by Bernhard Jaumann

Bernhard Jaumann taught college preparatory school for several years before leaving to travel widely. He has received several prizes for his fiction, including the Friedrich Glauser Prize of 2003 for best noveland the German Crime Fiction Prizeof 2009. The following story won the Glauser short crime fiction prize of 2008. The author makes his home in Windhoek, Namibia.

Translated from the German by Mary Tannert

“The investigation has not been concluded yet.” Sweat pearled on the chocolate brow of the Swakopmund police officer. The fan overhead churned slowly through the sticky air. Any minute now, it would grind to a complete stop. A loud, excited voice was audible next-door, barely muffled by the shabby wall of the office. It spoke in an unintelligible language. Hohner couldn’t help but think of an interrogation, although he wasn’t able to say whether the voice belonged to a suspect volubly insisting on his innocence or to an investigator shouting out one accusation after another.

“I came all the way from Germany,” said Hohner. “Ten hours in a plane and another four in the car from Windhoek to Swakopmund. Don’t you think I...?”

“We cannot exclude murder.”

“You said that already. I’d like to know exactly what happened.”

The police officer stared at his flickering computer screen. It wasn’t the latest model, but Hohner had expected at most a couple of old manual typewriters in a Namibian police station. He cleared his throat.

The policeman’s gaze met Hohner’s again. “Did your brother-in-law have any psychological problems?”

“What? Why do you ask?”

The officer tapped the side of his head with his index finger as if he wasn’t sure Hohner had really understood him.

“No,” said Hohner. “Never. At least, not as long as he was in Germany.”

“But he had been living in Namibia for two years,” said the police officer.

“What happened?” asked Hohner, leaning back and crossing his arms. He wasn’t going to be put off until tomorrow or packed off to some other office that was allegedly more responsible than this one.

The policeman looked back at him, his expression blank. Then he stood and left the room. The unintelligible voice next-door continued its loud lament. Geometrical figures crawled in a ceaseless honeycomb across the computer’s screen. Flies buzzed around Hohner. He swatted at the one that kept trying to crawl into his eyes. The policeman came back with a black notebook in his hand and laid it on the desk in front of Hohner.

“Your brother-in-law kept a journal. But I must ask you to read it here; it is evidence in the investigation.”

Hohner reached for the notebook.

“By the way,” said the policeman. “Namibia may be a backward African country, but even so there are a few people here who do not believe in spirits and telepathy. Myself, for example.”

Hohner opened the little black book.

* * * *

December 23, 3:00 p.m.

The air is so hot it burns. You don’t need to look up to know the sun has inflamed the whole sky. I’ve gotten out of the car, I’m sitting under the camelthorn tree. The springboks had been standing in its jagged shadows until the noise of the motor scared them off. I watched them as they leapt away, soaring high and wide with each jump. As if they were trying to avoid contact with the fiercely hot sand, touch it as little as possible. Now they’re standing still, two or three hundred meters away, as if their feet were rooted in the dried-out soil, their heads all turned in my direction.

Further away, the air is shimmering in a watery blue above the desert floor. You’d swear there’s a lake there; you’d be sure you can see the vegetation on the shore and make out the boats sailing across the surface. It’s an optical illusion, of course. There’s no water for a hundred kilometers in any direction, not even a puddle, just sand, rock, withered lichen, and some saltbush. That the few camelthorn trees survive in the dry riverbed is a miracle. I doubt a drop of rain ever falls here, but during a good rainy season the rivier, as Namibians call it, probably brings water from the mountains.

I drink some water. It’s lukewarm in the plastic bottle. If I had stayed in Swakopmund, I’d probably be tossing back the first few beers by now, in sheer despair over the regulars at the Tiger Reef Bar who spend their days blasting their brains out with thirty-year-old rock music, always ahead of me by at least a couple of Windhoek Lagers. And I’d be shaking my head at the rest of Namibia’s affluent white population spending their Christmas holidays racing up and down the dunes on quad bikes or sitting in cafes waiting for the idiotic Christmas lighting to be turned on. I hate strings of Christmas lights in the middle of an African summer. I never want to see another Namibian supermarket cashier sweating under a Santa hat. As far as I’m concerned, you could just cancel Christmas here. That’d be fine with me.

I take another swallow of water. The springboks haven’t moved an inch. I can already see the Bloedkoppie, as they call it here, on the horizon. One more hour of driving down a bad gravel road, and I’ll be there.

