A Love Story in Africa
© 2015
Oryx Publishers
Windhoek, Namibia
www.oryx-publishers.com
info@oryx-publishers.com
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form whatsoever.
ISBN 978-99916-786-7-2
Cover photo:
© Wolfgang Steiner, www.wolfgangsteiner.com
It was dry, that year. The tall man with blue eyes looked up at the cloudless sky. He was standing on a small rise in the middle of the bush and, in his khaki clothes, blended entirely into the landscape. The grass was yellow now, in the dry season, winter here in southern Africa. A season when it never rains and the nights make you shiver with cold.
During the day, though, there was sunshine, and the man’s tanned skin showed that he was outdoors a great deal. His straw-blond hair appeared bleached, as he took off his broad-brimmed hat to wipe the sweat from his forehead. Now, at noon, it was hot, but at night the temperatures fell at times to below freezing. This was Namibia, land of contrasts, big and wide, a dream of endlessness.
In the north there were rivers, with enough water to keep the fields and pastures green, but in the south the desert dominated. The Namib in the west, that stretched until it met the long Atlantic coast, and in the east the Kalahari, reaching far beyond Namibia’s borders, into South Africa and Botswana. Here the prevailing topic was the struggle to survive without water.
The man let his glance travel over the arid savannah where there were only a few dry shrubs dotted here and there. Apart from the small rise where he was standing there was no other elevation as far as the eye could see.
He frowned. He had seen something move behind one of the bushes. An animal, perhaps? His eyes contracted to narrow slits and he concentrated his gaze to a single point. The shrub was too far away to see anything clearly, and in the noonday heat the animals stayed in the shade. Only at twilight would they come out again, but he was used to reading the smallest signs. The long, sharp horn just appearing from the shadows told him that an oryx was resting there.
Even under the harshest conditions in the desert, without water, the oryx could survive, and so the oryx antelope was the National Animal of Namibia. Not a rare animal, its distinctive markings made it easy to tell apart from the other kinds of antelope native to the country.
The man tried to make out the beautiful grey animal with its black and white face mask, but the harsh African shadows wouldn’t allow him to. Where there were shadows, there was night. He shifted the weight of his weapon, which hung loosely on a strap from his shoulder. They didn’t need meat today. The antelope could continue to doze in the noonday heat.
He turned and went back to the old Land Rover at the foot of the rise. Its sand-coloured contours were also hard to make out in the shimmering sunlight. Not even the rubber of the tyres, covered with desert sand, stood out. Vehicle and driver blended in perfectly with the desert.
When he started the car the loud roar of the engine broke the silence brutally. But no bird flew up, no animal ran off. There were no birds here, and all the animals were hidden somewhere waiting for the heat to abate, for the night to come, so that they could look for food and water. Even the tok-tokkie beetles were not to be seen. They had buried themselves deep in the desert sand, to escape the midday heat.
The Land Rover ploughed through the sand until it reached firmer ground, when the driver increased his speed, leaving a dense cloud of dust behind him that covered his passage like fog.
After a while the dust settled, and every trace of human presence disappeared.
The desert lay there quietly; it had no need of human beings.
Vanessa was woken by mild turbulence. She had been so exhausted that she had fallen asleep right after dinner, and had hardly taken in any of the flight. Now, above the clouds, the sun was rising.
It was a splendid view. The horizon turned a shimmering red, and right after that the light of the sun struck her eyes. She turned her gaze away. It was impossible to keep looking into it. The air was so clear that nothing toned down the splendour of the glow.
Vanessa looked in her handbag and took her sunglasses out. Protected in that way she could now watch, fascinated, as the sun rose.
Then she noticed that above the clouds had been a false impression. When she looked down she didn’t see any clouds at all. How was that possible? This wasn’t her first time in a plane but she had never landed anywhere without clouds.
“I am happy.” The older man next to her sighed. “I’ll be home soon.”
Vanessa looked at him with interest. “You live in Namibia?”
“I was born there.” The man laughed softly. “Did you think I should have darker skin?”
“No, no.” Vanessa smiled a little in embarrassment. “I know that there are many different variations of skin colour in Namibia, black and white, and many shades in between.”
“And everyone lives in peace together,” said the man. “We’re proud of that. It’s not always the case, if you look at our neighbours, Zimbabwe, for example.” He looked past Vanessa and out of the window. “But even Mugabe can’t take his people’s good will away.”
In the meantime the sun had risen high and bright in the sky, white-gold in the clear air, and the red shimmer had disappeared.
A flight attendant came by with a bag. “Blankets, please.”
