The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

by Peter Orner

  Her feet are bare. It’s either bare feet or heels. Immense attention is paid to Mavala’s footwear in the quarters.

  “I asked if you’d like to sit, Teacher.”

  “Sure.” I sit down next to her on the bench. She leans over the pot and stirs some more, then sets the spoon on the bench between us. She crosses her legs one way, then the other. Then leaves them uncrossed.

  “You know, I wouldn’t be so fat if I was home working in the mealie fields. In the north, you strap a baby on your back and go to work in the fields.”

  We’d been noticing this, that she’d sometimes say things that made you think she’d been having a conversation with herself and your presence was only incidental.

  “Who said you’re fat?”

  “I heard English whites don’t like fat women. The Boers like them fat.”

  “I’m not English.”

  “I’m bored,” she says. “Aren’t you bored?”

  I watch her scratch her left ankle with her right toes. I stoop and pick up Tomo. I want, for a moment, to be closer to her feet. I start to bounce Tomo on my knees, but he goes for my eyes and I drop him. He snatches up my margarine tub and tosses it in the fire. She doesn’t seem to notice any of this. She looks at me, her eyes too big. Pohamba said no woman should open her eyes that wide, that a woman who advertised like that was either lying or crazy. I stare back at her with what I’m thinking looks like sensuous, but also intellectual, meaning.

  She looks back at the pot.

  “Why don’t you cook inside in the kitchen?”

  “It seems my sister thinks my morals contaminate the food.”

  “She said that?”

  “She said I’m a slut.”

  “Sluts don’t use kitchens?”

  “Apparently not.”

  I lean toward her sideways, with my eye on the small scoop in her neck, thinking this is the right angle for something, but she’s already off the bench, moving fast into the darkened veld, up and down a small koppie and out of sight.

  She shouts to me, “Feed him for me, will you, please? Wait for it to cool.”

  I spoon the pap into his bowl and set it on the bench. I watch the steam rise for a while. Then I call the monster and the monster comes. He plumps himself down against my leg and waits for his bowl.

  Down the road, Antoinette hollers wash. “You boys, I want you washed, scrubbed, and pious. Ten minutes!” And the boys shout it back in all their languages. A babel of voices hollering wash.

  In the house, there’s the subtle flick of the constantly changing white light. Miss Tuyeni laughs at something she thinks she sees. I watch Tomo eat.

  46

  WALLS

  A boy in the hostel has night terrors. We are all accustomed to it now. We wait for him. It’s as if he does our screaming for us.

  He’s screaming right now.

  Pohamba bangs the wall. “Can’t sleep?”

  “No.”

  “Which boy do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s he afraid of?”

  “Look, let’s try and —”

  “Mobutu can’t sleep either.”

  “What?”

  “Mobutu Sese Seko and his leopardskin hat. What keeps him awake? What’s he fear?”

  “It’s two in the morning.”

  “He fears Patrice Lumumba. Want one? A bedtime story?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Come now. We’ve nowhere to go but sleep. Answer. Why does Mobutu fear Patrice Lumumba?”

  “I have no clue.”

  “Good. You shouldn’t. Because Lumumba’s gone. They chopped him up in pieces and threw him in a barrel of acid.”

  “So he’s dead. Let Mobutu and me go back to sleep.”

  “Is the mind always logical? Mobutu lies in his big golden bed and he can’t sleep for fear. So he calls in his security chief and says, ‘Security Chief, I want you to do something for me. Go kill Patrice Lumumba.’ ‘But, master,’ the security chief says, ‘The postal worker’s been dead for years.’ ‘You think I don’t know that? The people—don’t you understand?—the people still love him.’ So the security chief calls his men and tells them what to do. They’re confused also, but the security chief shouts at them, ‘Do I pay you clods to ask questions?’ His men shrug. It’s not hard. They go out and murder a guy. The security chief brings the body to Mobutu. ‘Here’s Lumumba, master.’ ‘Good,’ Mobutu says. ‘Now go and do it again.’”

  Pohamba blows his nose, honks. “So every night, in Kinshasa, they murder Patrice Lumumba. Well, it’s Africa, no?”

  “Good night,” I say.

