Ghosts of the Past

CHAPTER 8

66 CHAPTER 8

Munich, Germany, the present dayThe page of the scanned letter Anja was reading was a fragment, its edges burned, and the damage showed as black on her photocopy.

I was not sure how much Captain Walters knew of my mission or my meeting with Kommandant Belvedere, but the raid on the trading post had been deliberately planned to capture the American and, presumably, myself. This meant there was most likely a traitor within the ranks of the Boers. The captain had only spent a short amount of time with Kommandant Belvedere, yet I can only assume Belvedere held his tongue. This, I knew, meant that the captain would be seeking an opportunity to question me about the mission at his earliest convenience.

Anja smiled at the formal turn of phrase. Claire, clearly a formidable woman, was expressing fear. This Captain Walters had proved himself to be completely ruthless, assuming it was he and not the Australian sergeant who had executed the American colonel in cold blood.

67Anja set the paper down and wondered what bearing this information might have on her own studies. Here was a man whose name she had heard before, Sergeant Cyril Blake, entering Claire Martin’s life in 1902 and reappearing four years later at the height of the Nama rebellion as a horse trader and rebel sympathiser.

Anja had heard of Blake from a South African journalist, Susan Vidler, who had contacted her after she had found, courtesy of Google, an article on Anja’s research in Namibia’s New Era newspaper. A young Namibian woman had struck up a conversation with Anja on a previous trip to Namibia while they had both been viewing the desert horses from a hide overlooking the waterhole at Garub near Aus in the country’s south. Anja had not realised the woman was a journalist and had been surprised to read a week later about her thesis concerning the origins of the horses. She had learned, since then, to keep her work largely to herself.

Vidler was running to an agenda, to make a name for herself writing a feature that would put pressure on the German government at a time when the Nama and the Herero were renewing their campaign for the Germans to pay reparations for the harm inflicted on their people during and after the colonial uprisings. A class action had even been lodged in the courts in the United States against the German government by expatriate Hereros living in America. The woman had discovered that Edward Prestwich, an Australian mentioned in a couple of history books as having fought on the side of the Nama people, was an alias. The man’s real name, Susan Vidler had disclosed, was Cyril Blake and she wanted to know if he had come up in Anja’s research. At that time, he hadn’t.

In any case, Anja was not interested in politics, nor in sharing her research or findings just yet with another journalist. Her thesis would eventually be in the public domain for anyone to see, but for now she wanted to take her time preparing it and not be led about by a pushy reporter.

Anja heard footsteps coming down the stairs and the door to her father’s underground study creaked open.

68‘Supper will be ready in ten minutes,’ her mother said.

‘Coming, Mama.’

Anja closed her folder of papers and went upstairs to supper, where her mother served up the plain meal of chicken and potatoes, just the way she liked it.

‘I don’t know why you need to keep going back over there,’ her mother said as they sat down to eat. Anja had wondered how long it would take for her mother to object to her impending trip back to Namibia. ‘You should find a nice man here, in Germany, and settle down. Do you know Mrs Mueller’s son, Hans, got divorced? He’s a catch, no kids, and he works in a bank. You could give up your part-time tutoring job.’

Anja groaned inwardly. She liked her job and her father had left money specifically in his will to allow her to continue her studies for as long as she wished. Neither she nor her mother wanted for much.

‘Anja?’

‘Yes, Mama?’

Her mother looked down at her food, and then minutely adjusted the cutlery around the plate. She seemed reluctant to meet Anja’s gaze. ‘You do like men, don’t you?’

Anja rolled her eyes and that was enough to settle her mother. They were similar people, both quick to anger. ‘I know, you are worried that I am going to stay at university all my life. As I have told you, I do not plan on doing so.’

‘Then what will you do? Get a job here? Or are you going to leave me for good and stay in Namibia forever?’

‘You know I’m only going for a month, Mama, to do some of my own research and help out with the wild horses monitoring project. As I told you, the horses are at risk of dying out; the spotted hyenas have been taking their foals before they can reach maturity. It’s important work and –’

Her mother banged the table in an uncharacteristic show of active aggression. ‘No! Your father did not work his whole life to pay for your schooling and your years of university so that you 69can spend your time sitting alone in the desert without a man or a proper job, counting horses.’

Anja clenched her fists.

‘It’s time for you to come home, for good,’ her mother said.

‘I have a home,’ Anja said quietly, but forcefully. ‘It is Namibia. I have citizenship there because that is where you gave birth to me, whether you like it or not, and that is where I want to live.’

Her mother’s body heaved, as though she was sobbing, even though Anja detected no tears. ‘It is true, my worst fear. You would abandon me?’

Anja sighed. ‘I don’t want to leave you, Mama, but I have a right to decide my own future, what I do with my life, and where I want to live. I’m a grown woman, not a child any more.’

‘But don’t you see,’ her mother reached across the table, ‘you are my child and I just want you close as I get older and as my time …’

Anja felt trapped, as she always did when her mother went down this path. She knew how much her mother missed her father and she was such a prickly old woman that she had few friends. There was that word again, she thought, ‘prickly’. A psychotherapist friend had told her that what people disliked in others was sometimes a reflection of their own issues. She felt like a prisoner. She wanted to scream.

‘You like those horses more than you like human beings,’ her mother said. ‘You’d be more at home with them than you would be with a man or your own mother.’

On that, Anja reflected she and her mother had finally reached a point of consensus.