* * * *

December 23, 9:00 p.m.

I’ve put up the tent close to the wall of the cliff so I’ve got at least a couple of hours of shade in the morning. Bushes are growing through the cracks in the rock around my campsite, and a little farther back in the valley I can even see a couple of stunted trees. The Bloedkoppie is right across from me. It’s a mighty block of raw stone that really lived up to its name—the blood hill—earlier this evening when the sun went down. I sat there and stared, just couldn’t take my eyes off the sight, and asked myself whether the unfolding spectacle had more to do with a greedy hunger for life or the inevitability of death. It was as if the setting sun was a wild animal that had been struck down by a spear; its blood spraying rhythmically with each heartbeat up into heaven and raining down across the rock walls to paint them an unreal shade of red just before the eye of the day glazes over and the gray of twilight takes the mountain. This drama was staged just for me, because there’s nobody else out here but me. You can almost imagine that no other human being exists, that’s how far away the drunks on the beach and the Santa Clauses seem, that’s how far away Germany and the past seem.

I made a fire, I grilled and ate my lamb chops. I didn’t miss anybody, didn’t think about anything, just watched as one star after another came toward me from the black sky. Now I’m listening to the crickets chirping and the geckos snarling now and then on the warm cliff wall behind me. Sometimes a bat whirs above my campfire, and at its edges, where the light fades into darkness, I can hear the noise of something rustling and padding around. Probably a jackal that can smell the lamb chops and is circling the campsite.

* * * *

December 24, 8:00 a.m.

My plan was to climb Bloedkoppie at first light, but I don’t trust the man. His name is Heiseb, he says.

“Heiseb what?”

“Just Heiseb.”

I have no idea whether the name even exists. Heiseb claims to be a Damara, but as tall and strong as he looks, I think he’s more likely to be either Herero or Ovambo. I had just gone for a quick leak in the bushes last night, and when I came back he was sitting at my campfire, as calmly as if he’d been there all along. He barely looked up when I spoke to him. Just turned up, out of the blue, and when I said I hadn’t heard any car coming, he just laughed and nodded his head toward Bloedkoppie. He lived here, he said; that was his mountain.

That’s nonsense, of course. We’re in the middle of the Namib-Naukluft National Park; there’s no water anywhere around, no houses, no huts, nothing. No one traipses endless kilometers through the desert at forty degrees Celsius, and nobody can live here all the time, not even the Damara or the Ovambo—or anybody else, for that matter. I tried to get some more information out of him, but he pretended not to understand me even though he spoke English quite well. For example, when I asked him whether he knew Swakopmund, he answered that he’d seen a mountain zebra that morning, running in the precise direction of the city.

“I see,” I said. And he himself? Had he ever been there?

“At first I thought the zebra was heading south,” said Heiseb, “but I was wrong. It was running toward Swakopmund.”

“Is that unusual?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Do the zebras here usually run in other directions?”

Heiseb looked at me, uncomprehending. “Zebras run in all directions, but the one this morning was running directly toward Swakopmund.”

And it went on like that. I asked him questions, and he told me stories that had no point, no message, no sense that I could discern. Soon I gave up. We sat there silently and watched the fire burn down. I was tired, but I didn’t want to crawl into my tent with this stranger lurking around. I wasn’t really afraid; I just wanted to make it clear to him that I was on my guard, and there was no point in even thinking of stealing anything.

The night was still warm, even though a breeze had come up from the southwest. The bushes began to rustle secretively. It was almost as if the wind sang from inside them. An unbelievable carpet of stars spread out overhead. I looked for Orion, and immediately found Rigel, shimmering in a metallic blue, and the red giant Betelgeuse; even the nebula that represented the hunter’s sword was easy to find. But I could no longer just look at it all and tune out my thoughts. When a sudden gust of wind stirred up the ashes from the glowing embers, it reminded me of the softly blowing snow that winter night, when the snowflakes danced outside the window and seemed to come from all sides at once.

As if Heiseb could guess what I was thinking, he asked, “It is cold in Germany this time of year, isn’t it?”

I nodded. He nodded back, stood up, and disappeared into the darkness. It wasn’t until he was gone that I realized I’d never told him where I’m from. Maybe he’d heard the accent in my English, but I could just as easily have been Namibian of German descent. I took my knife into the tent with me. I slept badly, but nothing happened during the night. My car wasn’t plundered. Everything is still there. Including Heiseb. He’s sitting a couple of meters away in the shade, leaning against the cliff wall, carefully stacking small stones on top of each other and humming to himself. Unless I miss my guess, it’s the melody to “Silent Night.”

