by Peter Orner
Born in peace, weren’t you?
*
She leaves her house and her sleeping husband (asleep again in his chair) and heads across the sand to the boys’ hostel. It will be another half hour before the light spills over the mountains and floods the veld.
10
A DROWNED BOY
Among the farm’s ghosts was the soul of a Standard Five. One morning, nineteen years earlier, the boy had drowned while swimming in the far dam, up near the ruined, roofless buildings of what was still called Old Goas, where the original farm had been. In theory, we lived at New Goas, but nobody called it that. Back then, the far dam had been used for the cows’ midday drinking. This was when Goas had more cows. There had once been a fence around it so the farmhands could check for missing cows after they were corraled. Now the fence was gone, as gone as the water, although you could see the remnants of it flattened into the dust by years of hooves.
He wasn’t a very demanding ghost. Some mornings he’d come and stand by our coffee fire. In the lingering dark, we’d huddle, jostling each other with our empty cups, waiting for the coffee to percolate. You knew he was there, because the smoke started wafting in the wrong direction, into the wind. Obadiah said the boy was using whatever breath he had left to push the smoke out of his eyes. The dead can’t use their hands, Obadiah said. He also said the boy was a Twsana, the only Twsana at Goas at the time he drowned, and that he visited us for some warmth and to be remembered a little. A boy who died so far from his people. There’s nothing criminal about needing to be spoken of once in a while. But it happened so long ago, no one remembered anything else about him other than that he died and that he was a Tswana. So whenever anybody claimed the smoke wasn’t behaving according to certain meteorological laws, we made things up. It didn’t matter who said what on those mornings. We were too cold to care, and people murmured into their coats. We all claimed the mantle of being as lonely as that boy must have been the moment he went under.
“Born in Gobabis, son of a rich chief,” said one voice.
“True,” said another. “His father—before the drought of seventy-nine made him a poor man—owned four hundred head of cattle.”
A third voice, or maybe it was the first. “But at Goas, the boy roamed in bloody feet.”
“Why bleeding feet?”
“Someone stole his shoes.”
“Ah yes, and rich men’s sons are tender-footed.”
“That’s true.”
“Tender-footed, but he knew how to swim.”
“True. He had lessons at the swimming pool for whites in Windhoek.”
“So what happened? If he knew how to swim, why’d he drown?”
“Sadness.”
“I see, yes.”
“And then he sank.”
“There was enough water to drown?”
“A rare year.”
“And they didn’t find him until the cows began acting strange.”
“They wouldn’t drink any of that water.”
“Then they trampled the fence.”
“Yes, and then a shepherd—not Theofilus, this was even before Theofilus—pulled himself up and looked over the edge.”
“That boy’s head was floating like a cabbage.”
Our feet were cold, our hands; we crowded to the fire and hunched toward it with our empty coffee cups. We watched each other’s breath more than we listened to any words. Those mornings, it was less that the sun would rise than that the darkness would simply pale. And it always, always came back to his loneliness, how he was the single Tswana on a farm of Hereros, Damaras, Namas, Coloureds, Ovambos. There were even two Bushmen at Goas then, two Bushmen who could at least talk to each other. We forgot about the stampeding cows, something nobody ever believed anyway. Cows at Goas never did anything that dramatic.
Our voices in the changing light:
“Forsook, the boy was.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Our Lord, the same.”
“And he didn’t call for help. He knew nobody would come. The one certain thing about calling for help.”
“And the cows?”
It was a rare woman’s voice that answered, a voice we didn’t recognize.
“The cows watched.”
Nobody said anything after that. There was the slow rise of the smoke. Then it wandered away, toward the boulders beyond the toilet houses.
11
GOAS
Seasons at Goas, as much as you can call cold, hot, and more hot seasons, catapult into each other. Days too. Winter mornings bleed to summer afternoons. And memory is as much a heap of disorder as it is a liar.
The spiraled ash of a spent mosquito coil. A book with a broken spine lying facedown. A row of tiny socks drying on the edge of a bucket.
