A Matter of Time Read online

  A matter of time : a novel

  A matter of time : a novel

  of Time

  ISI

  Bitter Honey

  The Kaiser's Birthday

  An African Hangover

  The Long-Awaited Telegram

  Wendt’s Beer Garden

  The Epicentre of Human Civilization

  Giraffes' Necks and Telegraph Poles

  When the Lime Trees Lose Their Leaves in Autumn

  Stoking till Judgement Day

  Cutlasses Will Be Worn

  Oh, Rudi...

  Black Spiders on His Face

  Multicoloured Nigger Socks

  For God and the King

  Mushy Sweet Potatoes

  Parades in the Savannah

  Seven Hundred Seasick Soldiers

  A Decent Harbour

  Humble Victor and Loud-Mouthed Loser

  What a Delightful Part of the World!

  Spicer-Simson Takes a Bath

  Not Long to Go

  Waiting in the Mist

  How Peace Descended on the Lake

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  A matter of time : a novel

  Capus, Alex, author

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  ‘...a wonderful fictionalised account’

  GILES FODEN

  mmm

  11/2015

  STWWBfWtt

  of Time

  A Matter of Time

  A Matter of Time

  A NOVEL

  by

  Alex Capus

  translated by John Brownjohn

  ISI

  First published in German by Knaus as Eine Frage der Zeit Copyright © 2007 by Albrecht Knaus Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House, Miinchen, Germany

  This new paperback edition published in 2011

  Copyright © 2009 Alex Capus

/>   Translation copyright © 2009 John Brownjohn

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Haus Publishing Ltd,

  70 Cadogan Place, London swix 9AH www. hauspublishing. com

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-907822-03-2

  Typeset in Minion by MacGuru Ltd Printed by CPI

  Jacket illustration courtesy of akg-images.

  CONDITIONS OF SALE

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This edition has been translated with the financial assistance of Pro Helvetia, the Arts Council of Switzerland

  prshetvetia

  For Louis

  Contents

  Table captionEpilogue i

  1. The Hippos Came at Night

  3

  2. Bitter Honey

  17

  3. The Kaisers Birthday

  27

  4. An African Hangover

  36

  5. The Long-Awaited Telegram

  43

  6. Wendts Beer Garden

  48

  7. The Epicentre of Human Civilization

  61

  8. Giraffes’ Necks and Telegraph Poles

  68

  9. When the Lime Trees Lose Their Leaves in

  the Autumn

  77

  10. Stoking Till Judgement Day

  92

  11. Cutlasses Will Be Worn

  100

  12. Oh, Rudi...

  109

  13. Black Spiders on His Face

  116

  14. Multicoloured Nigger Socks

  126

  15. For God and the King

  136

  16. Mushy Sweet Potatoes

  143

  17. Parades in the Savannah

  148

  18. Seven Hundred Seasick Soldiers

  158

  19. A Decent Harbour

  162

  20. Humble Victor and Loud-Mouthed Loser

  172

  21. What a Delightful Part of the World!

  180

  22. Spicer-Simson Takes a Bath

  186

  23. Not Long to Go

  191

  24. Waiting in the Mist

  25. How Peace Descended on the Lake

  195

  199

  Original sketch by S. Dequanter (p. 161) reproduced by kind permission of the Musee de l’Armee et d’Histoire Militaire, Brussels.

  Epilogue

  half blind and bemused with exhaustion, Anton Riiter scrambled up the railway embankment he had been making for since dawn. Snakes and lizards rustled among the clumps of coarse elephant grass, the sun was blazing high overhead, and behind him lay the East African highland plateau, which was now, at the start of the rainy season, flooded for hundreds of kilometres. For ten long days he had roamed across the flooded plain. At night he had snatched an hour or twos sleep standing up with his back propped against a tree, knee-deep in water. Sometimes, enveloped in clouds of whining mosquitoes, he had climbed to the top of a termite hill and curled up like a dog. He had eaten the raw cadavers of drowned animals lodged in the branches of uprooted trees and drunk the brackish water through which he waded. His hair was matted, his beard long, and his bare legs were covered with jungle sores. His uniform, which hung down him in tatters, was a grotesque hotchpotch acquired from the battlefields he had traversed during his escape. The tunic he had taken from a dead Belgian askari, the khaki shorts from a Rhodesian sergeant, the sun helmet from a South African officer. The sandals he had fashioned out of the remains of his own boots.

  Now he was lying prone between the rails with his face pressed against the rust-red ballast, listening to the cicadas’ deafening song without daring to peer over the embankment. He had no idea what to expect or hope for. If the flooded savannah extended all the way to the horizon, as he feared, he would die of hunger and exhaustion. If there was a native village, its inhabitants would kill him like vermin. And if he encountered some enemy soldiers, he would be shot, strung up, or at best clapped in irons.

