The Other Hoffmann Sister

by Ben Fergusson

Genres: Family Life; Historical Fiction; World War I; War & Military

Synopsis

Shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2015, Ben Fergusson's critically acclaimed debut, The Spring of Kasper Meier, was the winner of the Betty Trask Prize 2015 and the HWA 2015 Debut Crown Award. The Other Hoffmann Sister is a gripping, evocative read about two sisters set in pre-WW1 Germany which will appeal to fans of The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry.

For Ingrid Hoffmann the story of her sister's disappearance began in their first weeks in Southwest Africa...

Ingrid Hoffmann has always felt responsible for her sister Margarete and when their family moves to German Southwest Africa in 1902, her anxieties only increase. The casual racism that pervades the German community, the strange relationship between her parents and Baron von Ketz, from whom they bought their land, and the tension with the local tribes all culminate in tragedy when Baron von Ketz is savagely murdered. Baroness von Ketz and their son, Emil, flee with the Hoffmanns as the Baron's attackers burn down the family's farm.

Both families return to Berlin and Ingrid's concerns about Margarete are assuaged when she and Emil von Ketz become engaged on the eve of the First World War. But Margarete disappears on her wedding night at the von Ketz's country house. The mystery of what happened to her sister haunts Ingrid, but as Europe descends into chaos, her hope of discovering the truth becomes ever more distant.

After the war, in the midst of the revolution that brings down the Kaiser and wipes out the aristocracy that her family married into, Ingrid returns to the von Ketzes' crumbling estate determined to find out what really happened to her sister.

Release date: May 4, 2017

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 448

Sample

 

For Ingrid Hoffmann the story of her sister’s disappearance began in their first weeks in Southwest Africa, when she and Margarete went hand in hand to the top of the staircase to listen to their parents celebrating with the good Germans of Okahandja. Dusk was descending and candles had been lit in the hallway below. Intermittently insects flamed in them, emitting thick lines of black smoke that travelled high and straight in the still air, dissipating out of sight. The children sat down on the top step, flicking their ears, eyes and noses as flies landed on them – easy gestures that had already become habitual.

Nora, a strict Herero woman, snored behind them. She had fallen asleep in her chair in front of their bedroom door and they had escaped past her in the dark. Below, the house was filled with voices and clinking glasses. Their father said, ‘Yes, I’m sure that won’t be a problem…’ and their mother was laughing and saying, ‘No, I hardly saw myself as a farmer’s wife…’ The guests sounded drunk, entertained and happy.

Someone stepped into the hall and the sisters scrambled backwards into the shadows. It was a Schutztruppe soldier, his dress uniform too tight. His face was grey and his dark moustache moist and sagging. He glanced around before undoing his tight belt and removing his jacket. There were large roundels of sweat on his shirt that made the white cotton see-through; Ingrid could see the clumped black hair beneath his armpits. He stood like this for some time, one hand on his hip, the other holding out the jacket like a coatroom attendant, until someone approached from the drawing room and he pretended to be searching it.

‘Everything all right?’ said the other man. He was bald and his neck and face were burnt claret; his pale crown looked oddly separate, like an egg in a cup.

‘Yes,’ said the moustachioed man, pulling the jacket back on, ‘there was something in it. What with scorpions and the like. Better whip it off, than —’

‘There was a scorpion in it?’ the bald man said.

‘Well, it’s not there now.’ The moustachioed man did his belt back up over the waist of the jacket and dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. ‘What do you think of all this lot, then? A bit lavish, isn’t it?’

‘They’ve got money,’ said the bald man. ‘Or they want you to think they do. That wife is hardly aristocratic.’

‘They will be soon – by association. The husband’s bought all of Baron von Ketz’s good land around the wells, the house too. Everything he wouldn’t sell to Brandt in eighty-six. They’re travelling there tomorrow; taking their daughters with them.’

‘That’ll be a rude awakening: Baron von Ketz as your neighbour. Imagine! Did you see the boy when they were last in town? Awkward little sop.’

