Kundu, page 5
A sharp pain in the region of his bladder brought him unsteadily to his feet, and he lurched out into the moonlight to relieve himself. He saw N’Daria stumbling wearily up the track, and when he looked up towards the big bungalow, he saw the big figure of Sonderfeld leaning on the veranda rail and, behind him, silhouetted against the window, the gesticulating shadows of three men in the lighted living room. The girl must have gone to leaving the men to drink late. He grinned lecherously and wondered how long she’d stay there. Lansing would sleep at the house as he always did, and when the others had gone, Sonderfeld would come down to the laboratory and the lamp would burn long after midnight. Did he work there—or play? Wee Georgie had his own ideas, but he was wise enough to keep them to himself. This was the softest berth he’d had in many years—he wanted to keep it. Another mistake like tonight’s could mean disaster.
He shivered and swore and reeled back into the hut. Then, far down the track, he heard the pad of feet and the high giggling of the girls. He wondered whether he should beat them, but decided against it. He uncorked the bottle and took a long, gurgling pull that ended in a belch of relief. Then he stretched himself out on the dirty blanket roll and waited for them to come in. With whisky in his belly and girls in his bed, Wee Georgie was the Caliph of the high valleys. He speculated amiably on the scandalous tales that Scheherazade and her sister would bring—he had a shrewd suspicion that N’Daria and Kumo would have their parts in it.
Sonderfeld saw the light go on in the laboratory and smiled to himself in the darkness. He was desperately eager to know the result of N’Daria’s seduction of the sorcerer, but he was too careful a man to betray himself by even the smallest indiscretion. Gerda was safely in bed, but his guests were still drinking. He would go in to them, join the last hazy rounds, and tell them a dirty story or two to send them on their way to bed.
Lansing he would conduct with ironic courtesy to the guest room. With Curtis and Theodore Nelson he would walk a little way down the path that led to the Kiap house; he would tell them one last story; he would stand and watch them weaving homewards under the dark, drooping trees. Then he would go to N’Daria.
He straightened up, tossed the butt of his cigar over the railing and walked into the bright light of the living room.
Theodore Nelson, flushed and voluble, had reached the tag of his story:
“She said to me, ‘What sort of woman do you think I am?’ I said, ‘My dear lady, I thought we’d already established that.’ After which, of course, it was plain sailing from Aden to Bombay.”
Lee Curtis gave his braying, boyish laugh. Max Lansing, grey-faced and weary, stared into his glass. They looked up as Sonderfeld came in, smiling and hearty.
“Forgive me, my friends. I was having myself a little fresh air between drinks. Now the clergy are gone and the lady is retired, let’s have ourselves a private nightcap, eh?”
“If you don’t mind,” said Lansing flatly, “I’ll take myself to bed. I’m very tired. I’m not good company.”
“My dear fellow!” Sonderfeld was instantly solicitous. “Of course we don’t mind. Are you sure you are not unwell? You’re not getting the fever, are you? Have you been taking the tablets?”
“No, no … it’s not the fever. I’m just tired, that’s all. If you’ll excuse me—good night, Sonderfeld. Good night, gentlemen!”
Before they had time to speak their own farewells, he had left the room, a tall, stooping figure bowed under the burden of his own ineptitude.
“That’s an odd fellow,” said Theodore Nelson, as Sonderfeld poured him a generous slug.
“They’re all odd, these anthropology boys,” Lee Curtis chimed in, with his shining new knowledge. “Lots of ’em scattered round the Highlands. Queer as coots. They—”
“You mustn’t be too hard on the poor fellow.” Sonderfeld’s tone was a careful blend of tolerance, amusement and genuine affection. “He’s a clever and devoted scholar. A little prickly in company, of course, but that comes of living alone. Add to Which he is a very sick man. He has had one bout of scrub typhus. If I had not been here, I think it would have killed him. Gerda and I are very fond of him. That is why we like to have him here as often as we can.”
