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 hoteclass="underline" 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.