The bald man laughed. ‘I did. You know, the Baroness lost eleven children. Eleven! He was the one that survived, if you can believe it.’ There was a screened open window on the landing; the cicadas were loud and Ingrid heard a regular duck-like squawk, which their father had been unable to identify as either bird, mammal or amphibian. ‘She was a beauty once – the Baroness,’ the bald man said. ‘And rich. When she arrived here, there was a trail of men after her; that’s what old Altersdorf told me. Then she ends up stuck on the veld with von Ketz wasting her money trying to grow mahangu. He’s got through her fortune in ten years with his experiments. There’s a house back in Germany, Buckow I think, that’s falling to pieces.’

Ingrid was beguiled that they were talking about her family, as if the Hoffmanns were important. Her mother really wasn’t an aristocrat, so it didn’t occur to her to be offended by that. It was very sad about the Baroness and all of her dead children. They used to eat sops in gravy in Germany, but she didn’t know what it meant to be one. She didn’t understand what the man meant by ‘experiments’ and pictured the Baron like an apothecary behind a table of glass bottles and India rubber bungs.

‘They’ll realise their mistake the moment they meet him.’

‘They just see the title,’ the moustachioed man said. ‘Brandt thinks they’re Rhenish farming stock. He’d never heard of any Hoffmanns before.’

‘Excuse me.’

The men turned to the door that led onto the veranda. There was a silhouette behind the mosquito screen.

‘Oi! Get out of here,’ one of them said, his mouth jagged. The tone of the hallway had changed and the men’s chests were rising and their brows lowering, like dogs.

‘I’m here to see a Herr Hoffmann.’

‘It’s von Ketz’s kaffir,’ said the moustachioed man. His mouth pursed and he looked at the bald man for support.

‘Wait there,’ he said to the shadow. ‘And get off the bloody veranda.’

The man’s form disappeared from behind the screen and, seeing him gone, the soldiers left the hall.

Margarete, whose chickenpox had only abated a few weeks earlier, stroked the itching edge of one of the brown scabs on her knee and said, ‘I want to look at him.’

‘No,’ said Ingrid.

But Margarete was already creeping down the staircase, low like a cat, the dry boards groaning beneath her feet.

‘He’ll see you inside,’ Ingrid said.

‘I’ll look from the study where it’s dark,’ said Margarete, and before Ingrid could catch up, she had slipped into the small front room. Ingrid crawled down after her, shaking her foot whenever anything grazed it, in case it was a scorpion, or a cockroach, or a snake.

In the study the shutters were closed. Margarete was holding on to the windowsill, staring through the slats down into the street. Ingrid stared too, her fingers on the sill touching the sharp grains of sand that covered every surface and filled every crack in the house. Standing on the road, his hands folded neatly in front of him, she could see a young black man dressed, disappointingly, in smart German clothes. She had hoped at least for him to be bare-chested, like the Ovambo warrior foil-blocked onto the front of her book.

‘I’m tired,’ Margarete said, already bored of the game, and dropped her head onto Ingrid’s shoulder, so that her long blonde hair tickled Ingrid’s bare arms. Ingrid, who was already as tall as her older sister, put her arms beneath Margarete’s armpits. Margarete went stiff and Ingrid manoeuvred her towards the door like a puppet, rocking her from side to side. This was the standard conclusion to most adventures instigated by Margarete: agitation, impulsiveness, insolence, laughter, followed by stupor. If they were caught, it ended in screaming and tears. If they weren’t, it ended like this – Margarete tired and dead-eyed, sometimes tearful.

Ingrid reached for the door handle, but heard the bald man shout, ‘You can wait for him in the study, apparently. Don’t you touch anything.’

Margarete came to life and the girls scrambled around the room, their hands touching the dusty desk, the bookcases, trunks and chests, trying to find a hiding place. ‘The sofa,’ Margarete hissed, and they dropped to the floor and scrambled backwards, their knees scratching on the rug’s rough pile. The door opened and the black man walked in, carrying a candle.

