by Peter Orner
“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…”
32
OBADIAH (3 A.M.)
Every 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?
33
IN THE NORTH
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.
“And do you know what?”
We know. It’s me and Vilho and him, and we’re lounging on the mealie sacks outside the hostel kitchen, waiting for Dikeledi to hang her laundry. Holy laundry, blessed laundry. Pohamba slides his mirrored sunglasses down his nose and peers at us, repeats, “And do you know what?”
I stifle a yawn. “I can’t imagine.”
He leans back against the mealie sacks, sighs. Then he drags it out, slowly, dramatically: “He wasn’t a he.”
“Tut,” Vilho says, without looking up from his book. “Tut, tut, tut.”
Pohamba sucks his teeth and starts again. “Once upon a time in the north… You see, the north isn’t like here. Things happen in the north. Things have happened in the north. This is not a place to live. Cows eat sand for breakfast. In the north, the baobab trees grow so big they use one as a post office.”
“A baobab isn’t a tree,” Vilho says. “It’s a succulent.”
“Once upon a time in the sacred north,” I say. “An SADF tank is roaming the veld when suddenly a man with leaves on his head…”
“. . . begins beating the tank with a stick,” Pohamba says. “And beating and beating and beating and beating…”
“. . . until one of the troopies inside gets tired of it, so he shoots the man…”
“. . . who isn’t really a man,” Vilho says.
“Yes,” Pohamba shouts. “The end!”
We sit there. It’s still too early for Dikeledi’s laundry.
Vilho looks up from his book. “But why would she want to die like that?” he says. “Why would anyone choose such a graceless death?”
“Graceless?” Pohamba says. Then he stands up and does Christ. This is a new wrinkle in the story. He droops his head, reaches his arms out wide, contorts his face into his idea of rapturous agony. Crucifixion atop the mealie sacks. “You prefer this?”
“Our Lord didn’t have a choice,” Vilho says, looking up at him. “He didn’t want to die for us, he wanted to live. That’s the whole message.”
And Jesus did nudge Vilho with his toe. His arms still stretched out, his head lolling, Pohamba says, “You see, they’ve killed everyone in my village. All the terrorist old women and all the terrorist babies and all the terrorist chickens. Only I was left alive. So what must I do? I gather leaves. I find a good stick. Now do you understand?”
“Even their abominations do not justify.”
Pohamba twitches and takes a sniff of an armpit. “Whew, brother, too long on the cross!”
“Let her live,” Vilho says, squeezing his eyes shut. “Next time you tell it, let her —”
“What?” Pohamba plops down heavily on the mealie sacks. “You want her to wait around for it like a goat?”
34
DROUGHT STORIES
Drought stories were told the same way war stories were—they filled in the gaps of the longest days—except they were more true and left less room for dramatic acts of bravery. You don’t fight the Almighty. You don’t sneak up behind lack of rain. You don’t sabotage clouds. You die. At least back in the old days. Now drought means you breathe up dust and the food prices are higher at the Pick ’n Pay and salaries remain the same and the government has to import mealies from Zimbabwe. And cattle suffer.
But in ’79 the drought in the Koakveld (this happened to other people—to be a victim of drought meant you were a farm person, and no one at Goas was a farm person, Goas being a temporary stop, no matter how many years of your life you spent there) was accompanied by an epidemic of rats. Rats who became just as hungry as the people. What happened was, a rat ate a baby. This happened to a family no one knew personally. Antoinette told it while she was hosing down her tiny garden with water pirated from the science lab. She grew wild onions and radishes and small tomatoes. She was wearing her green Sunday dress. It was Sunday, after church. During the drought of ’79, in the Koakveld, up in Africa, she said, not here, it didn’t happen down here, a starving rat ate a starving baby.
35
MAVALA
I watch her shadow as she stalks across the courtyard, her heels stabbing the sand. She avoids the patch of the principal’s Ireland and steps up into the open door of his office. He’
s either on the phone or about to be, his big hand reaching for it. Who he talked to we never knew, although he always seemed to be ordering supplies and books we never saw.
I’m doing a reading-comprehension drill. I have just read them a story about a mischievous boy named Tom and his wily teacher, Sir Joseph Blinks. Now the question is: Why does Sir Blinks mistrust Tom?
