The Last Train to Zona Verde (11 page)

“I’m visiting my grandparents in Windhoek,” she said, “just for a break. I need a break.”

She lived in Cape Town and had a business there, making children’s furniture, and though business had been slow, she said it was picking up.

“Why are you taking the bus?” I asked.

“I always take the bus. I wouldn’t dream of going any other way.” She had the fluttery Afrikaans way of making the word “dream” into a stammer of two syllables, as if whispering ecstasies. “I love looking at the hills and the farms. It’s nice and relaxing on the bus.”

I agreed, and this rolling road was the only way of seeing how one country slid slowly into another.

Anke had been cheerful, yet in the next couple of hours a great sunlit sadness descended as the land flattened, the trees vanished, the mountains slipped down, and all the miles to the horizon filled with only reddened grass and low blue tufts of bush. The sheer size of the landscape was daunting, its dryness like desert, and some of the soil held the hard glitter of salt. Nothing grew higher than ten inches or so.

In Cape Town, my bedside reading had been
Voices
, a memoir by Frederic Prokosch, a somewhat forgotten American writer of the middle decades of the twentieth century who had spent much of his life as an expatriate in Europe. His novel
The Asiatics
had been a bestseller in 1935 because it seemed such an elegant and accurate
depiction of a young man’s travels through China and India. But the travel in it, so evocative and convincing, had all been invented — Prokosch had hardly stirred from his home in New Haven when he wrote the book, and his later life was marked by a succession of hoaxes.
The Asiatics
was much admired by the traveler Bruce Chatwin, who habitually fictionalized his travel writings, punching up mild episodes and giving them drama, turning a few days in a place into a long and knowledgeable residence. Prokosch’s many encounters with great writers in
Voices
also seemed like hoaxes, and the world-weariness itself was an affectation.

“Yes, there are still those endless jungles and deserts down in Africa,” a European socialite tells the author. “But what do we care about Africa? Nothing that matters happens in Africa.”

This was still the ignorant opinion of many people in Europe and the United States. I had copied it into my notebook and given
Voices
away, but I was reminded of “nothing happens” in this long stretch of emptiness that was taking us up the winding, narrow road to Springbok.

We were in the Namaqualand interior, in a stony immensity of low hills and gullies, a desolate grandeur I associated with dinosaur bones. The patches of white I took to be rocks were sheep, in the far distance as small, immobile, round, and mute as stones.

I was thinking — and wrote this in the notebook that bounced on my knee — how I often questioned what I was doing when I happened to be so far away in a parched climate like this. Way past retirement age and alone, I rode among bald hills and scrub, headed to Namibia. If it seemed purely self-indulgent to be here, what perverse aspect of my personality was I indulging?

I argued myself into thinking that physical experience is the only true reality. I didn’t want to be told about this, nor did I wish to read about this at second hand. I didn’t want to look at pictures or study it on a small computer screen. I didn’t want to be lectured about it. I wanted to be traveling in the middle of it, and for it to be washing
over me, as it was today, in the emphatic weather, very hot, the glissades of light and heat that gave it a visible lifelessness — now very bright, and all the vitality burned away.

Under the aqueous, utterly cloudless, late afternoon sky and the setting sun lay a landscape of broken and piled-up stones, tortured into sharp valleys and flinty cliffs. The place looked ancient and as if no one had ever lived here, and it matched the profile of an old woman on the bus who stared at the African stones like Karen Blixen, and had the same iguana face.

Sundown at Springbok was an unexpected and eerie arrival at a twilit town surrounded by rock, with smallish, stucco-walled houses embedded in the slopes of a valley of broken granite. As a settlement it seemed an absurdity. What was the point of such a place, glowing in the middle of the descending darkness, not another town for miles?

The answer was that copper had been found near here, the first mineshafts sunk in the seventeenth century by the earliest Dutch settlers. Copper and zinc were still mined in the area, but Springbok was best known today for the profusion of wildflowers that appeared in August and September, the South African spring. The darker history was that of the massacre of the Nama people — the Namaqua — by the Germans who’d come south from Windhoek, heavily armed. The indigenous Nama had lived hereabouts since the dawn of humanity and had flourished because of their proximity to the Orange River. But the discovery of copper and diamonds by the Dutch, and farther north the German imperative to have a whole colony to itself, meant that the native population had to be dealt with mercilessly. In a war that took place between 1904 and 1907, most of the Nama and Herero people were exterminated and the rest driven away or enslaved.

This is the brutal sort of history that produces shock in the tourist, but since it has its parallels all over the Americas, where genocide and slavery were routine, it is sanctimonious to tut-tut.
Anyone in Springbok could point out that the Wampanoag Indians captured in King Philip’s War by the embattled Pilgrim fathers were sent wholesale on ships and worked to death as slaves on Caribbean sugar plantations. The curious experience of African history is that it so often throws up images of one’s own country’s past. But in South Africa it is all so awful and so recent it is a happier diversion to concentrate on the wildflowers.

Half a dozen people on the bus got out at Springbok and, relieved to be home, reassured by their arrival, overcoming their shyness, called out “Safe travels!” to the rest of us.

Darkness fell. We had come almost four hundred miles and were near the border of Namibia. Later, in the glare of lights on tall poles, we pulled into a gas station, and while the other passengers scrambled for food — platters of fried potatoes served up by smiling women dressed like nurses in white smocks and white caps — I looked for someone to talk to. I found a man at the edge of the lights, which was the edge of the desert. He wore a wool hat and thicknesses of ragged clothes. He turned, surprised, because he happened to be shouting at his dog, a poor, beaten-looking mutt that seemed submissive and confused.

“Where are we?”

