1982 - An Ice-Cream War (3 page)

“
Moment
,” the woman said, and strolled languidly to the window, her low breasts swaying and juddering. She chewed fiercely for a second or two then spat something out into the night. There was a dull clang as whatever it was hit a tin roof below.

That does it, Temple thought. My God, this is depressing.

Tonight was his last night: he was meant to be having fun. He pulled up his trousers.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Nothing personal, lady. But goodnight.” As he left he heard her bangles rattle—it sounded like a kind of laughter, he thought—as she pulled her shirt back on.

8 June 1914,
The Northern Railway, German East Africa

Liesl von Bishop stared out at the towering green humps of the Usambara hills as the train slowly chugged alongside them on its way north to the terminus at Moshi. Her eyes barely registered the movement of game, deer and antelopes, bounding away from the track. She felt an intense boredom settle on her. The air in the compartment was hot and muggy despite every available window being opened wide. She pressed her forehead against the warm glass and shifted her position on the shiny leather seat. She felt her buttocks begin to itch. A fly buzzed somewhere above her head. She rubbed her stinging eyes. Erich and the fat American had smoked continuously, it seemed, ever since they had left Tanga. Why, oh why had she come back to Africa? She wondered for the hundredth time since her arrival three days ago. A night in Dar, suffering the condescension of Governor Schnee and his opinionated milkmaid of a New Zealander wife. Then a heaving, wallowing sea journey in a filthy tramp steamer from Dar to Tanga, the luggage reloaded and unloaded yet again. A troubled stay at the Deutsche Kaiser Hotel in Tanga; Erich and the fat American up all night joking and drinking with red-faced farmers and
Schutztruppe
officers. Erich drunkenly whispering to her as he climbed unsteadily into the creaking bed, then falling into a crapulous sleep almost immediately.

It started again in the morning: three hours in the dust and stink of Tanga station, hot, thirsty, surrounded by piles of luggage. The fat American running about worriedly, looking for water to moisten his wretched coffee seedlings. Erich was sullen and sore-headed. She walked about Tanga’s station buildings searching for cool shade, fanning herself with a silk fan her mother had given her as a leaving present. She noticed that all three clocks on Tanga station told a different time.

Finally the ancient train backed arthritically into the station. The luggage and crates were loaded on board and they secured their seats in a first class compartment. There was another unaccountable wait of forty minutes before the train pulled out of Tanga on its daily run to Bangui, midway between Tanga and Moshi. At Bangui they would have to spend another night as trains between Bangui and Moshi only travelled twice a week. Liesl sighed, thinking of the speed and efficiency of travelling in Germany. From her family home in Koblenz to her sister in München in under one day!

She turned her head and flipped open her fan. For some reason the American was standing up, swaying dangerously to the motion of the train. A small black buckled cheroot poked from between the bristles of his moustache and he was rubbing his buttocks vigorously, pummelling them with his fists as if he were plumping cushions.

He smiled, but his moustache still obscured his mouth, only the changing contours of his cheeks and the disappearance of his eyes in deltas of wrinkles indicated this new facial expression.

He spoke, without removing. his foul-smelling cigar from his mouth—a very common man, she thought, having noticed earlier his appalling table manners at the hotel: a common man indeed.

“All this sitting down,” he said. “Kinda makes a man stiffen up.”

What was he talking about? Liesl asked herself. She could hardly understand a word he said—his whining, droning accent—and she prided herself on her English. She smiled tightly back and resumed her hill-watching out of the window.

“Tell me, Erich,” she heard the American say, softening the
ch
to a
sh
. “What’s all this talk about war between England and Germany?”

She closed her ears. War war war. She was tired of hearing men talk about war. They were like children. Her father, her brother-in-law, her nephews. War, politics, war, politics. She sighed again, quietly so Erich wouldn’t hear, and she thought about her sister’s home in München. Electric lights, water closets, beautiful furniture, the richness and variety of the food. She’d forgotten what it was like: all those years with Erich on the farm, she’d forgotten about the choice and the succulence. She’d eaten so much on this last trip home, as if she were storing it up, like some animal about to go into hibernation. She could feel her hips and belly bulging beneath her corset, loosened to the full extent of its ties. None of her African clothes fitted her any more. She could feel her blouse cutting into her armpits, sense its material stretched—tight as a goose-berry—across her broad shoulders.

