The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (15 page)

Festus taught science. He said it wasn’t sad.

“What, then?”

“A matter of proportionality. It will never fit. I waited. I watched.”

“And if they love? Isn’t it sad that —”

Festus stared at me for a moment. “It doesn’t fit,” he said. “That’s all.” Then he scratched his belly and walked off toward
his house, toward Dikeledi, and we watched him, squat and round, walking away. Festus was said to be trying to emulate the
principal’s stomach. In this he was succeeding. And we thought of how unfair it all was, of a house free of sadness, of a
floor free of sand, of soft underwear (Antoinette, who did our laundry, was morally opposed to fabric softener), of those
waiting Dikeledian arms . . .

I turned slowly to Pohamba. This our revenge? That Festus and Dikeledi can’t consummate? That no sexual congress convened
in the purple house we’re all so jealous of?

Even we don’t wish this on Festus. We tried to think only happy thoughts. Nothing too big, nothing too small. Finally, Pohamba
couldn’t help himself.

“Oh, that poor poor poor girl.”

“Don’t you go save her.”

“Do you think I am that low?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “Never to friends.” He brightened. “Wait—Festus isn’t a friend.”

“Close.”

“Close isn’t a friend, friend.” And he bopped off toward the quarters and his waiting bed.

I
always said, Sure, it’s hot here, but you don’t get the humidity like we do back home in O-hi-o. You see, back home in Hamilton
County, we get what we call a wet heat, and no matter how bad it gets around here, there’s no humidity, and so it’s really
not so… I stop saying all that.

Bloat of eyeballs. I have returned to a liquid state. I am a broiled pig melted down to sap. No cold water anywhere on the
farm. We’d sent a boy around to beg for some, but neither the priest nor the principal would answer their doors. Water from
the tap was at least eighty degrees. We had no choice but to remain in the sweaty, greasy shade of our rooms until the principal
headed for Karibib and one of us could hitch a ride and bring back some Fanta. I lie on my bed and pant. I try to read Turgenev.
Until his dying day, Chertopkhanov remained convinced that the blame for Masha’s treachery lay with a certain neighbor, a
retired captain of Lancers by the name of Yaff, who, in Pantelei’s words, got his way just by perpetually twisting his whiskers,
thickly oiling his hair and sniffing significantly…
I toss Yaff on the floor and lust the walls, try to put together the pieces from the remains of my German calendar girls.
Mother of God, to have them back intact. Unhelpful body parts bob across my salt fat eyes: How do you letch an elbow? I can’t
sleep, won’t sleep, will never sleep. Too hot even for self-delight, the only exercise any of us ever got during siesta. And
then in the swamp of this lost time, a faraway click. A sound like a door opening. I try to sit up and I think I see a blurry
vision of Mavala moving toward my bed. She stands and looks down at me. Her eyes are still, but her lips are moving without
words. Through the sog, I think I hear her breathing, but it too sounds as if it’s so far away. She kneels and rests her head
on my stomach, where it rises and falls with my panting. That’s all. She says nothing.

At three-thirty, I woke up alone to Pohamba gargling.

W
e of course don’t have anything approximating your autumn here, but I have often imagined it. Beautiful, but also violent,
no? Those leaves, not yet deadened, ripped off the only mother they’ve ever known, their hold on a branch. Here the sun beats
and beats, and the plants, perhaps, come to expect it. Every day the homicidal sun. Your autumn, I’ve read about it, seems
much like a sudden, wrenching death. Or do I misunderstand it from the leaf’s point of view?

Murmur not among yourselves.

JOHN 6:43

T
his morning the principal is lustful by way of Isaiah. Thus: so are we. Yea, we are greedy dogs who can never have enough.
Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not what? Thou shalt not everything, because, yes, sinners, it’s everywhere. Lust grows out from
under the rock like wattle bush. Lust needs no water for a thousand days.

And Mavala, next to Vilho, who’s next to me, reaches her foot over and nips the back of my shin with the tip of her heel.
Then she says something into her coffee that I can’t make out. This is how we sometimes communicated, all of us, during the
moral tale—through our slurps. And the principal is so loud we can sometimes talk under him. I drink and keep my nose deep
in there, lean closer to Vilho, who pretends not to notice. I point my cup her way.

“What?”

“Bored.”

And myself, still early-early-morning dopish, gurgle back: “What?”

“Bored. I’m very bored.”

“Hast thou enough meatflesh, you insatiable whoremongers?” the principal booms.

And the fog begins to lift, and in a greedy yes covetous yes carnal whisper I nearly shriek into my coffee:
Okay, so
. . .

She waits a moment. The principal is working himself up into a hyperventilating frenzy, dramatically flipping pages. “Siesta,”
she breathes.

“He goeth after her straightaway as an ox goeth to the slaugh —”

“Where?”

Mavala aims the bottom of her cup at me, her eyes giant over the rim, steady, blinkless. “The graves,” she says. “The Voortrekkers.”

“Or as a fool to the correction of the stocks!”

