V.

It was problematical who among the females had the better time of it in the way of creature comfort; the courtesans who lived inside the barbed wire or the workers who were housed in a great thorn enclosure nearer the beach. They had to rely on primarily female labor, there simply being, for obvious reasons, a severe shortage of males. They found the distaff side useful for a number of functions. Women could be inspanned to the heavy-duty carts to pull loads of silt dredged from the floor of the harbor; or to carry the rails for the road of iron being driven across the Namib toward Keetmanshoop. That destination naturally enough reminded him of the old days when he'd helped march blacks there. Often, under the hazed-out sun, he'd daydream; remembering water holes filled to the brim with black corpses, their ears, nostrils and mouths bejeweled green, white, black, iridescent with flies and their offspring; human pyres whose flames seemed to leap high as the Southern Cross; the frangibility of bone, the splitting-open of body sacs, the sudden heaviness of even a frail child. But here there could be none of that: they were organized, made to perform en masse - you'd have to supervise not a chained trek but a long double line of women, carrying rails with iron ties attached; if one woman fell it meant only a fractional increase in the force required per carrier, not the confusion and paralysis resulting from a single failure in one of the old treks. Only once could he remember anything like that happening, and it may have been because the fog and cold the previous week had been worse than usual, so that their sockets and joints may have become inflamed - that day his own neck ached and he had trouble turning it to see what had happened - but a sudden wail went up and he saw that one of the women had stumbled and fallen and brought the whole line down. His heart rose, the wind off the ocean turned balmy; here was a fragment of the old past, revealed as if by a parting in the fog. He went back to her, ascertained that the falling rail had broken her leg; dragged her out from under it without bothering to lift it, rolled her down the embankment and left her to die. It did him good, he thought; it took him temporarily away from nostalgia, which on that coast was a kind of despondency.

But if physical labor exhausted those who lived inside thorns, sexual labor could as easily fatigue those who lived inside steel. Some of the military had brought with them curious ideas. One sergeant, too far down the chain of command to rate a young boy (young boys being rare), did the best he could with pre-adolescent, breastless girls whose heads he shaved and whom he kept naked except for shrunken army leggings. Another made his partners be still, like corpses; any sexual responses, sudden breaths or involuntary jerks were reprimanded with an elegant jeweled sjambok he'd had designed for him in Berlin. So, if the women thought about any of this at all, there couldn't have been much to choose between thorns and steel.

Himself, he could have been happy in that new corporative life; could have made a career out of construction work, except for one of his concubines, a Herero child named Sarah. She brought his discontent to a focus; perhaps even became one reason finally why he quit it all and headed inland to try to regain a little of the luxury and abundance that had vanished (he feared) with von Trotha.

He found her first a mile out in the Atlantic, on a breakwater they were building of sleek dark rocks that the women carried out by hand, deep-sixed and slowly, painfully stacked into a tentacle crawling along the sea. That day gray sheets were tacked to the sky, and a black cloud remained all day at the western horizon. It was her eyes he saw first, whites reflecting something of the sea's slow turbulence; then her back, beaded with old sjambok scars. He supposed it was simple lust that made him go over and motion to her to put down the rock she'd begun to lift: scribble and give her a note for her compound supervisor. "Give it to him," he warned her, "or - " and he made the sjambok whistle in the salt wind. In earlier days you hadn't had to warn them: somehow, because of that "operational sympathy," they always delivered notes, even when they knew the note might well be a death warrant.

She looked at the chit, then at him. Clouds moved across those eyes; whether reflected or transmitted, he'd never know. Brine slapped at their feet, carrion birds wheeled in the sky. The breakwater stretched behind them, back to land and safety; but it could take only a word; any, the most inconsequential, to implant in each of them the perverse notion that their own path lay the other way, on the invisible mole not yet built; as if the sea were pavement for them, as for our Redeemer.