by Peter Orner
“You did it at night?”
“Yes.”
“A few things I’d like to do at night.”
She holds her hand over her mouth. Maybe she winces, it’s hard to tell in the glare.
“You think I’m on vacation?”
She doesn’t raise her head.
“You think I don’t know I’m on vacation?”
She doesn’t answer. She looks back at the place where the buck had been leaping.
“Once, I drove. When I hit her, I didn’t hit her hard enough, only wounded her. She staggered away. I chased her again, rammed her down again. She was so quiet. I remember wanting her to scream, whimper, something, anything, but she didn’t. Like this was natural—as if all her life she expected to be crushed to death by a jeep full of Marxists drunk off peach schnapps.”
She holds her face to the sun again, holds it there for a while. I’m drowsy. I reach for her. She winces.
113
OBADIAH (3 A.M.)
Words in a small moon of light. History, at night, by torch, is the guiltiest of pleasures. Turn the page and there’s always more mayhem. In 1827, at Moordkoopie, south of Okahandja, an Orlam chief ordered the hands and feet of two hundred women captives lopped off so he could have their silver bangles. They were the wives, daughters, and concubines of his enemy. Couldn’t he have simply shouted: All right, ladies, take off those beautiful bangles or I’ll kill you? Do I repeat myself? How much is too much when there’s always another page? Why is the only rule that innocents pay?
Theophrastus said throwing a stone is less fatiguing than throwing emptiness. Don’t I know it. I talk in my head, and even I don’t listen. And my wife? While I mutter she sleeps, and even then she grasps the blankets as if they contain work she could get done in a dead hour. How do you say that even when she’s asleep your wife’s hands crave creation?
Speak to me, won’t you speak to me? I want to know of the pain in your hands. You carry a potato in your pocket. You think I haven’t seen you rub it? Is being born alone our transgression? My wife has hands and feet. She wears a thin gown that hangs loosely off her thinning body. Talk to me. Tell me about the pain in your hands.
114
ANTOINETTE
You want it in words, everything in words. All right, then, here are words:
My hands are His hands, and I don’t call it pain. Now come to bed.
115
DROUGHT STORIES
MAGISTRATE MCHUGH: I have come to see how you people live. I have heard you have had a very hard time during the latest drought, but hope you will soon recover.
FREDERICH MUKAUAMBI: We greet the magistrate. We are glad to see the magistrate here today. We have no rain and there is nothing left for the stock to eat. The people are shouting for water. The dams are dry. May we not trek to the east?
MAGISTRATE MCHUGH: No. All the ground you are thinking about has now been occupied and there is no further land available. Both the Europeans and the natives are in the same position and must depend on Providence—it is all we can do.
LOT OPPOSEMAB: We have nothing more to say.
At this stage permission was given to smoke.
—From the minutes of the quarterly meeting at the Otjimbingwe Native Reserve, presided by Magistrate M. J. McHugh, Esq., 16 February 1949.
116
GRAVES
Line going around Goas: How do you know Mavala Shikongo’s war stories are true?
Because she never tells any.
“War,” I say. “Now.”
“All right.” She pauses. She runs her tongue around her lips twice. “War. Yes. I remember. You are woman, they said. Woman! The men gave many speeches saying we were the soul and the strength of the movement. A commander would say, ‘Ladies, your Kalashnikov is an extension of your arm. Now, go do the wash. Go teach the little ones school. Wait, before you go, my darling, bring me a tea. Three sugars!’”
“That’s not a war story.”
“Isn’t it? What about this? I’d been sent to scout the food lorry. A good job for a woman. It was days late. We were living off refried pap and chocolate bars. Sometimes UNITA ambushed the lorries, so we never knew when, or if, the food would come. I walked about three kilometers from camp to wait. I was leaning against a tree when a man, one of ours, came out of the bush. He wasn’t a commander. He was only a new recruit. He’d just come up from the Kavango. I outranked him three levels. He raised a pistol at me and told me to drop my Kalashnikov. I told him he didn’t need a gun. Comrade, I said, we’re all here together. Long camp days, long camp nights. I think I insulted him by the suggestion. He wanted it by force or not at all. So he went away.”
“He did?”
“Yes.”
“Were you serious?”
“About what?”
“You know, giving yourself.”
“I don’t know.”
“You believed in it? That you were all comrades?”
“Listen, I’m tired.”
“Of what?”
“Of talk.”
“I’m only asking.”
“All right, I shot him. When he was turned away, I picked up my gun and shot him. Do you like that story better? Or should I try another? I have other versions.”
She rolls away from me. I watch the drought for a while. I look at the trails the cows have made across the veld, the way they loop and crisscross and join and separate again. I shake her.
“Was that guy Tomo’s father?”
Only her face turns back toward me. “Where did you—no—God, no.” And out of nowhere she smiles in a way I hadn’t seen. The way people do. When they’re remembering a face, another face?
“Why don’t you tell me anything?”
“I just did.”
“Tell me more.”
“No.”