‘Oh, hello,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise the room was occupied.’ Ingrid saw that the man was very young, that his skin was less dark than the other Africans’, and his nose and high cheeks were peppered with black freckles. He was tall like a Herero, but wore German tan breeches and knee-high boots. His jacket was navy rather than soldiers’ beige, and was made of cheaper, thinner fabric – a rough cotton that had taken on a sheen with use. And the sleeves were too short, revealing the muscles of his forearms. He filled the room with a different smell than the other men – it was clove oil, which reminded Ingrid of both Christmas Lebkuchen and a tooth abscess her father had had.

Margarete got to her feet and said, ‘Yes, well you shouldn’t barge into rooms in other people’s houses, I suppose.’ When the man looked around the room, she said, ‘This isn’t where we sleep, if that’s what you think. Ingrid left something down here, and I had to come with her, because she was scared.’

‘I was not,’ Ingrid said, standing too.

‘Be quiet, Little Fly.’ Margarete turned to the man, ‘It’s none of your business what we were looking for.’

‘I see,’ said the man and put the candle down on the desk. ‘You’re in charge here, then?’

Margarete shrugged. ‘I suppose I am. I am the oldest.’

‘You are older than me?’ he said. ‘You look very young.’

‘I’m thirteen actually, so I’m the oldest white person.’

The man nodded. ‘Then use your power for good, and tell a tired man where he might sit to wait for your father?’

He didn’t look tired at all and Ingrid wondered whether they should let him sit down. Margarete pointed to the shabbiest piece of furniture in the room: a worn wooden chair, with a seat of shredded wicker. The man sat; the chair creaked.

‘Are you a Hottentot?’ Ingrid said.

Margarete carefully shifted her heel onto Ingrid’s toes and transferred all of her weight onto it. Ingrid squealed and the man laughed. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am half Herero, half German.’

‘Half white?’ Ingrid said.

‘A Baster,’ said Margarete.

The man tipped his head to one side. ‘Not quite, Fräulein. A Baster is half African, half Afrikaans. There is not a drop of Afrikaans in me.’

‘Do you speak Baster though?’ Ingrid said.

‘There is no Baster language,’ Margarete said. ‘You speak Herero and German. You don’t have a language of your own if you’re half-caste.’

Ingrid frowned. ‘Is that true?’ she said, turning to the man.

He nodded.

‘Do you mind?’ she said.

He laughed. ‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

‘What’s it like to speak another language?’ Ingrid said.

The man seemed genuinely perplexed by the question. ‘I haven’t spent much time thinking about it. In Africa there are many languages, so it is not so very special.’

But Ingrid thought it was special; she thought it was wonderful.

‘Do you live in the bush?’ Ingrid said.

‘Let’s go back upstairs,’ said Margarete, and grabbed Ingrid’s hand.

‘Why?’ Ingrid said.

‘Because Papa’s coming.’

‘Your sister is probably right,’ the man said.

‘Have you ever seen a giraffe?’ Ingrid said. ‘We haven’t.’

‘Of course,’ the man said. ‘But don’t worry – you have been on the coast until now, and there are no giraffes there.’

Ingrid recalled staring at the dark waves lapping onto the sand at Walvis Bay, hoping to see animals, but seeing only a barren wall of dunes. She had imagined a port like Hamburg – people carrying trays of wares on their heads, bicycles, prams and women in pinafores, the shadows of gulls in the mist, the smell of brown coal, seawater and fried fish, high brick buildings rising from the water like cliffs. But Walvis Bay was like a shimmering smear in the desert, some rocks baked dry, a few British houses, and behind it mile upon mile of sand. They turned the ship’s engines off, the mechanical hum was suddenly gone and she heard the sea and the whisper of sand blowing onto the great metal hull.

‘Where then?’ they heard their father saying. ‘Oh, I see.’

