by Peter Orner
There was a strange story about the two of them. An inexplicable story, with no beginning and no end and no point whatsoever.
One morning the priest found the principal asleep on the rectory roof.
What was he doing up there? Spying?
Nobody knows.
Why’d he fall asleep? Was he drunk?
Wouldn’t you get drunk if you had to spend the night on a roof?
Yes. What was he doing on the roof in the first place?
I said, Nobody knows . . .
51
ENGLISH NIGHT
Even more than her lipstick and her baby-blue eye shadow and her skimpy skirts, it was Mavala’s enthusiastic organ playing that drove the priest out of his gullet. Wednesday night was officially English night in church. Any ordinary Sunday or daily morning Mass—if he happened to be at Goas, often he wasn’t, the Erongo region being short on priests—the Father spoke a kind of apocalyptic-sounding Afrikaans. Nothing but hell awaits you boys who flout your immorality under God’s all-seeing eyes… Wednesday nights, though, he left off the pulpit fist-banging. It was said that he resented the edict handed down by the bishop in Windhoek, out of deference to the new constitution, that English be spoken in church at least once a week. It seemed that Father wanted to show everyone that Afrikaans was still the language of a thunderous God. So, on English night, he tweeted his homily. And the boys took his cue. They knew it was safe to fall asleep in church on Wednesday. The older boys brought pillows and sprawled out on the back benches. In the front pews the sub b’s fell asleep, collapsed onto one another’s shoulders, their little heads lolling, their tiny kneecaps digging into the wooden slats as they endured painful but merciful sleep.
After dozing through the service, the boys perked up when Mavala played. She said that in spite of everything she was still Catholic. Whether they wanted her or not. The organ didn’t work very well. The pedals often stuck, and the notes reverberated even longer than they were supposed to, creating a sort of bleeding music that layered on itself, as if every note she played were happening at the same time. By the end of a hymn there was always total cacophony. It never mattered. And the boys irritated the Father further by singing in English. O food of exiles lowly, O bread of angels holy… Their voices carried across the farm—out to Theofilus in the veld; up to the top of the hill by the cross, where Pohamba sat alone, boycotting church.
As a supposed living embodiment of the virtues of speaking English, I made a point of going to church on English night. I sat with Vilho in the back pew and tried not to think of her legs pumping, her feet pumping. Mavala closed her eyes when she played, her head tilted slightly toward her right shoulder.
One Wednesday, I waited for her after it was over and everyone but Vilho had filed out. He often remained. He once told me there was something unusually calm about a just-emptied church. Together, Mavala and I walked up the road toward the principal’s house.
“The wind’s up,” I said.
(The wind’s up. The wind’s down. Sometimes we thought it, said it, just to have something to think, to say.)
“Yes,” she said.
“It was down before.”
“Right,” she said. “It was down before, wasn’t it?”
We passed two boys, Obadiah’s Standard Threes, Siggy and Petrus, who were sitting at the remains of the stolen picnic table, practicing introducing themselves in Obadiah’s King’s English; which king was never clear.
“I should be honored, kind sir, if you would favor me with your name.”
“I was christened Siegfried, but please, I insist, call me Siggy. Dare I inquire of yours, friend of my youth?”
“Ah, kindred spirit! I’m known as Petrus.”
They smoked pencils like pipes. They tipped imaginary hats. From their faces they both seemed to be in great pain. English was often associated with constipation.
The two of us went on up the road. “Like a zoo, this place,” she said.
“They love it when you play.”
“Oh, that.”
“You inspire them.”
Mavala popped her forehead with her palm. “You know what? I forgot the kid.”
We headed down the road again, walked across the soccer field to Antoinette and Obadiah’s. Antoinette was standing at her guard post, her open kitchen window. Tomo was doing a headstand on the steps.
“And how was my angel?” Mavala said.
“He abused my chickens. He fouled my radishes.” She shoved down the window. Antoinette’s smiles were vague and fleet. Her face was blurred in the gloom behind the glass.
Mavala scooped up Tomo and kissed him all over. “How could I forget this boy? A boy such as this boy?”
We started back up the road a second time. She put Tomo down and he refused to walk, so she yanked him through the sand and he plowed along like an evil little water skier. Then she dropped him, and he scuttled after us.
