sjamboked the Hottentot on the buttocks and thighs, forcing him into a queer little dance. It took a certain talent to make a prisoner dance that way without slowing down the rest of the trek, because of the way they were all chained together. They were doing quite well, until through some stupid misjudgment, Fleische's sjambok caught in the chain and he was pulled from his horse and under the feet of the prisoners.
Their reflexes are fast, they're like animals. Before the other trooper had really taken it in, the fellow they'd been sjamboking leaped on Fleische, trying to get his bight of chain around Fleische's neck. The rest of the line, realizing through some extra sense what had happened - anticipating murder - had come to a halt.
Fleische managed to roll away. The two of them got the key from the sergeant, unlocked and removed their Hottentot from the trek, and brought him off to the side. After Fleische, with the tip of his sjambok, had had the obligatory sport with the black's genitals, they clubbed him to death with the butts of their rifles and tossed what was left behind a rock, for the vultures and flies.
But as they did this thing - and Fleische said later that he'd felt something like it too - there came over him for the first time an odd sort of peace, perhaps like what the black was feeling as he gave up the ghost. Usually, the most you felt was annoyance; the kind of annoyance you have for an insect that's buzzed around you far too long. You have to obliterate its life, and the physical effort, the obviousness of the act, the knowledge that this is only one unit in a seemingly infinite series, that killing this one won't end it, won't relieve you from having to kill more tomorrow, and the day after, and on, and on . . . the futility of it irritates you, and so to each individual act you bring something of the savagery of military boredom, which as any trooper knows is mighty indeed.
This time it wasn't like that. Things seemed all at once to fall into a pattern: a great cosmic fluttering in the blank, bright sky and each grain of sand, each cactus spine, each feather of the circling vulture above them and invisible molecule of heated air seemed to shift imperceptibly, so that this black and he, and he and every other black he would henceforth have to kill, slid into alignment, assumed a set symmetry, a dancelike poise. It finally meant something different: different from the recruiting poster, the mural in the church and the natives already exterminated - sleeping and lame burned en masse in their pontoks, babies tossed in the air and caught on bayonets, girls approached with organ at the ready, their eyes filming over in anticipated pleasure, or possibly only an anticipated five more minutes of life, only to be shot through the head first and then ravished, after of course being made aware at the last moment that this would happen to them - different from the official language of von Trotha's orders and directives, different from the sense of function and the delightful, powerless languor that are both part of following a military order that's filtered like spring rain down countless levels before reaching you; different from colonial policy, international finagling, hope of advancement within the army or enrichment out of it.
It had only to do with the destroyer and the destroyed, and the act which united them, and it had never been that way before. Returning from the Waterberg with von Trotha and his staff, they came upon an old woman digging wild onions at the side of the road. A trooper named Konig jumped down off his horse and shot her dead: but before he pulled the trigger he put the muzzle against her forehead and said, 'I am going to kill you.' She looked up and said, 'I thank you.' Later, toward dusk, there was one Herero girl, sixteen or seventeen years old, for the platoon; and Firelily's rider was last. After he'd had her he must have hesitated a moment between sidearm and bayonet. She actually smiled then; pointed to both, and began to shift her hips lazily in the dust. He used both.
When through some levitation he again found himself on top of the bed, Hedwig Vogelsang was just entering the room astride a male Bondel who crawled on all fours. She wore only a pair of black tights and had let her long hair down.
'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,
