Mondaugen's story

 

I

 One May morning in 1922 (meaning nearly winter here in the Warmbad district)  a young engineering student named Kurt Mondaugen, late of the Technical  University in Munich, arrived at a white outpost near the village of  Kalkfontein South. More voluptuous than fat, with fair hair, long eyelashes  and a shy smile that enchanted older women, Mondaugen sat in an aged Cape  cart idly picking his nose, waiting for the sun to come up and contemplating  the pontok or grass hut of Willem van Wijk, a minor extremity of the  Administration in Windhoek. His horse drowsed and collected dew while  Mondaugen squirmed on the seat, trying to control anger, confusion,  petulance; and below the farthest verge of the Kalahari, that vast death,  the tardy sun mocked him.

Originally a native of Leipzig, Mondaugen exhibited at least two aberrations  peculiar to the region. One (minor), he had the Saxon habit of attaching  diminutive endings to nouns, animate or inanimate, at apparent random. Two  (major), he shared with his fellow-citizen Karl Baedeker a basic distrust  of the South, however relative a region that might be. Imagine then the  irony with which he viewed his present condition, and the horrid perversity  he fancied had driven him first to Munich for advanced study, then (as if,  like melancholy, this southsickness were progressive and incurable) finally  to leave depression-time in Munich, journey into this other hemisphere, and  enter mirror-time in the South-West Protectorate.

Mondaugen was here as part of a program having to do with atmospheric radio  disturbances: sferics for short. During the Great War one H. Barkhausen,  listening in on telephone messages among the Allied forces, heard a series  of falling tones, much like a slide whistle descending in pitch. Each of  these "whistlers" (as Barkhausen named them) lasted only about a second and  seemed to be in the low or audio-frequency range. As it turned out, the  whistler was only the first of a family of sferics whose taxonomy was to  include clicks, hooks, risers, nose-whistlers and one like a warbling of  birds called the dawn chorus. No one knew exactly what caused any of them.  Some said sunspots, others lightning bursts; but everyone agreed that in  there someplace was the earth's magnetic field, so a plan evolved to keep a  record of sferics received at different latitudes. Mondaugen, near the  bottom of the list, drew South-West Africa, and was ordered to set up his  equipment as close to 28 degrees S. as he conveniently could.

It had disturbed him at first, having to live in what had once been a German  colony. Like most violent young men - and not a few stuffy old ones - he  found the idea of defeat hateful. But he soon discovered that many Germans  who'd been landowners before the war had simply continued on, allowed by the  government of the Cape to keep their citizenship, property and native  workers. A kind of expatriate social life bad indeed developed at the farm  of one Foppl, in the northern part of the district, between the Karas range  and the marches of the Kalahari, and within a day's journey of Mondaugen's  recovery station. Boisterous were the parties, lively the music, jolly the  girls that had filled Foppl's baroque plantation house nearly every night  since Mondaugen's arrival, in a seemingly eternal Fasching. But now what  well-being he'd found in this godforsaken region seemed about to evaporate.

The sun rose and van Wijk appeared in his doorway like a two-dimensional  figure jerked suddenly onstage by hidden pulleys. A vulture lit in front of  the but and stared at van Wijk. Mondaugen himself acquired motion; jumped  down off the cart, moved toward the but.

Van Wijk waved a bottle of homemade beer at him. "I know," he shouted across  the parched earth between them, "I know. I've been up all night with it. You  think I don't have more to worry about?"

"My antennas," Mondaugen cried.

"Your antennas, my Warmbad district," the Boer said. He was half drunk. "Do  you know what happened yesterday? Get worried. Abraham Morris has crossed  the Orange."

Which, as had been intended, shook Mondaugen. He managed, "Only Morris?"

"Six men, some women and children rifles, stock. It isn't that. Morris isn't  a man. He's a Messiah."

Mondaugen's annoyance had given way all at once to fear; fear began to bud  from his intestinal walls.

"They threatened to rip down your antennas, didn't they."

But he'd done nothing ....

Van Wijk snorted. "You contributed. You told me you'd listen for  disturbances and record certain data. You didn't say you'd blast them out  all over my bush country and become a disturbance yourself. The  Bondelswaartz believe in ghosts, the sferics frighten them. Frightened,  they're dangerous."