I stand near my open classroom door. I hear her ask for construction paper. I look back at my class. Most have their heads down and are doing their best to write something, except for Rubrecht Kanhala, who knows I’m only trying to run out the clock before third-period break. He’s thumping the end of his nose with a pencil. Sir Blinks doesn’t know shit.
I step out and wander halfway up the porchway and listen.
“You need to fill out a requisition form.”
“Give me a form, then.”
“The forms are finished.”
A long silence. Outside Pohamba’s class a boy whacks two erasers together and gags on the chalky smoke.
The principal is sitting. Mavala is standing. His finger is poised in mid-dial of the rotary. She watches his face. If only she’d slacken a little, this young sister of his wife, and behave more like a woman is supposed to. He could make things easier for her. She need not acknowledge his authority—of course she needn’t go that far—but for God’s sake, won’t she look at his existence as flesh, as a man with hands and blood and cock and need and eyes?
I don’t have to see any of this—it’s all there in the silence. Power is easily spent—you can always get more later—but as far as she’s concerned, he can keep it and play with it. He sees this, and it only makes him sweat watching her. Her: Go ahead. Cower beneath me with your principal stomach, your principal key chain, your principal phone in your hand. She doesn’t leave, only stands there, in her sleeveless blouse, with her bare shoulders. Stands there like a taunt. A few minutes more she’s in that office. Maybe she’s going too far—stepping on him too much, too easily, too early. She hasn’t been back a month. There’s no more talk of construction paper or forms.
She leaves empty-handed and heads back across the courtyard—this time she tromps straight across Ireland—toward her class, which is waiting silently (itself a miracle at Goas). She’ll ask Obadiah for some construction paper. No, a better idea. She’ll take her boys to the veld and let them draw on the rocks like Bushmen. A few minutes later, I watch them file out, her ducklings, two by two.
36
COFFEE FIRE
What does she want, then?”
“Not to be a teacher, obviously.”
“Who wants to be a teacher?”
“Not me.”
“You degrade the profession. Shame —”
“Well, she was probably expecting more. Look at Libertine Amathila. Now she’s Minister of Health. Didn’t they name a boulevard after her in Otjiwarongo?”
“But Libertine Amathila’s a doctor. SWAPO sent her abroad to study. Easy to come back to the country a hero when you’re a doctor.”
“And now she’s got her own avenue!”
“Boulevard!”
“Yes, even better!”
“Miss Tuyeni says one day she just left and crossed the border. They didn’t hear from her for two years. They thought she was dead.”
“How old?”
“Seventeen or so. The mother nearly died of grief over it.”
“How did she come to teaching if she hates it so much?”
“She taught school up in the camp.”
“Teacher and a soldier?”
“Yes.”
“Not the only one.”
“Who else?”
“I’d rather not boast.”
“Well, it’s understandable.”
“What is?”
“To want more after something like that. After committing so much to the cause, wouldn’t you expect —”
“What? More than Goas? Everybody deserves —”
“Always more. Why can’t anyone ever —”
“And the kid?”
“Ah, yes—the child.”
“That child’s demonic.”
“Shush—that’s a beautiful lamb.”
37
ANTOINETTE
Just past noon and the boy is, at last, sleeping beneath the kitchen table. Difficult, the girl said, as if the child was a problem to solve. Now she understands. There’s some rage within him—his little fists are constant. Unless, like now, he’s sleeping, his anger gone. As if sleep possesses us, infuses us with a goodness that isn’t really us. She peeks at the boy, at his tiny unclenched hands, at his dirty elbows, at his stomach rising and falling. Or what if it is us? What if asleep is the only time we are true? If so, who are we when we’re awake?
She takes Obadiah’s glasses out of her apron. Often he declares them lost and she finds them at various places around the farm. She begins to read.
Most days she lets the wind decide the page. Other, rarer times, like now, she goes back to the beginning.
The beginning? Does one remember being born? I was always at Goas. Even before I was at Goas, I was at Goas. Before the dry land was the water and the firmament. Out this window, I see the dry land. At night, I see the firmament. Where’s the water?
They say there was an ocean here once. It must have dried up.
And the boy, scrambling out from under the table, makes for the door.
38
OBADIAH (SHAVING)
Two souls abide, alas, within my breast,
And each one seeks riddance from the other.
The one clings with a dogged love and lust
With clutching parts unto this present world.
The other surges fiercely from the dust
Unto sublime ancestral fields.