Vanessa freed herself from her blanket and gave it to her. The next flight attendant collected the pillows and it was clear that they were nearing their destination. The passengers were getting restless; a few got out their mobiles and video cameras and took pictures from the windows, which hardly seemed suited for it. Maybe they were ‘first timers’, like Vanessa, as a great number of others were ignoring the sunrise and the cloudless sky. It all seemed to be familiar to them.
Finally, they began their descent and as the ground came nearer, Vanessa made out a landscape that seemed to be made up of just brown earth and a few clumps of dried grass. She saw no buildings, until the end, when the airport pavilions came into view. They looked like a place that children had built with Lego. She wondered if the runway was long enough.
Her worries were unfounded. The plane touched down, slowed, and the pilot turned in order to taxi to the right place.
The passengers applauded. Several were already beginning to take their luggage out of the overhead bins and there was a general feeling of departure. Many of the holiday makers seemed to be in a great hurry to get to their destinations.
“Hurry, hurry,” remarked the man next to Vanessa, shaking his head. “That’s the way you Germans are.”
Vanessa smiled. “I’ve come with the intention of finally taking my time, a little.”
“Good.” The man stood up slowly from his seat and by doing so made it possible for Vanessa to get up as well. “Here in Africa, we always have time. There’s nothing that could be that important, that we couldn’t wait a while.”
Now Vanessa had to laugh, as the man courteously helped her to retrieve her luggage from the overhead bin. “I should tell some of my clients that!”
He glanced at the passengers pushing and shoving at the exit. “Or those people there.”
They tried together to find a way into the line. Slowly, the crowd began to thin; most people had left the plane.
Then Vanessa stepped hesitantly onto the top step of the stairs that led to the tarmac. Here there was no wind tunnel as in Frankfurt. Vanessa remained standing, as though she had run into a wall. The warmth assaulted her unexpectedly, after the cool interior of the plane.
She looked up at the blue sky. In spite of her sunglasses she had the impression that the light was very bright, as though she weren’t wearing sunglasses at all. When she pushed them up a little, however, she let them fall right back onto her nose. Without sunglasses it was impossible to see anything.
The warm air caressed her, and she saw that many people were too heavily dressed. Even now, in the early morning, the sun at the international – even if it was hard to believe – airport of the capital of Namibia had an unbelievable power.
“Are you going to stand here much longer?” The voice of her friendly neighbour from before woke Vanessa from her trance.
“No, of course not. Sorry.” She threw him a glance and started down the stairs. Her steps echoed metallically on the perforated iron steps.
But she didn’t notice. She was too fascinated by her surroundings. The wind blew sand over the tarmac and over her hand luggage and over the other passengers who were moving in a straggling line towards the airport building. There was only the one, low building; there was no doubt about where one had to go. Otherwise there was only the wide countryside and the bush, spread out around them.
From there rose the dark hills that Vanessa had already seen from the plane as they were landing. They weren’t really very high, but high enough to remind Vanessa of the Taunus Mountains, which she knew so well. But here the mountain sides weren’t green, but strewn with clumps of grass that were just as dry and yellow as the grass in the lowlands below. Among them were rough, stony slopes, looking as though torn off at some point, and thousands of years old.
Vanessa could hardly look enough at these configurations in the landscape. She had the feeling that she was stranded in a country before time itself began, where any minute a dinosaur might come tramping out of the bush. Nothing was as she had expected it to be and yet – yes, nevertheless she had the feeling that she had come home.
She shook her head in irritation, as she pulled her hand luggage trolley with some difficulty over the cracked concrete surface. What nonsense.
But she couldn’t shake the feeling, as she entered the airport pavilion.
As soon as she got into the line that had formed for immigration, she noticed that things were much more relaxed here than in Europe. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to process the passengers, to the vexation of some of the holiday makers, who were eager to get to their final destinations and who were politely but firmly told to wait their turn. Next to the line.
Vanessa had to smile. Apparently people here did not appreciate rude and pushy customers. The slow pace of life mustn’t be disrupted.
Finally her turn came, and she presented her passport and the immigration form that she had had to fill out in the plane.
“Holiday?” asked the ebony-black face of the immigration official, and didn’t crack a smile.
“Yes.” Vanessa nodded.
“Fill this out.” The uniformed official pushed the form back to Vanessa over the high desk behind which she sat, and pointed to the section that Vanessa had not completed. “Where are you staying?” she asked rather rudely, perhaps even more rudely than before, as though Vanessa had not treated the form with sufficient respect.
Or so it seemed to Vanessa. She hadn’t understood the question very well, as the official spoke English with a very pronounced accent. “At a guest farm,” she answered quickly. Her heart was beating fast, for some reason. There were only a few true borders in Europe, these days. To be treated as though one intended to invade a country as a conqueror was very unusual.