‘Don’t tell him we’re here,’ Margarete whispered. ‘Do you understand?’

The man nodded and put his finger to his lips. The girls scrambled backwards under the sofa.

‘Your hair,’ Margarete said, and Ingrid scraped it up and held it behind her head, feeling the metal springs of the sofa pushing into the sides of her hand.

‘Hans is it?’ their father said, coming into the room, small and energetic. He smoothed his sandy hair, frowned and said, ‘Or you have a…? Do you have a surname? Of course you do. It’s…?’

‘Ziegler.’

‘Ah, is it? We’ll call you Hans, I suppose. That’s normal, I imagine.’

‘As you wish, Herr Hoffmann.’

‘Well, Baron von Ketz was very complimentary, so I hope you don’t mind coming over to us. You’ve been with the von Ketzes for some time, is that right?’

‘Over fifteen years. Since I was born, sir.’

‘Indeed.’ Herr Hoffmann blushed and the scar beneath his right eye, cut in his university fraternity, stood out neat and white. He shifted his weight and said, ‘You must know the family very well. I’m sure we’ll get on with them. One must with neighbours, and they’ve already been so generous since we bought the land. Sending you and Nora, for one – letting us have you both. I hope we get along with them.’

Hans seemed unsure of how to respond to this modest concern. He offered a stilted nod and muttered, ‘Yes, sir.’

‘What are they like, the von Ketzes?’ her father said.

Hans stared about the floor blinking. ‘They are as they should be,’ he said, carefully pushing each word of the odd sentence out.

Her father, finally perceiving the awkwardness of the exchange, cried, ‘Good, good,’ and rattled the locked drawer of his desk. ‘You can write, I hear. German.’

‘Yes, sir. And French and English. A little Dutch. Herero of course, and I can understand many of the other native languages.’

‘Well, that’s excellent – quite excellent. I had hoped to get the girls a tutor, you know, but it seems that Southwest is not a magnet for sensitive intellectuals. Von Ketz wrote to suggest you as a houseboy, and when he mentioned your, well, your accomplishments, that really was for us a… That will be useful. If you can give the girls at least a bit of language – the normal ones, I mean – then we’ll be a few steps ahead, if they want to return to the city or Europe. One never knows who they’ll marry, does one? But I suppose you don’t have children.’

‘No sir.’

‘You speak German well – very well. But you’re half German, aren’t you?’ and before Hans could answer, their father added, ‘Yes, best not to talk about that with the girls – black and white makes most sense, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Hans said.

‘Ingrid will badger you mercilessly, I’m afraid. She intends to learn everything and used to drive Nanny mad. Margarete needs to be strong-armed into reading a word of German, let alone anything foreign, so you must do the best you can with her, but don’t expect any miracles.’

In the dark of the sofa, Ingrid reddened at this insult – besides, she had had no nanny to annoy in the first place, so that was also a lie. She moved forward to defend herself, but Margarete grabbed a fistful of her black hair, and her father said, ‘The farm – what’s it like?’

‘It’s hot most of the year, sir. It’s the veld and it’s very empty. But it has a beauty of its own, you might say.’

Their father laughed. ‘“A beauty of its own.” Ha! Listen to you! You’re a veritable Schiller, the way you talk. How funny. I thought you lot would all be leather skirts and bones through the nose, but listen to you! “A beauty of its own.” Wonderful stuff. That is good. Well, tomorrow morning then. Until then.’

And he was gone.

Ingrid stuck her head out and said, ‘Will we see giraffes on our way to the farm?’

‘Maybe,’ Hans said.

‘I’m sure we’ll see some when we all live in the bush together.’

Hans smiled and her sister pulled her out from under the sofa, through the door and back upstairs.

