V.

Having found the sad imitation of a strayed son, Godolphin wouldn't think of returning to his own room. One of them had taken the other in. The old officer slept, drowsed, talked. Because he'd "found" Mondaugen only after she'd well begun some program of indoctrination on him that Mondaugen would rather not guess at, there was no way to say for certain, later, whether Foppl himself might not have come in to tell tales of when he'd been a trooper, eighteen years ago.

Eighteen years ago everyone was in better condition. You were shown how his upper arms and thighs had become flabby; and the roll of fat around his middle. His hair was beginning to fall out. He was developing breasts; even they reminded him of when he first arrived in Africa. They'd all had their inoculations on route: for bubonic plague the ship's medic jabbed you with a tremendous needle in the muscle by the left breast, and for a week or so it puffed up. In the way troops have when there's not much else to do, they amused themselves by unbuttoning the tops of their shirts and coyly exposing these new female acquisitions.

Later, when it had got into deep winter, the sun bleached their hair white and browned their skins. The standing joke was "Don't walk up on me unless you're in uniform, I might mistake you for a nigger." The "mistake" was made more than once. Around Waterberg especially, he remembered, when they were chasing Hereros into the bush and the desert, there were a few unpopular soldiers - reluctant? humanitarian. Their bitching got so bad you found yourself hoping . . . How much of a "mistake" it was was open to question, that's all he meant. By him, bleeding hearts like that weren't much better than the natives.

Most of the time, thank God, you were with your own kind: comrades who all felt the same way, who weren't going to give you any nonsense no matter what you did. When a man wants to appear politically moral, he speaks of human brotherhood. In the field you actually found it. You weren't ashamed. For the first time in twenty years of continuous education-to-guilt, a guilt that had never really had meaning, that the Church and the secular entrenched had made out of whole cloth; after twenty years, simply not to he ashamed. Before you disemboweled or whatever you did with her, to be able to take a Herero girl before the eyes of your superior officer, and stay potent. And talk with them before you killed them without the sheep's eye, the shuffling, the prickly-heat of embarrassment . . .

His efforts at the code, such as they were, didn't succeed in keeping back the nightfall of ambiguity that filled his room progressively, as time - such as it was - went by. When Weissmann came in and asked if he could help, Mondaugen turned surly. "Out," he snarled.

"But we were to collaborate."

"I know what your interest is," Mondaugen said mysteriously. "I know what 'code' you're after."

"It's part of my job." Putting on his sincere farm-lad face, removing the eyeglasses and cleaning them mock-distracted on his necktie.

"Tell her it won't, it didn't work," Mondaugen said.

The lieutenant ground his teeth solicitously. "I can't indulge your whims much longer," he tried to explain; "Berlin is impatient, I'm not going to make excuses forever."

"I am working for you?" Mondaugen screamed. "Scheisse." But this woke up Godolphin, who began to sing splinters of sentimental ballads and to call for his Evan. Weissmann regarded the old man with wide eyes and only his two front teeth showing.

"My God," he said finally, tonelessly; about-faced and left.

But when Mondaugen found the first oscillograph roll missing he was charitable enough to ask, "Lost or taken?" out loud to his inert equipment and a faraway old skipper, before putting the blame on Weissmann.

"He must have come in when I was asleep." Not even Mondaugen knew when that was. And was the roll all he'd taken? Shaking Godolphin: "Do you know who I am, where we are," and other elementary questions that we shouldn't ask, that only prove how afraid we are to a hypothetical anybody.

Afraid he was and, as it turned out, with good reason. For, half an hour later, the old man still sat on the edge of the bed, making friends with Mondaugen, whom he was seeing for the first time. With the Weimar Republic's bitter breed of humor (but none of his own) Mondaugen stood at his stained-glass window and asked that evening's veld: was I being that successful a voyeur? As his days at the siege party became less current and more numbered (though not by him) he was to wonder with exponential frequency who in fact had seen him. Anyone at all? Being cowardly and thus a gourmet of fear, Mondaugen prepared himself for an unprecedented, exquisite treat. This unglimpsed item on his menu of anxieties took the form of a very German question: if no one has seen me, then am I really here at all; and as a sort of savory, if I am not here, then where are all these dreams coming from, if dreams is what they are.