* * * *

December 24, 7:00 p.m.

Heiseb is sitting by the fire, grilling. Trout. Exactly what Christine always cooked on Christmas Eve. It had been that way in her family for decades, and after we got married she insisted on carrying on the tradition. First the trout, then the Christmas presents. Except: In Namibia, there’s no trout. There’s kingklip, hake, sole, whatever, but no trout. I’ve been here for two years, and I’ve never ever seen one. Not in the supermarkets in Swakopmund, and not in the few delis in Windhoek. And we’re here at the base of Bloedkoppie, in the middle of the Namib Desert!

Heiseb just grinned when I asked him where the devil he got the fish. It’s a special day, he answered, and he wanted to invite me to share a special meal.

“Very nice, Heiseb,” I said, “But where did you get the fish?”

He snapped his fingers as if he’d conjured it up. This secretiveness of his is really getting on my nerves. But even more uncanny is the way the man can apparently read my thoughts, as if they were an open book for him. No, it’s worse than that. It’s as if he was poking around in my brain only to dig up things I don’t want to think about anymore. This morning he asked if I missed my wife. Just like that, out of the blue.

“I’m not married,” I replied.

Heiseb pointed to the wedding ring on my finger.

I said, “We haven’t been together for two years now. I just can’t get the ring off.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” said Heiseb. “Died at Christmas.”

I stared at him, at the tiny red veins tracing the whites of his eyes, saw the snow blowing outside the window and Christine on the bed and the blood that had soaked the sheets. It had taken me a long time to get over that, and now every detail was just as vivid as when it happened.

“Get lost!” I shouted. “Get out of my life!”

Heiseb left without saying another word. I ran off, too, completely beside myself, ran across to the other side of the valley and up the gently rising stone face of the Bloedkoppie. Small plates of rock that had broken off in the heat crunched under my shoes. Tiny lizards scurried out of the way. Soon it got steeper and I needed my hands to pull myself up, clawed my fingers bloody in cracks that glowed red with the heat, and finished up at some point in front of a smooth upright rock wall that cost me a half-hour to circle around. Then I huffed my way up a narrow ridge. Above it, the desert wind roared as if from a giant hair dryer. I was nearly at the summit when I realized I’d set out in the midday heat without a drop of water. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, my thoughts dried up in my brain, above me there was nothing but burning rock and a ball of fire that filled the sky and made my blood boil. It pounded so loud in my ears that I could barely hear the wind whistle. Spots danced in front of my eyes, as if snow were falling. I could barely walk, but I kept going, staggering, all the way to the top.

I have no idea whether I would have made it back down without Heiseb. He was squatting at the summit. Wordlessly he handed me a bottle of water. I emptied it greedily. Before we started down again, I sat down next to him for a few minutes, and we looked out over the Namib Desert. A godforsaken, lifeless, empty wasteland.

“How did you know my wife died at Christmas, Heiseb?” I asked.

“You went alone into the desert, far away from your country, so that her spirit would not find you on the anniversary of her death.” Heiseb nodded. “That was a clever thing to do.”

I’ve heard more convincing explanations. Not from Heiseb, admittedly. But on the other hand, who knows what the natives here think? Maybe to them, running away from spirits is the only conceivable reason to come to this barren place. I had just started to accept this view of things, but then he turned up with the trout. There’s definitely something “fishy” about it all!

* * * *

December 25, 8:00 a.m.

I’ve got the large hunting knife right here next to me, and the pocketknife in my pocket, just in case. I have to make a decision whether to escape on foot or just hope that a park ranger comes by sometime during the day. I can’t go another night without sleep.

I wish my head didn’t hurt so much! Yesterday’s heat, probably. I press back into the shadow of the cliff wall. Heiseb is sitting next to the open hatchback of the Land Cruiser, eating breakfast. Crackers and beef biltong from my food supply. He appears to enjoy the meal. Nothing about his behavior betrays that he’s just waiting for an opportunity to kill me. Last night he got up suddenly and began to bow, murmuring something, toward the pile of rocks at the base of the cliff.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“That is an old ancestral burial site.”

“Nonsense, Heiseb, I watched you pile up those rocks myself.”

Instead of replying, he asked, his voice so soft it was almost a whisper, “Why did you kill your wife?”

