The Marks of Cain

39

For a kilometre or more, Angus was silent. David tried again. More silence. For the third time, David asked the question. This time Angus cleared his throat and said, with an uncharacteristic tinge of nerves in his voice, like he was choked on desert dust:

‘What makes you say that?’

David didn’t want to say: I saw Miguel cutting up your boyfriend. But he felt he had no choice. Prefacing his answer with a warning, he told the Scotsman. About Miguel in the night. And then the events in the Cagot House. The body liquor of the stored and decomposed bodies.

Angus stared out of the car window, at the desolation of the great Namib. Then he said, without turning:

‘Yes, of course. And that’s why the smoke trick worked.’

Amy interrupted.

‘Sorry? What?’

‘It seems…somehow cruel. Discussing it. The Cagots are almost dead. Why heap this ordure on their grave?’

‘But -’

‘But now you’ve guessed. Now you’ve actually…witnessed…I might as well be fucking honest. Yes it’s true. Miguel is cannibalistic. Because he’s a Cagot. Part of their cursed genetic inheritance.’ He leaned forward. ‘The Cagots were cannibals.’

Amy shook her head.

‘Please…please explain.’

‘They were accused in early medieval times of eating human flesh, and the reputation stuck. Of course it could have been nonsense, like the Jewish blood libel – yet it was true. They really were…the Serpent Seed, the Curse of Cain. A race apart, a breed of cursed people. All of it true.’

‘How? I don’t get it!’ Amy was pale with anger; her white face framed by the yellow sands of the Naukluft, through the window. ‘Eloise? She is no madwoman. And she never said any of this?’

‘Well, she wouldn’t, would she?’ Angus spat out his sarcasm. ‘It’s the great wild shame of the Cagots, not something you mention to the neighbours – why don’t you pop round for a dinner, bring a fat friend -’

‘But what’s the science?’ David steered the car between two dead and spiky trees. ‘Cannibalism? How the hell does that…evolve?’

Angus frowned. ‘It’s because of the inbred isolated nature of the Cagots. Take their syndactyly, webbed toes and feet. This is typical of mountain peoples, with small gene pools. Syndactyly is associated with many chromosomal disorders. Some of them lead to psychoses, violence, strange sexual urges – who knows – you see?’

Any flashed a glance at David, then at Angus.

‘Miguel was highly…sexual.’

‘Excess libido, yep.’ Angus was actually smiling. ‘Hypersexuality, satyriasis. And the hypersomnia.’

‘He always fell asleep after sex.’

‘Typical man. What can you do.’ Angus gazed at nothing, then went on: ‘So, I suspect, Miguel has some obscure combination of Klein Levin and Hallervorden-Spatz syndromes, not unknown to the average Cagot. This syndrome will get worse over time. And one of the psychosexual symptoms can be anthrophagy. Cannibalism! I realized he had cannibalist urges when I saw him sniffing the smoke…last night.’

David checked the mirror: there was some obvious and shocking sadness in the Scotsman’s aggressive humour, his determined smile.

Amy said: ‘So that’s why the euphorbia worked.’

‘Exactly. After I watched him with poor Alfie, I knew he would want to sniff the smoke again, the smell of burning…human flesh. I realized he would do that when they started to toast you, David. Wouldn’t be able to resist.’

‘And euphorbia?’

‘Euphorbia virosa. Also known as Bushman’s poison. Eating the leaves will kill you quickly. The woodsmoke can kill over time and knock you out very quickly. My gamble was that Miguel would step forward and inhale, try and smell the delicious scent.’

David felt a profound queasiness, like vertigo:

‘But Angus. If Miguel hadn’t stepped forward and…inhaled…the euphorbia smoke would have killed me.’

‘Yes, well. I figured you wouldn’t mind dying quicker by poison rather than waiting to be chargrilled.’

The car was quiet. The old dirt track turned onto a proper road. Black and tarmacked and murderously straight: like a fine needle of jet pointing due south. The sun was azimuthal in the sky, the shapes of running ostriches spotted the far and desolate horizon. David thought of his frail grandfather, back at the hospice in the desert: desolada, desolada, desolada.

The sadness and shame of his grandfather; the terrible fate of his parents.

Amy spoke: ‘Where are we going?’

‘Rehoboth. City of the Bastards.’

‘Sorry?’

David checked in the mirror, Angus was still wearing that odd, cocky smile.