“What were you saying?”
“That your playing —”
“Oh yes. That I inspire. On English night I do inspire!” She paused and looked at me. “Don’t I?”
At the missing picnic table, Siegfried and Petrus were still at it.
“And may I inquire from where your people hail?”
“I was born and bred in Swakopmund, my friend.”
“Oh, the sea. Its extravagances.”
Mavala squeezed my elbow. “What do you call that?”
“At least he’s teaching them some English. Better than I can do.”
“What about teaching them to know who they are? Is that who they are? This place is a hole and he’s president. God bless poor Antoinette.”
“I’m running for vice president of the hole,” I said.
“Happy for you. When are the elections?”
“So why do you play in church? If this place is so doomed. Why give the boys a false sense?”
She didn’t answer. We reached the principal’s house. It was dark. He and Miss Tuyeni had gone to Karibib. Mavala let go of Tomo’s hand and he tore off toward their room. He couldn’t reach the knob, so he stepped back and began ramming the door with his head.
The wind was up. The air had sand in it now and it began to peck our faces. Mavala looked down at the ground as if she’d dropped something. She had a slight widow’s peak I hadn’t noticed.
“Why do you play?”
“Stop thinking about me.”
“I asked —”
“I’m finished with that.”
“With what?”
“Being thought of.”
She left me and went and stomped toward the kid.
52
HUNS AND KHAKIS
Our guru was musing about the difference between certain colonial powers. I don’t remember where we were. We may have been at the urinals in the rank men’s room behind the Mobil station in Karibib, or at the Dolphin in the location, or at our table at the Public Bar, or in a lorry heading back to Goas, a week’s worth of groceries between our knees, sweating, passing around a warm Fanta, so thick it was more like molasses—but it was Fanta and we had it, so we drank it. We might have been out beyond the dry Kuiseb River, where Goas ended and the real desert began, hunting the spoor of that elusive dwarfed hedgehog of the central Namib escarpment. We may have been anywhere where Obadiah felt the need to hold forth, to educate us, to alleviate the burden of our fathomless ignorances.
“Now, the Germans at least were honest. They said they were going to steal our land and they stole our land. They said they were going to kill us, and by God, they killed us. Now, the British were less—how shall we put it?—forthright. They said our land was ours and they stole it. They said they were humanitarians and they bombed the Namas. That was in 1922. A year later, they cut off King Mandume’s head and made a parade of it. So who’s the devil’s favorite? The Germans go before God with reeking, unwashed hands and say, See, Father, see what I have done. Now judge me. The British? Those khakis knock on heaven’s door and offer
plum pudding.”
Obadiah paused and straightened the collar of his frayed tweed coat. Wherever we may have been, I can say with certainty he was wearing his piebald-colored tweed coat. He wore it summer or winter, teaching or not, shirt underneath or not. (When he was shirtless, small tufts of white hair spaghettied out between his lapels.)
“Indeed, we’ve had ample opportunity to observe these two giants of the enlightenment. As an aside, I might say that the Boers never had to shoulder the burden of being enlightened… But the Germans and the British! Consider the idiot carnage of what they call the Great War. It even reached us out here at the far-flung edge. Shakespeare versus Goethe in a battle for thorn scrub. One British general wrote to the King, ‘Your Majesty, this land isn’t fit for baboons or Bushmen.’ Now, one may well ask, Then why send men all the way down here to die?”
“Good question,” Pohamba said. “Why in hell —”
“Never ask it. The lives of soldiers, even white ones, have never been worth more than baboons or Bushmen.”
“So fuck them both,” Pohamba said.
“Must you vulgarize?”
“Fuck the Swedes.”
And I seem to remember Obadiah squinting at Pohamba then. So maybe we were outside in the glare. Let’s say we were—us tromping across the veld toward the Erongos.
“What’d the Swedes do to you?” I asked.
Pohamba shrugged. “Fuck Hawaiians.”
“Fuck Bulgarians,” I said.
“God Save the King,” Pohamba said.
Obadiah ignored us and held forth to the afternoon. “The British vanquished the Germans at Korub Aub. In the histories, their histories, they call it a white man’s war fought in heathen Africa. As if we weren’t even here at the time. The simple truth is this: They wouldn’t have won without us. The British promised us land—our own—if we helped them.”
