by Peter Orner
71
GOAS
Quiet out here during most of the bad years leading to independence. The eighties were years of calm, when Goas settled into its mission of churning out farm boys with sufficient arithmetic, Afrikaans, and Fear of the Lord. The shooting at the Old Location in this country, Soweto, Sharpeville, Steven Biko in South Africa—all that happened on some other planet. Yet it is true that one boy did burn down a classroom here in 1985, an event that now stands as Goas’s proudest antiapartheid moment. At the time it was considered pure terrorism. The boy, Lucas Nambela, was sent down south to the juvenile prison in Mariental. That it was our current principal who whipped Lucas Nambela is an unspoken truth and one of the contradictions by which Goas runs. The principal does not discuss the particulars of back then. The revised truth is that everyone who was here believed in the cause of righteousness, all are survivors of apartheid’s unmitigated evil and oppression. Lucas Nambela was a freedom fighter. The classroom he burned down was the school science lab. Four years later, on the eve of independence, the diocese in Windhoek sent Goas new equipment. Men came out with state-of-the-art everything: lab tables, sinks with running water, microscopes. There are beakers and flasks. Safety goggles. Hazardous chemicals. Bunsen burners! To this day no boy has touched any of it. The principal keeps the place locked up like a gleaming shrine. The Lucas Nambela Memorial Classroom. Even Festus, who’s the science teacher, can’t use it.
The principal Scotch-taped his edict to the door:
The equipment inside this room is very expensive. It took many years after the patriotic incident of 1985 for this equipment to arrive. There is too much risk involved in the use of this equipment at the present time. An inventory is being conducted. Following this inventory, the lab will be opened in limited circumstances. The public shall be apprised of any progress in this matter.
Meanwhile, we all peek in and look at the shiny hardware. Our own museum of the future, right there, two classes down from the principal’s office. A form of worship to look at all that new stuff through the glass.
Across the courtyard, Festus teaches photosynthesis. Sometimes he points to the shackled class and says, “Behind that door, all that I’m telling you may be proved before your eyes.” A sort of heaven waiting. There were times we wondered if it wasn’t for the best. Bunsen burners get clogged. Beakers shatter. Crucibles rust. Theories go to hell. Let all remarkable things remain in the realm of perfection, of order . . .
72
GRAVES
There are no nights to remember, because we never had any. Out there by the graves after lunch. Only those stark early afternoons when the day died a little and everybody else wilted on their beds. Could we have snuck some nights? Probably, but first of all there was Tomo, and second, there was something about the lunacy of anybody being out in the veld during siesta. Weekdays only. (Weekends were too risky; Saturday and Sunday were like all-day random siestas, and you never knew who’d wander out in the veld.) We bucked the schedule of life at Goas, and this was somehow a small thrill, the best we could muster. We’d come from different directions and be shocked to see each other.
What a surprise —
Couldn’t sleep. The heat.
And how is Grieta today?
Still dead, I’m afraid.
Her hands always smelled of the lotion she was continually rubbing on the backs of Tomo’s dry arms. In the bleak light, the two of us leaning against the graves. Her making small piles of gravel with her fingers, then smoothing them. Her fingers were always busy. Tomo on the other side of the graves, drunk off chocolate in his car seat, strapped in, an umbrella propped over him. I was more exhausted after lunch than at night. I lied. Mavala lied. We said we didn’t need sleep. Sometimes we couldn’t help it, and in that light it was like falling asleep under interrogation.
Even then she was restless, talking to herself and fisting and unfisting her hands.
73
KRIEGER
Obadiah said: All our whites are demented in one way or another. It would indeed be interesting to come to America for the sole purpose of observing normal whites. This is not to say that our blacks are lacking in idiosyncrasies. Do you think it’s the sun?
Our closest neighbor, Krieger, we saw only behind the wheel of a speeding bakkie. When he drove across Goas, he scattered anything in his path; boys, goats, teachers. It happened twice a day. Krieger on his way to and from the dorp. Krieger’s truck wings around the church, rumbling across the ruts in the sandy road, then careens across the soccer field in the middle of a game. A fluffy-white-haired honking murderous Santa bellowing, Halloo! Halloo!
According to the principal, Krieger had a binding legal right to drive straight across the soccer field. Once, I spoke up about it during morning meeting. I usually kept quiet, but I felt the behavior of a white was something within my purview to comment on.
“Seems a little dangerous,” I said.
“He holds an easement,” the principal said. “I’ve seen the document, which was duly notarized in Windhoek.”
“He can’t drive around the field?”
“Why should he drive around when the document gives him the right?”
“To spare life and limb.”
“Did I not say the document was duly notarized?”
*
Soccer. A round-robin tournament. We’re holding a set of Pohamba’s betting forms. That wet mimeograph ink, that deep indigo you couldn’t wash off. It dyed your hands purple for weeks. Made you high if you sniffed it and we sniff it. The pool is set at fifteen rand with a double on the last match. It’s been nil-nil for as long as anybody can remember. We’re wilting in our seats like unwatered geraniums.