Theodore Nelson clucked sympathetically and plunged his snub nose into his drink. His own reading of the Lansing story made a very different text. But when a man made his living drinking other men’s whisky and eating at other men’s tables, it paid him to keep his thoughts to himself.
Lee Curtis was a less practiced diplomat. Lansing’s views on the cargo cult had been nagging at him all the evening. If they were correct, they spelt trouble for himself. The District Commissioner was a hard man and a subtle one. He had neither patience nor mercy for weak administrators and slipshod investigations. Curtis stifled a hiccup and put the question to Kurt Sonderfeld.
“He’s a clever scholar, you say. But you laughed at his ideas on the cargo cult. Why?”
“My dear fellow,” said Sonderfeld smoothly, “there is no contradiction, believe me. Lansing is a scholar, a man of books and theories. He lacks the practical experience of, say, a man like yourself.”
Nelson grinned into his drink. You clever bastard, he thought. You clever, clever bastard. There’s weather blowing up and you know it. Lansing knows it, too. But you’re not making any forecasts. You’re leaving it all to this boy, who hasn’t finished cutting his milk teeth. If there’s storm damage, you’ll be high and dry with a handsome profit.
Lee Curtis hiccupped again. The compliment was sweeter to him than the whisky and just as heady. He jabbed an unsteady finger at Sonderfeld’s shirtfront. His voice was thick and furry.
“That’s what I always say. It’s the men that do the job that really know. You do it—in a small way—on your plantation. I do it—in a big way—in my territory. The rest of ’em—the missionaries and the anthrop—anthrop—” He giggled happily. “Christ, I’m drunk! Better take me home, Nelson, before I fall flat on my face.”
Deftly, Sonderfeld maneuvered him through the last drink, smiling like a genial conspirator at the moonfaced Britisher who had survived a thousand evenings like this one. Nelson was no danger to him. Nelson was a bird of passage, hovering high above the storm waters. Nonetheless, it would pay to keep him friendly. With Curtis swaying between them, they walked out of the house.
When the cold air hit him, the boy gagged suddenly and vomited on the path. In the darkness, Sonderfeld grimaced with disgust, but he handled the situation with the ease and competence of long experience. He locked one arm round the boy’s waist, supported his head with his free hand and held him until the spasm had passed. Then he cleaned him with his own handkerchief and handed him over to Nelson with a good-humoured grin.
Nelson watched the performance with bibulous approval. The fellow was a gentleman at least. In his peripatetic career he had met a few originals and many imperfect copies, but Sonderfeld had earned the seal of the connoisseur. If it came to a showdown between the big man and the Administration, Nelson would back private enterprise every time.
Which was exactly what Sonderfeld expected him to do.
He stood a long time, watching, as their shadows swayed down the narrow path. Then he turned and walked swiftly back to the laboratory.
N’Daria was waiting for him.
She had stripped off the ceremonial costume and wrapped herself in an old housecoat that had belonged to Gerda. She was drooping with sleep and her body gave off the smell of fatigue and stale oil. There was no desire in her smile, only a furtive triumph. She held out to Sonderfeld the evening’s prize, carefully laid in a small tube of bamboo.
He took it from her without a word, slid off the top of the tube and gingerly extracted the wad with a pair of tweezers.
Strange, he thought, strange. Between those two steel fingers he held the key to power and dominion. That small foul relic of an animal act was a talisman whose touch would call up armies, rear a throne in the mountains, set on the forehead of its possessor the crown of a new empire. It was a giddy thought.
Yet it was true. The tribes were ruled in secret by the sorcerers. Chief of the sorcerers was Kumo. The man who held the blood and seed and spittle of Kumo was greater than he because at any moment, by a simple willful act, he could compass the death of Kumo. Such was the power of ancient superstition that once Kumo knew his vital juices were held by another man, he would be in perpetual bondage. Burn the tube in the fire and Kumo’s body would burn to agonizing death. Crush the tube with an ax, Kumo would feel the stone grind into his own skull and would die of the impact. Warm it a little, beat on it with a stick, Kumo’s body would bum with fever or his ears would ring with maddening noises.