At first I thought I hadn’t heard right, but then I understood. The flickering light of the campfire was reflected in Heiseb’s eyes. It was as if they were spraying sparks, and Heiseb wasn’t a man anymore, but a spirit or devil that had come from another world, just for me. That was when I knew my life was in danger. It took a moment before I came to my senses, and then I jumped up and shouted that I didn’t have to listen to lies like that. I ran to the Land Cruiser, got in, and turned the key, but it didn’t start. I revved again and again. Nothing.

“Sounds like the tank is empty,” called Heiseb. He hadn’t moved from his place by the fire. I opened the twenty-liter canister that I’d filled in Swakopmund myself. Empty. Not a drop! I panicked and nearly bolted into the night. Then I decided that Heiseb was waiting for me to do just that. I would wander for hours through the desert without being able to shake him off. At some point, his shadow would tower over me. Or behind me. I reached for the hunting knife and sat down again at the fire.

“Why did you murder your wife?” asked Heiseb, with a tone that suggested nothing had happened. As if he asked everyone that question, just to pass the time of day.

“I didn’t murder my wife,” I said.

“Then why is her spirit after you?”

Her spirit? It’s true, since last night memories have been haunting me again. In my mind, I can’t get rid of the images of that awful day. The lamp on the nightstand had been on. The lampshade had thrown its usual shadows on the wall. The curtains were open, and the snowflakes drifted so weightlessly outside that I couldn’t tell whether they were falling or rising.

I was sweating. It had to be the glowing fire, or the heat radiating from the rock wall. I forced myself to calm down, wanted to tell Heiseb that Christine had killed herself. That she had taken sleeping pills and then slit her wrists. That she had been depressed. That people with depression often try to commit suicide at Christmas, of all times, because...

* * * *

Heiseb had disappeared. I hadn’t even noticed that he’d stood up. His beer can was still there, but the rock he’d been sitting on was empty.

“Heiseb?” I called out into the night. The silhouette of the Bloedkoppie loomed up darkly against the sea of stars. Below it was impenetrable blackness that swallowed every contour. The crickets sang from the bushes, but no rustling or fluttering penetrated their ancient song. The spirits come and go noiselessly. I didn’t crawl into the tent. I just pulled back against the cliff wall, holding the knife. I didn’t close my eyes all night.

* * * *

December 26, morning

I haven’t had a drop to drink in twenty-four hours. Heiseb has hidden the water canisters somewhere. He keeps turning up and disappearing, just like that. One moment I see him moving through the desert, far away, like a Fata Morgana, and the next moment he’s sitting high above me on the cliff, humming “Silent Night.” Maybe I keep falling asleep, even though I draw the blade of the knife across my hand every time I feel my eyes starting to close.

The shade from the cliff is melting like snow in the desert. The sun’s already burning my legs. The lizards have started to come so close to me that I can almost touch them. I think they’re on my side, but I can’t be sure. Heiseb’s pile of rocks seems to have grown bigger overnight. I can hear voices whispering all around me, closer and closer, but I can’t understand their language. I create new words and say them out loud to keep myself awake: “desertwinter, knife-snow, sunflake.”

I should have left as soon as I noticed that Heiseb had disabled the Land Cruiser. I should have taken my chances, walked through the night. As soon as the Southern Cross was visible, I could have oriented myself and headed for Main Road C28. Every now and then a car comes down that way. Someone would have picked me up. I would have gotten away.

“Why didn’t you save your wife?” Heiseb asked earlier, circling around me like a starving hyena. If I didn’t have the knife, he’d have torn me to pieces a long time ago.

“She was already dead,” I moaned. “My car had broken down and I got home three hours late. It was Christmas Eve. I couldn’t get a tow truck anywhere.”

I’d walked through the night. Through the cold. Through the softly driven snow. Through an untouched white desert. The snow lay on the meadows like a shroud. I’m shivering. My mouth is terribly dry. I don’t know whether the heat or the cold is killing me. How long does it take to die this way?

“And if you’d come home on time?” asks Heiseb’s voice from somewhere. “If she’d still been alive and...”

Heiseb’s words become a dull roar. The cliffs of the Bloedkoppie give a glowing answer. Or is that the pounding in my head? I’m growing weaker and weaker. I can’t wait much longer. I still have the knife. Now or never. Heiseb or me.