He kicked off one of his sandals and dug a craggy toenail into the dry earth. It was a long time before he spoke again. Afternoon fell. The mountains ahead of us blued. A cloud, miserably pallid and empty, lazed slowly by. We’d failed at hunting again.
“When it was over,” Obadiah said softly, “there was a great deal of euphoria. A delegation of native soldiers went to military headquarters to present a petition to the British on behalf of the people. It expressed gratitude to the King and reminded him of the promise of unconditional return of ancestral lands. The soldiers waited two hours before a sergeant in leather hip boots appeared.”
Obadiah paused again, gulped some wind. Slowly, he cleaned the dust off his teeth with his tongue. We did the same.
“The sergeant didn’t read it. Instead, he flung that petition across the room. The men watched it float slowly to the floor. Then the sergeant barked: ‘Your hats! All subjects must remove any and all bonnets in the presence of an officer of His Britannic Majesty George V!’ Then some galoots came and tossed that delegation out the door.”
That was it. Enough alleviation of ignorance for a hot and useless day. We followed Obadiah along a goat path, into darkness the color of a new bruise.
53
KARIBIB
A forgettable sun-worn place with too-wide streets (an old German mining town, the boom never quite happened), midway between Windhoek and Swakopmund on the coast. A popular petrol and toilet stop. There’s a tiny (still) white dorp and a location across the rail tracks, north of town, where most people (still) live. There’s a hotel, a grocery, a few shops, and some scattered bottle stores, around which revolve much of the life of the town. So unimportant a place, Pohamba said, that during the struggle SWAPO didn’t even try to blow up the post office.
Still, since we were always trying to get there, we had to pretend Karibib was somewhere. It was our Mecca, our Bangkok. Sometimes we’d go to Ackerman’s, the furniture store in the dorp, and spend the afternoon loitering on the comfortable couches on the showroom floor. Pohamba knew the salesman, a former learner named Wilbard Lilonga. The manager lived in Swakop and came in only on Saturdays. Wilbard would let us laze around. We’d read magazines or just sleep on the deep plush. Love songs gentle on the Muzak. Velour, camel, horsehair, Fontainebleau. Our feet on what Wilbard had once told us were called occasional tables. For what occasions? Ackerman’s had those plastic tints on the windows so the world outside was dyed blue. We’d loiter and watch the blue people walk down the blue street.
Pohamba leans back, his feet on the table, his head resting on the top of the ridge of his loveseat. He looks up at the ceiling.
“Wilbard!”
Wilbard doesn’t answer. He’s in the back smoking, ashing his cigarette on the carpet.
“Who buys all these couches?”
Wilbard still doesn’t answer.
“Wilbard? Wilbard!” Pohamba thunders. “Wake up, you lazy shitter! I want to know, who can pay four hundred rand for a place to sit?”
54
BUTCHER SCHMIDSDORF
The choice is clear-cut: either the West
predominates in South-West Africa, or there will be a triumph of naked barbarism over
Western civilization… The hour is late
and the danger is great.
ANTHONY HARRIGAN,
RED STAR OVER AFRICA
This happens. Two whites alone together as we’re alone together in this tiny butchery next to the Mobil station in Karibib, and it’s back to the war, back to the glories of counter-insurgency. “Think about it.” The butcher Schmidsdorf, one bug eye a widening orb, the other squinting, whispers, “The South Africans would not use their navy because of the Soviet threat.”
“I’d like a kilo and half of pork loin,” I say. “And some lard.”
He takes the pork loin out of the case with one hand and carries it to the slicer. Pork loin’s on special. There’s a sign in the window. He glances toward the door and says, “You must understand. It wasn’t a war. It was a police action. We were fighting Sam Nujoma, not Brezhnev.”
The butcher Schmidsdorf is a very thin, mostly insane man with a flat nose and up-turned nostrils that face you like two black holes, abysses, hairy pistol barrels. He hates Commies, Jews, and kaffirs. A good butcher, Antoinette says. He even makes some cuts like a great butcher, though as a general rule, butchers shouldn’t be so bony. Engelbert Schmidsdorf, famous for his bloodwurst, boerwurst, leberwurst, fleishwurst, weisswurst, zungenwurst, and occasional schinkenwurst, as well as for his chronic wifelessness and the fact that he was one of the few German Southwesters who fought side by side with their ex-enemies, the South Africans (i.e, the British and the Boers), against the only true enemies, Commies, Jews, and kaffir terrorists . . .