‘I’m going to see Alphonse’s mother, just for a minute. To tell her what happened. Alphonse was a Baster. A Bastard. His mother lives in Rehoboth and we need to get there soon because Miguel is not dead and his men will find a way out of the desert and they will come to the Sperrgebiet, they will come for Eloise -’

Amy interjected: ‘Why didn’t he believe you? When you told him Eloise was in the Forbidden Zone? Why did he continue to…do what he did? He had his answer.’

Angus scoffed.

‘You still don’t see? This man is driven by his shameful urges, his Cagot cannibalism. Probably he has kept a hold on it for years, but as the syndrome worsens the most primal and evil of his desires are surfacing -’

‘He bit the hand of the Cagot woman he killed in Gurs. Eloise’s grandmother. The cop called it “experimental” -’

‘There you are. In one. He’s yielding to these base desires, at last, as he goes finally mad. The syndrome tightens and grips. You can overtake this car – we need to keep moving.’

It was the first vehicle they had seen in an hour. David sped by, the car driver was a big, German-looking man. Who flashed his headlights as they passed: two blinks of silver in the shimmering heat.

Angus continued: ‘So you see, Miguel used our predicament as an excuse to…cook someone. He had his answer but his impulses were predominant. What he really wanted was human flesh. As much as possible. A chance to feed his worst urges. He couldn’t help himself.’

‘And now?’

‘He will be after Eloise. He still has a job to do, after all. Destroy the experiments and stop our tests and then kill Eloise, the last of the Cagots.’

A terrible thought struck David.

‘Angus…Is Eloise also mad?’

‘No. Not every Cagot suffers these syndromes. She’s fine. And plenty of Cagots are – or were – perfectly healthy. Especially at the beginning of their…isolation.’

‘But then?’

‘As the gene pool dried up, over centuries, the bad genetic stuff recrudesced, healthier Cagots became rarer, and so the poor mad Cagots were shunned with ever greater severity, as a pariah tribe, and so the vicious genetic circle tightened. They were forced to inbreed, due to lack of partners; perhaps they were reduced to incest. Thus creating more cannibals and cretins and web-toed rapists. We better get petrol.’

The fuel station was a sudden outpost of sophisticated business in the bleak empty desert. One minivan was decanting half a dozen nuns, black nuns with smiling black faces, laughing. A couple of motorbikers were sitting in the shade, pouring bottles of water over their sunburned foreheads.

Watered and refuelled, they bought nuts and wizened apples and sticks of biltong. Then they climbed back in. The endless black strip of the road unfurled through the wastes.

Angus was still talkative: it was as if he saw conversation as a way of avoiding any contemplation of what they had been through. David was happy to go along; he, likewise, didn’t want to consider what they had so recently endured.

‘So tell me. You two.’ Angus sank some water. ‘We need to know who betrayed us.’

‘Yes…’

‘I think it’s pretty obvious. Don’t you?’

David said: ‘No.’

Angus tutted.

‘You were obviously set up in Swakop. By that guy. Hans Petersen. He was waiting for you. Like you just bumped into him and he kindly drove you to see us? Och right. I had suspicions when you showed but I was a halfwit, got distracted, didn’t do anything about it. Didn’t think.’

David protested:

‘I don’t think he’d betray us – No -’

‘Fuck that, it was him. The elephant man. He is known in Namibia, hates Nazis, any hint of racial science. They probably told him we were doing the Fischer experiments, he agreed to help – do a set up – I should have guessed.’

‘We didn’t tell him why we were going.’

‘He knew already. They had someone in Swakop tell him, so he was ready to befriend you, so you would give away Eloise’s whereabouts, lucky for us I moved her -’ Another slug of water. ‘Anyfuckinghow, here we go. The City of the Bastards.’

They were driving into a largish town, ringed with fuel stations and metal bungalows. Telephone masts stood whitely on shallow dusty hills, the streets were wide and languid in the heat and blessed with German names: Bahnhofstrasse; Kaisersstrasse. Big dogs ran behind tall wire fences. Dark orange girls laughed outside a pink bungalow called Viljoen’s Pool Hall. David rolled down the window and stared at the shoppers stepping inside one supermarket, Spar.

The people were strikingly beautiful. Like Alphonse. Coffee-coloured skin, slanting eyes, extraordinarily elegant cheekbones.

‘So who are the Basters?’

Angus explained. ‘The crossbred descendants of strapping Dutch settlers and petite khoisan tribesmen: the famous Bushmen of the kalahari. The Dutch and the Bushmen intermarried in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Cape Colony. Take a left here. This is where -’ His voice cracked for a second. ‘This is where Alphonse’s family live. I met him at Windhoek University. I needed an assistant. He was so beautiful, a beautiful bastard of Rehoboth.’