12
STORY OF A TEACHER’S WIFE
Tuesday and the beautiful and sleek and unsmiling and too good for us Mavala Shikongo is gone. The only single woman teacher to bless an all-boys boarding school so far in the veld even the baboons feel sorry for us. They come and shit by our doors. Yes, Mavala Shikongo has escaped Goas after a scant three weeks. Three weeks; the universe had only just begun to be merciful. The word is, she’s found a better posting at a junior primary in Grootfontien. But twenty-one days was enough for us all, single or divorced, or wanting to be divorced, decrepit or spry, morally repugnant or generally decent—every last one of us—to fall, to stagger, to cave into love with Mavala Shikongo.
She had arrived not long after I had. No longer was I the new teacher. Anyway, my novelty was short-lived. I wore pants. The brief moment she graced the farm, Mavala Shikongo lived a quarter mile up the road, cloistered, in a room that had once been the principal’s attached garage. She was Miss Tuyeni’s, the principal’s wife’s, sister.
She ignored us. Three weeks we were invisible. Long school-day afternoons she never once stopped by Auntie Wilhelmina’s fence to monger the latest lies, only went back to her room at the back of the principal’s house, to her books. Festus reported, having spied the mail, that she was studying for a university course in England by correspondence. She’s not satisfied, it was said. She doesn’t even want to be a teacher, it was said. She wants to be an accountant. This was swooned over. She’s going somewhere in this world, Mavala Shikongo is. She’s not going to lie down with the cows at Goas. Women rise higher now. The war did it. Because—not only skirts, not only textbooks—Mavala Shikongo’s a genuine hero of the struggle herself. An ex-PLAN fighter. Not even twenty-five and this girl’s shot her share of Boers. Those blinkless eyes, it isn’t hard to imagine them staring down a barrel. How many times those days did we moon by her classroom windows? On our way to the toilets, just to catch a glimpse. Three weeks we circled, coward vultures from a distance. And now look: Mavala Shikongo’s battered mustard suitcase is riding away in the back of the priest’s bakkie. How are we going to get up in the morning without the sight of her charging across the sand in her saucy black heels, those inspiring city shoes? Only Mavala Shikongo could lure us away from our dirty dreams on the coldest mornings. Days when our fingers cracked like the branches in the coffee fire and our scrotums didn’t loosen until after third period break. How to warm a desert winter now?
We’re all deep in mourning in the singles quarters and nobody feels like walking out to the road to wait for a hike into Karibib. Obadiah wanders over to my room and offers me a freshly peeled carrot. He invites me for an afternoon drink in his Datsun. I follow him out to the car. Obadiah’s Datsun is mired in the sand behind his house, near Antoinette’s chicken coops and laundry lines. An old Windhoek taxi, it will never, come the Second Coming or even the Third, drive anywhere again. Still, Obadiah has prophecies. Prophecies of the engine one day combusting, the carburetor carborating, the upholstery growing fur again. In the meantime, we talk in it. I take a nip of Zorba and say, Farewell, Mavala, if only we could have opened that mustard suitcase, taken one final whiff of you.
Obadiah adjusts the re
arview. He’s wearing his TransNamib hat, the hat his cousin Elias gave him when he retired from the railroad. Its peak grazes the top of the crumbling roof of the car, which, every time he moves his head, snows chunks of old yellow foam.
With his left hand at the top of the steering wheel, he gets right into it. It’s another story, he says. A good many years ago, he says, another new teacher arrived at Goas. He hadn’t been here long. Three weeks, perhaps. But three weeks is always enough for a man to fall in love with another man’s wife. The Roman Empire? It took Nero one drunken night and a box of matches to burn the place down. The Hundred Years’ War? An exaggeration. Advertising for Joan of Arc. God’s Flood? You think he needed forty days and forty nights to drown every man and beast and creeping thing? He—how do you put it?—overdid it. He was irritated. Wouldn’t you be? Five chapters in and already you’ve got to start again.
Obadiah moves the steering wheel only slightly, as if we’re moseying along a mostly straight road. Outside, around the car, the scrabbling chickens peck the dust.
