The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

by Peter Orner

  The diocese didn’t know what to do with Goas. There was an idea of turning it into a leper colony, but apparently they couldn’t find enough Catholic lepers. Finally, the bishop sent two German monks, Brother Sebastian and Brother Gerhard, out there to raise karakul sheep. Even at that time those two monks were well into their last years. But the diocese needed cash, and karakul was where the money was. Either way you looked at it, a win-win proposition. If the brothers made good and raised capital, praise be. If they dropped dead out there, God’s will. The plan failed on both counts. The sheep died and Brother Sebastian and Brother Gerhard didn’t.

  In ’42, their inaugural year, drought wiped out half the herd. In ’43, the rains came, but so did blue tongue. In ’45, more drought. In ’46, they held on. In ’48, they had too much rain. The Swakop River swelled and another third of the sheep drowned. And yet the two monks lived on—and on—thereby establishing another tenet of Goas: Its misery is hearty. The lashing wind and the frigid mornings and the eyeball-melting afternoons eventually become what your life was always supposed to amount to. Two monks, exiled in the wind. Raising karakul even under the best of conditions—they are a finicky, wimpy breed—was an enterprise born of love and despair. Year follows year and Brother Sebastian and Brother Gerhard don’t die. Their nights are long. The bleat of the parched lambs keeps them awake. They aren’t exactly missionaries. There are no native heathens here to preach to. The monks carry God’s Word to a veld that never even sends back an echo. Weren’t there days when they wondered whether they were still alive, when it occurred to them that they might no longer be living, breathing men, holding sheep shears and praying?

  The fifties were as hot and desiccated as the forties. And yet because of a year like ’53, they endured. In ’53 there was enough rain. The sheep got fat. The shearing went on into the night for weeks. The sort of year that makes all the suffering worth it, until the next drought comes and all that’s left is to tell stories of ’53.

  You recall ’53, Brother Sebastian?

  Oh, happy times, Brother Gerhard. Happy times.

  Then one afternoon Brother Gerhard didn’t come home from a walk in the veld, and Brother Sebastian went out and searched for him. He’s still searching. Of all the ghosts at Goas, and as Obadiah says, for a small place, our ghosts are legion, none is more bewildered than Brother Sebastian. Awkward, naked, and cold—and dead himself now too—and still Brother Sebastian keeps searching for Brother Gerhard’s body. He senses him in one place, then another. People hold out hope that Brother Sebastian will one day stop looking and be at peace. In the meantime, it is Brother Sebastian who digs those strange, unidentifiable holes we sometimes find by our doors in the morning, too big for a rabbit and too small for a hedgehog. Each one like a tiny, empty grave.

  In 1967, with the Group Areas Act forcing black schoolchildren out of the towns, the Church found another use for Goas. A school! Why hadn’t anybody thought of that before?

  *

  It would be difficult to find a place more unlovingly built. Two parallel rows of classrooms, concrete blocks, repainted yellow each year by Theofilus. The boys’ hostel the same—narrow, barracks-like. A church that could double as a storage area. Small houses for the married teachers. A bachelors’ quarters for the single males. In spite of the new paint, the place is already in a state of minor crumble. We live amid newish-looking ruins. And yet after a while you start to see that maybe there’s a logic to the place, that the buildings of Goas are only as temporary as the people who pass through them.

  Hereby established a Native School (Inboorlingskool) situated south of Karibib and maintained by the Archdiocese of Windhoek resident at 2013 Peter Mueller Strasse, Windhoek, was duly registered under Sub-section (1)(a) of Section one hundred and five Education Ordinance, 1962 (27 of 1962) made under the ordinance.

  DIRECTOR OF NATIVE EDUCATION

  WINDHOEK

  27 JULY 1967

  And when the wall of night fell on the first boys in the hostel, boys who had come here from all parts of the country, where did they think they were?

  41

  THEOFILUS

  He was easy to forget, though he was always among us. At least when he wasn’t in the veld mending a fence or milking the cows or shooting a kudu for meat for the boys or disinfecting the toilets or regreasing the generator or smoking bats out of the hostel—or any other of the thousand things he did every day that made us feel our laziness so acutely it was like a wound—Theofilus was among us. Maybe not even listening, but near. His hands momentarily still. The farm would have collapsed without him within a week, and yet we so often forgot him. In hindsight, this seems surprising, because, to be honest, he was so shocking-looking. Theofilus was albino, but this was never mentioned out loud. Not white exactly, his skin was more like faded red leather. And nobody made any of the usual cuts about black albinos either. Nobody said his eyelids got seared off when God kissed him out of heaven. Nobody said he was a photographic negative with legs, or a milk kaffir, or that he was the ghost who nibbled children’s feet at night. People talked only about his graceful, motor oil-stained hands and how there was nothing he couldn’t fix except Japanese cars, which was all right, since Jesus himself couldn’t have healed Obadiah’s Datsun.