*

The journey to the farm was by bullock wagon. Ingrid and Margarete sat in the wagon waiting in the red dusk, brushing flies from their faces with their grubby hands. The commissioner’s daughter had given Margarete a horse-tail whip for the flies, but she flicked it with too much alacrity, striking Ingrid in the face while she was trying to read, making her scream. Their mother wrested the whip out of Margarete’s hands and threw it back onto the commissioner’s veranda, where his daughter, embarrassed, picked it up and took it back into the house. Margarete cried for a few minutes, then sat in silence, the dirty rivulets of tears dry on her face.

The bullock wagon was a biblical-looking transportation, a tubular white canopy on a wooden frame, pulled by sixteen oxen, led at the front by a Herero boy, and whipped from the wagon seat by an Afrikaner. He wore a wide Schutztruppe-style hat, the brim pinned up at one side, which, along with his stone-coloured shirt and trousers, was covered in salty tide marks, showing the outer limits of his sweating. Ingrid was embarrassed by her father, who wore a similar outfit, but crisp and pristine, as if he had dressed up as the driver for a parlour game. In the hot purple shade of the white canvas, she kept her eyes on the back of the driver’s head, where his hair stuck to his red neck in sweaty spikes, and intermittently she sniffed the stinging sharpness of his body odour mixed with the dung of the oxen, that she thrilled at seeing pat-patting from under their lifted tails.

In the heat of summer, it was decided they should travel at night where the roads were good enough, and rest during the hottest part of the day, but there was already a problem. On his journey in, Hans had been stopped near Osana, on the banks of the Swakop, and two traders posing as officials had made a show of checking his papers, then confiscated his horse. Unarmed and outnumbered, Hans had completed the journey on foot. It had therefore been assumed that he would travel in the second of the two wagons that Ingrid’s father had procured, but the supplies Herr Hoffmann had bought in Okahandja were stacked too high to allow extra passengers.

Their parents stood on the street arguing. Her mother dominated the scene with a height that she had bequeathed to Ingrid, and a constant motion, which Margarete had inherited. In her early middle age, though, Frau Hoffmann had lost Margarete’s moth-like fragility; she was equine, long and powerful, always on the verge of being dangerously startled, her fingers permanently striking her broad chest, signalling the relentless onset of indigestion. Herr Hoffmann listened shaking his head with exasperation, small and – next to the other sun-wrinkled settlers – incredibly boyish-looking, with a thick mop of blond hair. Beside his wife, it was enough to inspire glances and titters, this Amazon and her David, but they were practised in entering rooms chin up, unimpeachable.

Ingrid was thirsty and asked for water. Her mother, still on the street, held up her hand to silence her, saying to their father, ‘Are we to sit the girls on the kaffirs’ laps?’

Hans and Nora stood away from the road. Hans, very still, carried only a small satchel slung across his chest; Ingrid marvelled at his neatness, after the journey from the von Ketzes’ farm, thinking of their own trunks piled up behind her. Nora was almost as tall as him, her eyes were slender like his, but her mouth was smaller, fixed in a disapproving pout. She wore a bright red headscarf and was wrapped in a blue cotton shawl, giving her a look, Ingrid thought, of the French Revolutionaries in her copy of Les Misérables.

Both Hans and Nora were impassive, staring blankly at the cattle. Later, she would learn that she was meant to see the blacks as furniture, to believe that they were no more concerned about the family’s talk than the snakes beneath the floorboards, but for now she was mortified and ashamed of her mother for talking about people as if they weren’t there.

After several return trips to the commissioner’s house, and cries of ‘this God-forsaken desert’ and ‘follow you round the damn world for your filthy money,’ their parents quietly climbed into the wagon, their mother sitting between the girls, their father opposite.

Herr Hoffmann patted his leg and whistled and, astonishingly, with a scrabble of claws, a dog, honey- and black-patched, jumped into the wagon. Its ears lay flat to its head above its large brown eyes and it moved forward with vast supplication, wagging its tail in wide swings that distorted its body. The girls, open-mouthed and hushed, said, ‘Is it ours?’

‘Yes,’ said Herr Hoffmann.

‘It’s a working dog, girls,’ their mother said. ‘You aren’t to make it a pet.’