Amy glanced at David. Then she said: ‘Angus, if you want to…be alone for while…we can…’

‘No no no. I’m fine. I’m fine. Let me talk. Let me explain. Amy, the Basters were hated and despised from both sides because they were such unusual half castes, such extreme hybrids. The racial prejudice they faced drove them north, across the thirstland, into Namibia. So they settled here on the high plateau south of Windhoek. And they farmed cattle.’ Angus gestured through the car window at a passing butcher’s shop, with fiercely caged windows. ‘They actually founded their own nation with its own flag and anthem. The nation of the bastards. That’s what Baster means. Bastard.’ Angus chuckled. ‘And they’re still here today. A precious genetic remnant. The unique inheritance of the Basters makes them rhapsodically beautiful – cocoa coloured, high cheekboned, sometimes blond yet simultaneously dark. Literally the most beautiful people in the world. As you can see – look at that girl there, by the post office. Stunning. They also like a drink, and they gamble. And they brawl. All the time, whenever they get drunk. Clock the fences. OK, here’s the house. Alfie’s mum. Five minutes.’

It was a bright blue bungalow, with a basketball hoop over the garage, and another tall wire fence around a neat if austere grass space. It could have been a house in America, but for the burning African sun and the acacia trees on the street and the strange slender beautiful cheekboned people laughing on the stoop of the Lutheran Church with the lurid green Le Palace gambling hall next door.

David and Amy said nothing. They sat in the car in the heat and she touched his hand and he squeezed her hand and they said nothing.

The Scotsman emerged.

‘That was…fun.’ He waved away any inquiries, and ordered David to drive on. ‘Drive south. Let’s just get there. Just get to the Sperrgebiet as fast as we can. Go!’

As they drove he talked – and talked. He talked of the Basters and Eugen Fischer. He spoke, it seemed, as a therapeutic measure. David listened to the mesmerizing babble of Angus’s talk. Half soothed, half alarmed. The deserts were encroaching again, as they sped south along the straight back road at a hundred miles an hour. The road was so empty and straight and good and flat it felt like they were doing thirty, across the wilderness. They saw virtually no other cars.

‘So you want to know why Fischer was here. In Rehoboth. In Namibia. Right? Yeah?’

David shrugged.

‘I guess.’

‘Simple answer. Because it’s such a paradise for someone interested in genetics, like Fischer. There is more human genetic variation in Africa than anywhere else on earth. And there is maybe more in Namibia than anywhere in Africa. From the Nama to the Cape Malay to the purebred Boer. And I’ve sampled them all. I got them all. I’ve even sampled the khoisan, the Bushmen! Alfie’s ancestors…They are very important, to the Fischer experiments. Now we need to go right, off road. Use the track.’

The wastes swallowed them, at once. The car growled along a dead valley, another vlei of dust and flattened salt. The dunes were smaller than before.

Angus went on: ‘So what was Fischer doing here? Fischer believed that, technically, the Bushmen were a special kind of human. Certainly they are a unique adaptation to the dry desert lands. They are very small, and nimble, but they have all the necessary features, as it were. They have been cleverly miniaturized by evolution. Like Japanese electronics. I call them the Sony Bushman.’

‘In what way? How are they different?’

‘The Bushmen have distinct genetics and physiognomy. Take the…steatopygia -’

‘Steato – what?’

‘The enormous buttocks. They are an adaptation to climatic harshness and regular famine. Like a camel’s hump. And the women also have something called a Hottentot apron. Francis Galtony the great eugenicist, called it hypertrophy of the nymphae. Which is very delicate. He actually examined the women’s vaginas with a sextant.’

‘Are you saying,’ Amy asked, her voice tremulous, ‘that the women of the Bushmen, the Hottentots or whatever, that they have different…genitals?’

‘Yes. They do. Different labia. They are distended and slightly askew. If the Bushmen were, like, seagulls, a taxonomist would probably put them in their own category. A subspecies.’ Angus smiled in the car mirror at David’s appalled and astonished face. ‘Incidentally isn’t it weird that Eugen Fischer, the greatest eugenicist after Galton, was called Eugen? It’s like Charles Darwin’s parents calling him Evolute Darwin instead of Chas.’ He paused. ‘Not that Fischer was the most consistent racist. He wasn’t. When he was here he befriended the Kellermans. He liked nice cultured intelligent millionaire Jews in Johannesburg and Cape Town – with beautiful Jewish wives. He was less keen on Zulus. OK where are we?’