Mondaugen admitted he'd been using an audio amplifier and loudspeaker. "I  fall asleep," he explained. "Different sorts come in at different times of  day. I'm a one-man research team, I have to sleep sometime. The little  loudspeaker is set up at the head of my cot, I've conditioned myself to  awake instantaneously, so no more than the first few of any group are lost .  . ."

"When you return to your station," van Wijk cut in, "those antennas will be  down, and your equipment smashed. A moment -" as the young man turned,  redfaced and snuffling - "before you dash off screaming revenge, one word.  Just one. An unpleasant word: rebellion."

"Every time a Bondel talks back to you people, it's rebellion." Mondaugen  looked as if he might cry.

"Abraham Morris has joined forces by now with Jacobus Christian and Tim  Beukes. They're trekking north. You saw for yourself that they'd heard about  it already in your own neighborhood. It wouldn't surprise me if every  Bondelswaartz in the district were under arms within the week. Not to  mention a number of homicidally-disposed Veldschoendragers and Witboois from  up north. Witboois are always looking for a fight." Inside the but a  telephone began to ring. Van Wijk saw the look on Mondaugen's face. "Yes,"  he said. "Wait here, it may be interesting news." He vanished inside. From a  nearby but came the sound of a Bondelswaartz pennywhistle, insubstantial as  wind monotonous as sunlight in a dry season. Mondaugen listened as if it had  something to say to him. It didn't.

Van Wijk appeared in the doorway. "Now listen to me, younker, if I were you  I would go to Warmbad and stay there until this blows over."

"What's happened."

"That was the location superintendent at Guruchas. Apparently they caught up  with Morris, and a Sergeant van Niekerk tried an hour ago to get him to come  in to Warmbad peacefully. Morris refused, van Niekerk placed his hand an  Morris's shoulder in token of arrest. According to the Bondel version -  which you may be sure has already spread to the Portuguese frontier - the  Sergeant then proclaimed 'Die lood van die Goevernement sal nou op julle  smelt.' The lead of the Government shall now melt upon you. Poetic, Wouldn't  you say?

"The Bondels with Morris took it as a declaration of war. So the balloon's  gone up, Mondaugen. Go to Warmbad, better yet keep going and get safely  across the Orange. That's my best advice."

"No, no," Mondaugen said, "I am something of a coward, you know that. But  tell me your second-best advice, because you see there are my antennas."

"You worry about your antennas as if they sprouted from your forehead. Go  ahead. Return - if you have the courage, which I certainly don't - return  up-country and tell them at Foppl's what you've heard here. Hole up in that  fortress of his. If you want my own opinion it will be a blood bath. You  weren't here in 1904. But ask Foppl. He remembers. Tell him the days of yon  Trotha are back again."

"You could have prevented this," Mondaugen cried. "Isn't that what you're  all here for, to keep them happy? To remove any need for rebellion?"

Van Wijk exploded in a bitter fit of laughing. "You seem," he finally  drawled, "to be under certain delusions about the civil service. History,  the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally  sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the  morning is history. He doesn't fight it, he tries to coexist with it.

"Die lood van die Goevernement indeed. We are, perhaps, the lead weights of  a fantastic clock, necessary to keep it in motion, to keep an ordered sense  of history and time prevailing against chaos. Very well! Let a few of them  melt. Let the clock tell false time for a while. But the weights will be  reforged, and rehung, and if there doesn't happen to be one there in the  shape or name of Willem van Wijk to make it run right again, so much the  worse for me."

To this curious soliloquy Kurt Mondaugen flipped a desperate farewell  salute, climbed into his Cape cart, and headed back up-country. The trip was  uneventful. Once in a great while an oxcart would materialize out of the  scrubland; or a jet-black kite would come to hang in the sky, studying  something small and quick among the cactus and thorn trees. The sun was hot.  Mondaugen leaked at every orifice; fell asleep, was jolted awake; once  dreamed gunshots and human screams. He arrived at the recovery station in  the afternoon, found the Bondel village nearby quiet and his equipment  undisturbed. Working as quickly as he could, he dismantled the antennas and  packed them and the receiving equipment in the Cape cart. Half a dozen  Bondelswaartz stood around watching. By the time he was ready to leave the  sun was nearly down. From time to time, at the edges of his field of vision,  Mondaugen would see small scurrying bands of Bondels, seeming almost to  merge with the twilight, moving in and out of the small settlement in every  direction. Somewhere to the west a dogfight had started. As he tightened the  last half-hitch a pennywhistle began to play nearby, and it took him only a  moment to realize that the player was imitating sferics. Bondels who were  watching started to giggle. The laughter swelled, until it sounded like a  jungleful of small exotic animals, fleeing some basic danger. But Mondaugen  knew well enough who was fleeing what. The sun set, he climbed on the cart.  No one said anything in farewell: all he heard at his back were the whistle  and the laughter.

