At the Edge of the Desert Read online

  A few days after the wake, I met Chesley and Zenaid at his office his office, which had once belonged to a dentist. The room was neat and plain. We crowded around his desk near a pink dental chair half-hidden by potted areca palms, watching two weddings I’d filmed in Jo’burg to give them an idea of what their money could buy.

  Afterwards, my cousin surprised me with a list of questions he’d jotted down after our encounter at the funeral. He attempted to review each point with me but Zenaid kept interrupting – waving her hands with excitement every time a thought occurred to her – and Chesley would ask her to repeat herself while he transcribed her words. How long his patience would last was anyone’s guess.

  Weddings are inconvenient, but ultimately useful. They cut into my documentary-making time – the walkthroughs, the last-minute requests, the edits that take forever because the married couple’s memory of their blissful day never quite matches the dreary reality captured by my camera – but are easy enough to make and help pay my bills. To be honest, they require little effort on my part. And during the reception I’d listen out for ideas. Unfortunately Chesley’s was my only wedding since returning to Lüderitz, and it didn’t ameliorate my financial squeeze.

  ‘You’ll barely notice me on the day,’ was the lie I told Chesley and Zenaid, the lie I told every couple, ‘but I’ll be there safeguarding your memories.’

  ‘I want it classy classy classy,’ Zenaid said. ‘Do whatever to make it triple class.’

  ‘Let’s talk about this,’ Chesley said in a low voice while I encouraged her: ‘Understated and chic?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ignoring him. ‘That’s what I want. Chic.’

  ‘Not too flashy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing glitzy?’

  ‘No. Just classy chic. But maybe a little bit of sparkle.’

  I nodded enthusiastically because I needed the Archipelagos to like me, to recommend me to their rich Capetonian friends, and for Chesley to tell me more about the witness interviews he’d alluded to after the funeral.

  Five men hauled yellow-and-white canvas over a metal tent-frame in the Rhenish Mission’s churchyard while another team began hastily fastening the guy-ropes, attached to the canvas, to concrete weights. They shouted as the wind threatened to tear the tent from its mooring – a chorus of curses and quick apologies – and fought to prevent lift-off.

  Chesley’s mother was inside the hall, her hair in curlers, wearing a dressing gown and pompom slippers to oversee the preparations. She’d been arguing with a man about trust and money – ‘You overcharged!’, ‘Not true, Mrs Archipelago’, ‘You thieved me!’ – until she caught sight of my camera and fixed her mouth into a tight smile.

  I was pleased with my shots of the bride and groom kneeling side by side before the altar as they exchanged vows. Every time Chesley said Zenaid’s name, his index finger caressed her pinkie and she smiled at him. Behind my camera, I smiled too – as if Jago had reached out to me. Perhaps I’d been over-sensitive, but Jago’s words had disappointed me. I regretted not suggesting that I go to his hotel after the wedding. Seeing him again tonight would have been something to look forward to.

  After the service, I followed the married couple into the hall of eagerly waiting guests. Both Chesley and I cried at their expectant faces. His mother, in a pretty floral dress, rushed past me to kiss her son and his new bride. Her odour of just-ironed clothing mingling with the faint scent of baby powder reminded me of my aunt, and of her embrace.

  The footage taken inside the hall was going to be less successful than that in the church. This was because the room was used for exercise classes during the week – maroon gym mats stacked in one corner with soccer balls in a fisherman’s crate – and I kept forgetting to frame out the equipment. A long table held Rupertine’s wedding cake along with dozens of foil-covered meat casseroles alongside cling-filmed salads the guests had brought with them, and which would remain uneaten because Zenaid had paid a caterer.

  I sounded people out to film messages on camera for the happy couple, and to get cutaways of everyone having fun.

  Most were born-and-bred Buchters who knew me, or more precisely knew of me. Men shook my hand. Women’s gazes tended not to linger although their mouths retained their smiles. ‘You don’t know us,’ they’d all say, ‘but we knew your mommy and daddy. Good friends!’