So, Obadiah says, three weeks and the new teacher is insanely, lunatically, in love with another teacher’s wife. The teacher with the wife taught Standard Four math and the new teacher taught Standard Five Afrikaans. One day the husband noticed that the new teacher’s class was cacophonous, more cacophonous than usual. He went and stuck his head in the window of his new colleague’s classroom. Where’s Teacher? he asked. Thirty, forty voices answered, We know not, Teacher. But the teacher with the wife could see something in the eyes of those boys. They were mocking him. This happened in the seventies. Boys were less innocent then. The war made them more worldly. These boys didn’t want to study fractions, they wanted to kill whites. They used to climb up the hill by the cross and shout: Boers back to Kakamas! And what is it about war and lust? So yes, they mocked that teacher. Although their lips were tight, he could see the laughter in their eyes. While the cat’s away, the mice will play! The teacher then walked slowly toward the singles quarters. He didn’t knock on the new teacher’s door. It happened, by the way, in Kapapu’s old room, the room next to yours. A few minutes later, his wife followed him home across the sand, naked and guilty as Eve, clutching her clothes to her chest. We all watched—I am shamed to confess it—from our classroom windows. Neither the teacher nor his wife nor the new teacher left their room for the rest of the day. That night the teacher with the wife returned to the new teacher’s room and killed him with a bicycle spoke. But here is the strange part. His wife accompanied him. In the morning we found them together, leaning against each other outside the new teacher’s door, sleeping. Odd thing that, except for the blood on their clothes, they could have been angels. Lovers entwined. Romantic. The magistrate at Usakos sentenced them both. Eventually the husband was released—his offense being merely a crime of passion—but the wife remained in prison, she being guilty, under the laws of the time, of not one but two heinous crimes.
Obadiah reaches across me and pulls a rusty nail clipper out of the glove compartment and begins to trim his cuticles. Now that he’s stopped driving, the coming of the winter night, the flat dim bluelessness we wear along with our double sweaters and bed socks, gives me a weird sense that we’ve really gone somewhere. I watch the shadows Obadiah’s billowing shirts make as they swing on the line in the wind. Near the ashes of the fire pit are the remains of a laceless tennis shoe and the torn cellophane of an empty potato-crisp bag pecked clean by the roaming chickens.
The room next to mine?
Obadiah nods. To kill a man with a bicycle spoke is an ugly thing, he says, as he sweeps the nail slices off his shirt into his hand and tosses them out of what used to be a window. The new teacher’s stomach was so ripped apart, Obadiah says, the constables had to collect his insides up in a bucket. To many people the question was: Did she take part, or did she only watch? Yet I was never interested in this question. To myself the murder itself has never meant very much. It was the vigil by the door. Over the years what has remained is the way we found them slumped in the morning. Vengeance, true, but something else perhaps, something more difficult to define. I ask this: However it came about, there must have been satisfaction in such exhaustion, no? A sense of things being finished at last? Might it be that those two spent their best hours out there waiting for the light?
He stoops and begins to work on his toes.
Antoinette comes from around the front of the house and, without hesitation, chooses a bird from the coop, twirls it by the neck. It’s a circling. You flap your useless wings, you splay your crooked feet. Maybe Mavala Shikongo will hate Grootfontien, I say. Maybe she’ll come back.
Obadiah is too polite to laugh at anybody. Nor does he point out every time you’re a goon. He says nothing. In the waning, in the doomed light, I watch Antoinette raise a rusty cleaver on dinner.
13
UP ON THE HILL BY THE CROSS
The school hunkers in the center of the farm, near the intersection of three dry rivers. It was thought that this would ensure enough groundwater to support the teachers and the learners, even during the driest years.
The view from the top of the hill extends all the way from the mission—the school buildings, the church, the hostel—to the base of the Erongo Mountains. And you can see all three rivers, channels of grassless sand, meeting for a stretch near Goas and then parting for good. The Gamikaub heads straight north across the veld, ridged as a tar road, while the Kuiseb meanders west, where it snakes a narrow gorge into the Erongos, the beginning of its long desert haul to the Atlantic. The Toanib River, the Goas favorite, has no sense where it’s going. It winds beneath Krieger’s gleaming razor-wire fence, but then wanders back onto Goas, twisting south, where it seems to die out in the scrub.