“Name? We have a lot of farms here.”
“Oh. Yes.” Vanessa hurried to enter the farm’s name into the form. “Of course. Sorry.” She didn’t want to suffer the same fate as the woman before her, who still stood, impatient and stressed out, next to the line.
After Vanessa had filled out the form completely she got a stamp in her passport, a tourist visa for ninety days. If only I could stay here for that long, she thought for a moment, with longing.
But she had to move on to the baggage claim, to wait for her suitcase.
It was a lesson in patience, as the suitcases just didn’t come; the carousel kept moving around senselessly without producing a single piece of luggage.
A woman, also in uniform, but not the same as the immigration official’s, came up to the carousel, threw it a disapproving glance and then asked the passengers, “Aren’t the suitcases here yet?” She got a unanimous shake of the head in reply and, suddenly resembling a locomotive, snorting in fury, she went out to the tarmac, where a number of black men were standing and sitting around in a leisurely way, laughing with one another, and yelled at them in an incomprehensible language, after which the men jumped up like rubber balls and quickly ran off.
Vanessa had to smile. It seemed women had more to say in this place than men. She hadn’t expected that. She looked through the glass pane at the Airbus they had come in. It stood lonely and abandoned on the broad airport premises in front of the panorama of the African highland. It looked as though the big aeroplane was standing in the middle of the bush itself. There wasn’t much business here.
No large train station, no gate, no tunnel leading to the plane, just some stairs that a few of the men who had been brought into action had rolled up to the plane and then were holding underneath it, so it wouldn’t roll away. It felt like being in a film from the 1930s.
“The only thing she still needs is a whip, right?” An unpleasant voice, that she would gladly have never heard again, grated on Vanessa’s ear. And she recognized the unpleasant odour, too. “Black women.” It sounded very scornful, but Vanessa had the impression that it had nothing to do with skin colour. This wannabe Indiana Jones considered women in general to be a lesser species.
She didn’t acknowledge him with an answer and continued to stare in front of her in the hope that the men would now bring the luggage. And, finally, there was a luggage transporter to be seen on the tarmac, on its way to the hatch through which the suitcases would be placed on the carousel.
A few minutes later the first piece of luggage appeared. The passengers gave a collective sigh of relief, and one had the feeling they might even have applauded.
The man next to Vanessa made a disdainful sound. “Africa. The most inept continent in the world.”
She actually hadn’t wanted to respond to that, but his arrogance made her blood boil. “And so why are you here?” she asked with eyes that flashed with anger.
He grinned. “Trophy hunter. I’m just going to get my gun from customs, and then get on my way. I hope I get an elephant in my sights. That’s what’s missing from my collection. But if not, there are plenty of other animals.”
Vanessa turned away in disgust. Happily in that moment she saw her suitcase appear on the carousel. She went towards it quickly, took it off and pulled it together with her trolley toward the exit.
As she passed through customs – nobody was interested in her luggage, they just waved her through – a door opened into an amazingly large lobby. Up to now Vanessa had had the impression that everything here was very small.
Sure, this hall could not compare to the one in Frankfurt, but nevertheless it had something very modern about it: shiny metal seats for those waiting, such as could be found in Europe as well, the familiar signs for car leasing companies, an ATM, a souvenir shop, and even a café.
She looked around. They had told her that she would be met.
Close to the exit that she had just come through there were a number of people with signs bearing names. A few of the men holding up signs were calling out the names as well.
Suddenly Vanessa seemed to hear her own name. She tried to figure out who the speaker was, and approached him. “I am Vanessa Kluge.”
The man had dazzling white teeth in a shiny black face that seemed very friendly. “I am Johannes.”
He spoke in German, which made Vanessa do a double take.
“We have to wait for the others,” Johannes explained to her. “Two more.” He let his gaze travel to the exit again.
Vanessa nodded, still quite surprised. “You speak very good German.”
“The Baas is German,” replied Johannes, showing his white toothpaste smile. “And I was in Otjimbingwe as a child.”
Vanessa looked at him in confusion. “Otjim- . . .” She couldn’t pronounce the name. It sounded very foreign to her. “That doesn’t sound very German.”
“But the German missionaries were,” he grinned, pleased as punch. “I grew up on the missionary station.”
An older couple approached them. “Hello, Johannes. How nice to see you again.” The woman was positively beaming, while the man was clearly trying to contain his own emotions, and greeted Johannes with a very masculine handshake.
Johannes, however, was beaming for what it was worth all over his face. “Nice that you’re back again,” he replied.