Angus stared at the drifting sands ahead. The dunes were nearly all gone now, they were entering a flatter, slightly greener landscape; still desert, but with the odd little camelthorn tree, and yellow acres of pristine dust. David checked his watch. They had been driving for many hours. Hundreds and hundreds of miles, right across central Namibia. They hadn’t seen one other human being.

Angus said: ‘We should head for Aus. Then across the desert to Rosh.’ Angus squinted at the sun. ‘Though we’re not gonna make Aus before dark…Yes take that track there, by the ranch gates.’ He sat back. ‘So I was saying about the Hottentots. The Hotties are the sedentary version of the Bushmen, the Khoisan. Anyway, they had these creepy habits that the early researchers found altogether disturbing. Like the priest urinating on the newly wed couple, that wasn’t too popular. And the worshipping of grasshoppers. And of course the constant eating of intestines was a big winner. And when they get married the Bushmen have one single teste removed. How weird is that?’ He grinned, with a certain wildness. ‘I always used to…tease Alfie about that. Told him to come and live with me in Scotland with his one teste. So he could be Monorch of the Glen.’

Amy spoke up, her voice full of emotion: ‘Angus, I don’t think this is funny.’

‘No?’

‘Are you simply racist? Or just a bit racist?’

A huge plume of dust was riding behind them, like a bridal train of orange-grey floating on a breeze.

Angus snapped his reply: ‘I despise racism. I hate it. Racism is stupid. It’s like hating donkeys for not being sheep. Besides…we are all the children of God. All brothers and sisters.’

David was startled.

‘You believe in God?’

The scientist was almost angry.

‘How can you not believe in God? In a place like this? This is the last and greatest Namibian desert. The Succulent Karoo. Look at it, the driest place in the world, arguably, but watered by the fogs that come off the sea – thataway. Check the farcical trees. Entirely different ecosystem.’

He was pointing at a fat thorny awkward sapling, with massive spikes stark against the cloudless blue.

‘Koekerboom. The fauna and flora here are remarkable: lunatic cacti, insane beetles, thousand-year-old trees that burrow underground. There are also hyenas: a uniquely vicious subspecies called the strandwolf. Saw one once near Luderitz, frightened the living shit out of me. They prowl the beaches eating seal pups. Look like stage villains.’

David thought of Miguel, out there, hunting them down. The strandwolf.

Angus was still talking, a determined monologue. ‘But this is why I believe. Look at it. Look at it! It’s not an accident so many religions come from the desert. And this is the most daunting of all deserts. Look at this landscape!’ He waved, quite furiously, at the wilderness. ‘I’d like to drop a planeload of atheists at Luderitz airport and send them out across the wastes with a packet of cashew nuts. Within ten days they’d either be dead or believers. Atheists. Fuck ’em. Adolescent wankers.’

David was perplexed. He simply couldn’t work out Angus Nairn. He was like no one he had ever met. Angus was still talking.

‘Of course that doesn’t mean God is this nice guy. He ain’t. The universe is fascist. It is a tyranny, a mad dictatorship. Stalin’s Terror. Saddam’s Iraq. It’s all so random and scary. We all lie there at night thinking, when will death come for me? Don’t we? And one by one, we disappear. The Death Gestapo comes, and they drag you away, and you are expertly tortured, with lung cancer, heart failure, Alzheimer’s.’ Angus was talking to himself, almost. ‘And people whisper, they tell each other, “You hear about so-and-so? He’s gone. He’s gone as well. They took him last night…”.’ He shook his head. ‘Alphonse, poor fucking Alphonse…’

The car motored south. Angus was, finally, quite silent.

David thought of his grandfather, and that eagle circling the Arizona sky. The Sonora desert was beautiful, but Angus was right: this desert, the Succulent Karoo, was even more stirring, in a haunted way. The green and yellow bushman’s grass, the pale acacias, the pink acid wastes scarred by long disused railways. It was desolate but transfixing: and the violet and purple mountains, the sudden inselbergs, they floated above the hazy and aethereal sands like a kind of memory; a memory of mountains, in the ghost of a landscape.

He stared and drove, and thought of his grandfather. His grandfather’s strange and guilty shame.

Desolada, desolada, desolada…

Three hours later the sun had gone, and the violet-purples had turned to grainy black, and they were racing, silently and very fast, through the darkness. The true and noble darkness of the desert.

It was cold.

They were quiet and exhausted. Every so often the eyes of a nocturnal animal would catch in the headlights – a bat-eared fox, a desert hare. Then darkness. And then the headlights illuminated a big sign: Sperrgebiet. Diamond Zone 1. Extreme Danger.