117
DROUGHT STORIES
Morning, cusp of the first ring of the triangle. I groggle over to the tap and nothing happens. I knock on Pohamba’s wall. “There’s no water.”
“None?”
“Check your tap.”
He checks his tap. “There’s no water.”
Through the wall, Vilho calls, “There’s no water.”
“We’re a chorus,” Pohamba says. “Let’s all sing. There’s no —”
“It’s the drought,” Vilho says. “The water levels in the dams —”
Pohamba groans. “How are we going to have coffee?”
“I’ll eat it dry out of the can,” I say.
“Theofilus!” Pohamba shouts. “Theofilus!”
It came out later in the day that Theofilus had diverted our drinking water to try to save the cows. It was such a brazen act of love, he wasn’t even called to task for it by either the principal or the priest (who was gone to Swakop during the crisis). The principal finally had to call the municipality in Karibib, and the town council arranged for a water truck to come out to the farm. We had a holiday drinking water and spraying each other with the hose attached to the truck. For a week, nobody bathed. The classrooms got a little rank, but it was all right. You got to know other people better. You got to know yourself better. Being from Ohio, I have always thought of death as something cold. The bones of my grandfather in the cemetery in Walnut Hills in February, the snow falling lightly on his chiseled name. No longer.
*
It made for days of stink by the graves. Together we were festering. Not only the sand and pebbles that clung to us, but everything. Naked, we wore loose change, buttons, peanut shells, toenail clippings.
“Teacher, you smell malodorous.”
“I smell malodorous?”
118
WHELPS
There was cause for minor celebration. Auntie collapsed in the heat while trying to pry a hubcap off the principal’s car. It was three in the afternoon. Festus saw her flop over face-first in the sand. He waited for her to twitch. When she didn’t, he ran around the farm telling everybody she was dead. She wasn’t. Theofilus drove h
er to the clinic at Usakos to be examined. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? Clean sheets and pills and male orderlies? Why live anywhere else?
Her whelps suffered for it. They started roaming like the pack of wolves they almost were, living off our garbage—emptied pilchard cans, the last bit of dust at the bottom of a box of dried milk. Antoinette began leaving them scraps at the back of the hostel dining hall. They had mottled, thorn-bitten fur and sorrowful eyes. They no longer came close enough to allow us to pet them, as if the absence of Auntie had ended their official association with human hands. At night they’d yowl for their lost mother, who’d stolen them and pampered them, who’d shampooed them and fed them rotten hamburger. The whelps looked so much alike, they were always nameless to us—Antoinette called them her starvelings—but somebody remembered they did have names, names like Shaka and Beethoven and Rasputin. The too-well-endowed one with his eye gouged out she called Houdini. They didn’t live up to their names. They weren’t nearly so bold as their benefactor, and they didn’t steal, which surprised us. They’d only creep slowly, reticently, as if they didn’t want to bother anybody with their hunger.
“If that woman doesn’t come back,” Antoinette said, “we’ll have to drown them.”
“In what water?” Obadiah said.
119
GRAVES
She unbuttons and rebuttons her shirt as she talks. She’s been talking since the beginning of our hour.
“I wasn’t the only young mother in the camp. There were others. I remember thinking how calm they seemed. Nursing and cooing. I never gained it. I could teach myself so many other things. But that beautiful mothering. So I told myself they were cows.”
“Cows,” I repeat.
She sits up and looks at me. What was I doing in the sand with her? Goas is still asleep, but it’s that time when you can feel the silence about to be trampled.
“Are you calm now?”
“No,” she says.
I listen to her breathing, to her hand piling and smoothing the gravel. Leaning against Grieta’s grave, we don’t face the mountains, only the scorched plain, the rocks, the dry tufts bent to the wind. I reach for her. She uncoils slowly toward me.
120
POHAMBA
He leans against the wall outside his room. He’s marking homework assignments. Long division. His red pen flinging. He had little tolerance for messy papers and would sometimes mark off for it even if they got the answer right. His shadow plump and flattened next to him, squashed by the angle of the early-afternoon sun. His door is held open by a brick, but in this glare you can see nothing of his room but a hole in the dark. He stops his pen for a moment and stares out at the veld. As if it isn’t distance but time he’s looking at. His shoulder blades tense. Not his, this parch. His place is Otavi, where it always rains at least twice after the fifteenth of February. He takes up the pen again and continues to slash.
121
COMRADE YANAYEV
And still nothing happens here. We walk the veld and the dry puckerthorns explode beneath our feet. Where the dead grass has gusted away, there are deep fissures in the dirt. The sun squashes and the weeks pass flat. And then an occurrence: Obadiah loses his TransNamib hat. A farmwide search has yielded no suspects. Standard Sevens, under heavy questioning, deny any involvement. Then, off the radio, still more news. Gorbachev’s been murdered. An hour later he’s resurrected, but now imprisoned on treason charges, in his dacha, in the Crimea. The BBC intones: All seven phone lines leading into the vacation house are reported to have been cut.