Vanessa noticed that the couple used the familiar form of ‘you’ with Johannes, while he used the formal form. It gave her a strange feeling. She knew that apartheid had been over for a long time, but here, at this moment, it seemed to her as though there were still two classes of people in this country.
Together they went through the hall out to the large car park. Besides Johannes, other drivers had managed to collect their guests, and everywhere there were small groups making their way to various vehicles.
What these vehicles all had in common was their size. Sedans didn’t seem to be in use here. There were a number of minibuses, but most of the cars that stood in the car park were large all-wheel drives. And most looked to be astonishingly new.
Vanessa thought of images that she had seen in films or documentaries that took place in developing countries, of cars held together only by rust. Black drivers, whose clothes seemed to be made more out of holes than cloth, dirt, rubbish, chaos, loud honking, with loud, lively conversations or arguments.
There was nothing like that here. Everything was quiet, inconspicuous, clean and new.
Well, the material on the tarmac that she had walked on, on her way to the airport building, had not seemed particularly new. And the people who worked there didn’t seem to be rich. But they weren’t as poor as Vanessa had imagined it,
either.
She followed Johannes and the other two guests to the car. Here she finally saw something of what she had expected: the car was an old Jeep that looked pretty battered. And Johannes seemed to have driven through mud, at some point. Traces of it hung in the form of high splashes of mud on the car.
Maybe I really am in Africa, thought Vanessa with a smile, and got in the car.
When Vanessa awoke the next morning, she first had to figure out where on earth she was. The high beams over her head certainly didn’t belong in her bedroom, she figured out after a moment.
She turned her head and looked out. And this bright light didn’t make you think of November, although the month itself hadn’t changed, just the hemisphere where she was, and therefore the season.
She smiled. How easy it was to escape from winter into summer. Unbelievable.
She got up quickly and went out to the small wooden veranda that was attached to the hut. Looking out at the open view of the savannah she felt as though she were totally alone in the world. She raised her arms. The warm air was like a coat of pure silk that caressed her skin.
After a delighted sigh she took a deep breath. Could life really be this good?
At that moment her mobile phone went. At first she ignored it; she didn’t want to be bothered with it, in the midst of this morning mood, then it began to get on her nerves. She went in and answered it.
“Where are you anyway?” Steffen asked.
“Where do you think?” she answered sharply. “The last time you called me I was on my way to the airport.”
“So you really did fly?”
“That’s generally what you do, when you go to the airport,” Vanessa replied. “Unless you’re picking someone up.”
“So you really did go without me.” Steffen’s voice sounded as though he had a cold.
“Just a minute, please, Steffen . . .” Vanessa turned and went out to the veranda again, to look into the distance. “I invited you to come with me, but you didn’t want to.”
“That was just one of your crazy ideas,” he said. “How could I take it seriously? I thought you just wanted . . . well, what all women want.”
Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “What all women want? And would you explain to me what that is?”
“Marriage, children, and so on,” said Steffen. “And a vacation is the best way to start. A man can’t run away. Afterwards you would have probably dragged me to the Registry Office. Or would have fallen pregnant, to put pressure on me.”
Vanessa was speechless. They had never spoken of marriage or children. It was just too early for all that. Where did Steffen get such ideas? “Maybe you should have let me in a little on what you were thinking,” she said. “Then we might have discussed it. I didn’t have the faintest desire to come home pregnant from my holiday.”
“That’s what you say now,” he replied. “Because I’m not there.” There was a short silence on the line. “Who did you go with? Do I know him?”
That was starting again? “Why can I not have flown alone?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t have,” he claimed, in a deep voice. “What are you going to do by yourself on holiday?”
Get a break from everything, maybe? Vanessa thought. From you, for example? Steffen had never seemed this clingy, up to now. Up to now they had only had a relationship without commitments. Now he was behaving as though he had exclusive rights to her.
“Are you lying in bed with him now?” he continued, bitterly. “Can’t you talk?”
Vanessa began to boil, inside. “Yes, that’s it,” she said, holding the phone away from her and asking into the air: “It’s Steffen. Do you want to talk to him, darling?” She waited a second, then put the phone to her ear again. “He doesn’t want to talk to you. Satisfied?”
Steffen huffed and puffed a little. “See, I knew it. Very clever of you. You manipulated me, so that I didn’t go with you, so you could go with him.”
Manipulated? She had manipulated him? He had laughed at her! What kind of tricks had she used?
“You’re not really with it,” she said. “I’m not paying roaming charges for this kind of nonsense. Bye, Steffen.” She terminated the call.