Instead of answering, the man shouted at me and walked away, his dog following.

“Steinkopf,” a bystander said.

Farther down the road, not long after that, we came to a high chainlink fence surmounted by razor wire and looking like the perimeter of a prison. Making it more prisonlike were watchtowers and dazzling lights and men in uniform with wicked rifles slung under their arms. The border.

Some people collect antiques or stamps or Beatles memorabilia. I collect border crossings, and the best of them are the ones where I’ve had to walk from Cambodia to Vietnam, from the United States to Mexico, from Pakistan to India, from Turkey to the Republic of
Georgia. To me a frontier represents the life of most people. “I became a foreigner,” V. S. Pritchett said of being a traveler. “For myself that’s what a writer is — a man living on the other side of a frontier.” It’s a thrill to go on foot from one country to another, a mere pedestrian exchanging countries, treading the theoretical inked line that is shown on maps.

Often a frontier is a river — the Mekong, the Rio Grande, the Zambezi; or a mountain range — the Pyrenees, the Ruwenzoris; or a sudden alteration in topography, a bewildering landscape transformation — hilly Vermont flattening into Quebec. But just as often — perhaps most of the time — a border is irrational yet unremarkable, a seamlessness that goes by the name of No Man’s Land, a width of earth bounded by fences. You can hardly tell one country from the other. Often there is no visible difference, as any migrant who crosses the Sonoran Desert from Mexico to Arizona can testify — wasteland straddles the frontier; if there is any drama, it is imposed by the authorities, heightened by the presence of police or the Border Patrol. Otherwise, the border is a contrived and arbitrary dotted line, a political conceit dividing communities and people, creating difference and disharmony. I suppose the act of walking across a border is my way of undoing difference and seeking harmony, even if it is only in my head. It is nearly always a happy act, even in the darkness of night, slowed by officialdom and inspections.

There’s an equality in pedestrian border crossings, too: no first class, no fast lane, no preferential treatment. You line up at the office, get your passport stamped, your bags searched, and off you go, perhaps to find a ride on the other side or to reboard the bus. The bus doesn’t leave until everyone is processed, and while waiting the travelers shuffle their feet and become restlessly talkative.

My map gave this limit of South Africa as Vioolsdrift.

“
Viool
means ‘violin,’ ” a woman told me. We had gotten off the bus and were going through immigration. “It’s a funny name for a place.”

Drift
means “ford,” as in fording a river. The Orange River was the border, but “violin”? One story had it that a Nama man, named Jan Viool after his fiddling, lived here and gave the place its pretty name.

The woman I was speaking to, one of the passengers, was elderly but uncomplaining, standing in the chilly night carrying a small bag. She had a complex ancestry: “I’m German and Malay and Herero, and some Khoisan, and others.”

Her name was Johanna, and she was going home to Windhoek. This was the best way, through the Northern Cape. “Beautiful countryside,” she said, “especially when there’s flowers.” She loved to travel, even on this old bus.

“I’ve been to Britain. It was nice. But my cousin lives in Croydon, a sort of suburb. I didn’t like it at all. Too many people. Not like this.” Johanna gestured to the emptiness, the surrounding darkness, the immensity of night sky, the glitter of stars. “I went to Malaysia once, just to see it.”

“Did people ask you where you came from?”

“Ach, yes. Some of them asked, ‘Are you an Australian aborigine?’ ” And she laughed. “I told them ‘Namibia,’ but they had no idea what I was talking about. They didn’t know this country. Never heard of it.”

Her friend Edith was with her, the woman I’d spotted who looked like a Roman emperor with her scraped-down Gertrude Stein hair. But now I could see that she had a distinct and rather handsome hue that marked her as mixed race. She was bound for Rehoboth, on the road to Windhoek.

“They say the most dreadful things about us,” Edith said. “They” I took to mean the world at large. “But you know, we have everything here, plenty of food and lots of space. I reckon we’re luckier than most people, but no one knows us, no one really gives a toss.”

“You’ve traveled the world too?”

“A bit. Enough to know that I don’t want to live anywhere else.”
She regarded the night sky. “And it’s peaceful here now. Not like what it was. We had a war, you know. Shooting. Bombs.”

“It’s so much better now,” Johanna said.

“Except there’s no work for the young people,” Edith said, and turned because someone had shouted — the bus driver, calling to us. Edith shuffled toward the bus, muttering, “Mustn’t get left behind.”

The Namibian side was Noordoewer (“North Bank” in Afrikaans). Another stroll, more formalities, a new country. It was getting late, and when we set off on the bus again I slept, not waking until the stop in Keetmanshoop, where I saw Edith again, hugging herself against the chill.

“How are we doing?” I asked.

“Very well. Only five hundred kilometers to go.”

Johanna screeched. Edith laughed. Other passengers were yawning and stamping the fatigue out of their feet. No one minded the distance. Off we went into the darkness, deeper into Namibia, across the desert.

5
Night Train from Swakopmund

O
N A DAZZLING HIGH-DESERT
early morning, I stepped off the bus into thin air, in the center of Windhoek, a city of wide streets with the kind of old-fashioned wooden arcades jutting over sidewalks that you see in cowboy movies. It was a Sunday. The dignity and somnolence of a Sunday, gone in most countries, was observed in Windhoek, and that made my arrival simpler. Among families in formal churchgoing clothes — men in suits, women in frilly dresses or long-sleeved robes, all smiling as though newly baptized — I walked toward a hotel a few blocks away. And I saw that rarest of workers in Africa, a street sweeper — two of them, actually — one chucking at the granite gutters with his yard-wide broom, the other scooping with his shovel, succeeding in their labors. The clean streets added a touch of surrealism to this African capital.