  I reassured everyone that I remembered them – in Lüderitz the predominant reason for not acknowledging another Buchter is snobbery – although we never spoke about when last they would have seen me, most recently at my aunt’s funeral, and at my parents’ before that. If they mentioned my aunt it was to say how much they’d admired her generosity and kindness to my sister and me.

  Mrs Archipelago came to find me, perhaps worrying that I’d be tempted to sit down, so I assured her that I was working and had no time to eat.

  ‘But of course we’ll save you a plate of food, Hermanus,’ she said. My real name took me by surprise, whereas for her it was just another word. Her eyes glistened as she recalled the beautiful ceremony, her hand stroking her gold necklace as if to console herself.

  The guests found their tables, and Chesley, as big as a rugby player in his tight suit, began his speech. I moved as close to him as possible, attempting not to block anyone’s view, so that I’d be able to use the audio. (From a distance the noisy hall would make the track a clattering mess.) His father, who was smaller than Zenaid, never reacted to his son’s panegyric upon matrimony and the Fifth Commandment. Mrs Archipelago tilted her head to listen.

  All of which made me grateful to prop up a wall and safely observe proceedings from behind my camera. I took comfort in an unhappy, arguing couple on the far side of the hall, in a young boy, with as much cake as his fist could hold, one-handedly pushing his bike around the perimeter. He missed crashing into two girls playing under the table next to me, and kept reversing into my leg as he attempted to get away so I sent all three of them outside.

  A husband and wife arrived late to the table on my left.

  ‘We’re just from the factory,’ the man said. ‘I was talking to our foreman on Tuesday. No one can believe it.’

  ‘Shame,’ his wife said.

  ‘The whole place is in a state of shock,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘His little girl found him on Wednesday.’

  ‘Dawid, we are at a wedding,’ the wife said.

  ‘It really is very tragic,’ another woman said.

  ‘Ja, I knew him well. Tansy knows the girls from school. And such beautiful daughters.’

  I have childhood memories of adults stopping their conversations as soon as they’d see me. Concerned faces looking at me in much the same way that the wedding guests were trying hard not to stare.

  Five smokers congregated outside the French doors near the marquee.

  ‘The mine is losing ten million a day because of industrial action and the shit that’s going on with China,’ one said.

  ‘Kak!’ said another wearing a tuxedo.

  ‘Ja, it’s true. Ten million. Who knows what this means for our future …’

  The smokers took a long drag while contemplating the diamond mine’s impact on their lives.

  ‘So how much do you think this wedding cost?’

  A woman’s cousin had recently left for Botswana, and was living in a caravan outside Gaborone. ‘He’s hopeful,’ she told her friend, ‘but it’s the wrong decision.’

  ‘There’s no work here,’ the friend said. ‘What else can our youngsters do? And I don’t even want to think about their children.’

  Each woman recited a list of people who’d left Lüderitz for a better life.

  ‘There’s too many uitlanders here and not enough jobs.’

  If they were suspicious of strangers who moved here voluntarily, neither mentioned the bride by name.

  The buffet queue discussed Lüderitz’s street names.

  ‘The quicker Höher and Bahnhof and Bismarck are renamed something like Indepe
ndence Avenue, the better.’

  ‘You can’t just scratch out history like it didn’t happen.’

  ‘The whites don’t seem to have a problem doing just that. And anyway, who says Woermann is better than Mahatma Gandhi?’

  Also up for discussion was !NamiǂNûs, the Nama word for the town, or the region. (No one was quite sure.) Its first click sounded like a pulled cork. The last syllable was as wet as a kiss.

  I was biding my time, waiting for the married couple to say farewell and leave the reception, so that I could pack my kit and attempt a rendezvous at Jago’s hotel, when Zenaid beckoned me over to the head table where she sat with her two bridesmaids, dressed in pink silk, across from her younger sister, who was not.

  I said, ‘You’re not dancing?’ because Mrs Archipelago was with Chesley in the marquee disco.

  ‘It’s too loud in the tent,’ Zenaid said, ‘and this is the only time I can catch up with my best friends from high school. This is Jo-Ann and Patricia, and my baby sister—’

  ‘Rozena,’ her sister said with a wave.