  All at once a smell assailed his nostrils: the scent of hot oatmeal porridge. He sniffed, incredulously at first, then consumed with greed. There was no doubt about it, his hunger-whetted senses had not deceived him. It was oatmeal porridge, presumably without sugar or salt, the way the British liked it, and very probably made with water instead of milk. But porridge it undoubtedly was. Anton Riiter raised his head, gripped the scorching hot rail with both hands and hauled himself to the edge of the embankment. Once there, he had no eyes for the King’s African Rifles platoon encamped on the edge of a copse a mere stone’s-throw away. He took no notice of the five armoured cars, the mortars, machine guns and stacks of ammunition boxes, he ignored the thirty soldiers in immaculate uniforms who were pitching their tents, unloading supplies or relaxing in the shade of the trees. He had eyes for one thing alone: the unguarded copper cooking pot fragrantly steaming over a fire on the edge of the copse some distance from the tents. Scrambling to his feet, he dashed down the embankment, seized the cooking pot, and staggered off into the trees. Deaf to the British soldiers’ startled yells, the barking of dogs and the whistle of bullets, he disappeared into the sheltering gloom among the trees. After only a few steps he fell, complete with cooking pot and porridge, into a sunken stream bed he had failed to see through the dense undergrowth. When he recovered his senses, grazed, bruised and scalded by hot porridge, he crawled beneath the roots of a fallen tree and strained his ears. The shouts and barking did not seem to be coming any nearer, so he licked the porridge off himself, knowing that he would be found sooner or later. Then he fell asleep, oblivious of the porridge, the gunfire, the dogs, the railway embankment, the interminable, waterlogged savannah, and all that he had done, endured and undergone in the last four years.

  1

  The Hippos Came at Night

  human beings do not spend every moment of their lives weighing up the importance or unimportance of the things they do as time goes by. They knead their dough, tote their stones or curry-comb their horses. They have toothache and make plans, drink soup and go for a walk, and before they know it a city of millions has been supplied with bread, a pyramid built or an empire toppled. Great and imperishable deeds are not performed in full awareness of their significance. People dislike questioning themselves all the time. On Sundays or New Years Eve, perhaps, but not while at work.

  Master shipwright Anton Riiter certainly didn’t cudgel his brains about the historical importance of the moment when, shortly after half past ten on the morning of 20 November 1913, the siren of the Meyer Werft shipyard at Papenburg summoned him to attend the naming ceremony. A break was a break, after all. There would be speeches and schnapps for all, plus tobacco in those long Dutch clay pipes of which the shipyard kept boxes in stock for such occasions. Riiter paced the engine room of the brand-new vessel with economical steps. He carefully adjusted the steam regulator, listening to the rhythm of the pistons, the hum of the wheels and the hiss of the valves. While the brass band of the Papenburg Gymnastics Club was playing Hail to Thee in Victor’s Crown outside, he checked the generator s voltage, glanced into the furnaces and made sure the freshwater cock was open. He was proud of the Gotzen. She was his ship - the largest and finest vessel ever built at Papenburg, and Riiter had designed her. He had drawn the original plans and supervised her c
onstruction for ten long months, performing the trickiest and

  most important operations with his own hands. Ever since the keel was laid he had spent his days - and often his nights - inside the framework of the hull. His thoughts had revolved around the ship when he was awake, just as he had dreamed of her when asleep. And now she was finished. The engines were turning over smoothly, the steam pressure was steady. Riiter gave no thought to the fact that he was going to dismantle his handiwork immediately after the naming ceremony, breaking it down into its smallest components. That was his job, after all, and it would present no technical problems. He wiped his hands on a rag and made his way up to the main deck.

  The Gotzen, dressed overall in the black-white-and-red of imperial Germany, reposed on the stocks with her steam engines hissing, her funnel smoking, and her screws turning in mid air. She looked all set for launching. Had the retaining ropes been severed, she would have slid sideways off the blocks and down the oil-sodden timbers of the slipway into the Turmkanal. As usually happens when a vessel is launched sideways-on, a tidal wave running the full length of the hull would have washed over the field on the opposite bank, complete with its contents - which was why the children of the town would have been standing there with big wicker baskets, ready to gather up the wriggling fish left stranded on the grass. The ship would then have glided along the Sielkanal and into the northwards-flowing Ems, across the Dollart, past the East Frisian Islands, and out into the North Sea, there to fulfil her destiny.

  But this time there were no children standing in the field because theyd known for months that the Gotzen would not be launched. The whole town was aware that the Colonial Office had ordered a ship capable of being dismantled and reassembled elsewhere - like a construction set, so to speak. Everyone also knew that Anton Riiter was going to pack up the Gotzen in five thousand wooden crates and rebuild her deep in the African interior to the south of Kilimanjaro, near the sources of the Nile in the legendary Mountains of the Moon. The shipyard workers had realized, all the time they were building the ship, that they would set about her like termites immediately after her christening - that they would soon be undoing every screw they tightened and removing every plank

  they laid. Despite this, Ruter had been obliged to intervene on countless occasions because one of them was caulking seams or riveting plates together permanently instead of temporarily securing them with bolts, either out of a craftsmanlike sense of duty or from sheer force of habit.