Every evening the five of us—Pohamba, Obadiah, Festus, Vilho, and I—we’d stretch out on cushions stolen from the staff-room chairs and pass around a two-week-old Windhoek Advertiser. You didn’t read the Advertiser for news. You read The Namibian for news. But who wanted news? After a week in the classroom, we wanted the real dirt, the smut and the glory. A fifty-thousand-rand sweepstakes on page 3 and multiple sets of naked breasts (in rainbow colors, spirit of the new nation) on the foldout. It was a good newspaper. Pohamba had it first and read out loud a sampling of that day’s headlines:
IDI AMIN HAS ADVANCED SYPHILIS
NAMIBIAN WHITES PLAN MASS EXODUS TO PARAGUAY
US VP QUAYLE TO VISIT WINDHOEK
DOG POISONER ACTIVE IN TSUMEB
TWISTED AND HORNY, WIFE TAKES GRANDPA LOVER
MISS NAMIBIA PAGEANT BATHING SUIT MISHAP. PHOTOS, PAGE 5
“Hey, let’s see those last two,” Festus said.
And when we were through with the paper, I’d either sleep or watch the veld. Pohamba liked to say the only absolute of Goas is this: The same veld that wishes you good night will kick you in the head in the morning.
But Obadiah would say, That’s blindness. “Empty? The veld? You must be looking into your own heart, Teacher Pohamba.” Obadiah would say the veld changes so much, it’s hard to keep track. One day you’ll be out walking beyond the Voortrekker graves, and there, in a place where there had been nothing the day before but nameless scrub, will be a rare clump of stinkbush. Another day, in that same spot, poison mustard berries, or the more deadly euphorbia. It’s not that nothing grows on Goas, it’s only that it’s nothing we can eat. And the grass? The Boers call it upslang because it shoots up overnight. After rain, it’s green for a day. The next day it’s dry as straw. Watch the dry grass alone, he would say. How some hours it leans with the wind, other hours fights against it. And more than movement—consider the light. In late morning, the Erongos to the west look like mounds of peppered cheese. And think of the mirages that pool at the base of those mountains. You walk and you walk and that water stretches away, but also, at every step, gets bigger. A pond becomes a lake, becomes an ocean. It’s merely a collision of heated and unheated air causing an optical refraction. But what, I ask, do cli
matological proofs matter to a thirsty man?
14
CLASSROOM
Let the truth out: Kaplansk has no grammar. I am an American from the 1970s. In Miss Eckersley’s English class, we sewed puppets while Miss Eckersley played guitar and sang.
Again, today, I drone onward, reading to my learners out of the book. English Lesson 12: The Simple Future. I drone as if droning itself is to have faith in something . . .
“To express a promise, willingness, as well as futurity, we use I (we) will and not I (we) shall. Remember, for the interrogative we use Shall I? in all cases, not Will I? Now, Shall I or Shall we? often has the meaning Do you want me to… ? or Would you like me to… ? E.g., Shall I open the window? Shall I get you a cup of tea? Shall we go to the theater tonight? Will, on the other hand, is another can of worms entirely. Will expresses not a question but rather a determination. For instance, I will study my grammar during study hour. I will not beat children who are smaller than I. This sort of thing. Any questions? Confusions? Bafflements? Things of this nature?”
“The simple future as opposed to what?” Rubrecht Kanhala, class genius and sweat-inducing burden on the teacher, asks.
“Excellent question, Rubrecht. As opposed to, well, the complicated future, which we don’t have to worry about right now.”
Resume drone.
The other boys’ heads remain steady; for a while the droop is only in their eyes. Then slowly, one after another, their heads begin to drop, and I watch them catch their heads without their hands, raise them again, and try so hard to listen.
“All right, then. Does anybody remember what an interrogative is?”
Silence, tomb-like. Even Rubrecht is tired of this. None of the boys wear watches and there’s no clock on the wall, but Jeremiah Puleni, famous for knowing the time in his bones, has begun to rub his feet on the sandy floor. Half an hour left now and everybody knows I’ll talk it to the grave. Jeremiah, barefoot farm kid so much taller than the other boys, older too. He started school years late because he was needed on the farm. His brother was up north in the fighting. He’s never caught up. He just sits in class after class and smiles. Jeremiah Puleni smiles across years. Not a word of English, he speaks only Damara and Afrikaans. When I look at him, he’s always staring, silent, concentrating. I wonder, Concentrating on what, Jeremiah? A big oaf of a kid, always looking for a reason to laugh. We know he’s doomed, and for this we all love him more. Goas is a haven for some. No one wants to think about what will happen to Jeremiah Puleni when he finally finishes Standard Seven and there’s no primary school left for him.