‘OK,’ said Angus. ‘Down that dirt road.’

Two hundred metres further, sudden lights blazed. Two armed black men had emerged from a wooden hut, with rifles cocked. They had torches: their faces were grim and determined.

‘Stop!’

Angus leaned out of the car.

‘Solomon. Tilac. It’s me!’

A silence.

‘Angus?’

Now the men were smiling.

‘Angus. You de bloody mad man. We could have shoot you!’

‘Sorry – sorry -’

The guards stepped back. One of them was flamboyantly waving them through.

They sped past; the untarred road was rumbling and rocky. Though it was hard to tell in the silvering darkness, the landscape seemed to have changed. The night air was still cooler. David realized he could smell the sea, salty and pungent.

And there indeed was the ocean, glittering malevolently in the moonlight. The road ran up and over seaside rocks, bare grey rocks. Ahead of them was the twinkle of more lights: the silhouette of structure, a large complex of buildings, bristling with antennae and satellite dishes.

‘Tamara Minehead,’ said Angus. ‘Park here.’

The reaction to their arrival was immediate: several men came straight out, one of them a tall and languid white man, in an intoxicatingly impractical grey flannel suit.

‘Nathan,’ said Angus, very wearily. ‘This is Amy…Myerson and David…Martinez. Friends…those friends of Eloise. Friends, this is Nathan Kellerman.’

Nathan Kellerman stepped closer. He was young and handsome.

‘My God, Angus, what happened to you all? You look terrible.’

‘We’re fine. Just need sleep. Fine.’

‘And Alphonse, where is Alphonse? Everyone else? What the hell happened?’

Angus shrugged; a painful silence enveloped them.

Nathan Kellerman lifted a manicured hand. His tone sharpened. His accent was faintly American.

‘Do you have the blood samples? The last blood samples, Angus!’

‘Yes.’

‘Then -’ David could see Kellerman’s relieved smile, his perfect white teeth. ‘Then all is well. Let’s go inside. Robbie, Anton. Help the good people.’

Slowly they shuffled through the bright modern building: offices, corridors, bedrooms. The cleanliness and modernity made an intense contrast to the privations of the desert. Expensively thin TVs, gleaming white kitchens. Cold steel fridges with glittering test tubes. It was another stunning dislocation, like stumbling on a Venetian palazzo in the jungle.

David and Amy were led to a bedroom. He tried to look calm and normal as they undressed, but some uncrystallized thought was troubling him. Something. Something. What was it?

He looked at his hands. Were they twitching? Maybe there had been some infection. From the body liquor.

He thought of Miguel sniffing the meat. He thought of Amy’s eyes as she looked at him; would she still look at Miguel the same way, sometime? David was bewildered by the absence of Eloise. Amy came close and kissed him.

‘Hey -’

‘Eloise,’ he said. ‘Where is Eloise…?’

‘I know,’ said Amy. ‘I know. But…I am so tired. I can’t even think…Let’s just…Tomorrow…’

Amy was nuzzling close. Scared and close and exhausted. The bedroom looked out onto the sea; a sharp salty breeze was lifting the curtains through the open window. The moon was high. It looked like a white screaming face, the face of someone being tormented.

They lay together in the moonlit bedroom, quite still, for a few moments.

Then they quickly fell asleep.

And he dreamed.

He was eating some meat, chewing on some gristly biltong; the dried meat was really gristly and bony. He was in his grandfather’s hospital room, the desert was blinding outside. Then Granddad reached from his bed and pointed. David turned, with a mouthful of biltong, and he saw a naked girl, standing outside in the desert. And then he saw: she had no hands. And the reason she had no hands was because David was eating her hands. He realized he was eating her hands.

David woke with a jolt of terror; it was the middle of the night, he was staring at the still-screaming silent desert moon, through the square windows, with Amy snoring courteously beside him.

At last he had the truth. David now realized the truth: why he had been thinking about his grandfather. His grandfather’s shame and guilt. The inability to explain, the terrible furtiveness.

He was in the Forbidden Zone in his mind, he had crossed into the Forbidden Land.

Granddad was a Cagot. It was the only explanation that made any sense; that explained it all. Granddad was a Cagot. An untouchable. A pariah. A cannibal of Gascony. The Cagots were indeed cannibals. And David was descended from a Cagot: he was one of them.

Amy snored and turned over; her bare young shoulder was soft in the moonlight. Soft like a succulent peach.