It was the old, dark, fearful magic of primitive man turned against him by a twentieth-century despot.
For a long time Sonderfeld stood there, lost in the secret joy of his own triumph. The girl watched him, smiling uneasily. Then, abruptly, he replaced the tampon, closed the tube with a snap and thrust it into his pocket. He turned to her and grinned.
“You have done well, N’Daria.”
Her eyes lit up. She moved forward to touch him. He drew back in disgust. It was as if he had struck her.
“But … But … you said …”
“You stink!” said Sonderfeld softly. “You stink like a village pig. Before you begin work in the morning, wash yourself clean.”
With that he left her. She heard the door slam and the key turn in the lock. She flung herself on the low cane bed and sobbed.
Chapter Four
•
GERDA WAS ASLEEP when he came in.
She lay on her side, her face pillowed on one hand, the other lying slack across the curve of her hip. Her hair was a dark cascade against the white sheets. Her skin was like warm marble. Her lips were smiling softly, like the lips of an innocent child. He turned up the lamp and stood looking down at her. She stirred faintly, then settled again, still smiling. It was as if she mocked him, even from the frontiers of sleep.
She had been with Lansing. He knew that. She had been as warm to him as she was cold to her legal partner. She had been tender and passionate and wanton—to a straw man, limp with his own self-pity. She had put horns on her husband in his own house and there was nothing he could do about it—yet. He could strike her and she would laugh in his face. He could kill her—as soon he would kill Lansing—but her death would bring him loss instead of profit. So he must wear the horns and endure the dreaming mockery night after night, until his triumph was perfected and she was delivered once more into his hands, as she had been that winter’s day, twelve years ago … when Sturmbannführer Gottfried Reinach stood in the compound at Rehmsdorf and slapped his cane against his polished jackboots and looked over the new batch of women from Poland.
There were more than fifty of them, old and young and in-between. They were dirty and in rags. Their faces were pinched with hunger, their eyes glazed with fear. Their feet were bound with rags and old newspapers, and their skin was blotched with cold. They stood ankle-deep in the slushy snow, humble under the professional scrutiny of Gottfried Reinach.
He was an important fellow, the Sturmbannführer, ambitious, too, and careful of his career. He held medical degrees from two universities. His brief civilian practice had given him the name of a brilliant pathologist. His repugnance to Army service and his desire for rapid advancement had turned his thoughts to politics. He had joined the Party. He had made good connections—right to the door of Himmler himself—and now he was established comfortably, almost spectacularly, as Chief Research Officer, with the rank of Sturmbannführer in Rehmsdorf concentration camp. Here he directed the researches of a group of junior men on typhus vaccines, using as his subjects the decaying wrecks who were the camp inmates. He had other duties, too: the choice of subjects for the gas chambers and for the Sonderbau, the sterilization of young women of inferior race, lest childbearing interfere with their duties or increase the percentage of helots among the master men.
He had little taste for the work or for his associates, but he was a calculating fellow and, having chosen his road, he walked it resolutely—and circumspectly. His files were carefully kept. His success was minuted to the highest authorities. His failures were stifled as soon as they were born.
So, on this winter’s morning, he walked down the line of women like a buyer in a cattle yard, pointing with his little stick, sorting them into categories—this for the work commandos, that for the brothel, this other for the Officers’ Mess, these for the scrap heap. …
Until he came to the end of the line and saw Gerda Rudenko.
She was tattered and travel-stained like the others and the same fear was in her eyes, but her beauty was like a banner and her youth was still unravaged. She was a student, according to his lists. Her crime was consorting with suspected persons. She was nineteen years old.
To Sonderfeld she was a percentage profit. He had her sterilized like the others. He had her examined with more than usual care for venereal and other diseases. Then he took her into his service—clerk by day, bed and body servant by night. She was diligent because she was afraid of him and of his power to consign her to the crematorium. Because he was kind to her sometimes and not too often cruel, she was grateful, tender when he permitted it, passionate when, more and more rarely, he touched the deep spring of desire in her young body. There were even moments when fear and need brought her almost to belief in him; but as the years of her servitude spun out and she came to know him more intimately, belief became impossible. She served him still, but only with fear and with a deep and hidden hate.