Itches ran down the back of her thighs. The heat rash was starting, after only three days! She needed to bathe every day, and she hadn’t had a proper opportunity since she’d left the
Tabora
. She cursed her fair complexion, her soft moist skin, suddenly envying the American his freedom to stand up and scratch.

To take her mind off her discomfort she opened her travelling bag and took out the thin wooden box. Turkish Delight, bought in Port Said, her last box. She had bought five, meaning to hoard them, but she had eaten her way greedily through the lot on the voyage out as if it were the last time she’d ever taste it.

She took off the lid. There were three pieces left, like large chunks of uncut precious stone, pale pink, seeming to glow beneath their dusting of powdered sugar. She picked up the little wooden prongs and stabbed them into the largest piece and popped it into her mouth. Saliva flowed. She chewed slowly and carelessly, allowing bits of the sweet to become lodged in her teeth. Two pieces left. She shut her eyes, relishing the pleasure, forgetting her itches for a moment.

“Must be good stuff,” she heard the American say. And then Erich’s false machine laugh.

“Ah, you see Liesl has developed a sweet tooth.”

She opened her eyes and saw them grinning at her like two idiots. She offered Erich the box. He waved it away, accompanying the gesture with a little snort of air through his nostrils. She held it out to the American. He peered in, almost timidly.

“I don’t think I’ve ever come across this before. What’s it called?”

“Turkish Delight,” she said flatly.

“Hey. All the way from Turkey.” Two blunt and calloused fingers plucked a piece out. Only one left.

“An exotic experience,” the American said. “Light shines through it too. That’s nice.”

She watched him as he bit the delicacy in half, raised his eyebrows in approval, then finished it off, licking his fingers. Icing sugar whitened the ends of his moustache.

“Now that’s what I call a sweet,” he said, relighting his cheroot. “Very nice indeed.”

Liesl knew she had been sulking and in a bad mood all day, but she didn’t care. And once they arrived at Bangui there was little chance of an improvement. The guest house was small and dirty and kept by a taciturn railway engineer’s wife. Liesl slept fitfully for two hours in the afternoon saying she had a headache. As dusk gathered outside she got up, washed her face and went downstairs to the bar-cum-dining room that occupied most of the ground floor. She strolled outside to the verandah. Erich and the American sat on cane chairs looking out over the dusty main street. She joined them, assuring her husband she was feeling much better. She asked a native servant to bring her a cup of coffee.

“Here they come again,” Temple Smith said, looking up the street.

A squad of about sixty askaris was being drilled by a German NCO. They marched briskly down the street, halted, ordered arms and stood at ease. Then they shouldered arms and marched off followed by a crowd of small boys.

“Now why,” Temple said, wagging a forefinger at von Bishop, “why are your askaris being drilled like this? It looks like you’re expecting trouble.”

“I’ll be honest with you,” von Bishop said. “I don’t know what’s going on. They say it’s for the exhibition in August, but since von Lettow came, everything has changed. They even called me up.” He spread his arms and shrugged his shoulders.

Temple turned politely to Liesl. “Do you think there will be war in Europe, Mrs von Bishop? Was this the talk when you were there?”

Liesl wrenched her attention away from a lizard which was stalking an ant.

“There was some talk. But with Russia, I think. Not England. I don’t know.” She smiled apologetically. “I didn’t listen very hard. I’m not very interested.” Her English sounded thick and clumsy on her longue. She hadn’t had to speak it for so long. She resented having to speak it now, for this American’s sake.

Temple frowned and turned back to von Bishop. “I can’t see there being any fighting out here, can you?”

“I doubt it,” von Bishop said. “It seems most unlikely. Von Lettow is just a very cautious man.”