At that moment, as she turned to go back into her room, she saw Kian’s blue eyes fixed on her. He was standing on the narrow path that led to her hut. She froze. Because she thought she was alone, she wore nothing but a t-shirt, a very short t-shirt. But even that seem to disappear under Kian’s gaze. She felt naked.
How silly. He had often seen her naked. It was nothing new for him. She cleared her throat. “Morning, Kian,” she greeted him casually, as though they had met during a Sunday stroll on the beach front.
His eyes were fixed. She didn’t move either. “I have to look at the water pump,” he said. “I’ll come again later when you’re having breakfast.”
“You can do it now . . .” Vanessa slipped halfway into her room, found her dressing gown and put it on. She tied the belt quickly. Now she felt better.
“It can wait. I’m sure you want to shower.”
To shower? Well, why, actually? Was that so necessary? Questions teemed in her head, as though Kian had brought it into wild disorder with his arrival. For a moment she couldn’t think straight and felt that something in his gaze held her fast. And then there was this fatal undertone which made his voice so soft and seductive. She just wanted to sink into it.
But she couldn’t. Kian was married, and to Isolde, of all people. They had children. “Before I leave, you mean?” she asked coolly.
He lifted an eyebrow. “If you leave with so little prior notice, we can’t give you your money back.”
“I thought you wanted me to go.” Vanessa tried the trick with the eyebrow, but couldn’t do it. She had to lift both of them.
“That’s your decision,” Kian said again, just as coolly as yesterday. “You’ve booked for fourteen days. You’re entitled to use the rondavel.” He turned and left with long strides.
For a few seconds Vanessa watched as his figure became smaller and smaller, as though she were glued to the spot, then she turned and went into the house.
Men. First Steffen, now Kian. Couldn’t they just leave her in peace?
She showered and got dressed. Then she went over to the restaurant. Yesterday at supper everyone had chatted about the game drive, reliving their experiences. The excellent South African wine had helped to loosen their tongues, and soon there was laughter to be heard that didn’t seem to fit in with the quiet, secluded surroundings.
Isolde had appeared and had sat down with the guests and answered their questions. She was a good hostess. One couldn’t tell if the questions bored her or not. In contrast to Kian, she didn’t behave rudely if people asked her the same question a hundred times.
Vanessa had sat and watched everything for a while. The guests were clearly all here in pairs, a few with their children. She was the only one on her own.
After a while she couldn’t bear Isolde’s attitude as woman of the house any more. Presumably she was only doing what everyone expected of her – as always – but it felt like a taunt to Vanessa. As though Isolde wanted to show her: all this is mine – including Kian.
To escape the sight of this, she had gone to bed early. In bed she had listened to sounds that were no longer drowned out by the laughter of good-humoured guests.
She lay there and listened with her eyes closed and had allowed herself to be lulled by the chirping of the African crickets. Whenever something to do with Africa was shown in a film, it was usually accompanied by this wall of sound. For this reason it didn’t sound strange. But this time she wasn’t lying on her couch in her living room, hearing the sounds come up and thinking: Aha, now there’s going to be something about Africa.
This time she was in Africa.
She reached the restaurant, which in contrast to last night was noticeably quiet at the long table. Many guests seemed already to have left, fairly early, to go to the next lodge or farm or camp site. ‘Lodge hopping’, one of the men had called it, everyday somewhere else. The mother at the airport in Frankfurt had described it in the same way.
Apparently there were quite a few people who travelled around Namibia this way, wanting to see as much of the country in as short a time as possible, which meant just sitting in the car for long stretches of hundreds of kilometres, on some days, considering the size of Namibia.
That wasn’t Vanessa’s idea of a holiday. A number of the guests had considered her to be a kind of exotic, wonderful creature when she said that she had booked her entire holiday here on this farm. They couldn’t believe that anyone would want to stay so long in one place, when there was so much to see elsewhere.
Vanessa took a deep breath and served herself from the food at the breakfast buffet that was set up in the shade. It was pleasant not to be deluged with questions for once today about why she was travelling on her own, as if that were something unusual. To be sure, she did have the feeling that here in Namibia she really was an exception. In Germany this had never happened to her.
“Well, how was your first night in Africa?” Isolde came towards her with a smile. “Did you sleep well?”
Vanessa forced herself to smile as well. How could Isolde look so fresh again, considering that she had surely sat for a good while together with the guests at the table yesterday evening? “Yes,” she answered. “Very well. It was so quiet.”
Isolde laughed. “Yes, that always drove me crazy in Germany. Noise everywhere, even at night, as though the city would never shut down. It’s so different here.”
