Tchitcherine’s father was a gunner on the Admiral’s flagship, the Suvorov. The fleet paused in Lüderitzbucht for a week, trying to take on coal. Storms lashed through the crowded little harbor. The Suvorov kept smashing up against her colliers, tearing holes in the sides, wrecking many of her own 12-pound guns. Squalls blew in, clammy coal dust swirled and stuck to everything, human and steel. Sailors worked around the clock, with searchlights set up on deck at night, hauling coal sacks, half blind in the glare, shoveling, sweating, coughing, bitching. Some went crazy, a few tried suicide. Old Tchitcherine, after two days of it, went AWOL, and stayed away till it was over. He found a Herero girl who’d lost her husband in the uprising against the Germans. It was nothing he had planned or even dreamed about before going ashore. What did he know of Africa? He had a wife back in Saint Petersburg, and a child hardly able to roll over. Up till then Kronstadt was the farthest he’d been from home. He only wanted a rest from the working parties, and from the way it looked… from what the black and white of coal and arc-light were about to say… no color, and the unreality to go with it—but a familiar unreality, that warns This Is All Being Staged To See What I’ll Do So I Mustn’t Make One Wrong Move… on the last day of his life, with Japanese iron whistling down on him from ships that are too far off in the haze for him even to see, he will think of the slowly carbonizing faces of men he thought he knew, men turning to coal, ancient coal that glistened, each crystal, in the hoarse sputter of the Jablochkov candles, each flake struck perfect… a conspiracy of carbon, though he never phrased it as “carbon,” it was power he walked away from, the feeling of too much meaningless power, flowing wrong… he could smell Death in it. So he waited till the master-at-arms turned to light a cigarette, and then just walked away—they were all too black, artificially black, for it to be easily noticed—and found ashore the honest blackness of the solemn Herero girl, which seemed to him a breath of life after long confinement, and stayed with her at the edge of the flat sorrowful little town, near the railroad, in a one-room house built of saplings, packing-cases, reeds, mud. The rain blew. The trains cried and puffed. The man and woman stayed in bed and drank kari, which is brewed from potatoes, peas, and sugar, and in Herero means “the drink of death.” It was nearly Christmas, and he gave her a medal he had won in some gunnery exercise long ago on the Baltic. By the time he left, they had learned each other’s names and a few words in the respective languages—afraid, happy, sleep, love… the beginnings of a new tongue, a pidgin which they were perhaps the only two speakers of in the world.