They reached out their hands to touch its fur, watching their mother to see if she would disapprove. She nodded wearily and the girls stroked the animal and it whimpered with delight.

‘What’s it called?’

‘She’s called Pina,’ their father said. ‘After her owner’s daughter. Died of typhus, poor thing. And the owner.’

‘Johannes!’

‘Oh Hedwig,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t be so soft.’

The driver lifted his hand, the plaited leather whip arched upwards impossibly high against the purple sky then bowed and cracked, causing the animals to low and shuffle and the wagon to jerk forward. Pina, in an ecstasy of petting, laid her head on the wooden floor and let out a sharp whine of joy.

The town dissipated, as did the sun, dropping away not in a slow blue haze, but a dazzling burst of red, striated with thin purple cloud. Tired, but kept awake by the strange sounds of the veld and their mother’s stiff body, the girls stared out of the wagon until the blackness afforded a few grey shapes, lit by the carpet of stars overhead.

‘Are there lions?’ Ingrid said.

‘No idea,’ her father said. ‘Hans, what do you say?’

Her mother tensed in the dark and muttered, ‘Be an example.’

Ingrid shifted on the wooden seat to catch a glimpse of Hans, but only heard his voice the other side of the canvas answer, ‘There may be lions – they often come at night. You would hear lions.’

‘Are there more flies where we are going than in Okahandja?’ Ingrid said.

‘The same amount of flies,’ Hans said.

‘Are there locusts?’ Ingrid said.

‘Yes, there are sometimes locusts. The Damara drive them into fires and eat them.’

The girls squealed and their father laughed.

‘Have you ever eaten locusts?’ Ingrid said, the volume of her voice dying under the weight of her mother’s glaring eyes, the whites of which had emerged from the darkness.

‘No, Fräulein Ingrid,’ Hans said. ‘I am not a Damara.’

Her mother reached over slowly, as if she was going to brush something off Ingrid’s dress, but instead pinched her leg hard, producing a burning, bruising pain of such intensity that Ingrid threw herself into her father’s lap and sobbed into the new cotton of his trousers, which were stiff and smelt of vinegar.

*

Eventually Ingrid was lifted onto the sacks of provisions and laid next to her sister. As she was moved she murmured in protest, calling for Pina. It was her mother who picked her up, kissing her, but Ingrid refused to look at her, her leg still aching. She hoped that they would bathe the next day, if they had already arrived, and she could let her mother see the bruise that she could feel forming like blackened lips. Their mother became sorrowful if her pinches bruised them, and if they pretended to be scared of her and didn’t let her touch the bruises it made her cry.

Ingrid lay down on the sacks, which were itchy where the sacking found bare patches of skin at her neck, and between her long socks and the hem of her petticoat. The wagon shifted. The smell of hessian was strong and her sister’s hair crept across the sacks and found its way into her mouth. She wanted to dream about the languages that Hans was going to teach her. She imagined herself at a dance, someone offending Margarete in English or French, and her turning and saying perfectly, idiomatically, ‘Well, that’s rather rum, and you’d better shut up.’ The aggressors would look at her askance, the dancers would stop, astounded by her skill. She tried to hold on to the joy of this feeling, but found herself, in the heat, sunk into the sacks, attacked by sleep – it washed over her in dark waves, pulling her down in jerks so strong that they woke her back up again, until she startled herself awake and found the wagon silent and full of sleep, but for the clatter of the wheels and the groaning of the cattle.

Ingrid crept down from the sacks and over her father’s outstretched leg and sat on the floor of the wagon. She held her arm out in the dark and Pina came to her and licked her forearm and elbow, then settled down in the semicircle made by her legs and torso.

‘Hans?’ Ingrid said quietly, her fingers exploring Pina’s fur.

There was a pause, and then he said, ‘Yes, Fräulein Ingrid.’

‘Are you going to walk all night?’

‘I’ll walk as long as we travel.’

‘Aren’t you tired?’

‘We’ll sleep tomorrow, Fräulein,’ he said.