  ‘I was just about to introduce you,’ Zenaid said.

  All three had driven together from Cape Town for the wedding. They were discussing that city, which they all loved except for Rozena, who preferred Johannesburg.

  ‘What do you think?’ Jo-Ann asked me, wrinkling her nose. Her foundation retained faint creases after she relaxed her face.

  I sided with my client.

  ‘Cape Town is beautiful,’ Rozena conceded, ‘but Jo’burg is so exciting. It recharges my batteries.’ She was pretty, and less made-up than the others.

  ‘I’m still not mad for Jo’burg,’ the bride said. ‘It’s too impersonal.’ She looked at me: ‘You’re in Lüderitz for good?’

  ‘For the time being.’

  ‘Same, for the time being …’ she echoed. ‘Join us.’

  I said I was happy to continue filming her reunion with her friends, but she insisted I sit down. ‘Rozena, get a chair.’

  ‘I’ve got it,’ I said, grabbing one from a nearby table. I’d been on my feet for hours, and they were glad for a rest.

  Zenaid insisted I eat a slice of wedding cake. ‘Chez says you know the lady who baked this.’ (I explained my connection to Rupertine.) ‘Please tell her from me that this is one of the best I’ve tasted.’

  ‘She’s not just saying that,’ Jo-Ann assured me.

  ‘Now don’t touch your camera until you’ve finished.’

  ‘Zenaid’s always this bossy,’ her sister said as I chewed.

  ‘If you ever visit Cape Town you must tell Chez and he’ll make sure you’re looked after,’ Zenaid said. ‘He knows people who can tell you which restaurant to visit and where to shop, eksetra eksetra.’

  ‘It’s a deal.’

  Her friend Patricia’s turn: ‘Is this your job?’

  ‘Weddings?’ I said.

  ‘Ja.’

  ‘Not really. I make documentaries.’

  ‘You mean like nature documentaries?’

  ‘No, mine are about people and their stories. And history. I also freelanced in Jo’burg for overseas news agencies who always needed a local cameraman. And I was involved in an oral-history project with Wits University, interviewing prisoners at Leeuwkop Max C.’ To further impress Zenaid, I told her I’d filmed in the Houses of Parliament.

  ‘Chez is looking for someone to do interviews for him,’ she said. ‘I think he was going to hire a guy from Cape Town, but that doesn’t make sense. Listen, I’m going to speak to him. You’re not too busy?’

  ‘No, I’ve put my latest documentary on hold for your wedding. My work for you and Chesley comes first, before anything else. You’re my number-one priority.’

  Frank Sinatra sang about the moon and the stars as the guests gathered around a white Mercedes to wave goodbye to the newlyweds. Chesley kept revving the engine, windgatting to impress us, until the tyres gave a sharp cry and the vehicle surged forward.

  A man in front shouted for Chesley to brake, and the car stopped dead. A bicycle was trapped under the Merc’s front wheel. Rainbow streamers hung from its handlebars. We carried a boy to the flowerbeds, pleading with him not to move.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ we asked the kid crushing the yellow vygies. He stopped crying when his father crouched over him, but began again after Mrs Archipelago smacked his cheek because of the fuss he was causing. They made him apologise to Chesley, and the child obediently shook the groom’s hand like a businessman negotiating a deal.

  Chesley wrenched the bike free of his car, and everyone applauded his successful departure as Sinatra sang his final verse in the marquee. And when the music ended I realised to my shame that I hadn’t put my camera aside to help, but that I’d filmed it all.

  My neighbour’s barking dog prevented my falling asleep, so I worked on my budget spreadsheet instead. Income from Chesley in one column, expenses in another, my bank loan and all the money I’d borrowed from my sister in a third. I’d inserted another line for a second wedding, perhaps a recommendation from Zenaid, but quickly discovered that if I booked one a month for the rest of the year, a hopelessly ambitious target for a small town like Lüderitz, my bank account still wouldn’t be in the black. There was little solace in those numbers, so I went to my enclosed veranda to think of other things.

