Once he could not imagine a life without return. Before his conscious memories began, something took him, in and out of his mother’s circular village far out in the Kakau Veld, at the borders of the land of death, a departure and a return… . He was told about it years later. Shortly after he was born, his mother brought him back to her village, back from Swakopmund. In ordinary times she would have been banished. She’d had the child out of wedlock, by a Russian sailor whose name she couldn’t pronounce. But under the German invasion, protocol was less important than helping one another. Though the murderers in blue came down again and again, each time, somehow, Enzian was passed over. It is a Herod myth his admirers still like to bring up, to his annoyance. He had been walking only for a few months when his mother took him with her to join Samuel Maherero’s great trek across the Kalahari.

Of the stories told about these years, this is the most tragic. The refugees had been on the desert for days. Khama, king of the Bechuanas, sent guides, oxen, wagons and water to help them. Those who arrived first were warned to take water only little by little. But by the time the stragglers arrived, everyone else was asleep. No one to warn them. Another lost message. They drank till they died, hundreds of souls. Enzian’s mother was among them. He had fallen asleep under a cowhide, exhausted from hunger and thirst. He woke among the dead. It is said that he was found there by a band of Ovatjimba, taken and cared for. They left him back at the edge of his mother’s village, to walk in alone. They were nomads, they could have taken any other direction in that waste country, but they brought him back to the place he’d left. He found hardly anyone remaining there. Many had gone on the trek, some had been taken away to the coast and herded into kraals, or to work on the railroad the Germans were building through the desert. Many others had died eating cattle dead of rinderpest.

No return. Sixty per cent of the Herero people had been exterminated. The rest were being used like animals. Enzian grew up into a white-occupied world. Captivity, sudden death, one-way departures were the ordinary things of every day. By the time the question occurred to him, he could find no way to account for his own survival. He could not believe in any process of selection. Ndjambi Karunga and the Christian God were too far away. There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of pure chance. Weissmann, the European whose protégé he became, always believed he’d seduced Enzian away from religion. But the gods had gone away themselves: the gods had left the people… . He let Weissmann think what he wanted to. The man’s thirst for guilt was insatiable as the desert’s for water.