The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (8 page)

Beerless, we raise plastic cups of lukewarm water and toast this pigeon’s flight to hell. Sheeny blue-green body, deviled
orange eyes. All around, his countryman haven’t noticed, haven’t flagged. A fundamental truth we didn’t want to be reminded
of: You die, everybody else goes on fucking. That’s when Vilho, smelling our vulnerability, flaps back to the Old Testament,
starts in about the murder of the Kenite, Sisera, by Jael, the wife of Heber. How Jael, clever wench, lured the sex-starved
Sisera into her tent with the promise of her favors, her charms. How she gave Sisera butter. Then, as soon as Sisera got comfortable,
she smote him on the head with a nail. “
At her feet, he bowed, he fell, he lay down
. A Kenite,” Vilho says. “God reviled him, but still his death is grace. Who among us will not die on a bed of sin?”

We look at Vilho. We look at the deceased. As if one or the other could provide an answer, but to what? Even Pohamba is silent.
Butter—absolutely—but to be smote on the head? Theofilus brings back a shovel from the mission garage, and we, bereft, bury
our old tormenter amid the racket of the continuing deliciousness of his fellow foul fowls.

S
he never laughed. Even during break, when Obadiah would retell that morning’s moral tale, doing his best imitation of the
principal’s self-flagellation (which was, by his kind of osmosis, our flagellation):

Oh, savage gluttony! Ye who fare sumptuously while others go without. Do ye not ache for your lack of guilt? Consider for
once the Ethiopians, the Irish, the Chinese. Have you no pity? No, it is only, More meat, more crackers, more cheese. Ye who
would not offer a finger dipped in water to a thirsty —

Mavala sitting in the sand, leaning against a barrel, unpeeling a hard-boiled egg. Not hearing a thing. Us all trying not
to watch her bite the top off that egg. Obadiah said it was the struggle. All those years of believing the end of the war
would usher in Paradise. He said Mavala Shikongo was even more beautiful for believing in all that. Now she carries an attendance
register and wipes snot from under sub b noses? She’s old, Obadiah said. No matter what her legs look like. It’s all that
believing. A woman with a Kalashnikov isn’t anything new. My Lord, think of the Amazons of Dahomey. But believing—it’s like
seeing a bronze-winged courser this far west of Gobabis.

We must raise the political and social

status of teachers. They should command

the respect not only of their students, but

also of the whole community.

DENG XIAOPING

A
fter classes, after lunch. A consecrated time of languishment. A flopped, dead-eyed hour. Our beds damp oases, narrow paradises
of our own orificial excretions. And here we wallow in moist, sweat-clammy bliss, until the study-hour triangle rings us back
to bondage.

One siesta—hark—treason! A boy (ruffian! villain! bandit!) whistles—loudly—as he wanders by Obadiah’s open bedroom window.
The insomniac inside just so happens to be asleep this day. (Taped to Obadiah’s screen, facing out for the world to be inspired
by, is a photo of Mandela after his release: that peppered hair, that raised fist, that loving-even-my-jailers smile.) But
Obadiah, now that he is awake, is no gentle spirit of the nation today. He’s belligerent. Nonetheless, to temper his fury,
he uses the language of diplomacy. Hence, the following resolution is translated from the French:

Be it known that Head Teacher Obadiah Horaseb of the Goas Primary School RC
calls upon
all boys of Goas to heed the following… That Head Teacher
recognizes
the need for spontaneous joy in young plebeians who do not yet comprehend that life on earth amounts to nothing but sorrow,
regret, failure, and, ultimately, humiliation. Furthermore, that Head Teacher
reaffirms
such young plebeians’ inherent, nay, inalienable right to express such bonhomie in certain proscribed instances, such as
the Lord granting me a decent night sleep. However, be it known that Head Teacher henceforth
forbids
the expression of any such jollity—particularly by way of infernal whistling—at any time during siesta, which, be it also
known, is the only remaining solace for those who do understand that life on earth amounts to nothing but sorrow, regret,
failure, etc., etc. The Head Teacher
decrees
that punishment for whistling—which may, in the instant case, be defined, to wit, as: to emit or utter from the mouth or
beak a shrill sound or series of sounds—shall be the
SEVERANCE
of said offender’s lips from said offender’s mouth, through the deployment of Theofilus’s unsharpened sickle.