  “You think this isn’t Africa?”

  “What?”

  “You’re not afraid?”

  “No.”

  “I am.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m afraid I’m Lumumba.”

  “Nobody wants to kill you. Sleep.”

  Vilho taps the opposite wall lightly, whispers, but these walls make no difference. “Patrice Lumumba was a martyr,” Vilho says.

  Pohamba clears his throat like a drumroll. “And how do you know I’m not a martyr?”

  Vilho ponders this. We can hear him. He sighs when he ponders. Vilho wears a nightshirt to bed. We can see him tucked in there snug, in sheets so clean they squeak. We find sleep listening to him ponder. The three of us breathe in the dark behind our walls.

  47

  VILHO

  Vilho who is always cold. Unlike the rest of us, whom the sun warms too quickly after the cold mornings, he remains bundled, wool-hatted, scarfed. He accepts chill as his fate. He never complains. We complain. We complain about the heat. We complain about the cold. We complain that Vilho never complains. He’s the confusing sort of lonely person who does not seek to be unlonely. And beyond this, the most alarming fact of all: It’s not the terrible coincidence that Vilho was a learner at Goas and is now marooned here again as a teacher. It’s that it’s not a coincidence. Upon graduating near the top of his class at Dobra, Vilho requested a posting at Goas. “Requested!” Obadiah cried, incredulous. “It means our poor Puck outcasted himself!”

  If you didn’t know he was a teacher, you’d mistake him for a learner. His face is so smooth, hairless, supple. He seems, also, not to salivate over women. Not Mavala. Not even Dikeledi. Pohamba says it’s impossible. An African man? Vilho? A moffie? But Obadiah says, if it’s true, we’d certainly be more cosmopolitan, a bit of Cape Town in the scrubveld. Even so, with all Vilho might hide, he’s the only one at Goas who seems unburdened—and so, naturally, we foist our various aches on him. Antoinette knits him scarf after scarf to keep him warm.

  48

  THE SEVASTOPOL WALTZ

  I must say I’m pleased we’re all in the road,” Obadiah said. “Does anyone have a theory as to why?” No one had a theory. No one intended to have a theory. Still, he waited. Morning break and the heat’s already risen and we’re under the single tree closest to school, which happened to be in the road.

  “We’re not learners,” Pohamba said. “Aren’t we the teachers?”

  “Wrong!” Obadiah shouted. “I’m tickled, good people of Goas, because the place for stories is in the road. You don’t tell stories inside a house. This was my father’s rule. When he wanted to tell a story, he herded us outside. My two brothers and four sisters, the whole family, except for my mother, who used to say my father made dead dogs look unlazy. She’d come out, however, but she never stepped into the road. Now understand, we lived on a dusty street full of rocks and garbage and sleeping tsoties with hats pulled over their eyes, and my father would tell stories of gone days in the Old Windhoek Location, before they came with the bulldozers and moved everybody to Katatura. My father spoke of the Old Location as if it were God’s humble paradise. Then he’d look around at our road, at all the houses—not houses, he never called our houses houses; they were pilchard cans pushed together with our tribe and number on the door—and he’d say, ‘
I’m an old man, and they expect me to fight. With what? These shaky hands?’ My father was a proud man, a cultured man, a Pan-Africanist, a Garveyite. He didn’t condemn men for picking up arms, he begged mercy on the devils who forced them to do so. He’d quote Senghor: Lord, forgive those who made guerrillas/of the Askias, who turn my princes/into sergeants. It was only that he was convinced there was a better way. He believed in education as a way to revolution. Books, he’d say, are the great topplers. Tromp the Boers with Tristram Shandy! The poor man. For my mother, it was one settler, one bullet. My father shamed her. She’d only laugh nastily at his memories, which she said weren’t even memories at all—but colonialist propaganda.

  “And once, out in the road, my father told us about the dance hall that used to be in the Old Location. ‘So big that dance hall, it felt like being in a small country.’ From the other side of the fence, my mother said, ‘Dance hall? You want to thank them for a dance hall in 1942? Other husbands go to jail.’ Then she spat.”