She liked the wise depth of his voice.

‘Aren’t you thirsty?’ she said.

‘I’ll drink in the morning.’

The driver muttered something in Afrikaans, but Ingrid couldn’t understand what he’d said.

‘Why do you keep breathing like that?’

‘Like what?’ Hans said.

‘Little gasps. Like you’re afraid.’

Nora said, ‘Best let Herr Ziegler rest, Fräulein Ingrid. Best get some rest yourself.’

Ingrid frowned. How could Hans get any rest, when he was walking? But she didn’t ask any more questions and lay down on the bare wood of the wagon, holding the dog. She could see the stars and the cooler night air touched her face and she fell asleep.

*

Ingrid woke to the sound of a river and the splash of hooves. They wouldn’t cross a river in the dark, would they? she thought as the wheels of the wagon broke into the water and she felt the freshness of spray in the air. How would Hans get across? But she was already drifting back to sleep, rocked by the jerking wagon.

The heat woke her. She could hear cicadas and the hard clatter of shoes on the floor of the wagon, which rocked as people climbed out. She rolled onto her back and saw her sister sitting up on the sacks, looking disoriented. Pina stretched on her forelegs and yawned, letting out a high whine like an iron gate.

‘Are we there?’ Ingrid said.

Margarete squinted at the wagon’s bright opening. ‘I don’t think so.’

They were on a great plain of grass, pale yellow and green, shifting dry in the hot morning wind, dotted with flat acacia trees, like cloud islands floating over smears of silvery thorn.

‘Where’s Mama and Papa?’ Ingrid said.

Margarete climbed down from the sacks and draped herself over the dog. Stale-breathed, she whispered, ‘They’re going to the toilet, I suppose.’

Ingrid smiled. ‘But there aren’t any toilets here.’ The girls giggled.

Margarete’s laughter faded.

‘What is it?’ Ingrid said, recognising the forced smile that had presaged many sad events in Germany: Margarete pulling over a cabinet that contained their mother’s good dinnerware; her scratching the horses’ eyes out on the painted chest in the hallway; and the night she had disappeared into the steep woods above Cochem when she was ten, returning grubby and bewildered the next day when they were sure she was dead.

‘I’m just tired, Little Fly,’ Margarete said, and let go of the dog, climbing down from the wagon, jerking her head away from the oxen’s flicking tails. Ingrid followed and then Pina, who squatted, creating a curling trail of urine, a black worm in the amber earth. They stared over the veld, that became more and more bare as it reached a mountain of crumbling red stone and dark green scrub, at the bottom of which was a house.

‘Is that the farm?’ Ingrid said, afraid of the bare little building.

‘No, no,’ Hans said.

The girls turned. He was standing by one of the wagon’s wheels with a tin cup in his hand and a spoon. The sweat on his forehead reflected the sun as a large white spot above his left eye. He smiled.

‘Who lives there then?’ Ingrid said.

‘Baron and Baroness von Ketz and their son.’

‘Oh,’ said Ingrid, and at the mention of aristocratic names, they turned back to the house, shielding their eyes. There was a shallow creek snaking past the front of the land, with what looked like a wooden bridge as a crossing, bleached almost white. But the house itself was drab – small and wooden, broken black shingles on the roof, glistening with spots of melted tar. There was nothing around it at all – no trees, just a few outhouses made of brick stacked open to let the wind through. It was nothing like the immense white villa of verandas and balconies that Ingrid had modelled in her imagination on the grandest buildings in Okahandja.

‘Baron and Baroness von Ketz live there?’ Margarete said.

Hans nodded. He was spooning water onto the wagon wheels.

‘What are you doing?’ Ingrid said.

‘You shouldn’t talk to him any more, Little Fly,’ Margarete said. ‘They’ll be back soon.’

Ingrid watched him drip the water onto the silvery wood, staining it black.

‘It’s for the wheels,’ Hans said. ‘To stop them cracking. Wagons should be kept in the shade, but there’s no shade here.’