It was several more hours to Foppl's. The only incident on route was a  flurry of gunfire - real, this time - off to his left, behind a hill. At  last, quite early in the morning, the lights of Foppl's burst on him  suddenly out of the scrubland's absolute blackness. He crossed a small  ravine on a plank bridge and drew up before the door.

As usual a party was in progress, a hundred windows blazed, the gargoyles,  arabesques, pargeting and fretwork of Foppl's "villa" vibrated in the  African night. A cluster of girls and Foppl himself stood at the door while  the farm's Bondels offloaded the Cape cart and Mondaugen reported the  situation.

The news alarmed certain of Foppl's neighbors who owned farms and stock  nearby. "But it would be best," Foppl announced to the party, "if we all  stayed here. If there's to be burning and destruction, it will happen  whether or not you're there to defend your own. If we disperse our strength  they can destroy us as well as our farms. This house is the best fortress in  the region: strong, easily defended. House and grounds are protected on all  sides by deep ravines. There is more than enough food, good wine, music  and -" winking lewdly - "beautiful women.

"To hell with them out there. Let them have their war. In here we shall hold  Fasching. Bolt the doors, seal the windows, tear down the plank bridges and  distribute arms. Tonight we enter a state of siege."

 

II

 Thus began Foppl's Siege Party. Mondaugen left after two and a half months.  In that time no one had ventured outside, or received any news from the rest  of the district. By the time Mondaugen departed, a dozen bottles of wine  still lay cobwebbed in the cellar, a dozen cattle remained to be  slaughtered. The vegetable garden behind the house was still abundant with  tomatoes, yams, chard, herbs. So affluent was the farmer Foppl.

The day after Mondaugen's arrival, the house and grounds were sealed off  from the outside world. Up went an inner palisade of strong logs, pointed at  the top, and down went the bridges. A watch list was made up, a General  Staff appointed, all in the spirit of a new party game.

A curious crew were thus thrown together. Many, of course, were German: rich  neighbors, visitors from Windhoek and Swakopmund. But there were also Dutch  and English from the Union; Italians, Austrians, Belgians from the diamond  fields near the coast; French, Russian, Spanish and one Pole from various  corners of the earth; all creating the appearance of a tiny European  Conclave or League of Nations, assembled here while political chaos howled  outside.

Early on the morning after his arrival, Mondaugen was up on the roof,  stringing his antennas along the iron fanciwork that topped the villa's  highest gable. He had an uninspiring view of ravines, grass dry pans, dust,  scrub; all repeating, undulating east to the eventual wastes of the  Kalahari; north to a distant yellow exhalation that rose from far under the  horizon and seemed to hang eternally over the Tropic of Capricorn.

Back here Mondaugen could also see down into a kind of inner courtyard.  Sunlight, filtered through a great sandstorm far away in the desert, bounced  off an open bay window and down, too bright, as if amplified, into the  courtyard to illuminate a patch or pool of deep red. Twin tendrils of it  extended to a nearby doorway. Mondaugen shivered and stared. The reflected  sunlight vanished up a wall and into the sky. He looked up, saw the window  opposite complete its swing open and a woman of indeterminate age in a  negligee of peacock blues and greens squint into the sun. Her left hand rose  to her left eye, fumbled there as if positioning a monocle. Mondaugen  crouched behind curlicues  of wrought iron, astonished not so much at  anything in her appearance as at his own latent desire to see and not be  seen. He waited for the sun or her chance movement to show him nipples,  navel, pubic hair.

But she had seen him. "Come out, come out, gargoyle," she called playfully.  Mondaugen lurched vertical, lost his balance, nearly fell off the roof,  grabbed hold of a lightning rod, slid to a 45 degree angle and began to  laugh.

"My little antennas," he gurgled.

"Come to the roof garden," she invited, and disappeared then back into a  white room turned to blinding enigma by a sun finally free of its Kalahari.