  As a child, whenever I couldn’t sleep, my aunt would tell me about the time she crossed the equator by steamer to restore her health. Her tuberculosis had failed to respond to Bavarian treatments, so before the European winter set in her parents sent her to live with relatives who’d moved to Namibia after the Second World War. Her uncle, unknown to her before she arrived, had purchased five cattle farms. He’d abandoned Europe because foreign powers were feminising Germany.

  I’d stare at sleeping Lüderitz, as I did tonight, conjuring up her childhood in an ancient German city overlooked by fir-shaded mountains. Thoughts that have remained with me even after I learnt about the carpet-bombing Allies.

  I’d often think about the disembarked fräulein squinting in the African sunlight. She spent the summer on her uncle’s farms becoming accustomed to his lifestyle. To his seaside holiday home in Swakopmund. To his countless Ovambo servants to order about. All of which meant that when it came time for her to leave the colonial splendour for her European sickbed she refused. She dug her heels in the hot earth, and the businessman-farmer and his wife had little choice but to adopt her. It was a lesson in defiance that informed my aunt’s life: from that day forward whatever Elisabet Escher wanted, Elisabet Escher would get. This self-belief procured two church scholarships for my sister and me from a private South African boarding school that she could otherwise never afford.

  My aunt finished her own education under the care of a German governess, followed by a year at a Swiss finishing school in the Pays-d’Enhaut where she learnt to ski, sew and loathe French. (She’d returned to Europe on condition that no one would tell her birth family. She never spoke about her relatives on the Continent. Did she have brothers or sisters? Both?) And on her path to adulthood her surname acquired its ‘von’ prefix. She married and just as quickly divorced a Windhoek diamond-merchant. He’d enjoyed playing dummy, and many other positions, with Jo’burg socialites at the bridge table, and in the bedroom.

  I knew from experience that my just-shot wedding footage would be too fresh to withstand any editorial scrutiny, especially when serenaded by an aggrieved dog, so I grabbed my laptop from my room and attempted to work on my prison documentary. But my mind was leaden and I was soon questioning my decisions.

  The sleeping town was safer to contemplate from my vantage point, and it took my thoughts back to Jago. The accident at the wedding had made me forget my plan to surprise him at his hotel, and now it was too late.

  By morning a sea fog covered the harbour and its surrounding buildings. I’d spent all night on the veranda, uncomfortable in my wicker chair, with only a thin blanket to keep me warm. It had been a difficult sleep filled
with unsettling images.

  But the hopeful prospect, the possibility, of meeting Jago and of returning with him to his hotel, spurred me on.

  The disordered water revealed itself as I went down into the Shark Island mist, but there was no sign of Jago. Hidden fur seals and African penguins complained on the rocks near the lighthouse.

  During my lacklustre training an unbidden memory interrupted me mid-lap: ‘When you were eight years old there was a sandstorm like a nuclear attack. You ran down the corridor screaming because of the blood. That day I couldn’t catch you.’

  My aunt’s words were so clear that she could have been in the pool with me. The last time I saw her was during what I’d thought would be a short trip to Lüderitz to celebrate her eightieth birthday, and a week later we buried her. She’d not yet left me.

  I climbed out to clear my head, but to no effect.

  Returning to the water, I went to the deep end, to the far corner where the waves were doing their worst. I clung to the ocean wall with my eyes shut against the heavy water, and surrendered to every surge. Let them wash my aunt’s words away. I eventually paddled back to the shallow-end steps, out of breath and sore from the pummelling, where a man’s voice, perhaps from the harbour, echoed around me in the wet air.

  I was drying myself as four Lycra-clad tourists jogged out the mist into the campsite. They were German, wintering in Namibia before returning home to their snowy mountains and fibre-optic broadband and film festivals and government grants. To wonderful Europe, its terrorists notwithstanding.

  I’d pulled my jeans over my cossie by the time the men in Speedos and the women in one-pieces came through the gate. They said hello before jumping into the water, yelping from the cold.

  There was a chance that Jago might still turn up. I was tempted to go to his hotel, but decided that an unannounced visit might not be a good idea.

  I heard the man’s voice out on the harbour again, and because I didn’t want to go home and risk missing Jago, I walked along the promontory to explore.