Vanessa sat down at the table with her breakfast plate. “Although there was a tapping on the window,” she added with a slight frown, perplexed. “And yet there wasn’t any wind at all.”
“Baboons,” nodded Isolde. “They keep on trying, even though all the windows now have bars. If you don’t want to have a few things go missing suddenly, then you should always keep your windows shut, or at least if the windows are open make sure that nothing is lying close enough to the window that a clever monkey arm can get at it.”
Vanessa raised her eyebrows. “Is it that bad?”
“They’re sassy creatures,” Isolde confirmed. “And not harmless. They have teeth like lions – and know how to use them, too. So be careful. People confuse wild monkeys with the animals on television. But ours here aren’t harmless, like them. You’ll fare best, if you keep your distance from animals in the wild, unless you have a gun.”
“Do you have a gun?” Vanessa looked at Isolde in amazement.
“We all do,” said Isolde. “On the farm we learn to shoot before we can walk.” She laughed and waved goodbye to Vanessa. “Enjoy your breakfast. And let me know if you need anything.” With that, she left.
Vanessa remained seated, somewhat surprised. Isolde had never seemed to be a violent person, and judging by her views regarding what a woman should be like a gun was the last thing that Vanessa would have imagined her to have as an accessory.
To be sure, Isolde was quite different here in Namibia compared to how she had been in Germany, back then. It was clear that she knew what she was doing here and that she belonged here, just as Kian did.
Vanessa ate her muesli slowly. Surprisingly, they offered something like that here. She almost had to laugh. Muesli in Africa. She hadn’t expected it, but one had to take into account the tastes of the tourists here.
Kian had preferred a cooked breakfast in Germany: eggs, bacon and sausage. Vanessa had also seen that on the buffet. That’s what people usually ate in the morning in Namibia, he had told her, then. Her muesli had always made him grin in amusement.
She let her gaze wander, just looking into empty space and enjoying the warmth and the sun. Maybe later she would go to the pool for a while. It was so nice to have the time – no deadlines looming, no clients to get on her nerves, no ink jets that she had to run out for at the last minute. It was heavenly.
“Aren’t you leaving?” A child’s voice brought her out of her thoughts.
Vanessa looked in astonishment at a little girl who was standing on the other side of the table and watching her. The girl was dark brown, not as black as Johannes, for instance, and the child was speaking German.
Vanessa was irritated, for a moment. “No, I’m not leaving,” she answered. “I’m staying here.”
“For how long?” The dark eyes appraised her soberly.
“Two weeks,” said Vanessa. “That’s how long I’ve booked for.”
“How long is that?” asked the child.
“Fourteen days,” Vanessa explained. “Today, tomorrow, day after tomorrow . . .” She counted the days on her fingers. “Both hands,” she raised her hands, “and then four more fingers.” She raised one hand and folded the thumb down.
“That’s long,” the child nodded slowly.
“Well . . .” Vanessa laughed a little. “It depends on your point of view. For a holiday it’s probably a little short.”
“What’s a holiday?” The little girl came over to her side and stood very close to Vanessa.
“When you don’t have to go to work,” said Vanessa.
“Leave,” said the little girl.
“Yes.” Vanessa nodded. “You can call it that, too.” She looked at the child. “And while we’re at it, don’t you have to go to school?” She thought the child was perhaps six or seven.
The brown head shook. “The teacher is sick.”
“What’s your name?” Vanessa asked. “I’m Vanessa.” She gave the little girl her hand.
The child didn’t seem to know what to make of this gesture. She looked at it, but didn’t take it. “Tuhafeni,” she said.
Vanessa wasn’t sure if that was a name or a greeting. “That’s your name?” she asked, just to be sure. “Tuhafeni?”
The little girl nodded enthusiastically.
“Do you have German in school, Tuhafeni?” Vanessa asked.
“No.” The topic didn’t seem to interest Tuhafeni. She looked at the ring that Vanessa wore on her right hand.
“And how come you speak it so well?”
Tuhafeni didn’t answer. She ran a finger over the glittering surface of the ring. It seemed to fascinate her.
At that moment an older black woman came out of the house and spoke to Tuhafeni in a sharp tone.
Vanessa didn’t understand a word, but from the gestures she could see that the woman was sending Tuhafeni away.
Tuhafeni made a face. Apparently she didn’t want to go. The gestures and the tone of the woman became even more commanding.
“Let her stay here a while,” said Vanessa in English. “She’s not bothering me.”
“She has to go,” the woman answered. With a last, bad-tempered look she chased Tuhafeni away and the little girl scurried around the nearest corner of the house. The woman put a bowl of fruit that she had held in her hand on the table, in front of Vanessa, and then disappeared into the house again.