He completed his job of setting up the antennas, then made his way round  cupolas and chimney pots, up and down slopes and slates till at length he  vaulted clumsily over a low wall and it seemed some tropic as well, for the  life there he found too lavish, spectral, probably carnivorous; not in good  taste.

"How pretty he is." The woman, dressed now in jodhpurs and an army shirt,  leaned against the wall, smoking a cigarette. All at once, as he'd been  half-expecting, cries of pain lanced a morning quiet that had known only  visiting kites and wind, and the dry rustling of the exterior veld.

 

Mondaugen knew, without having to run to see, that the cries had come from  the courtyard where he'd seen the crimson stain. Neither he nor the woman  moved. It somehow having become part of a mutual constraint that neither of  them show curiosity. Voila: conspiracy already, without a dozen words having  passed between them.

Her name proved to be Vera Meroving, her companion a Lieutenant Weissmann,  her city Munich.

"Perhaps we even met one Fasching," she said, "masked and strangers."

Mondaugen doubted, but had they met: were there any least basis for that  "conspiracy" a moment ago: it would surely have been somewhere like Munich,  a city dying of abandon, venality, a mark swollen with fiscal cancer.

As the distance between them gradually diminished Mondaugen saw that her  left eye was artificial: she, noticing his curiosity, obligingly removed the  eye and held it out to him in the hollow of her hand. A bubble blown  translucent, its "white" would show up when in the socket as a half-lit sea  green. A fine network of nearly microscopic fractures covered its surface.  Inside were the delicately-wrought wheels, springs, ratchets of a watch,  wound by a gold key which Fraulein Meroving wore on a slender chain round  her neck. Darker green and flecks of gold had been fused into twelve vaguely  zodiacal shapes, placed annular on the surface of the bubble to represent  the iris and also the face of the watch.

"What was it like outside?"

He told her the little he knew. Her hands had begun to tremble: he noticed  it when she went to replace the eye. He could scarcely hear her when she  said:

"It could be 1904 again."

Curious: van Wijk had said that. What was 1904 to these people? He was about  to ask her when Lieutenant Weissmann appeared in mufti from behind an  unwholesomelooking palm and pulled her by the hand, back into the depths of  the house.

Two things made Foppl's a fortunate place to be carrying on sferic research.  First, the farmer had given Mondaugen a room to himself in a turret at one  corner of the house; a little enclave of scientific endeavor, buffered by a  number of empty storage roams and with access to the roof through a  stained-glass window portraying an early Christian martyr being devoured by  wild beasts.

Second, modest though their demands were, there was an auxiliary source of  electric power for his receivers in the small generator Foppl kept to light  the giant chandelier in the dining hall. Rather than rely, as he had been  doing, on a number of bulky batteries, Mondaugen was sure it wouldn't be too  difficult simply to tap off and devise circuitry to modify what power he  needed, either to operate the equipment directly or to recharge the  batteries. Accordingly, that afternoon, after arranging his effects,  equipment and the attendant paper work into an imitation of professional  disorder, Mondaugen set off into the house and down, in search of this  generator.

Soon, padding down a narrow, sloping corridor, he was brought to attention  by a mirror hung some twenty feet ahead, angled to reflect the interior of a  room around the next corner. Framed for him there were Vera Meroving and her  lieutenant in profile, she striking at his chest with what appeared to be a  small riding crop, he twisting a gloved hand into her hair and talking to  her all the while, so precisely that the voyeur Mondaugen could lip-read  each obscenity. The geometry of the corridors somehow baffled all sound:  Mondaugen, with the queer excitement he'd felt watching her at her window  that morning, expected captions explaining it all to flash on to the mirror.  But she finally released Weissmann; he reached out with the curiously gloved  hand and closed the door, and it was as if Mondaugen had dreamed them.

Presently he began to hear music, which grew louder the deeper he descended  into this house. Accordion, fiddle and guitar were playing a tango full of  minor chords and an eerie Ratting of certain notes which to German ears  should have remained natural. A young girl's voice was singing sweetly:

   Love's a lash,

   Kisses gall the tongue, harrow the heart;

   Caresses tease

   Cankered tissue apart.

   Liebchen, come

   Be my Hottentot bondsman tonight,

   The sjambok's kiss

   Is unending delight.

   Love, my little slave,

   Is color-blind;

   For white and black

   Are only states of mind.