“Watched high soccer is a lot more interesting,” I say.
Pohamba shouts, “Can’t you get it right? Football. It’s an offense on our culture.”
I wave him away. I’ve discovered something else. If you watch the ones without the ball it’s even better. Their feet. How every move is a beautiful anticipation. The ball is only incidental to the dance. Which is the answer to the mystery. Not only isn’t it about scoring, it isn’t even about the ball. I sniff the betting forms, understanding soccer, proud, loving it, between being bored and sleepy, when suddenly from around the church comes Krieger, roaring, barreling, honking, hallooing. His white arm banging the outside of the door, his fury of white hair waving in the wind. “Run for your lives, boys!” And the boys do. They dive, they tumble. They think it’s hilarious. They think everything’s hilarious. Krieger drives on toward the C-32. Play resumes.
“One of these days that Nazi is going to kill an innocent,” I say.
Obadiah raises a Sherlockian brow. “Nazi?”
“Why not? He’s the right age.”
“Which doesn’t necessarily mean —”
“The Nazis here never even had to learn Spanish.”
“Is not a central tenet of your justice system the transcendent concept of innocent before proven guilty?”
“This isn’t a court. This is Goas.”
“That’s true,” Pohamba says. “No justice here.”
Mavala stands. “You’re all ridiculous.” She slaps twenty rand on Pohamba’s desk. “Put it on United Africa in the next round.”
We watch her walk up the road. Tomo remains. He’s digging a tunnel beneath Vilho’s chair.
I turn to Obadiah. “Look, I’m simply asking for a little empathy for another marginalized people.” (Residual phrase fortuitously recalled from Prof E. L. Cloyd’s Sociology 202, Bowling Green State, Larry Kaplanski’s final grade: C+)
“A little empathy?” Obadiah says. “If empathy was money —”
Score! Kanhala with the header.
Krieger’s other claim to fame is that he shoots zebra in the Erongos and donates the meat to the school. Zebra meat has a distinctive stink. It’s acrid and gamey at the same time. Only the most meat-hungry boys eat it. But it does make for good biltong. When it’s dried out, you can�
��t smell it as much. Very chewy. So chewy you could chew it like gum, for hours. My own Standard Six Jeremiah Puleni walks around in the late afternoons and hawks zebra biltong to us for small change or old eraserless pencils.
74
GRAVES
Speak, quiet one.”
“About what?”
“About where you’re from.”
“You want to hear about Cincinnati?”
“Yes.”
“Not much to tell.”
“Try.”
I tell her about Cincinnati.
“That’s all?”
“Oh yeah. And at Christmas they put these white lights up at the zoo. It’s very beautiful. And there’s Taft.”
“Who?”
“William Howard Taft. Obesest president. Once he got stuck in a bathtub. They had to come chop him out with hammers. And Christ, Davey Concepcion. How could I forget Davey Concepcion? It must be the heat.”
“Who’s he?”
“You see the thing about Davey was that he wasn’t the superstar. I mean, we’re talking about a team with Johnny Bench, Caesar Geronimo, Tony Pérez, Joe Morgan. And Pete Rose. Hail, Pete Rose. In Cincinnati, he’s lord of earth and sky and hell. Fuck the Hall of Fame. Yes, but it was Davey who had something you couldn’t really name. Davey was the one with the intangibles. No ego, a little bat, just that great glove, but it was his spirit, his loyalty —”
“Like Kaplansk. He’s vice president.”
“Listen: I’d burn down this farm to be Davey Concepcion.”
“Tell me more.”
“He was a humanitarian. He’d send half his salary back to the poor people of the Dominican —”
“About you.”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Anything.”
“I once loved a girl named Rainy Pinkus.”
“Her name was Rainy?”
“Yes. Rainy Pinkus.”
“Why not Snowy?”
“It was Rainy.”
“Did she love you back?”
“Not really.”
“Tell me another thing.”
“What?”
“About your childhood.”
“I herded goats at dawn.”
“Lies!”
75
INTOXICATIONISTS IN A DATSUN
Bottle of Zorba on the dash, long since emptied. Obadiah and Kaplansk. All that’s left are their voices, their bodies are gone, floated up, evaporated, poofed.
OBADIAH: I understand that many Talmudic blessings require repetition as a way of ritualizing one’s contact with God.
KAPLANSK: Really?
OBADIAH: In other words, God not as a bolt of thunder but there in the simple everyday moments, in the tying and retying of one’s shoes. In a belch, if you will.
KAPLANSK: Interesting. I hadn’t —
OBADIAH: I myself believe in absolutely nothing. At least not today. This of course is the paradox. One never knows when faith—like love—will wander back like an old dog you thought was dead. It would all be easier if it stayed away for good. Don’t you think?
KAPLANSK: Probably, but —
OBADIAH: Would you like a mint?
KAPLANSK: Please.
76
ANTOINETTE
For her, it’s nearly a love story. She tells it as she beats a carpet she’s hung off the mapone in her garden. She beats the carpet with a wooden spoon the size of a small child’s head. At her feet the wash towels are boiling. Her apron is tight around her chest like body armor.