  He slept on a cot in the mission garage. His bed was always neatly made with a single blanket. I never saw a pillow on it. He kept his second pair of boots under the bed, along with a cardboard box where he stored the clothes he wasn’t wearing. There was also, sometimes, a shadow made by his bed that stretched across the oily pavement of the garage, depending on the time of day and the angle of the sun coming in through the cracked windows.

  Every third Saturday of the month, Theofilus would leave the farm and its cattle and goats in the charge of two Standard Sevens and take a donkey cart to visit his wife. She was attached to a farm near Wilhelmstal, halfway to Okahandja. It was said she couldn’t move out to Goas and live with Theofilus because keeping a wife didn’t come with his job. Once a month, he ironed his suit and white shirt on an old unused door held up by two upturned paint cans. Once a month, his tattered blue jumper swung in the wind on the line behind the garage, waiting for him to put it on again Monday morning.

  The boys were having a soccer tournament that Saturday, so we were out there on the sidelines, sitting on desks we’d dragged from our classrooms, watching and betting on teams. Bufula Bufula were 2 to 1 over Pepsi All-African Stars, 8 to 1 over Omaruru Toyota. (Pohamba’s odds.)

  Theofilus on his donkey cart in a pressed black suit and shined shoes. He was all hitched up, the cart standing near the far goal, in front of the mission garage. The unfair thing was, he had always been kind to them, never beat them at all, much less very hard, and he never picked on the lazier of the two, a nameless grizzle-haired black and brown who often let his friend, a gray shaggy named Oom Zak, carry most of the weight. He fed those two donkeys more carrots than they could eat. It was as though they’d talked it over and decided that day to go on strike, Theofilus and his mercy be damned. We could see, from our seats on the other side of the field, that he at first considered it an aberration. He beat them a few times, gently. Still, they wouldn’t budge. He beat them harder. Nothing. We watched him look curiously at the stick, as if it were the problem. Then Theofilus raised the stick over his head and calmly began to flog them.

  He kept at it.

  Finally, even the boys noticed and stopped the game to watch Theofilus crack those donkeys so hard and for so long that we could see the blood of the lazy nameless one flicking off the stick. The whole time he stared straight ahead, like none of this was happening, as if the whole farm weren’t watching. A man on his way to see his wife but not going anywhere. His long legs at perfect right angles, so that they looked, from where we all were sitting, like a solid table. We all watched—the teachers and the boys. Him pretending it wasn’t happening, even as the blood began to splatter his clean suit, and still those two stood motionless, as if today t
hey were no longer farm donkeys but dignified statues of their supposed cousins, horses.

  Theofilus straddled up there in his best now-ruined clothes. There was something almost obscene about how we couldn’t take our eyes off it. It was Mavala Shikongo who finally said something. She was sitting with that baby, Tomo, clawing around, biting her ankles. She’d begun to join us. Tomo had come first. He couldn’t be contained in that little room that used to be the principal’s garage. And Mavala had followed. What else was there to do at Goas, ultimately, but join us?

  She gets him a day a month?

  I didn’t hear it when she said it. Do you know what I mean? At first, you don’t hear something, and then you play it back in your head and you hear it perfectly?

  She didn’t say anything else. Still, she shamed us. We hadn’t thought of his wife. Maybe we figured we didn’t need to. We’d seen so many like her, old mammies walking along the goat paths that ran beside the tar roads, scarves wrapped tight around their heads. Why be more specific?

  Theofilus didn’t break the bastard stick across his knees. He set it down on the floor of the cart like it was made of glass. He looked exhausted, as if he really had gone to her and come back. His pale, sun-ravaged face. He got off the cart and unbuckled the harnesses the same gentle way he always did. Then he walked to the mission garage and hoisted the door and went inside. The boy who had been closest to the cart, the keeper, Skinny Hilunda, walked up and gave the donkeys a few punches in their flanks. They didn’t notice. Later, both of them wandered away to the veld, because they felt like wandering away to the veld. Theofilus didn’t work that day. He didn’t come out of the garage. And we sat by the soccer field and thought of her watching the road he wouldn’t come home on, wondering if somehow after all these years she had got the wrong Saturday. Are you next week, Theo? Always she hears him before she sees him. The axles beneath the cart shriek, and if there’s no wind, she can practically hear him from as far as Vogelslang—then him coming into view over a rise in the highway.

  Part Two

  FARTHER INTO THE VELD

  God preserve me from love.

  — BESSIE HEAD

  42

  NIGHT

  Summer or whatever you called that even hotter time before summer even started when your skin wasn’t used to the night heat yet and the mosquitoes began their bloodlusty moaning. How their noise changed as the night went deeper. At the beginning of the night they were feverish because of the unbearably beautiful proximity of your flesh, and yet the netting and the coils worked for the most part and the lust changed to frustration and you’d listen to their hunger for you rise and dissipate, rise and dissipate, until you sank into a sort of stupor that didn’t feel like sleeping, though you woke up in the morning and realized you had slept, that it hadn’t all been a waiting. And in the morning, the hopeful ones, the hangers-on, were so drowsy from unrequited aching outside the net they were simple to kill, so on hot mornings you’d hear, from every room in the singles quarters, the sound of joyous acrobatic whacking, easy rolled-newspaper slaughter, even from Vilho’s, all that love-thy-neighbor talk and he was as much mass murderer as we were, and then we’d show off the carnage on our walls, give each other mini-tours of death, Got this fucker with my pinkie, all the flat black asterisks, and the lucky ones also, the ones sated with our blood, them massacred now too, us thinking we’ve reaped our revenge, always forgetting that tonight our victories will mean nothing, that they’ll all be reborn, reincarnated fifty, a hundred, a thousand times, and that killing them will always be the same as not killing them.

