He returned to the tent. A lizard sat next to the lamp, staring at an ant slowly approaching. Then its tongue lashed out and the ant was gone.
That night he made another note in his book. He wrote to Matilda: Wish that tonight I had had the courage to flog open the back of one of my ox-drivers with the heavy whip. But I’m not quite at that point yet. If I struck him now it would bother me. Not until I know that the action won’t cause me any pain, only the one who has the skin on his back flayed, will I do it.
He rolled up the diary in the beaver skin that protected it against damp and insects, turned off the lamp and lay down.
I’m searching for an unknown fly, he thought. The way other people search for a god. In the desert I believe I’ll find it. But Wackman with his brothel, his whores and his peculiar ears has no doubt already written to my father’s housekeeper and reported that I failed, that I’m lying in an unmarked grave.
Even though he was very tired he lay awake until dawn.
The next day they continued past the low mountains and in the evening reached the Kalahari Desert.
Chapter 4
From a distance they saw a group of Bushmen pass by.
They were like black dots against the blinding sand. The fact that they were humans and not animals could be surmised from the oxen: the beasts had scented them but decided they were no threat.
They had then been in the desert for two months and four days. It was the first instance in all that time that they had seen any human beings. Before this they had seen only a small herd of zebras and the tracks of snakes that coiled below the crescent-shaped barchans of sand.
Bengler had lost more than nine kilos in weight. Naturally he couldn’t weigh himself, but he knew that it was precisely nine kilos. His trousers flapped around his legs, his chest had sunk, his bearded cheeks were hollow. At night he dreamed that he was slowly being buried in sand. When he tried to scream there was no sound because his vocal cords had dried out.
Somewhere everything had gone wrong. According to the maps Wackman had got for him, they should have passed the chief town of Windhoek in German South-West Africa a week ago. But nothing other than bare mountains, sand and scattered bushes had lain in their illusory path. Twice they had come across waterholes, both times after they had seen swarms of birds rising and falling against the sky. Until now the ox-drivers had not complained, but Bengler realised that it would not be long. Every day the distance between them had increased. On two occasions he had been forced to raise the whip to get them to go on: he knew that the third time it happened he would have to strike.
Neka was still as fat as before. This amazed him. The ox-drivers’ meals were even sparser than his own. But apart from Amos, who knew a few words of English, all conversation was impossible. As soon as he approached they were ready to take orders, perhaps receive a rebuke as he impatiently waved his arms or pointed at some detail that was not as it should be. He had assumed the habit of inspecting the wagon wheels every morning and evening since they could not afford to lose another one. He tried to evaluate the condition of the oxen, whether any were showing signs of illness or exhaustion. He also checked to see that nothing in the wagonload had disappeared. There were his jars and metal containers of alcohol waiting for insects, his drawing materials and provisions. As yet he hadn’t been able to discover if any of the ox-drivers had begun stealing. Each time he made these checks he felt a surge of shame shoot up through his body. What right, really, did he have to mistrust these men, who were the reason that he made progress each day, who pitched his tent and prepared his meals? On several occasions, most often in the evenings, he wrote to Matilda about this. He nearly always used the word caste, as if it had become a sacred term in this connection. The caste who decreed, and those who took orders about what had to be done.
The two months they had been travelling through the desert had altered his entire perception of what the purpose of life actually was. He continued to believe resolutely in his idea that an unknown fly, or perhaps a beetle or butterfly, would provide a reason for his whole existence. Yet at the same time the sand, which was hopelessly incomprehensible, had forced him to look back at his life. The wagon rolled slowly onwards behind the oxen. Within him he was always walking backwards, or inwards, towards something, but he knew not what. Clarity? An understanding of what an individual could or should be? Each morning when they struck camp he selected an idea that he would work on for that day. Since he was poorly trained in philosophy, he had to formulate the big questions in his own mind as best he could.
One day he had pondered love, from the early morning until he fell asleep exhausted that evening. He was thirsty because from the beginning they had had to ration the water. To Matilda he wrote in his book that the grace of love was incomprehensible to him. But that the erotic game she had taught him could still fill him with strong desire.
That day the desert had filled him with hate, because there was nowhere he could go to and masturbate. And by evening, when he was alone in his tent, the desire was gone.
One night he was awakened by a strange silence. At first he didn’t understand what it was. Then he realised that his father’s jaws had stopped grinding. He lit the lamp, looked at his watch and noted the time in his diary. Without knowing it for sure, he was convinced that his father had died. He had been sitting on his chair in the arbour and when the housekeeper crept in to fetch him, his jaws were still and his heart dead. Bengler felt no sorrow, no pain or loss. But he did feel an impatience that was difficult to control. How long would it take before he could get confirmation that it was true? That his father had really stopped grinding his jaws on that very night?
After two weeks in the desert he had caught his first insect. It was Amos who found it. A very small beetle with a greenish-blue shell that was walking slowly through the sand. He identified it in one of the British entomological lexicons that he had brought along. To his astonishment he read that the Bushmen made a lethal poison from the secretion of this beetle. He stuffed it into one of his jars, filled it with alcohol and labelled it. Slowly he had begun to convert his wagon into a museum.
But the journey itself was still what was most important. He had decided that the trading post somewhere ahead of them would serve as the base for his expedition. From there he could organise his hunt for ostriches; from there he could plan, in an entirely different manner, his search for the unknown insect. There would be people he could converse with. He imagined that everything would be there that made a life possible. A hymn book, an old pump organ, ledgers and regular meals. He vaguely hoped that there would also be a woman waiting for him, someone who, like Matilda, might visit him once a week, sit on him and then drink a glass of port.
That had been among the last of his purchases in Cape Town before he said farewell to Wackman: two bottles of Portuguese port.
But the damned maps weren’t right. Or else the constantly drifting sand was a landscape that was impossible to map. In vain he had sought along the horizon for a folded mountain range that was supposed to be there, according to the map. But he hadn’t found it. He wondered whether there was some mysterious disturbance in the sand that made his compass unreliable. Sometimes he was confused at daybreak, thinking that the sun was rising over the horizon at a point where east had not been the day before. Since he had no one to talk to he started talking aloud to himself. So that the ox-drivers wouldn’t think he was losing his mind, he disguised his conversations with himself as religious rituals. He folded his hands, and sometimes he knelt, while out loud he argued with himself about why in hell that mountain range wasn’t where it should be. Why neither the landscape nor the maps were correct. During these sham rituals the ox-drivers would always keep their distance. Occasionally he would also remember to scold them for their laziness, for their unwashed bodies, as he knelt there with folded hands.