And somebody named Gennady Yanayev declares a renewal of Soviet proletarian fortunes.
“Sounds like a putsch.”
“Tasty putsch?” Pohamba says.
“Yanayev? Who the hell’s Yanayev?”
And Obadiah sermonizes, hatless, during mid-morning break: “Wherefore I ask: Who will deliver our Daniel from the ferocity of the lions?”
Empires keel. And still the goats come in from the veld on wobbly legs, and still they don’t know they’re starving.
122
DROUGHT STORIES
It is said that goats eventually go mad. When this happens, they refuse to obey their shepherd and flee to the open desert, where they roam like the great wild horses of the Namib until they die alone, proud, and free of the shackles of bondage and unforgiving husbandry . . .
Our goats never got the chance. When they stopped recognizing Theofilus, he loaded them on the lorry and trucked them north to a farm near Tsumeb. But Father refused to send the cows. He told Theofilus the grazing fee per head for cattle was more than our poor church could afford.
So the cows go it on their own now. They starve more gently. Poor fat-witted things. They do not go mad. They do not roam. They simply graze where there’s nothing to graze. When they’re thirsty, they simply plunk their noses in the empty dams and huff around.
123
GRAVES
There are afternoons now when to so much as touch is the last thing either of us wants. An hour we stay apart. Her up on the grave, me down on the tablecloth. What little grass is left is so dry it pokes through the tablecloth like freshly sharpened pencils. I’m spraying a beetle with Doom to see how much it can take before it dies.
“I don’t know why,” she says.
“Why what?”
“Sometimes in the morning I’m lying in bed and all I want to do is lie in bed. How can you want something you’re already doing?”
“My grandfather used to say when you’re dead you spend your time wishing you could pay taxes.”
The beetle’s not dead yet. “It isn’t the work. That beyond this bed there’s work I have to do. All those little boys. Tomo. Soon he’ll be awake and pulling on the edge of my sheets. He might be already awake and doing that. Because times like this I only know what I’m thinking, not what’s happening.”
“I understand. Tomo. It’s difficult.”
“I said, it isn’t Tomo. It’s the wanting —”
“But wanting what?”
“Didn’t I just explain it to you?”
124
THE PHARAOH’S DREAM
To give them hope, Antoinette read Genesis to the cows. She brought her Bible out to the veld and read to them.
“And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, In my dream, behold, I stood upon the bank of a river:
“And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, fat fleshed and well favored; and they fed in a meadow.”
(Kine, Antoinette explained to them, means you.)
“And, behold, seven other kine came up after them, poor and very ill favored, such as I never saw in all the land of Egypt for sadness:
“And the lean and ill favored kine did eat up the first seven fat kine.”
The cows stood there and listened to her. Their eyes were hardly visible through the dust that coated them. They had dug their faces into the earth till the earth blinded them.
What she left out, she told me later as she fiddled with the nozzle of the paraffin can in order to stoke the Primus—the swoop of the paraffin catching, its muted steady roar—was what happened after the ill favored kine ate the fat ones. Her Bible on the counter, a pen holding the spot, her hand reaching for it.
She reads, “And when they had eaten them up, it could not be known that they had eaten them; but they were still ill favored, as at the beginning. So I awoke.”
The stove, a perfect circle of blue flame. The tiny black flecks in the flame. Antoinette closes the book.
That night we listened to their raspy lows from our beds. Night being the only time they expressed their displeasure toward God at being ill favored.
125
GOAS THEATER
A new Goas tradition. In honor of independence, Obadiah would write a play for Cassinga Day, May 4. And so weekends he sequestered himself in the mimeograph shack with the big crank machine, the chemicals, and the spiders. He had some boys carry over his personal library. He’d refuse to eat anythi
ng other than rusks and cold tea. Through the grimy window we watched him, surrounded by all those tented books. Occasionally he’d emerge lost in thought. We knew this because if you happened to be passing by when he was standing outside the door, he’d say, “Yes, well, I’m lost in thought.” Then, if you laughed he stared at you, not at your face, at your heart, as if something was missing there. We did not understand the tribulations.
A knock on the door. “Head Teacher?”
“Come in.”
A boy, a Standard Two named Tonderai, famous around Goas as the one who loves to run messages back and forth for teachers, enters the writer’s chamber shyly.
“Ah, Muse, I thought you’d forsaken me. I must say I was expecting someone taller.”
“Auntie will be back to tomorrow, Teacher. Sister Ursula phoned.”
Obadiah uncaps a pen and hands it to the boy.
“Slay me.”
“Excuse, Teacher?”
“With this lance—do it.”
126
UP ON THE HILL BY THE CROSS
I climb up the hill to the cross and find Vilho up there by himself. He’s reading and doesn’t say anything to me, and I don’t say anything to him.
When Vilho read, he had a strange way of squinching his eyes. It occurs to me now that this might have been because he was rereading sentences. He would hold the book close to his face and remain on the same page for a long time. On a farm full of readers, he might have been the only one who read with pure delight.