by Peter Orner
She lived at Old Goas, in a ruined pondookie up and over the ridge, only half of which was roofed. Vilho, who was here that far back as a learner, remembered that one day she materialized. That one day Auntie Wilhelmina was simply in the veld, rooted, like something that had always been right where it was. You just hadn’t seen her. Like a hill beyond another hill. Or as if, Vilho put it, Goas had come to her, not the opposite. Obadiah refused to indulge in anything so metaphysical about Auntie. He only said: That old bitch talks too much.
Auntie Monologued
She had an extremely hoarse voice, like an old dog’s after it’s spent the day barking and can hardly do it anymore—but bark onward it must. In that terrible voice, she would go on about her royal lineage and her family’s personal relationship to Jesus. She said she could trace her family back to Kambonde on her father’s side and Impinge on her mother’s. She said her paternal grandmother’s eldest brother was Mpingana, who was assassinated by Nehale. And she said Mpingana’s son, Kwedhi, her great-uncle, was the one who, after banishment, started to associate with the Germans. She said the Germans might have had their faults, but we must always bless them for bringing the word of God to this heathen place. Eventually Kwedhi was baptized and declared himself king—hence, as she, Auntie, was the great man’s niece, everyone owed her fealty for freeing them from the bondage of paganism. In Auntie’s universe, four hundred years of colonialism and apartheid never happened. And she carried her namesake, the last Kaiser—Wilhelm II!—proudly.
“Murdering fop of a Kaiser,” Obadiah said. “And there is nothing, zero, in the historical or anthropological record to support a lick of her stories. That obese woman bastardizes history! Christianization was a gradual process. It occurred over decades, centuries. No one man determined anything. Her Kwedhi was no Constantine, and for that matter, neither was Constantine. Faith is not something commanded by a despot. The woman’s a fake and a liar.”
“A fake what?”
Obadiah didn’t answer. He was going to condemn her for making up stories? For exploitation of history to suit her own ends? For lying for the sake of the good of the story? This sin?
Auntie Filched
Initially the priest had hired Auntie Wilhelmina as an undercook in the hostel kitchen. Then one day she walked off with two forty-kilo bags of carrots. Dragged them behind her in broad daylight, her philosophy being that stealing in public is no sin. Robbing His children under His watchful eye is no transgression. If it was, she said, wouldn’t there be thunder and lightning? How do you argue with this? The priest fired her, but he didn’t have either the heart or the stomach to banish her off the farm for good. So he let her live up there in her half-roofless house with the dogs she stole as whelps from farmers up and down the C-32. A good, quasi-socialist thing about Auntie Wilhelmina was that she stole only expensive things from the government (rands from the tuition scholarship fund) and the Church (a year’s supply of communion wafers and a golden chalice). From us, she took double-A batteries, lightbulbs, mosquito coils, your last nub of toothpaste. Her dogs were especially fond of gnawing rolls of toilet paper. She’d knock on your door and there she’d be, every glorious boozy inch of her. “I bestow my blessment upon this dwelling.” And you’d be faced with a choice that wasn’t really a choice. Let her in and let her take whatever the hell she wanted. Or listen to her.
“Come on in, Auntie. I was actually just on my way to choir practice. Make yourself at home.”
“Sing well, White Child, raise high your voice.”
Auntie Promised She’d Die
Like all descendants of Kavango royalty, Auntie said, she could not allow herself to die a natural death. As with Jesus, as with the lineage of Kwedhi. When her time came, she said, the oldest male was supposed to strangle her to death. She often hinted that such time was nigh, but Obadiah, overanxious, would ask, “Is it not yet time to perish, O Queenly Queen of Queenishness?”
And she’d say, “Patience, little brother, patience. Soon, soon, the royal murder.”
And Obadiah would stroke his old callused hands as if to sharpen them.
25
UP ON THE HILL BY THE CROSS
Mavala Shikongo walking along the road to the principal’s house. Us watching from the top of the hill, the gust in our faces. Obadiah says, There are sixteen kinds of wind, but only one that lifts a skirt like that.
He stands and whaps the cross with his hat.
26
GOAS LOVE
And still the bedraggled pigeons fuck. Everywhere they do it. No place is sacred, or depending on how you looked at it, all places sacred. Every mapone, every acacia. Toilet pit, dam, trough. They fuck on the road to Krieger’s farm. We blame it on the late freak rain, the theory being that somehow it had lodged into their chickpea brains that the world was all greenfull and pleasure from now on. Couldn’t they see the land was already parched again? Obadiah caught nine of them orgying in the backseat of his Datsun and attacked them with a broom, which seemed only to increase the rapture all around. The noise of their foul love deafening but indescribable, and yet I hear them still in my sleep. That gurgly, broody, out-of-breath whorling. Ecstatic death throes that went on deathlessly across dusk, night, dawn, coffee—feather-flapping fuckery. They do not do normal pigeon activities. They do not roost. They do not sun themselves. They do not harass your feet while you are eating an egg sandwich. They fuck. After that they fuck. Pigeon-mating season was supposed to last two weeks in the drier season—dry, drier, drought—and so was considered by the regional government to be only a minor plague on the list. As it has now gone on a month, we would welcome any other wrath, because those birds are such an affront to the general celibacy of Goas. Toads, serpents, locusts, boils, blains—at least they wouldn’t mock us. Leprosy? Give us the spots. Of course, Vilho counsels love, his finger holding his place in Matthew 13:37. He calls them doves, not pigeons. “He that soweth the good seed,” he says. “What would Jesus say?”
Pohamba blows him a kiss. “Jesus would stomp these flying rats with a fat hairy sandaled foot.”
*
A moment of reprieve. Mercy of a soft thud. One drops dead in the soccer field right in the middle of it. Just rolls off and that’s it, motionless feathers. We go out there and hold an impromptu funeral. We ring around him, we figure it’s a him. “Same thing happened to Nelson Rockefeller,” I say. “Died on top of his secretary.” People ignore this, like a lot of things I tend to say.
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.
27
MID-MORNING BREAK
She 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.
28
SIESTA
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
After 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.
29
SHOE WAR
Miss 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?
30
MOSES
The 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.
31
BY THE PISS TREE
Obadiah 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 ha
d 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?”