Thump. Dust waffles up.
There was once a man who stuck his wife’s hand with a fork to prove he loved her, and she walked around with this scar, proudly showing it to people. Then one morning she hacked off his legs with a panga and he bled to death in bed.
Thump. Dust waffles up.
But even after that, she showed her hand with pride. Four little valleys pronged in the flesh. Thy will be done. On earth as it is in heaven.
Thump. Thump. Dust waffles up.
77
MAGNUS AXAHOES
He runs barefoot in the limp sand of the riverbed. He loves the feel of it between his toes. That sound, that shish shish, of sand being thrown behind him. There are days it is the sound alone that keeps his feet moving. That beautiful grinding. One day he’ll run as fast as Rubrecht Kanhala. To run with a pucker thorn in your foot is better, because then you feel no fatigue in the muscles, only the wound in your foot. The pain builds more than endurance. It creates forgetting—and if you can forget, that’s all that matters. He’s read this in a runners’ magazine. A Kenyan said it and it’s the truth.
78
POHAMBA
And the goats snoofing each other’s asses and us sprawled, dunking buttermilk rusks in cold tea, and Pohamba’s got another brother.
“God have mercy,” Festus howls. “Spread-leg woman gave birth to an army.”
Pohamba’s on his stomach. A Standard Two he’s hired to do some chiropractic work walks up and down on his back as he talks.
“Abner, my fourth brother. He worked at the Budget on Peter Mueller Strasse. My other Windhoek brother. He cleaned the cars when the tourists brought them back from a week of chasing elephants at Etosha. Dirty dirty cars, and my brother Abner washed them like babies’ arses. The thick dust of Etosha made him sneeze and sneeze, but he washed and wiped and scrubbed and hosed. But this isn’t what I want to tell you. What I want to tell you is, the baas wouldn’t let him use the toilet to shit. The man was enlightened. He said my brother could piss in the toilet, but not shit in it. For that he had to go across the street to the takeaway.”
“How would the baas know he was shitting?”
“Easy, if it was too quiet, he’d start pounding on the door.”
(Obadiah, offstage left, from behind the mapone, where he’s been dozing: “What the baas of course didn’t know is that one’s posterior is eighty percent cleaner on average than one’s hands. Thus —”)
“Thus what?” Pohamba says. He stands up. The Standard Two drops off his body like a free-falling Lilliputian. “Thus what?”
We wait. His brother could piss, but not shit. Thus what?
Obadiah comes out from behind the tree and, as if this were some proper debate in some proper debating place, concedes defeat, bows to Pohamba, his left arm swooping through the dust.
79
A VISIT FROM COMRADE
GENERAL KANGULOHI
Antoinette enthroned on a plastic chair amid her wilted tomato plants and rock-hard radishes. The rest of us are frantic. On her sun-ravished face is the serenity of absolute truth. Not only wasn’t she going to kiss the ring of any general, she wasn’t going to grace him with a single wash of her eyes. Two of her nephews went north to fight the Boers. One came back in a plastic bag; the other didn’t come back at all.
But that wasn’t it. She said she didn’t blame any general for what had happened to those boys. They were heading for it, even before they got the ridiculous idea they were men. This is the way of boys. They go off to war and come back dead, or not at all. She wasn’t blaming the general for those boys, she was blaming the general for being a general.
Antoinette said we were so ignorant we didn’t know the difference between Jesus and the devil’s houseboy. “And make no mistake, your general is in Lucifer’s pay,” she said. Antoinette, radical pacifist, pontificating lazily, shockingly. As I swung around her house with a loaded wheelbarrow, I paused to ask, “So how do soldiers come home from war if they happen to still be alive?”
“Where are you taking that garbage?”
“Behind the toilet houses.”
“Go farther.”
“All right.”
“What did you ask?”
“You think fighting the South Africans was righteous?”
She shook her head.
“If not righteous, then justifiable?”
“Acceptable under the c
ircumstances.”
“So then how does a soldier return?” I stood there with my garbage. Antoinette, calm in her plastic chair, began to soar, her eyes fanatical. “ON HIS KNEES!”
The door of their house flapped open and Obadiah stepped out in an aviator hat with earmuff flaps. “Bravo, wife! Oratory! But it’s only pomp, and pomp never hurt a soul. Now, come, puss-puss, go slip on your green dress. It goes so well with the venom in your eyes.”
No one had ever heard him call her puss-puss before. Maybe she hadn’t either. She didn’t blink. “In holy hell, my green dress.”
Thus, Antoinette refused to lift a finger during the most comprehensive clean-up operation in the history of the farm. We buried random scrap metal. We skoffled the weeds. We picked up goat shit pellet by pellet. The principal had even ordered some boys to rake the veld, the entire veld, which is a bit like trying to siphon off the Atlantic, and they were doing it. The sand rippled out in crests in every direction. It was difficult to know where to walk, the scalloped veld looked so good. I thought of sand traps at the country club I used to caddy at before I got fired for being more interested in the cabana girls.