Weissmann threw back his head and began to laugh, and would say no more. Mondaugen shrugged, took down a cue, dumped the three balls from their velvet bag and practiced draw shots till well into the morning.
He emerged from the billiard room to hot jazz from somewhere overhead. Blinking, he made his way up marble steps to the grand ballroom and found the dance floor empty. Clothing of both sexes was littered about; the music, which came from a Gramophone in the corner, roared gay and hollow under the electric chandelier. But no one was there, no one at all. He plodded up to his turret room with its ludicrous circular bed and found that a typhoon of sferics had been bombarding the earth. He fell asleep and dreamed, for the first time since he'd left it, of Munich.
In the dream it was Fasching, the mad German Carnival or Mardi Gras that ends the day before Lent begins. The season in Munich, under the Weimar Republic and the inflation, had followed since the war a constantly rising curve, taking human depravity as ordinate. Chief reason being that no one in the city knew if he'd be alive or well come next Fasching. Any windfall - food, firewood, coal - was consumed as quickly as possible. Why hoard, why ration? Depression hung in the gray strata of clouds, looked at you out of faces waiting in bread queues and dehumanized by the bitter cold. Depression stalked the Liebigstrasse, where Mondaugen had had an attic room in a mansarde: a figure with an old woman's face, bent against the wind off the Isar and wrapped tightly in a frayed black coat; who might, like some angel of death, mark in pink spittle the doorsteps of those who'd starve tomorrow.
It was dark. He was in an old cloth jacket, a stocking cap tugged down over his ears, arms linked with a number of young people he didn't know but suspected were students, all singing a death-song and weaving side to side in a chain, broadside to the street's centerline. He could hear bands of other rollickers, drunk and singing lustily in other streets. Beneath a tree, near one of the infrequent street lights, he came upon a boy and girl, coupled, one of the girl's fat and aging thighs exposed to the still-winter wind. He stooped and covered them with his old jacket, his tears fell and froze in mid-air, and rattled like sleet on the couple, who'd turned to stone.
He was in a beer hall. Young, old, students, workmen, grandfathers, adolescent girls drank, sang, cried, fondled blindly after same and different-sexed alike. Someone had set a blaze in the fireplace and was roasting a cat he'd found in the street. The black oak clock above the fireplace ticked terribly loud in strange waves of silence that swept regularly over the company. Girls appeared out of the confusion of moving faces, sat on his lap while he squeezed breasts and thighs and tweaked noses; beer spilled at the far end of the table and swept the table's length in a great foam cascade. The fire that had been roasting the cat spread to a number of tables and had to be doused with more beer; fat and charred-black, the cat itself was snatched from the hands of its unfortunate cook and tossed about the room like a football, blistering the hands that passed it on, till it disintegrated among roars of laughter. Smoke hung like winter fog in the beer hall, changing the massed weaving of bodies to more a writhing, perhaps of damned, in some underworld. Faces all had the same curious whiteness: concave cheeks, highlighted temples, bone of the starved corpse there just under the skin.
Vera Meroving appeared (why Vera? her black mask covered the entire head) in black sweater and black dancer's tights. 'Come,' she whispered; led him by the hand through narrow streets, hardly lit but thronged with celebrants who sang and cheered in tubercular voices. White faces, like diseased blooms, bobbed along in the dark, as if moved by other forces toward some graveyard, to pay homage at an important burial.
At dawn she came in through the stained-glass window to tell him that another Bondel had been executed, this time by hanging.
'Come and see,' she urged him. 'In the garden.'
'No, no.' It had been a popular form of killing during the Great Rebellion of 1904-07, when the Hereros and Hottentots, who usually fought one another, staged a simultaneous but uncoordinated rising against an incompetent German administration. General Lothar von Trotha, having demonstrated to Berlin during his Chinese and East African campaigns a certain expertise at suppressing pigmented populations, was brought in to deal with the Hereros. In August 1904, von Trotha issued his 'Vernichtungs Befehl,' whereby the German forces were ordered to exterminate systematically every Herero man, woman and child they could find. He was about 80 per cent successful. Out of the estimated 80,000 Hereros living in the territory in 1904, an official German census taken seven years later set the Herero population at only 15,130, this being a decrease of 64,870. Similarly the Hottentots were reduced in the same period by about 10,000, the Berg-Damaras by 17,000. Allowing for natural causes during those unnatural years, von Trotha, who stayed for only one of them, is reckoned to have done away with about 60,000 people. This is only 1 per cent of six million, but still pretty good.
Foppl had first come to Sudwestafrika as a young Army recruit. It didn't take him long to find out how much he enjoyed it all. He'd ridden out with von Trotha that August, that inverted spring. 'You'd find them wounded, or sick, by the side of the road,' he told Mondaugen, 'but you didn't want to waste the ammunition. Logistics at the time were sluggish. Some you bayoneted, others you hanged. Procedure was simple: one led the fellow or woman to the nearest tree, stood him on an ammunition box, fashioned a noose of rope (failing that, telegraph or fencing wire), slipped it round his neck, ran the rope through a fork in the tree and secured it to the trunk, kicked the box away. It was slow strangulation, but then these were summary courts-martial. Field expedients had to be used when you couldn't put up a scaffold each time.'
'Of course not,' said Mondaugen in his nit-picking engineer's way, 'but with so much telegraph wire and so many ammunition boxes lying around, logistics couldn't have been all that sluggish.'
'Oh,' Foppl said. 'Well. You're busy.'
As it happened, Mondaugen was. Though it may have been only because of bodily exhaustion from too much partying, he'd begun to notice something unusual in the sferic signals. Having dexterously scavenged a motor from one of Foppl's phonographs, a pen and rollers and several long sheets of paper, the resourceful Mondaugen had fashioned a crude sort of oscillograph to record signals in his absence. The project hadn't seen fit to provide him with one and he'd had nowhere to go at his former station, making one up till now unnecessary. As he looked now at the cryptic pen-scrawls, he detected a regularity or patterning which might almost have been a kind of code. But it took him weeks even to decide that the only way to see if it were a code was to try to break it. His room became littered with tables, equations, graphs; he appeared to labor to the accompaniment of twitterings, hisses, clicks and carolings, but in reality he dawdled. Something kept him off. Events intimidated him: one night during another 'typhoon' the oscillograph broke, chattering and scratching away madly. The difficulty was minor and Mondaugen was able to fix it. But he wondered if the malfunction had been quite an accident.
He took to roaming the house at odd hours, at loose ends. Like the 'eye' in his dream of Fasching he now found he had a gift of visual serendipity: a sense of timing, a perverse certainty about not whether, but when to play the voyeur. A taming, possibly, of the original heat with which he'd watched Vera Meroving in the earlier days of the siege party. For example, leaning in bleak winter sunlight against a Corinthian column, Mondaugen could hear her voice not far away.
