I took Claire’s first letter out the backpack. A well-read piece of paper. There were photos in the airmail envelope. One showed my sister in Peru, leaning against a ruined wall. Another one was at home in our kitchen. I was on the third photograph with my arm around her, together with Mom and Dad.
Looking at my parents brought on a pang of guilt and homesickness. Was it right to just leave like that, leaving them to worry about me too?
It was done, I decided. I was in Africa now and there was no turning back. I squeezed the backpack down in front of the seat and put my bare feet up on the dusty dashboard, hoping that Tony didn’t mind. Then I re-read the letter for the umpteenth time:
‘Gaborone, 11 June 1988
Hi Foompy,
Arrived in Gabs, as the locals call the capital. It’s so small even compared to good old Cambridge. I have seen only two traffic lights so far … It’s really cold at night, because, can you believe it, it’s winter here. One moment I’m in balmy England in June and now it’s winter. Only at night, though.
It’s hot and dry during the day. Who knew that winter could be like that? It was so cold last night that I crept into my sleeping bag. Must buy a proper thick duvet and blankets tomorrow, if I can find a shop. Tony’s lucky he doesn’t get cold easily. He’s been here for almost a month, so he should know the shops in Gaborone.
I swear I saw ice-covered puddles this morning. The gardener, who looks after the company house garden (and it’s a huge house), watered the lawn yesterday and… ‘
The letter went on about the features of house and garden and how sweet Tony had been. He had greeted Claire with a bunch of flowers at the airport and after delivering her luggage to the company house, they had gone to the office to meet her new colleagues.
Those colleagues were something else. Comical, almost. I had to smile again as I read on. There was this obnoxious fellow draughtsman from Chicago, who liked to wink suggestively at her.
‘…Maybe he has a nervous tick...’ Claire wrote, but I already knew from her subsequent letters that he didn’t.
Rather a case of thinking that the sun shone out of his backside, leaving females mesmerized. Chad Sullivan fancied himself a ladies’ man. Apparently, women ran for the hills when they heard his pickup lines.
‘…Then there is Liesl, the dull, blonde girlfriend of a young engineer called Desmond Kahl. She spends the whole day in a back office with her boyfriend, but doesn’t seem to work. I’m sure she dresses like her mother.
Wolfgang Klein, head of the design team and my direct boss, is firm and fair with his staff. He’s a tall, good-looking man in his mid-fifties and very smart. The design team consists of Wolfgang’s right hand, an engineer called Werner Pfeiffer, his spunky PA Emily van Heerden, Kgomotso Min the Tswana bookkeeper, whose stepfather’s a Chinese banker and Thomas Taylor, a senior engineer, who looks like a wild Scotsman with a flaming red beard. A clutch of less interesting people complete the team...’
Claire got on easily with people, but she didn’t like the corpulent office manager, Mr. Feindlich. I knew that his name meant ‘hostile’ in German. Telling.
‘…Mr. Feindlich took me to a French (!) restaurant called The Bougainvillea yesterday. He filled me in on my colleagues over lunch. The man had nothing good to say about Emily. Thinks she’s a slut — imagine. How can a manager be so crude? And I didn’t have the impression at all. In fact I rather like Emily and Kgomotso. You know I always go by my instinct.’ (I knew) ‘Does this man think I don’t have a brain to make my own mind up?’
I sighed. Would I meet any of these people while I was in the country?
‘…Mr. Feindlich likes Desmond and his girlfriend a lot. Liesl seems to be some relation of his. She’s quite young and chubby, but looks a lot older in a cute pug-faced sort of way. I’m sure she dresses like her mother. Feindlich wanted me to go shopping with her. Oh dear! Came up with some excuse. He’s going to hate me, if he finds out that I’ll go shopping with Emily and Kgomotso instead…’
So there was a clue. Did this Mr. Feindlich really hate Claire? Perhaps not. Don’t read clues into everything, I reprimanded myself. I had scrutinized the letters over and over, but couldn’t find anything enlightening. They had little more than sentimental value in my quest to find Claire.
‘…Emily is intelligent and headstrong. 23 and quite pretty with her light-brown hair. She’s a South African from Johannesburg and goes home to visit her family at least once a month. Kgomotso is Emily’s best friend. The two girls are stark opposites in the looks department, but they have the same liquid movements and friendly personalities. I’ve been to the smaller company house in Tsholofelo. They share it with two other people. Tsholofelo is a nice suburb. Emily loves to wear sunglasses and has at least five pairs. She’s not aware of it, but men are quite attracted to her. Mr. Feindlich is aware of it ...’
Claire didn’t write much about Kgomotso in her first letter, but I gathered that the three of them had become pals. I tried to picture a company house with Claire in it.
“Bridget, hey!”
“Umm, yes?” I must have dozed off for a while. A street sign read ‘Mahalapye’.
“Wake up.”
There were soldiers in the road. We were stopped at an army roadblock.
“What’s going on Tony? Is there something wrong?” I was alarmed. Bombs, street battles…
“No, nothing wrong. Sorry I forgot to tell you. Soldiers often search cars for weapons and things to do with the military. Leave it to me. Just smile.”
I rubbed my eyes. Tony was ordered to open his boot and I smiled.
The soldiers looked very young with their machineguns slung over one shoulder and seemed nervous. Were they trigger-happy? The harsh tone and the guns made me nervous too. I had never been so close to a real weapon before. We had to produce our passports and were waved on after a couple of minutes.
“That was scary,” I said and started breathing again.
“Better get used to it. They have roadblocks in the cities as well.”
“What happens if they actually find something?”
“Well, that rarely happens. A British salesman, who travelled with an old camouflage jacket from his army days, was interrogated for a few hours. Poor chap was still rattled, when he told us his story at the Botsalo Hotel.”
Botsalo Hotel. That’s where I had phoned Tony a couple of weeks ago.
“Very comforting,” I mumbled. How could people get used to something like that?
“Just don’t carry anything army green in your car and be friendly,” Tony said.
Okay, nothing army green, I thought sleepily. The sun now wavered over the hilltops and a fine mist rose over the fields, but it was still early afternoon.
I ate another sandwich and offered Tony the one with salami. He took one bite and then stared at the road again. Did he expect a cow to come charging out from behind a hut any moment now?
“Tony, tell me something about Palapye.” We had just passed a road sign with the name of our destination on it, just below the name ‘Francistown’.
Tony took a deep breath as if he was waking up from a dream.
“Well, there isn’t much to tell. Don’t be surprised if you don’t see the houses at first.” He took another bite from the salami sandwich he had deposited on the dashboard.
“Most of the kraals are hidden by motsetsi hedges and dried branches.”
“Motsi what?” I didn’t understand.
“Motsetsi. Tall evergreen plants. Then there is a new tar road all