“You know what?” I say. “Maybe make it two kilos.”
He peeps over the counter at me. “I was stationed at Ruacana. Greenest place in this dry hole of country. And there were terrorists on every side—black shadows.”
He rubs his nose upward with the palm of his hand, and those nostrils have me in their sights again.
“Did you ever see a black with a shadow? Out there at that school? We lived in a guest house, soldiers, and we had maids, black ones in white shoes. In the mornings we went out and got killed, but didn’t we sleep well at night?” He pauses, looks down at the loin on the slicer. “Since then, I am dead.”
This happens also. The butcher says he’s dead. He fondles the pork loin on the slicer. People say it’s the bug eye that does the talking, and that it’s the other eye, the one that squints, that’s the lonely one, the one that never wants you to leave him. Antoinette says the man is so lonely he forgets to eat. All the meat under the sun and the butcher starves. There are days, Antoinette says, she’d like to drag him out to Goas and make him listen to the boys sing in church.
“How fatty your loin?” he says.
I wiggle my hand. “So-so fatty.”
He holds a slice up for my approval.
“Little more.”
He finishes the slicing and wraps up the package, holds it out to me with a bl
oody paw, just out of my reach. He sneezes, a small, forlorn sneeze. He wipes his nose with some bloody paper.
“How much lard?”
“Five K bucket.”
“No fleishwurst? It is very fresh.”
“Maybe next week.”
*
Outside, I wait for Pohamba. He’s next door in the China Shop buying a pair of snakeskin shoes. You could find anything in the China Shop, including Chinese people. Across the road, in front of the takeaway, I watch two drunks hold each other tenderly, like two drunks.
55
SISTER ZOë
On the wind of talk, word carried—from Usakos to Omaruru to Karibib, and then even out to Goas—that’s no real nun. It had, people said, something to do with her mouth, or more specifically, the way she bit her lip with one jagged, vampirish incisor. People said this wasn’t the way you walked around penitent. Not a bride of Christ, this one. Her catechism is nothing but lies. It was about desire, how it eats away at you when it’s stifled, and just because you hide in the sisterhood doesn’t mean you don’t sweat the sheets. Sister Zoë, her serious, tired face, her generous hands. She was from the south, a Nama from Keetmanshoop. She ran from her mother. She ran from Keetmanshoop. Anybody would run from Keetmanshoop, where the sun does nothing all day but lash your neck and look for plants to kill. At least up here we’ve got three scrawny trees a kilometer.
Now they say she’s back down south for good.
Sister Zoë worked at the clinic at Usakos, and she used to come every first and third Saturday with Sister Ursula and Sister Mary, out to the farm for sick call. The boys would line up in front of the hostel dining hall and go in one by one to be examined. There wasn’t a boy at Goas who wasn’t deathly ill those particular first and third Saturdays. If only to get touched by Zoë’s hands and sent away, condemned healthy. Sister Ursula was German, gaunt and old, with cracked hands. She’s been a nurse so long among blacks, people said, the woman thinks she’s a doctor. Sister Ursula would usually stand off to one side and wait, haughty, for hard cases. She carried antibiotics in a padlocked handbag. Sister Mary was the one the boys went to when they were actually sick, so sick that even the touch of Zoë meant nothing. Sister Mary was a large, shaky-breasted woman with a pocked face. She was from Malemba up on the Caprivi, a place, she’d said, that was so thick in the bush that once you left, you could never find home again. She laughed at the boys who were sick, called them God’s paupers. Come, little pauper, come; we shall take your temperature and then see what we find in Sister Ursula’s magic handbag. Sister Mary always gave out free Q-tips and plastic rosaries in multiple colors. But mostly those Saturdays were about Zoë and her hands on your body. Pohamba would stand and supervise the mob, and every once in a while walk to the front and push his way inside the dining hall and announce to Sister Zoë that he had cancer.