William Boyd - An Ice-Cream War

Gabriel had become quite an expert at rolling cigarettes; it was as if, as his hands got bonier and the knuckles more evident on his fingers, they acquired a new dexterity. He took time over it, packing the tobacco tightly, rolling the paper up in a neat, even cylinder. Often he’d spend a day making a dozen or so cigarettes and offer them to Liesl as a present. She smoked a lot. Fortunately there was plenty of tobacco. Paper was the problem. If the war continued, Herr von Bishop’s small library wouldn’t last very long.

Gabriel finished the cigarettes and waited for Liesl to return. Outside the oppressive weight of the afternoon sun seemed to have stunned the world into silence. Gabriel stood up and looked out of the dispensary window whose view gave on to the deserted prison camp.

When the prisoners had been marched off he had kept out of their way. Had he done the right thing? He consoled himself with Major du Toit’s remarks. It had been Major du Toit who had initiated the plan. Major du Toit was the senior British officer in the POW camp; it was he who had encouraged him to try and stay within the hospital and who had urged him to give his parole, convinced that Gabriel’s injuries would debar him from ever fighting again.

In the hospital, Major du Toit had argued, he was in an ideal position to smuggle items of food and medical supplies to the men behind the wire. Also, as he soon found out, he could pick up news of the war far more easily. Nanda was a military camp. In the civilian camps prisoners who gave an oath not to try and escape were allowed to wander freely around whatever village or town the camp was set in. But for the captured soldiers such an oath also contained the undertaking not to fight against Germany or her allies for the duration of the war. Du Toit had forbidden any of his men — apart from Gabriel — to take such an oath and consequently they spent their time behind the barbed-wire stockade. As it turned out, having Gabriel on the outside proved most useful. And this was what Gabriel told himself too. He pilfered professionally from the German stores — especially from the efficient quinine substitute they had developed — and was able to pass on the news of the attack on Taveta in March, the invasion of German East and the advance down the Northern Railway to Tanga. For the last few weeks the Schütztruppe had been in constant retreat and the fall of Dar-es-Salaam was expected any day.

But then the prisoners had left, a long straggling line of tattered troops with their little bundies of personal possessions, and with them had gone the garrison of native askaris — effectively emptying Nanda of three-quarters of its population. Gabriel had watched the column go with decidedly mixed feelings. The hospital was now full exclusively of sick and wounded Germans. He was the only Englishman in Nanda.

Gabriel ran his fingers through his hair. The problem was that, now the prisoners had gone, there was really no excuse — no reasonable excuse — for his remaining in the hospital, for so selflessly re-infecting his leg wound. He rubbed his forehead. What reason could he give himself for staying on?

Liesl came into the room. Gabriel turned and smiled. She wore an old blue calico dress that had faded from navy to an uneven pale blue. She had a white cotton scarf tied over her gingery hair. She sat down heavily on the wooden seat with an audible sigh, the thump making her large breasts shiver under the material, and Gabriel felt the familiar tugging in his guts.

“Deppe is coming back tomorrow,” she said in English, lighting her cigarette. “But for only one day, thank you God. Do you want your cigarette?” She held it up.

“No.” Gabriel cleared his throat. “You have it.”

“Thank you.” She coughed. “It’s so strong, this tobacco.” She patted her chest and coughed again, pressing her breast with a forearm. Gabriel stood motionless by the window. He found it extraordinary how every movement this woman made — the slightest gesture — seemed loaded with sexual potential. He watched her now wiping her creamy freckled neck with a handkerchief, the action revealing the dark patches of perspiration in the armpits of her dress.

“Hammerstein is going,” she said matter-of-factly. “An hour or two, I think.”

“Anything I can do?” Gabriel asked.

“No,” she said. “Nothing.”

♦

Hammerstein took longer to die than estimated, so Liesl didn’t leave the hospital until quite late. Outside it was dark and the familiar noises of the African night — the crickets, the bats, the hootings and the howlings — were everywhere about her. Gabriel watched her pause for a moment in the doorway and then set off down the main street of Nanda towards her bungalow. The street was dark, lit only by a few glimmering lanterns set outside the doorways of the mud shops and houses and the glow that spilled from some windows. Gabriel watched her go. Then he turned and went round the back of the hospital, through the kitchen gardens and into the rubber plantations beyond. He set off down an avenue between the trees. This was another, more discreet, route he had found to Liesl’s bungalow.

He knew his way instinctively now, ducking under the low branch of a mango tree, squeezing through a gap in a thorn barrier, cutting through a dark copse of cotton trees. He paused as he came in sight of Liesl’s bungalow, waiting until he saw her enter. Then he moved forward across a patch of waste ground and past the huge stand of bamboo that towered over the house at the back, the dried knife-leaves of the bamboo crackling softly under his feet. He moved more slowly now, as he entered the thicket of bushes directly behind the house, praying silently to himself that the shutters would be open. It had been a hot day, surely the maid would have opened them in the evening in an attempt to cool the house?

He heard Liesl call “Kimi!” as he took up his position. The shutters were open, an oil lamp was already lit in the room, rilling it with its damp yellow light. Gabriel stood there, breathing shallowly, his heart beginning to beat faster as he mentally rehearsed the routine he now knew so well.

He had stumbled on it quite by chance some weeks before. Liesl had left some cigarettes he had made her in the hospital. He had taken them round to her bungalow only to be told by her maid that Frau von Bishop couldn’t see him as she was busy. Gabriel said it wasn’t important and had left the cigarettes. Going by the side of the house he had seen the light cast on to the bushes from the back window. Guiltily he’d made his way into the thicket to spy, for some reason suspecting a lover. But there he saw the sight that had proved his undoing. A magnificent pale Bathsheba, heavy-breasted and full-thighed, glistening palely in the lamplight as the buckets of water were tipped over her, while he looked on, captivated, an impotent David in the shadows outside.

He stood there now, well screened by the bushes and bidden by the darkness, peering through the leaves into her bedroom. Liesl came into view, framed for a moment by the window. Then she moved out of vision while she undressed. He heard faintly the tinny scrape of the bath being shifted into the middle of the floor and the mutter of some words she exchanged with her maid. It was only a matter of moments now.

♦

For some reason Gabriel felt the acid bite of his guilt more strongly that night than before. He lay on his hard bed in the fetid heat of his hut unable to get to sleep, tormented and entranced by the remembered images of Liesl. Sometimes the desire he felt seemed to prove too much for him and he thought his chest would burst, his ribs springing apart like staves from an old barrel. The ache of his longing hit him with full force. He wanted desperately to bury his head in those pillowy enveloping breasts, set his forehead in the soft junction of her neck and jawbone, feel her strong arms about his body…