  Obadiah paused a moment to think of his mother. Mavala closed her book, but held her finger in the place where she’d stopped reading. She gazed up at the sky. The sun was faint, like a useless bulb in a day-lit room. Pohamba was marking quizzes. Festus was asleep with his head on his knee.

  “No, she wasn’t a lady, my mother,” Obadiah said. “And she would have gone and beat the Boers herself if she didn’t have to prepare mealie pap for six of us. My father feared her, but in public he pretended he didn’t, so he hushed her, told her, ‘Go home, woman. Go make your man some Ovaltine.’ She didn’t move. Neighbors had gathered around. Any activity in the road was better than nothing, and if it wasn’t a riot, at least they could watch my parents battle. ‘Size of Lesotho, that dance hall,’ my father said. ‘And in that great hall they held competitions, fierce dance competitions, and during one such event my wife and I—that belligerent woman standing right there—placed first in the Sevastopol Waltz.’”

  Obadiah leaped up and stood before us. “Like myself, my father was a skinny man. His clothes never fit properly. When he waltzed in the road with my second sister, his shirt flapped in the air so that he resembled a bedraggled bird with shoes.” Obadiah held his arms out and gripped a woman only he saw, his body erect, one hand cupping an elbow, the other flat on an invisible back. “Ready position!” he called. “And a one and a one, and a two and a two. Swing forward, swing back —”

  Whatever he was doing didn’t look like a waltz. It didn’t look like much of a dance at all, really. He was still a little drunk from the Zorba he’d had in his morning coffee, and he was flailing—a slow flail in loose loafers. He was a little drunk and loving his father and his father’s story, and we weren’t listening, because it was too hot and we had to haul ourselves up and teach in less than five minutes and we were just trying to get a little rest by the only shade tree.

  He was still circling, alone, when Mavala dropped her book in the dust and stood up and joined hands with him. After a bit, he said, “You can’t dance. How can a woman with so much natural finesse —”

  “And you’re an old souse,” Mavala said.

  “Try,” Obadiah said. “Try and dance.”

  And they did try, the two of them, in the road, in the sand. Mavala pulled off her heels. Even without them she was as tall as he was. Still, they were an awkward pair. When he went forward, she went forward, and their heads knocked together. Finally, he dropped his hands and peered at her curiously, as if he were trying to read something in bad light. “There’s something else,” he said. Up the road, the boys were coming back from the dining hall, gripping half-eaten carrots.

  “What?” Mavala said.

  Obadiah moved toward her, and reached out to her without touching; his hands only hovered over her shoulders. “My father never drank a drop. But—and I have never in my life forgotten this cruelty—that day as my father waxed triumphant in the road about the Sevastopol Waltz, my mother said, softly, because she knew she need not shout it, ‘Better a man drink.’”

  Obadiah stood in the road and looked at his feet. Mavala raised her hand and swatted, almost gently, the beak of his TransNamib hat.

  The triangle rang, and we stood up and brushed off our pants and gathered our stray pens. There was a knob on Festus’s forehead from his knee. As we started back to our classrooms, Obadiah called out, “May I add an addendum?”

  Nobody turned around.

  “My mother had, it’s true, exquisitely long legs. Are there not days when a son may imagine how they might have looked?”

  49

  HYGIENE PATROL

  One woman delouser. Pest Control Queen. Antoinette stalking the rows of beds in the boys’ hostel. The only instruments necessary are her hands, long-fingered, clawlike pinchers. No meek shampoos. She needs to feel the crush of death in the skin. One by one she tweaks the lice and squeezes. Hygiene as spectacle and Antoinette the unhooded executioner. Boys at attention! Your bodies are living, breathing, sweating violations! Their bunks are so close together she has to walk sideways. Boys, boys, boys. So many heads to inquisition. Boys, year after year, boys. Scalps! Underarms! Pubic nesting grounds! Lift your arms, Matundu. Pants down, Shepa. Your head, Titus, bow it! And then one day a boy simply says, No. My head is my head. Unhooded halts. Examines recalcitrant. Eyes his eyes, her pupils colossal. Antoinette is less alarmed than fascinated. Being stood up to is always something she’s wondered about. A tyrant without opposition gets very bored. Napoleon was said to have dreamed sweetly of defeat. And didn’t Stalin await the poison, half loving the notion of martyrdom? Antoinette halts, looks the boy up and down. He’s sitting on his bunk. His feet don’t reach the floor. She doesn’t know him. He’s not a thief, a vandal, or an arsonist. The good ones blur together. Why is it we remember only the hoodlums? His defiance isn’t even very spirited, and yet it’s unequivocal. His little legs in shorts. The dirty bottoms of his little feet. His clean powder-blue shirt. (Clearly he follows some regulations.) His slightly ovaled head and bags beneath his eyes. Does this boy ever sleep? He stares: Do what you want to me, old bitch, but my head is my head.