Mindful of this day of non-repose,

Head Teacher Horaseb

Adieu.

M
iss Tuyeni had much of her sister’s beauty, but wore it all wrong. She had the same long legs, the same jutting chin and huge
blinkless eyes. But Tuyeni scowled constantly, so, unlike her sister’s, there was no mystery on her face. The world never
ceased to find ways to disappoint Miss Tuyeni. We noticed her much more after Mavala came back. Before that, she had seemed
to be merely a better-looking appendage of the principal. She was childless. As far as anybody knew, she’d never been pregnant.
This led to all kinds of talk, most involving the besmirchment of the principal’s manhood. But it wasn’t true that she was
a complete nonentity. She wielded a quiet sort of power in her own right, and you could sometimes feel it during staff meetings.
When she didn’t like something he’d said, she had a way of letting him know. All of sudden he would veer away from a topic,
and we knew it had something to do with her. But we never cracked their intimate marital code. Mostly she kept to herself.
She never was treated quite like a traitor. After all, she had to live with him, and people couldn’t help but feel a little
sorry for her for that. The only person she ever talked to was Antoinette, as if Miss Tuyeni, for her part, acknowledged the
one true authority on the farm.

Still, as I say, the fact of Mavala made Miss Tuyeni more present, because how could we not compare them? And maybe she realized
this and tried to compensate. Even though Mavala had dishonored her family in the eyes of the Lord, Miss Tuyeni started wearing
high heels to school. She had no mastery of this delicate art. The truth: We all took sadistic joy in watching Miss Tuyeni
totter across the sand toward morning meeting. The treacherous crossing, books in arm, one unnimble step after another. Sometimes
she would tip over and the principal would send a boy to help her up.

Then Mavala would come charging down the road, always on the edge of being late. We speculated that the reason Mavala was
so good in heels, her gravity-defying sense of balance, had something to do with—combat. Everything that was wonderful about
Mavala Shikongo had to do with combat. You see how she twisted us?

T
he boy who the priest caught jerking off to the statue of the Virgin in the church grotto. The boy who burned down the science
class. The boy who tried to poison the farm’s water supply with diesel. The boy who stole Festus’s classroom door. The boy
who… The boy who… None was mightier than Moses, the Standard Seven who slaughtered a neighboring farmer’s cow with
a pocketknife and lived off it in the veld for two weeks. Moses out there alone, a small cooking fire, only the eyes of the
dead cow for company. But he’s eating meat; Lord, is he eating meat. A boy who got tired of mealies every day. He was a poor
boy, an orphan. Yet a child born of this earth is entitled to some meat now and then. Is he not?

“In those days the boys ate meat only on holidays,” Antoinette says. “Now we try to give it to them twice a week, if we have
enough paraffin for the refrigerator.”

Antoinette speaks of Moses in the way a lonely mother might go on about the antics of the favored bad child. If anything remotely
like this happened on her watch now, she’d thrash him. Uncountable lashes for a boy so bold. But Moses—she’d pull him to her
bosom. Have some tea with four sugars, my wayward boy.

We are in the kitchen of the hostel dining hall, a wide, cavernous, many-windowed building beyond the soccer field. It reminds
me of an air hangar or a floor of an abandoned factory. The windows are fogged from the steam rising from a vat of burbling
pap. The boys are lined up outside the door, banging one another on the head with impatient spoons.

She lays out clean bowls on the tables as she talks. Antoinette tells stories only during the heat of work. A Moses without
a basket. A Moses without a people to lead. Only his own poor hunger. After the constables finally found him, they beat him
until they got bored. What could they take from him other than his blood? Then they brought him to the farmer, who beat Moses
until he too got bored with it, and that was the end of it. God only knows where the boy is today.

Outside, the boys begin to clamor louder. Antoinette walks the tables slowly, ladling thick pap into bowl after bowl. Today
is krummelpap with a side of toast with jam.

“But forget the end,” Antoinette says. “Go back to the beginning, think of murdering a cow with a pocketknife. Cows don’t
fight back, but this doesn’t mean they die easy. They stand and bleed. It took hours. It took the boy all night. It wasn’t
rage. It was work.”

She points to the door. I open it. Then she steps past me and stands before the motley line of boys and raises her oven-mitted
hands for silence. The boys file in, trying to be slow, trying not to dash, the big ones yanking the little ones back, toward
their waiting, steaming bowls.