Vanessa shook her head. Even if she hadn’t understood what the woman had said it had still sounded very angry. Perhaps Tuhafeni hadn’t been telling the truth about the sick teacher. The older woman might have been sending her back to school.
She finished her breakfast and then went to her hut, to put on a bikini. In the meantime it had become so warm that she looked forward to cooling off in the pool.
On the way to the pool she came upon her old friend, the little dragon. Naturally she couldn’t tell if it was the same animal or not, but in any case it stopped, as though it was waiting for her, so it could say hello.
“That’s really nice of you,” said Vanessa with a smile. She stopped as well and looked at it. The colours were gorgeous. And how they glowed in the sun.
She looked up at the sky. It was still morning and already hot. Yesterday she had taken a siesta during the worst noon-day heat, and today she would see how things went if she didn’t take a nap.
She went on to the pool, put her towel on a lounger and sat down on it to put on sun screen. You really needed it here. Last night she had seen a lot of sunburnt skin on a number of guests. Above all the men had looked like lobsters, especially if they didn’t have much hair left on their heads, with bald, sunburnt heads and sunburnt necks. The women had sunburnt décolletés and upper arms.
Kian should actually have praised her, because she hadn’t done the same thing. Instead, he had criticised her.
Her jaws clenched. Why had she ever come here? It didn’t make any sense.
A breath of warm air caressed her skin. Her jaws relaxed. Maybe it would work out. It was November. She wasn’t sitting in her office. She wasn’t staring at the computer. She didn’t have to listen to the complaints of her clients or talk to the printer on the phone. It wasn’t wet and it wasn’t cold. The sun was pampering her, in the middle of winter.
All at once she smiled. She stood up, went to the pool and dived in. No sooner was she in the water than she screamed. The pool wasn’t heated. The cold temperature had given her a shock. Next time she had better test the water with a toe.
But it was too late for that. Later in the day the pool was probably warmed by the sun, but now, just after breakfast, the water had a temperature that was not very inviting.
But since she was already in there . . . She did a few laps. All at once she saw a shadow at the edge of the pool.
“Tuhafeni,” she smiled gently. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“The teacher is sick,” Tuhafeni repeated. She stared at Vanessa in the water.
Vanessa spread her arms out. “Don’t you want to come in?”
Tuhafeni shook her head vigorously. “Cold.”
Vanessa laughed. “You should have told me that before!” She swam to the edge and pushed herself out of the pool. She rubbed herself down quickly with a towel, but the cold of the water evaporated as soon as the sun touched her skin again. It had only been a short cool-down.
“So your teacher really is sick?” she asked Tuhafeni. “You weren’t just making it up?”
Apparently Tuhafeni hadn’t understood the question.
“That woman from before,” Vanessa tried to explain. “She didn’t send you back to school?”
“Maria can’t tell me what to do,” Tuhafeni explained. “She thinks I’m sick, too.”
Vanessa frowned. “Why ever for?”
“Because my mother was sick,” Tuhafeni said. “She thinks I’m sick, too.”
“But you look perfectly healthy,” Vanessa observed. “Do you feel unwell?”
Tuhafeni shook her head.
“Well then, it can’t be that bad.” Vanessa pushed the lounger further into the shade, took her book and stretched out. “I’m going to enjoy the sun for a little while. You can stay here, if you like.”
Tuhafeni smiled for the first time since Vanessa had seen her. “White people are crazy,” she said. “The sun is always there.”
“It’s easy for you to say. You don’t know German winters.” Vanessa laughed. “But of course you’re right. You always have sun. You probably don’t know it any other way.”
She smiled at Tuhafeni and opened her book. Tuhafeni hesitated a little, then came over to Vanessa and sat down next to her on the ground.
Vanessa didn’t have much experience with children. She didn’t know what to do with a child who just sat there. Was she supposed to play with her?
Tuhafeni didn’t look as though she needed that. She played, totally absorbed, with a little stick and some pebbles that had fallen out of the edging of the pool.
She didn’t seem to need anyone else.
Vanessa sighed in relief. Now she could spend time on her book.
She began to read, but after a while the words began to swim in front of her eyes, and she fell asleep.
The old jeep, with Vanessa and the other two passengers in it, was rumbling over a gravel road, leaving a cloud of dust behind them. Vanessa looked out of the window, fascinated.
Starting at the airport, they had ridden first on a tarred road, but even there only the bush had stretched out to the right and left of them. The road was like a black ribbon between hills that were covered with dried grass.
They had been underway for a while, when Johannes suddenly braked and pointed to the front. “Baboons.” He laughed.