  43

  POHAMBA

  Spacious days yawned on. We put off everything we had to do, because there would always be time for it later. This afternoon was tomorrow. Night was Madagascar. We’d stand before our classes and say words, slowly, languidly, words. It was as if we were talking under water. These were days Pohamba couldn’t contain himself. He was sweating for it, working long hours of love, going to Karibib every chance he got (hitching rides, taking Festus’s bike), and straggling back to Goas at sunrise and not changing his clothes for school, just appearing in the staff room for morning meeting with enormous ovals of sweat staining his silken armpits. Even the principal respected Pohamba’s work ethic and didn’t ride the Good Book too hard on him.

  He’d often run out of money. Only Vilho would still give him any. That saint would look at him with his sad, empathetic eyes and stick the rands in Pohamba’s pocket like a bouquet. And still Pohamba would feel the need to explain it: “Can’t be a sugar daddy without any sugar, hey?”

  Those days were hardest on his Standard Sevens. The more fatigued he was, the more he expected of them, up there in front of his class roaring: “Differentiate the following: Y equals 1 plus X divided by the square root of 1 minus X to the second power.”

  “But, Teacher —”

  A bleary, too-caffeinated man pacing the rows with a ruler in one hand and his big deadly wooden protractor in the other. “Do you want to end up at Goas like me? Don’t you boys see I only want the best for you? No fingers. Calculate!”

  44

  TOMO

  What kind of person hates a baby? That’s no baby. He only looks like a baby. Mavala called him her monstrous, her squirmy, her rodentia, her bedlam. He had squat little legs like a miniature Greco-Roman wrestler. We called him Little Festus. He was not yet two but was seen by reliable witnesses lifting a wheelbarrow over his head. He loved a toilet house, especially when you were in it. (As good a time as any to mention that the only toilet house that locked from the inside was the principal’s private one. It would have been considered tantamount to a coup d’état if anyone else shat in it.) Tomo’s ferrety, chicken-greasy fingers in your pockets. He ate everything. He noticed everything, understood everything. I remember his eyes staring at me through the slats of a chair, just his eyes, holding me, knowing me, hating me back. We were jealous of him. Of what his eyes had the privilege of seeing in person. An outside shower, the spigot in the back of the principal’s house. Tomo sits in the muddied sand while she… she… she . . .

  I’d try to hold him tender—my false hands—and his body would seize. And that thing. All babies do this, but Tomo did it with particular vengeance. That thing they do. You’d be playing with him, or think you were playing with him, having a good time making gurgling noises and chasing him around, and then he’d fall over and he’d raise his head and think about it a moment, make the calculation. Decide whether it was in his best interest to cry bloody murder. In my case he always wailed like the tornado drill at Wainscott Elementary on North Clifton in Cincinnati. The way he could turn it on, turn it off. Blast. Modulate. Blast.

  Upside-down in his car seat, his feet where his head should be (one bootie on, the other long gone), that big head dangling down. How those eyes never seemed to bother with seeing anything superfluous. Like your lying-ass smile. He sneered right through you. He couldn’t talk yet, and maybe this was the true source of his power. Words would only get in the way of his seeing the essentials. Who would hate a baby?

  We said Mavala Shikongo never laughed. It wasn’t true. It was that only he could make her do it. I mean laugh. Laugh like a banshee, as if she had the whooping cough, uncontrollable seal barks you could hear all the way from the principal’s house. Small, easy things like brushing his hair with a toothbrush, like stuffing a little mashed potato up his nose, would get her going with her croaking.

  45

  LATE DUSK

  Goats skitter in from the veld through the late dusk, the blue light like falling smoke. Pohamba’s asleep, his early evening nap. I take a tub of Rama out of the food cupboard and scoop the margarine out and toss it onto the garbage pile beyond our fire pit. One of Antoinette’s roosters, the one with the spiky tuft of green hair, immediately converges, stunned—never has such a mother lode been delivered with such nonchalance. I leave him to his wonder. I walk up the road toward the principal’s house. She’s sitting on a bench ou
tside her door, stirring pap over an open fire. Tomo sits up from rolling in the dirt at her feet and glowers at me. I hold up my empty tub.

  “Anybody home? We’re out of margarine in the quarters, wondering if —”

  Mavala jabs her thumb toward the window. Beyond the curtain I can see the fuzz of the television. The principal can’t get any reception from Windhoek, but he and Miss Tuyeni like to sit there and pretend they’re watching the shows they read about in the paper.

  “My sister and her husband are being entertained,” Mavala says. “Would you like to sit and wait, Teacher?”