nose every time he paused for thought, which irritated me. But his audience was quiet and spent most of the session nodding along, although there came a point when they began to fidget. How anyone could put up with more than a few minutes of this stuff was beyond me.

  I eventually asked Will to take a break so that the group could go to the toilet or grab a cigarette. My sister and Amanda took this as their cue to speak encouragingly to him. I filmed them consoling him, which might make an interesting segment.

  I’d need to grade these shots in the edit to brighten them for use in my own film. Normally I’d have suggested we try again on another day, one when the weather was cooperating, but after hearing his doubts in the bowling alley I wasn’t sure if he would agree to a repeat performance.

  ‘Is it too dark?’ he said when he saw me nearby.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said. ‘But I need to fix your collar.’

  He patted his chest absent-mindedly.

  ‘It’s going well,’ I reassured him as I adjusted the radio mic.

  ‘Technology …’ he muttered.

  I took the opportunity to speak softly: ‘Tell them about London.’ He gave no indication that he’d heard me, so I tried a second time. ‘Tell them what happened to you in London.’ The auditorium’s lights flickered on and the room felt warmer. Still no response from him.