GOETHE,FAUST
I stand before this mirror an orphan. Of my own body I would say I have decidedly mixed feelings. It is tall. It carries my head. It seems my left leg is longer than my right, but this has never been proven. There are days when I see my feet as if from a great distance. When I was young, in my vanity, I favored turtleneck sweaters to accentuate what I considered to be my Corinthian neck. That I am now ugly is of no concern. My mottled, sagging skin. My berried nose. That my face fails to present my beauty and originality is not a failure of my maker. Rather, it is a testament to the unsung nature of my uniqueness. That the philistines cannot recognize my soaringness only makes it truer. More than truth. Is there a higher highest? A truthlier truth? My head carries my thoughts and my legs carry my body. And yet touch—physical—I long for it again. Don’t you remember? When you used to do do do Meneer Oblongsky? Remember? Your thimbled fingers? When I was poor but also beautiful? Now I’m poor and ugly? Meneer Oblongsky hangs limp like a wrung chicken’s neck, and still I’m sick with desire? Lame men make lusty husbands? Would it were so, Poet. Now I ride the donkey by memory. And yet it isn’t merely youth I lust for, but last week. Give me back last week. My Antoinette in her chair rubbing her feet with camphor.
39
ANTOINETTE
and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
L ove? You want to know where love went?
Easy. Same place as all the water. Now enough. I have stomachs to satisfy.
40
GOAS
The first recorded attempt to escape Goas occurred in 1930, when a Boer farmer named S. J. Dupreez tried to trade the farm for a lusher parcel upcountry.
OFFICE OF THE MAGISTRATE
KARIBIB
12 JULY 1930
My dear Sir,
As you no doubt know I have been a heavy loser of stock, having lost all owing to the latest drought. It was my intention to quit the country altogether but owing to the pleas of my motherless and unmarried daughter Grieta I have decided to try again but in another district. With this end in view I paid a visit to the north and was very much taken with the east side of Outjo District, particularly the vacant farm Weiseenfels. What I propose t
o do is effect an exchange of my farm Goas with that of Farm Weiseenfels, the hectarage being roughly the same. Goas as you know is occasionally well watered, and will no doubt make a most valuable addition to the Otjimbingwe Native Reserve, an opportunity for an enterprising kaffir. In penning you these lines I do so in the hope that you will kindly forward same with your recommendation to the proper quarters.
Your Obedient Servant,
S. J. Dupreez
SECRETARY FOR SOUTHWEST AFRICA
F. P. COURTNEY CLARK
WINDHOEK
8 DECEMBER 1930
RE: FARM GOAS
SIR, I beg to forward herewith for your consideration a letter received from Mr. S. J. Dupreez, owner of the farm Goas in this district. There has been no rain on the farm since early last year, and Mr. Dupreez has lost all his cattle throught [sic] drought. I have informed Mr. Dupreez that the Administrator does not contemplate purchasing any of the farms adjoining the Otjimbingwe Native Reserve owing to the depletion of stock therein, and there is little likelihood of his proposal being accepted.
Acting Magistrate
T. Miller
OFFICE OF THE MAGISTRATE
KARIBIB
12 DECEMBER 1930
RE: FARM GOAS
With reference to your minute No. 2/4/2/4 of the 8th instant, I shall be glad if you will kindly inform Mr. Dupreez that it is regretted that the administration is not at this time prepared to entertain his generous offer.
SECRETARY FOR SOUTHWEST AFRICA
F. P. COURTNEY CLARK
WINDHOEK
Thus, Dupreez’s proposal (i.e., this farm is so useless you may as well give it back to the natives) failed. He did, however, establish a precedent of unrequitement that would reign at Goas for the next sixty years: a great urge to leave, matched only by total practical impossibility. Eleven more years Dupreez hung on in the wind and sand. In March of 1941, he died of gout. His bloated corpse was buried between his long dead wife and his (still unmarried) daughter, Grieta, who had died of consumption the year before. Moss doesn’t grow on graves in the desert. At Goas they are known as the Voortrekker graves, in honor of the great trek the Boers took to reach this paradise of their dreams. In his will, S.J. bequeathed the farm to the only one who couldn’t refuse it, God, through his fiduciary on earth, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Windhoek. There are two ways of seeing this at Goas. One is that he may have thought he’d get a place in heaven for this bestowal. In which case, the line went, he burns in hell for trying to stiff the Almighty. The other: He knew exactly what he was doing. As a Dutch Calvinist, he wanted to stick it to the Catholics.