Vanessa had already seen dark shadows from afar, on the edge of the road, but had thought they were bushes. Now she recognized that they were monkeys. Baboons. A large family with adults and many smaller little monkeys that either clung to their mothers or hopped along next to them, with mischief in their minds. Several of the older animals seemed to have found something to eat, squatting on their behinds, chewing leisurely and looking at the car. They didn’t seem to be afraid.
Suddenly the group decided to cross the road, and that happened in a very leisurely fashion, too. A large male went first, looked around, reached the other side and looked back. As though that had been a signal, the other monkeys in the pack set off.
Vanessa could hardly believe it. Baboons were sitting, just like that, at the edge of the road in the wild. They were clearly living in their natural habitat, and the road was only a part of their environment, one that didn’t have that much meaning for them.
Roswitha, one half of the married couple, who sat next to Vanessa, laughed. “The first time, it’s always such a surprise, isn’t it? I also sat there, like you. If you only know animals from the zoo . . .”
Vanessa shook her head. “That is . . . unbelievable. They don’t belong to anyone, and no one takes care of them?”
Johannes shrugged his shoulders. “No, why should they? There are enough baboons. No one has to take care of them.”
Vanessa turned around and watched the baboon family until they had disappeared into the hills next to the road.
It wasn’t long, however, before they had turned off from the tarred road onto a gravel road, and the signs of civilization disappeared completely. The grass was closer to the car, and the road was full of holes that were partially filled with sand, through which the car slid as though on ice.
Vanessa clutched the seat in front of her, as there was no other way to hold on. The suspension of the rustic vehicle was also not up to present-day standards. This was no place for people with bad backs. And seat belts – there weren’t any of those, either. If one thought about it, this car seemed to be from a different era, when people didn’t worry about safety features.
However – or maybe, just because everything was so primitive – she began to feel that exhilaration that she had felt after landing. Along the edge of the road, that actually wasn’t one, people were walking – to be sure, not as Vanessa remembered it from the pictures she had seen. They wore totally normal clothing, t-shirts and trousers, or a kind of bright blue overall. Some women with children had covered their fairly round curves with dresses that looked more African.
Johannes waved to them, stopped the car from time to time and exchanged a few words with them; they all seemed to know each other somehow. Their black faces laughed, and they were obviously making comments about Johannes’s passengers, which they couldn’t understand. The language didn’t sound like anything that Vanessa had heard before. It was made up not only of words but also of clicking and snapping sounds, and Vanessa had to ask herself how they produced them. It seemed that the people could speak and click or snap at the same time.
“I didn’t know that the guest farm was so far from Windhoek.” Vanessa looked at her fellow passengers. “In the description it sounded as if it was quite close.”
Siggi, Roswitha’s husband, laughed. “It is, by Namibian standards. A drive like this isn’t considered long, if you consider that a farm has a few thousand hectares.” He smiled encouragingly at Vanessa. “But we’re nearly there, a half hour at the most.”
Vanessa looked out of the window, as if in a dream. “It’s not that I want to get there any faster. It’s so marvellous here.”
“Yes, it is. That’s why we keep coming back here.” Roswitha was beginning to get the same dreamy expression. “We’ve been coming to Namibia for twenty years. There’s nothing better.”
Vanessa could only share their sentiment. This feeling of being ‘at home’ that had come over her without warning at the airport, became stronger and stronger. As though she had come home, but not to a home she had grown up in. It was more like a memory from a past life.
But Vanessa didn’t believe in things like that. Nevertheless, this feeling bothered her, pleasant as it was. She felt like a stranger here and yet, at the same time, it was all so familiar, in a way she had never experienced before.
They drove on and Vanessa saw that the bush at the edge of the road was becoming thicker and thicker, almost impenetrable. Suddenly, a gigantic machine, which appeared to be parked on the gravel road, came into view. It looked like a combination of bulldozer and combine harvester, but colossal, at that.
Without slowing down at all, Johannes drove past the machine. They almost landed in the bush, and for a moment Vanessa had the feeling that they would turn over, the jeep was leaning so far to one side.
She held on tight and when they were back on the gravel track she asked: “What was that?”
Instead of Johannes, whom Vanessa had asked, Siggi answered her. “That’s how they keep the roads smooth. And deal with the holes. These machines practically shave the top layer off. Then the pad is smooth again for a while, but it doesn’t take long before the holes are there again, especially when it rains.”
Vanessa looked back, to where the machine was getting smaller and smaller. It was strange to be here in the bush and to see such a machine as that. A contrast that couldn’t have been greater. That was definitely not something she had expected.