‘What if we need to drink it?’ Margarete said, leaning on the great wheel, so that Hans had to stop his work.

‘We are only two hours away now,’ Hans said, standing back, holding the spoon out ready to start again when Margarete moved away. ‘There will be fresh water at the farmhouse. There is a well. Your father has bought very shrewdly.’

‘I’m not sure it’s right to talk about what our father does or doesn’t buy,’ Margarete said. ‘I’m not sure it’s your business to comment on it at all.’

Hans face died as it had in Okahandja when their mother was swearing. It was as if his soul had temporarily left his body. He didn’t seem offended, he didn’t seem anything; he seemed not to be present at all.

Ingrid pointed to the von Ketzes’ farm. ‘What about their bit of the farm? Was that good to buy?’

They heard a stifled cackle and turned. It was from Nora, hidden from view on the shaded side of the wagon.

‘Baron von Ketz bought all of this land,’ Hans said, alive again. ‘But your father bought most of it from him, except this corner where their plot is.’

‘Is the bit we bought better?’ Ingrid said.

‘Ingrid, we shouldn’t talk about being better,’ said Margarete. ‘It’s vulgar.’

‘It is better situated,’ Hans said. ‘There are wells with clean water. Herero, sometimes Nama, sometimes Damara when it is very dry, will come a long way for the wells there. They have never been owned, the wells.’

‘How silly,’ Ingrid said. ‘Why didn’t anyone buy them before?’

Hans shrugged. ‘Now someone has.’

Margarete pulled at Ingrid’s hand and said. ‘Let’s go. This isn’t important. We shouldn’t be asking about other people’s money.’

‘It is important if they’re going to be our friends.’

‘They’re not going to be our friends. They’re aristocrats and Papa’s a farmer.’

‘But there’s no one else to be friends with here!’ Ingrid said.

‘You’ll learn the hierarchy when you get some proper schooling. The Kaiser, aristocracy, merchants, farmers, peasants and then the kaffirs,’ Margarete said. ‘And then dogs, I suppose.’ She picked up Pina and climbed into the wagon with her and dropped down with such force that the metal suspension creaked.

Ingrid turned back to Hans and whispered, ‘Don’t mind Margarete – she gets gloomy sometimes and says cruel things. But we’ll be friends, won’t we?’

‘Of course, Fräulein Ingrid.’

‘There won’t be any girls to play with, I suppose,’ she said sadly.

‘That’s probably right,’ Hans said.

‘What’s “girls” in French?’ she said.

‘Filles,’ said Hans.

‘Teach me something to remember in French,’ Ingrid said.

‘You had better wait in the wagon with your sister, Fräulein Ingrid.’

‘Just teach me one line,’ she persisted. ‘Something I can learn by the time I get to our farm. Something just to repeat.’

He squinted over at the von Ketzes’ farmhouse. ‘I can’t think of anything appropriate.’

‘You’re thinking of something though,’ she said. ‘I can tell.’

He smiled. His face was perfect: the features fine, the jaw smooth, the nose sprayed with black freckles, the hair trim, the ears small; perfect except for a scar, a smooth rivulet the same colour as the rest of his skin that ran from his eyebrow almost to his hairline. ‘Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles,’ he said, ‘Je ne me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs.’

The sound of it thrilled her and she mouthed it as he said it, then tried to repeat it, saying, ‘Commje desendey floves impossible, jenemesent…’ and then she was lost.

Hans laughed. ‘That’s very impressive. You are very good at remembering.’

She flushed red, but defended herself, saying, ‘But you just said it.’

He chuckled. ‘Try again,’ he said. ‘Comme je descendais des Fleuves impassibles.’

‘Commeje desendey floves impossible.’

‘Je ne me sentis plus guidé par les haleurs.’

‘Jeneme sonti ploo giday parles aler.’

‘Can you remember it all?’

‘Commejedesendey flovesimpossible jenemeso. . .