   So at my feet

   Nod and genuflect, whimper for me:

   Though tears are dried

   Their pain is yet to be.

 

Enchanted, Mondaugen peered round the door jamb and found the singer to be a  child of not more than sixteen, with white-blond, hip-length hair and  breasts perhaps too large for her slender frame.

"I am Hedwig Vogelsang," she informed him, "and my purpose on earth is to  tantalize and send raving the race of man." Whereupon the musicians, hidden  from them in an alcove behind a hanging arras, struck up a kind of  schottische; Mondaugen, overcome by the sudden scent of musk, brought in a  puff to his nostrils by interior winds which could not have arisen by  accident, seized her round the waist and wheeled with her across the room,  and out, and through a bedroom lined with mirrors round a canopied  four-poster and into a long gallery, stabbed at ten-yard intervals down its  length by yellow daggers of African sun, hung with nostalgic landscapes of a  Rhine valley that never existed, portraits of Prussian officers who'd died  long before Caprivi (some even before Bismarck) and their blond, untender  ladies who'd nothing now but dust to bloom in; past rhythmic gusts of blond  sun that crazed the eyeballs with vein-images; out of the gallery and into a  tiny unfurnished room hung all in black velvet, high as the house, narrowing  into a chimney and open at the top, so that one could see the stars in the  daytime; finally down three or four steps to Foppl's own planetarium, a  circular room with a great wooden sun, overlaid with gold leaf, burning cold  in the very center and round it the nine planets and their moons, suspended  from tracks in the ceiling, actuated by a coarse cobweb of chains, pulleys,  belts, racks, pinions and worms, all receiving their prime impulse from a  treadmill in the corner, usually operated for the amusement of the guests by  a Bondelswaartz, now unoccupied. Having long fled all vestiges of music  Mondaugen released her here, skipped to the treadmill and began a jog-trot  that set the solar system in motion, creaking and whining in a way that  raised a prickling in the teeth. Rattling, shuddering, the wooden planets  began to rotate and spin, Saturn's rings to whirl, moons their precessions,  our own Earth its nutational wobble, all picking up speed; as the girl  continued to dance, having chosen the planet Venus for her partner; as  Mondaugen dashed along his own geodesic, following in the footsteps of a  generation of slaves.

When at length he tired, slowed and stopped she'd gone, vanished into the  wooden reaches of what remained after all a parody of space. Mondaugen,  breathing heavily, staggered off the treadmill to carry on his descent and  search for the generator.

Soon he stumbled into a basement room where gardening implements were  stored. As if the entire day had come into being only to prepare him for  this, he discovered a Bondel male, face down and naked, the back and  buttocks showing scar tissue from old sjambokings as well as more recent  wounds, laid open across the flesh like so many toothless smiles. Hardening  himself the weakling Mondaugen approached the man and stooped to listen for  breathing or a heartbeat, trying not to see the white vertebra that winked  at him from one long opening.

"Don't touch him." Foppl stood holding a sjambok or cattle whip of giraffe  hide, tapping the handle against his leg in a steady, syncopated figure. "He  doesn't want you to help. Even to sympathize. He doesn't want anything but  the sjambok." Raising his voice till it found the hysterical-bitch level  Foppl always affected with Bondels: "You like the sjambok, don't you,  Andreas."

Andreas moved his head feebly and whispered; "Baas . . ."

"Your people have defied the Government," Foppl continued, "they've  rebelled, they have sinned. General yon Trotha will have to come back to  punish you all. He'll have to bring his soldiers with the beards and the  bright eyes, and his artillery that speaks with a loud voice. How you will  enjoy it, Andreas. Like Jesus returning to earth, yon Trotha is coming to  deliver you. Be joyful; sing hymns of thanks. And until then love me as your  parent, because I am yon Trotha's arm, and the agent of his will."

As van Wijk had bade him do, Mondaugen remembered to ask Foppl about 1904  and the "days of yon Trotha." If Foppl's response was sick, it was sick of  more than simple enthusiasm; not only did he yarn about the past - first  there in the cellar as both stood watching a Bondelswaartz whose face  Mondaugen was never to see continue to die; later at riotous feasting, on  watch or patrol, to ragtime accompaniment in the grand ballroom; even up in  the turret, as deliberate interruption to the experiment - but he also  seemed under compulsion somehow to recreate the Deutsch-Sudwestafrika of  nearly twenty years ago, in word and perhaps in deed. "Perhaps" because as  the siege party progressed it became more and more difficult to make the  distinction.