Then came the last wild madness of defeat, the frenzy of murder, when the bodies piled up in the compounds and the gas chambers were choked, and the furnaces could not keep pace with the fuel that was fed to them. For the first time in his life, Gottfried Reinach was afraid—afraid of the haggard beasts in their wire pen, afraid of the vengeance that rolled in with the tanks and the gun limbers and the troop carriers.
So he struck his bargain with Gerda Rudenko.
He would take her out of the camp, save her from the final holocaust. He would marry her—not as Gottfried Reinach, but as Kurt Sonderfeld, Doctor of Medicine, bachelor, dead long since and burnt in the fire; but Sonderfeld’s records lay, complete and carefully preserved, in the steel filing cabinet.
When the final collapse came, they would merge themselves in the tide of stateless wanderers and claim protection from the liberating armies. And, lest she be tempted to accept now and betray him later, he pointed out that she, too, was compromised by her long association with Gottfried Reinach. She had enjoyed the protection of the defeated; she might well share their punishment.
She was trapped, and she knew it. She made the bargain. Three days before Rehmsdorf was taken, they left the camp. Reinach was now Sonderfeld. The dead man’s number was tattooed on his forearm; the list of his works and days was etched in his memory. He wore the filthy rags of a camp inmate, starved himself for a week and had Gerda shave his skull to complete the change of identity.
The plan worked. Slowly they sifted through the inadequate machinery of relief organizations and reestablishment camps. They answered questions and filled in papers and lived in daily fear of recognition, until one day their names were posted on the camp notice board as migrants acceptable to the Commonwealth of Australia.
A new life was opening to Kurt Sonderfeld and his wife, Gerda. A new horizon challenged his cold ambition. This time he would follow no banners; he would walk alone.
They were a week out from Genoa when Gerda had her first affair with a fellow migrant. When he taxed her with it, she smiled. When he threatened her, she laughed in his face. When he struck her, she told him, gently and without anger:
“If you ever do that to me again, Kurt, I will tell everything I know. No matter what happens to me, I will tell. Remember that. We are bound together. We cannot escape each other. But from this moment I do not wish to sleep with you, to kiss you, even to touch you ever again.”
At first he thought of divorcing her as soon as he could. Then he realized he would never sleep in peace so long as she was free and able to tell his secret. He toyed with the idea of killing her, but before he could frame a plan, she had forestalled him. They had not been two months in Australia when she told him that she had lodged papers with a bank—papers that would incriminate him if she should die before him.
No, it was he who was trapped, bound to a body he had maimed, denied its pleasures, shamed by its defiant wantonness.
As for Gerda herself, she was a woman without illusions. Cheated of love, cheated of children, she had made a bargain that guaranteed her security and comfort—and the bitter sweets of a protracted revenge. On this rickety foundation she and Kurt had built for themselves a kind of permanence, even a kind of peace. They were polite to each other. They cooperated on projects of mutual benefit. If they made love in other beds, they did so with reasonable discretion. In the new land bustling and bursting with vitality they were accepted even if they were not loved.
One of the conditions of their entry into Australia was that they should serve, each of them, for two years in any employment to which they were directed. Sonderfeld worked as a tally clerk on a dam construction project, Gerda as a waitress in the men’s canteen. Strangely, the big man was not irked by the humble work. He was learning the language, adapting himself to a new, rugged environment. Every scrap of information was scanned and filed away for future reference. He had made one mistake in his life; he was not going to risk another. Sometime, somewhere, in this young, thrusting country, a door would be opened to him and he must be ready to enter into his new estate.
Then one day he read a notice in a Government Gazette. Migrant doctors who could produce evidence of medical qualifications in Europe would be permitted to practice in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea without renewing their courses.
