V.

"Good evening, poor Kurt." She rode the Bondel as far as the bed and dismounted. "You may go, Firelily. I call it Firelily," she smiled at Mondaugen, "because of its sorrel skin."

Mondaugen attempted a greeting, found himself too weak to talk. Hedwig was slithering out of the tights. "I made up only my eyes," she told him in a decadent whisper: "my lips can redden with your blood as we kiss." She began making love to him. He tried to respond but the scurvy had weakened him. How long it went on he didn't know. It seemed to go on for days. The light in the room kept changing, Hedwig seemed to be everywhere at once in this black satin circle the world had shrunk to: either she was inexhaustible, or Mondaugen had lost all sense of duration. They seemed wound into a cocoon of blond hair and ubiquitous, dry kisses: once or twice she may have brought in a Bondel girl to assist.

"Where is Godolphin," he cried.

"She has him."

"O God . . ."

Sometimes impotent, sometimes aroused despite his lassitude, Mondaugen stayed neutral, neither enjoying her attentions nor worrying about her opinion of his virility. At length she grew frustrated. He knew what she was looking for.

"You hate me," her lip quivering unnaturally as a forced vibrato.

"But I have to recuperate."

In through the window came Weissmann with his hair combed in bangs, wearing white silk lounging pajamas, rhinestone pumps, and black eyeholes and lips, to steal another oscillograph roll. The loudspeaker blithered at him as if it were angry.

Later Foppl appeared in the door with Vera Meroving, held her hand, and sang to a sprightly waltz melody:

“I know what you want,

Princess of coquettes:

Deviations, fantasies and secret amulets.

Only try to go

Further than you've gone

If you never want to live to see another dawn.

Seventeen is cruel,

Yet at forty-two,

Purgatory fires burn no livelier than you.

So, come away from him,

Take my hand instead,

Let the dead get to the task of burying their dead;

Through that hidden door again,

Bravo for '04 again; I'm a

Deutschesudwestafrikaner in love . . .”

Once mustered out, those who stayed either drifted west to work at mines like the Khan, or homesteaded their own land where the farming was good. He was restless. After doing what he'd been doing for three years, a man doesn't settle down, at least not too quickly. So he went to the coast.

Just as its own loose sand was licked away by the cold tongue of a current from the Antarctic south, that coast began to devour time the moment you arrived. It offered life nothing: its soil was arid; salt-bearing winds, chilled by the great Benguela, swept in off the sea to blight anything that tried to grow. There was constant battle between the fog, which wanted to freeze your marrow, and the sun: which, once having burned off the fog, sought you. Over Swakopmund the sun often seemed to fill the entire sky, so diffracted was it by the sea fog. A luminous gray tending to yellow, that hurt the eyes. You learned soon enough to wear tinted glasses for the sky: If you stayed long enough, you came to feel it was almost an affront for humans to be living there at all. The sky was too large, the coastal settlements under it too mean. The harbor at Swakopmund was slowly, continuously filling with sand, men were felled mysteriously by the afternoon's sun, horses went mad and were lost in the tenacious ooze down along the beaches. It was a brute coast, and survival for white and black less a matter of choice than anywhere else in the Territory.

He'd been deceived, that was his first thought: it wasn't to be like the army. Something had changed. The blacks mattered even less. You didn't recognize their being there in the same way you once had. Objectives were different, that may simply have been all. The harbor needed dredging; railroads had to be built inland from the seaports, which couldn't thrive by themselves any more than the interior could survive without them. Having legitimized their presence in the Territory, the colonists were now obliged to improve what they had taken.

There were compensations, but they were not the luxuries army life had offered. As Schachtmeister, you got a house to yourself and first look at girls who came in from the bush to surrender. Lindequist, who'd succeeded von Trotha, had canceled the extermination order, asking all the natives who'd fled to return, promising that no one would be hurt. It was cheaper than sending out search expeditions and rounding them up. Because they were starving out in the bush, promises of mercy included promises of food. After being fed they were taken into custody and sent out to the mines, or the coast, or the Cameroons. Their laagers, under military escort, arrived from the interior almost daily. Mornings, he'd go down to the staging area and assist in the sorting-out. The Hottentots were mostly women. Among the few Hereros they got, the proportion was of course more nearly equal.