“Guten Abend,” he said. “Do you speak English?” Some of the sailors looked round at the unfamiliar accent. Temple felt the close heat in the room cause his clothes to stick to his body. He wondered why he was bothering to go to all this trouble.
“Englisch?” said the Goanese. “Nein.”
Shit, Temple swore to himself. “Upstairs?” he said, pointing at the ceiling.
The Goanese smiled his comprehension. “Oh ja,” he said. Then indicated the sailors. “Ein Moment, ja?”
Temple sat down and drank two glasses of beer. Three sailors clattered down the wooden stairs from the first floor, smiling and grinning and immediately went into a huddle with their friends.
Temple smoked a cigarette. He tried to keep his mind empty of thoughts. He concentrated on the taste of the beer. It was good beer, he said to himself, brewed right here in the city, as good beer as he’d tasted in Africa…He looked round the bar. For a bar it was decidedly quiet, he observed. A muttering of conversation from the sailors, a flip of cards from the engineers, the occasional scrape of a chair on the paved floor. It was as if everyone were afraid of drawing attention to himself, wanted to be as unobtrusive as possible.
Two more sailors descended the stairs. The Goanese proprietor came over and took away his beer glass. He smiled and nodded at Temple, shooting his eyes in the direction of the floor above. Temple stood up. He was about to walk over to the stairs when the proprietor touched his elbow.
“Vier Rupee, bitte,” he said. Temple paid him the money.
He climbed the stairs, acutely aware of the clump of his boots on the wood. On the first floor landing were three doors. Gently he tested the first, but it seemed locked. He was about to open the second when a German sailor came out. Temple stood to one side and the sailor moved past. He said something to Temple in German but Temple didn’t understand, but he smiled wryly, shrugged his shoulders and gave a chuckle. He sensed it had been that sort of remark. Temple moved to the third door, pushed it open and went inside. The room was small and bare except for an iron bed. In one wall was a small window which overlooked Marktstrasse. The shutters of this window were open a few inches and a native woman stood in front of them looking down on the street. On a ledge above the bed was a crude lamp, a burning wick in a bowl of oil.
The woman by the window was chewing something vigorously. She was wearing a rough cotton shift and had a bright fringed shawl loosely about her shoulders. With the toes of her right foot she scratched the back of her left calf.
Temple cleared his throat and shut the door behind him. The woman looked round.
“Abend,” she said dully and went over to the bed. She looked a strange mixture of Arab, Indian and Negro, Temple thought. Her hair was long and wiry and tied up in a complicated knot. Around her neck she had ropes of beads and metallic neck-laces. On her thin arms she had a large collection of bracelets. The bed was covered in a grey blanket. Temple moved closer. He saw that her hair was thickly oiled, and indeed that her entire body was covered in a thin layer of shiny grease. Dark blue tattoo marks stood out against the dark brown skin of her forearms. Set in her nose was a brass stud of a simple flower shape. Her middle parting had been smeared with a rusty, ochrous unguent. A cloying, oddly farinaceous smell came from her body. Temple wondered how many races, cults, theologies and customs were meeting in this small room tonight, and what little portion he would add to the mix.
He looked around him and became suddenly aware of the accumulated filth of the place. He saw the rickety bedstead strengthened with wire, saw the flies and insects buzzing and crawling round the flame of the lamp. He could sense the blanket alive and twitching with bed bugs.
He scratched his head. He’d been in some fairly primitive whore-houses in his time, but this won first prize. Still, he thought, he’d come all this way: it seemed pointless not to see the thing through.
The woman folded her shawl carefully over the end of the bed. With a single movement and a clank of bangles she removed her shirt. She was now wearing only her jewellery collection. More strings of beads were wrapped round her waist, Temple noticed. It would be like going to bed with the bric-a-brac counter at a dime store. He wondered vaguely if the beads were talismen of some kind.
The woman sat down and with an innocently lewd gesture parted her legs in order to examine more closely the irritation on the back of her left calf. To his annoyance, Temple realized he was smoothing down his hair. The woman’s breasts were low slung and oddly pointed. The tattoos he’d seen on her forearm were extended over portions of her torso.
Unhappily he unbuckled his belt and undid the buttons on his trousers. He was wearing no drawers but the woman didn’t spare him a glance. She only looked up when he stumbled as he tried to step out of his trousers. He’d forgotten, in his absorption with the exotic, to remove his boots.
“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.
2: 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 Schütztruppe 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!