Liesl let them talk on. It was marginally cooler now the sun was setting, turning the Usambara hills behind them a golden bracken colour. Crickets began to cheep and chirrup and she smelt the odour of charcoal fires. The boy brought her coffee, and she sipped it slowly. An oil lamp was lit on the verandah and some moths immediately began to circle round it casting their flickering shadows over the few Europeans who sat on chatting. For the first time since setting foot on shore at Dar Liesl felt she was truly back in Africa, the memories of Europe which she had protectively gathered around her slipped away, or retired to a safer distance.

She looked at her husband. He caught her eye for a moment and then his glance jumped guiltily away. She wondered if he would try tonight. They hadn’t been together for over a year, the time she’d spent away. On the voyage back her mind had turned regularly to their reunion, and she had been vaguely surprised at the vigour of her desire. But that had been on the ship. Now she was quite indifferent.

She looked covertly at his thin bony body, his taut, lined face, his big nose, his soft, thick old-man’s ears. She wished he hadn’t shaved his head like a soldier. It accentuated the angularity of his jawbone, seemed to deepen the hollow of his temples, made his nose look longer…He was nervous tonight, she could see.

She sighed. She had been away once before to Europe on her own, in 1907 during the Maji-Maji rebellion. Since then it had been six years without a break. During that period the Northern Railway had been completed, Erich had resigned his commission and bought the farm on the northern slopes of the Pare hills facing Kilimanjaro. The farm prospered, the ground was rich and fertile. They built a large stone bungalow. They lived well, and money steadily accumulated in the bank as the crops were transported down the Northern Railway to the port at Tanga.

Oh, but the life! The beauty of their surroundings, the success of their enterprise couldn’t make up for the tedium of the diurnal round. Erich was away all day in the plantations, returning exhausted at night. She had many servants to do her work for her, but she was always uncomfortable in the heat, her fair skin wasn’t suited to the sun. Every biting insect saw her as a delectable target. She seemed to sweat unceasingly, her clothes rough and chafing against her moist skin. She got fevers regularly. Her neighbours were remote and uncongenial, there were few diversions in Moshi, and Erich was not a man for dances or social gatherings.

Then, last year, she spent an entire month locked in a severe fever, her body trembling with rigors, her teeth chattering for hours. She announced she was going home to convalesce as soon as she began to recover. Erich couldn’t refuse. They had a bank account full of money. She could return to her family with pride, armed with purchasing power. She smiled at her spend thriftiness. She’d spent everything she had, bought presents and luxuries, spoilt her little nephews and nieces. How they had loved Aunt Liesl from Africa! It had been a marvellous year.

She smiled again, perhaps that was why Erich was so nervous. When she left a year ago she had been thin and miserable, still wasted from the fever. Perhaps Erich didn’t recognize her now. She touched her neck reflectively, feeling its creamy softness. Maybe Erich thought he was seeing a ghost.

The next morning Liesl, von Bishop and Temple Smith stood on Buiko station watching two companies of
Schutztruppe
askaris climb onto half a dozen flat cars attached to the rear of the Moshi train.

Liesl fanned her face with her straw hat. Again Erich had sat up drinking with the American. He had eased himself silently into bed, careful not to touch her, thinking she was asleep. Liesl felt irritation mount in her again. Flies buzzed furiously around her face, settling for split seconds on her eyelids and lips. Waking this morning she had counted two jigger fleas beneath the big toe nail on her left foot. Small red spots, slightly painful to the touch. How could she have jiggers already? Thank God she would be home soon. Her houseboy Mohammed was expert at removing the sac of maggoty eggs the fleas laid beneath the skin. He used a pin: like extracting a tiny winkle from its tight little shell. She never felt any pain when Mohammed did it.

Eventually they boarded the train and it pulled out of Buiko on the final leg to Moshi. The Usambara hills gave way to the gentler Pare range as they rattled steadily northwards through lush green parklands, the hills on their right, the Pangani river on their left.

“There is talk,” she heard her husband say, “of banning native shambas and villages from a five-mile-wide strip the entire length of the line. It’s such good farmland and so close to the railway.”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” Temple observed, looking out of the window. “They do it in British East. I only wish my farm was as good as this.” He looked to his left at the line of trees that marked the Pangani.

“Ha!” he exclaimed, making Liesl jump. “There she is!”