One midnight Mondaugen stood on a small balcony just under the eaves,  officially on watch, though little could be seen in the uncertain  illumination. The moon, or half of it, had risen above the house: his  antennas cut like rigging dead-black across its face. As he swung his rifle  idly by its shoulder strap, gazing out across the ravine at nothing in  particular, someone stepped on to the balcony beside him: it was an old  Englishman named Godolphin, tiny in the moonlight. Small scrubland noises  now and again rose to them from the outside.

"I hope I don't disturb you," Godolphin said. Mondaugen shrugged, keeping  his eyes in a constant sweep over what he guessed to be the horizon. "I  enjoy it on watch," the Englishman continued, "it's the only peace there is  to this eternal celebration." He was a retired sea captain; in his  seventies, Mondaugen would guess. "I was in Cape Town, trying to raise a  crew for the Pole."

Mondaugen's eyebrows went up. Embarrassed, he began to pick at his nose.  "The South Pole?"

"Of course. Rather awkward if it were the other, haw-haw.

"And I'd heard of a stout boat in Swakopmund. But of course she was too  small. Hardly do for the pack ice. Foppl was in town, and invited me out for  a weekend. I imagine I needed the rest."

"You sound cheerful. In the face of what must be frequent disappointment."

"They leave the sting out. Treat the doddering old fool with sympathy. He's  living in the past. Of course I'm living in the past. I was there."

"At the Pole."

"Certainly. Now I have to go back, it's that simple. I'm beginning to think  that if I get through our siege party I shall be quite ready for anything  the Antarctic has for me."

Mondaugen was inclined to agree. "Though I don't plan on any little  Antarctic."

The old sea dog chuckled. "Oh there will be. You wait. Everyone has an  Antarctic."

Which it occurred to Mondaugen, was as far South as one could get. At first  he'd plunged eagerly into the social life that jittered all over the  sprawling plantation house, usually leaving his Scientific duties until the  early afternoon, when everyone but the watch was asleep. He had even begun a  dogged pursuit of Hedwig Vogelsang, but somehow kept running into Vera  Meroving instead. Southsickness in its tertiary stage, whispered that  adenoidal Saxon youth who was Mondaugen's doubleganger: beware, beware.

The woman, twice as old as he, exerted a sexual fascination he found  impossible to explain away. He'd meet her head-on in corridors, or rounding  some salient of cabinetwork, or on the roof, or simply in the night, always  unlooked for. He would make no advances, she no response; but despite all  efforts to hold it in check, their conspiracy grew.

As if it were a real affair, Lieutenant Weissmann cornered him in the  billiard room. Mondaugen quivered and prepared to flee: but it proved to be  something else entirely.

"You're from Munich," Weissmann established. "Ever been around the Schwabing  quarter?" On occasion. "The Brennessel cabaret?" Never. "Ever heard of  D'Annunzio?" Then: Mussolini? Fiume? Italia irredenta? Fascisti? National  Socialist German Workers' Party? Adolf Hitler? Kautsky's Independents?

"So many capital letters," Mondaugen protested.

"From Munich, and never heard of Hitler," said Weissmann, as if "Hitler"  were the name of an avant-garde play. "What the hell's wrong with young  people." Light from the green overhead lamp turned his spectacles to twin,  tender leaves, giving him a gentle look.

"I'm an engineer, you see. Politics isn't my line."

"Someday we'll need you," Weissmann told him, "for something or other, I'm  sure. Specialized and limited as you are, you fellows will be valuable. I  didn't mean to get angry."

"Politics is a kind of engineering, isn't it. With people as your raw  material."

"I don't know," Weissmann said. "Tell me, how long are you staying in this  part of the world."

"No longer than I have to. Six months? it's indefinite."

"If I could put you in the way of something, oh, with a little authority to  it, not really involving much of your time . . ."

"Organizing, you'd call it?"

"Yes, you're sharp. You knew right away, didn't you. Yes. You are my man.  The young people especially, Mondaugen because you see - I know this won't  be repeated - we could be getting it back."

"The Protectorate? But it's under the League of Nations."

Weissmann threw back his head and began to laugh, and woul............