* * * *

The last entry ended with these words. The handwriting had become shaky. Hohner shut the little black book and said, “That looks a lot like murder to me.”

“That cannot be ruled out,” said the police officer.

“Have you found this Heiseb?”

The officer shook his head.

“But you’ve put out a bulletin, you’re looking for him?”

It had grown quiet next-door. The soft rattle of the ceiling fan was now the only noise. The policeman said, “We have found no sign that anyone besides your brother-in-law was at Bloedkoppie.”

“You should have his journal translated properly,” said Hohner. “He writes about a tall, strong man who claimed he was a Damara and—”

“...and who reads minds, conjures up trout, turns up like a spirit, and disappears again.”

“What are you trying to say?” asked Hohner.

“We found bones from lamb chops, but no fish bones. The tank of the Land Cruiser contained precisely forty-five liters of gas. The jerry can was full. The car started without any trouble the first time we turned over the engine. The water canisters were standing right next to the body of your brother-in-law at the base of the rock wall. His journal was lying right in front of it, weighted down with a rock so the wind couldn’t blow it open or carry it away.”

Hohner stared at the black cover of the notebook. The sticker on the cover said “Counter book, 96 pages” and the fine print claimed that it had been bound with extra thread to withstand heavy use.

“This Heiseb must have seen your brother-in-law writing,” said the police officer. “He must have known he’d be mentioned in that notebook. Valuable evidence. So why didn’t he take it?”

Hohner shrugged his shoulders.

The policeman went on, “Your brother-in-law bled to death. His wrists were slit. Both arms. With his own knife.”

“Suicide? But you said yourself that you...”

“...cannot rule out murder, that’s right. Or at least something that comes very close.” The officer opened the journal at the last page that bore any writing and pointed with his index finger to a sentence near the end of the entry. “What if your brother-in-law had come home on time? He finds his wife alive and reaches for the telephone to call an ambulance. And while he’s dialing the number, he thinks that everything would have been over, he would have been free to emigrate to Africa if only he’d come home an hour or two later. If, for example, the car had broken down and he’d been delayed. And then he puts down the receiver and gets into his car and...”

“That’s impossible!” protested Hohner. “The German police already looked into that. There wasn’t even enough to file charges.”

“It’s not easy for a man to kill himself,” said the police officer, “even when his conscience has tormented him for two years. A part of him clings to life. It resists, justifies its actions, represses memories, runs away to the desert, but even there it can’t get away from the other part that remembers everything, that pricks him and prods at him constantly and never stops demanding atonement.”

The air was completely still now, not even a breath moved, even though the fan continued to turn. Fast enough that Hohner couldn’t say for sure how many blades it had. Three? Four?

The policeman went on, “I have no idea why white people always think that guilt wears a black face. But I can imagine how someone came to call that black man Heiseb. Heiseb was a demigod of the Nama and Damara. Death had no power over him. Every time he died and was buried under a heap of stones, he got up and went on singing his mysterious songs from the bushes. He was someone you couldn’t get rid of, any more than you could get rid of your own conscience. But I don’t believe in demigods. I think this Heiseb only existed in your brother-in-law’s mind. It was the part of him that acknowledged his guilt in the death of his wife and wanted to make a clean sweep of it. So it’s no wonder he knew what there was to eat at Christmas, or why your brother-in-law fled to the Bloedkoppie, and what really happened in Germany two years ago.”

A soft flurry of snow on Christmas Eve. Hohner remembered that everything had still been white at the funeral. The open grave had looked like a deep, fresh wound in the blanket of snow.

“He just let my sister die?” Hohner shook his head.

The police officer was silent. The fan hummed softly. Hohner stood up. The policeman said, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m going back to Windhoek today,” said Hohner, “and I’m catching the next flight back to Germany.”

He left the police station. Outside, a fresh wind was blowing up from the southwest; it made the heat more bearable. Hohner crossed the street and walked down to the water. He passed the beach on his right, full of people, passed the Ocean Basket restaurant, waved away a street vendor selling carved wooden animals, and strolled all the way to the viewpoint at the head of the breakwater. For about half an hour he stood watching the seals on the square blocks of stone, and then a tall man walked up and came to a stop next to him, an Ovambo maybe, or a Herero.

“My name is Heiseb,” said the man.

“Heiseb what?”

“Just Heiseb.”

Hohner had no idea whether the name even existed. He nodded briefly. Then he reached into his pocket, removed the envelope containing the five thousand euros, and handed it to the man.