O
badiah and I doing our part, watering the desert.

“Teacher Kaplansk?”

“Yes?”

“I should like to know your candid opinion of Woodrow Wilson. It’s my contention that despite his having a horse-like face,
he had a certain fastidious decorum. And I do not doubt his sincerity. And yet, I must tell you straight out, and you must
pardon any offense: Your man Woodrow was a cabbage. Not only was he ultimately responsible for fascism, he also left us, our
dear insignificant country, in the lurch for seventy years. And South-West Africa shall be a sacred trust of civilization.
Sacred trust of
whom
?”

“He wore a top hat,” I said.

“I wonder why. To make himself taller? Napoleon did that.”

“I think he was tall to begin with.”

“Hmm. Interesting. A tall man in a tall hat. May I ask you another question? Apropos perhaps of nothing?”

“Sure.”

“Your quite un-Wilsonian surname. What sort of name is Kaplansk? It seems highly original.”

“It was Jewish Polish until the principal lopped off an —”

“Polish! I should have known! How many names under the sun rhyme with Gdansk? Ah, and a Semite? But your hair —”

“What?”

“It’s orange.”

“Yes.”

He leaned toward me and examined my face. I breathed in his sweet, malty breath. “Hmm. Yes, well,
Hosanna!
My first Jew! I’ve waited a long time.”

“You’re my first Damara.”

“Half. My father came from Angola.”

“First half-Angolan also.”

“My father’s dead. Yours?”

“No.”

“Jewish as well?”

“Yes.”

“A rebbe?”

“No.”

“A scholar?”

“Not really.”

“A dealer in ancient manuscripts and maps? A cabbalist? A loan officer? Pardon any offense.”

“He’s a dentist.”

Obadiah thought a moment, a bit dejected, but after he zipped up, he brightened. “Ah yes, a most basic and elemental human
need fulfilled, no doubt honorably, by your Hebrew father.”

“He left my mother. Ran off to Memphis with a hygienist named Brenda.”

“I see, nonetheless, teeth…”

E
very moment is a death. We may go back and haunt them, but we may never possess them again. Who designed such a cruel mechanism
as memory? Imagine yourself on a train. You see a boy walking the veld. He begins to raise his arm, his mouth widens. He’s
about to shout to you—and then nothing. The boy’s gone before you even started to see him. I was on a train only once, the
most dawdling train anybody ever bothered to build—the Windhoek-Swakop line. Pushing a team of wheelbarrows across the Namib
would be faster. But even the slowest train in creation is still a train. Even a wooden seat in a third-class carriage rocks
you like a mother. See him out there beside the tracks? Trousers too short for him, shirtless, carrying a staff tied off with
a red kerchief? And still I can’t hold him, his rising arm, his almost shout. I float by. Something he needed to tell me?
Something I needed to know? So I died then. That was twenty-five years ago, the occasion of my exile. Are that boy’s words
still on the wind? A warning? At the temple courts, Jesus wrote with his finger, in the dust. What words? Nobody knows. Do
you see what I’m trying to say?

I
’m not talking about some fucking Gandhi refusing to step on ants,” Pohamba says.

He tells this often. It happened up north in the bush near Oshikuku, he says. An SADF tank is roaming the veld looking for
terrorists, when suddenly—Pohamba loves the word “suddenly”—an old man with leaves on his head jumps out from beyond a clump
of bush and begins to beat the tank with a stick. The two troopies inside watch him for a while through the heavy windows.
It’s a pretty good show after two months of wet Ovambo heat. They listen to the crazy smacking, which reverberates, so that
for every hit they hear it twice.
Someone’s knocking on the door,
one troopie sings.
Someone’s ringing the bell.
He points to the other troopie, who opens the hatch and shoots the man with leaves on his head once in the arm, but this doesn’t
stop him. He keeps at it. Whack whack. The troopie shoots him again. Single pistol shots sound almost funny in a bush war
like this, Pohamba says. Normally you hear only the bursts of automatics. But the second shot doesn’t slow him down either.
The man with leaves on his head is dancing now. Dancing around the tank, bleeding and hitting. Now the tank is polka-dot red.
It takes two helmeted troopies ten shots, Pohamba says, and even then he never lets go of the stick.