  “Surname?”

  “Axahoes, Mistress.”

  “Common name?”

  “Magnus.”

  “Standard what?”

  “Six, Mistress.”

  “So small a Standard Six?”

  He doesn’t answer this, looks at his feet as if they explain so small a Standard Six.

  “From which place?”

  “Andawib West.”

  “Farm?”

  “Of Meneer Pieterson. Kalkveld district.”

  “Parents?”

  “Father.”

  “Mother?”

  He sits silent. One leg twitches.

  “Stand up.”

  He gets up off the bed. The other boys stand mute, but their eyes are swarming.

  “Bow your head.”

  “No, Mistress.”

  “Why not? You suspect vermin? An infestation? You’re afraid?”

  His eyes want nothing, not even for this to end. Such a rare thing. You can’t drain the want out of your eyes no matter how hard you try. Even the dead want everything back, which is why the undertaker either closes their eyes or blocks them with a penny. But this boy. Not even sorrow, as if he knows that above all sorrow is only pride. Train your eye to watch a single mosquito. You can never concentrate enough. Since she was a child, she’s tried to follow the course of just one. It’s impossible. You can only hope to get lucky when it flings back into your vision. But this boy’s eyes, because they see nothing else, could probably do it. She thinks: Your mother, child. The world is full of dead mothers, to the hilt with dead mothers. Jesus in his meekness, and you claim the right to be haughty? Your affliction’s greater? Still, she pities him, she loves him. This is not a standoff. This is a breath before a rout. She raises her hand and breaks him on the hostel floor like a donkey.

  50

  NOTES ON A MOSTLY

  ABS
ENT PRIEST

  Storyless lump. To Goas his sole importance was that he had transport. A car, two bakkies, a lorry, a tractor. Our Father of Goas captained a fleet. It was like being on a desert island with half a dozen rescue boats. Except there was a catch. Only Theofilus was permitted to drive any of them, and he could use them solely for official church business, which did not include the business of teachers.

  For a mostly doughy man, the Father had very square shoulders. In his robes he looked like a box dressed in a tablecloth. No one knew him well enough to hate him. He’d been at Goas only a few years. He spoke in an oddly high-pitched voice, and, it was said, there was something in it that harked backward. Whether fair or unfair, people sometimes said it was because Father was “coloured,” and so a half-step closer to being white under the old—just recently old—laws. Myself he ignored. He once asked me what my faith was, and when I told him, he said, “So Windhoek sent us a pagan?” Then he shrilled something that might have been a laugh and marched off.

  He kept a German shepherd in a pen—sequestered from Auntie Wilhelmina’s whelps. He loved the dog and would feed it fresh kudu bones. One day this pampered dog escaped and stepped on a puff adder in the veld. It dragged itself back home and stood howling in front of the rectory for its master. We all stood around and watched its neck balloon. Then the dog begin to convulse and choke. Eventually, Father came out and brained it with a hammer.

  The priest had two rules, as opposed to the principal’s countless ones. No drinking and no fornicating among unmarrieds. The first one wasn’t enforced (the priest was known to indulge in vermouth). The second didn’t need to be.

  Why the principal, by far the loudest Catholic on the farm, and Father despised each other was a mystery. It probably had something to do with the nationalization of schools, which happened after independence. This made for a sense of confusion as to who truly ruled Goas. The principal ran the school, but the school was on Church property. The teachers of Goas saw it this way: The principal owns our asses; the priest, whatever’s left of our souls.