S
he keeps them in an empty tin next to the Rooibos tea in the kitchen sideboard. Her vice. Her weakness. Her raisins. What
is it about them that makes her crave their shriveled little bodies with such abandon? What makes her lust so overpowering
there are times when she slinks into her own house in the smack middle of a working day to stuff a pluck of them in her mouth?
Ugly emaciated things, like the shriveled tops of fingers left too long in the wash water. She hardly chews one before it’s
gone and all she’s left with is an insatiable need for another. Savage gluttony. The original fruit comes wrapped in a package
from the Pick ’n Pay. The devil is crafty. There is a psychologist in the office block next to the Mobil station, and there
was even a time when she almost knocked on the door. I have only a small question, Doctor, concerning a small fruit. Otherwise
I am healthy in the head. All I want is to control the passion. To bring it to heel. To leave a boiling cauldron of mealies,
my post, my responsibility, to feed my face? Like an old hoer stealing across the sand to a tin in the sideboard. Hand pushing
the door. The glant of sun on the sideboard. Fingers seize the tin. Leave your nose among them. How at first they don’t smell
and then they do. A snort of sugared earth up the nostrils. Oh, filth. Ravish them. A vision of herself scurrying across the
sand, the midday sun. Soon the boys will be lining up at the dining-hall door for lunch, spoons in hands. Temptation, fulfillment,
emptiness. How can it be that the only cure for sin is more sin?

I
nstead of walking up the road by the principal’s, I took the long way around, out past the cattle gate, and doubled back behind
Dikeledi and Festus’s. The Boers were buried near the banks of the dry Toanib River, where it looped out toward Krieger’s
farm. It was a kind of ghost river. Not only was it dry like the other rivers, but there were days it was gone, when you couldn’t
distinguish it from the rest of the veld.

She was already out there, sitting on one of the black granite graves. The graves were three narrow slabs, with a tall headstone
at the front of each. The only shiny things at Goas; I wondered how they could still look like this after so many years. Mavala
was sitting on Grieta Dupreez, the unmarried daughter. Around Grieta was a moat of white gravel. Below her name:
Rus in Vrede
. Rest in peace. Beyond the graves, in a small rutlike gully, a place where Theofilus sometimes burned garbage; the ground
was strewn with ash.

She was making piles out of the gravel, making piles and then slashing them. She didn’t look up at me. “I thought you weren’t
coming.”

“I had to make Pohamba a sandwich.”

She made a roof with her hand and squinted, looked me over. “Are you the houseboy now?”

“We switch off.”

“What kind of sandwich?”

“Turkey with chutney.”

“Chutney?”

“What’s wrong with chutney?”

She drank from a water bottle she’d been holding between her knees. The water spilled out from the edges of her mouth and
ran down her neck, soaking her shirt.

“Is it all right?” she said.

“Is what all right?”

“To come here.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to sleep?”

“No.”

“You look tired.”

“I guess I’ve gotten used to siesta.”

“So go back to bed.”

“I’m fine.”

“I don’t need sleep.”

“I don’t either.”

“I never need sleep.”

“Neither do I.”

“I only wanted to talk—without all of them—always —”

“I know.”

“They’re always —”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell them?”

“No.”

“Not Pohamba?”

“No.”

“He has a mouth. They all have mouths.” She looked at me, looked away, looked at me. “I only wanted to talk without them,”
she said. “Why is that so difficult?”

“Where’s the kid?” I asked.

“Behind us. Asleep in his car seat. I hope asleep. I bribed him with Twix.”

“His car seat?”

“Now I need a car. Sit?”

“Here?”

“Why not? These dead Boers are comfortable chairs.”

A
postle John at the Mobil station in Karibib will always God bless you even if you don’t give him any money. There’s John in
his wheelchair without tires, his slow rumble across the oily pavement, one hand out, the other doing his best to steer. His
shoes are tied to his knees to remind you he’ll never need them again. Some days Apostle John is blind. Other days he isn’t.
He says he got blown to Christ up north in the struggle. You try not to look at him. Apostle John rolling toward you, palm
up—and still it doesn’t matter, even if you don’t give him a single rand. Still, it’s God bless you. Apostle John’s not a
miser with the Almighty’s love. You ignorer. You of the undeserving horde. Yes, you. You. I’m speaking to you. God bless you.

Honorable Obadiah Horaseb

Chief Librarian

. . . while the Hindus, for instance, say that behind every book is a set of hands. Now in the context of a library,
a lending institution
(a lovely idea, no?), we may carry this golden idea further. The more a book is borrowed, the more hands have held it, cradled
it. Would you have the imprint of a human soul go untouched? And yet what of those books that go years, nay, decades, unread,
their words silent, waiting? Contemplate this a moment. Do unread words continue speaking? If so to whom? Is it not the lonely,
unheard chattering of the dead? Is a closed book not a tomb? Oh, mourn the unborrowed books. Here’s one. A fine copy of
Bleak House
published in 1957 by Black International, Hudson, New York. Last borrowed from this library in 1973. 1973! Would it were
a crime, citizens. This book, these words, dormant? A book with the boldest first sentence ever composed! “London.” That’s
all. “London.” Amazing conjurement. Imagine you hold a book in your hands. Open it. “Goas.” One of you boys might very well
be the future crafter of such an evocation. A feeble example from a man of little poetic gifts might go something like this:

Goas. Second term finally over and His Highness, the majordomo, is sitting on his patch of grass outside his princely office.
Unflinching drought. As much sand in the air as if the wind had but newly broomed up the desert itself, and it would not be
fantastical to meet a sun-crazed grampus-like woman hulumphing down the road from her fence line . . .

Thus, I propose a moment of silence, not only for stories unread, but for stories untold. Was it not Cioran who said a book
should both cure old wounds and inflict new ones? Thus, an unread book is what? A festering sore? A cancer? What then, I ask,
is an
unwritten
book? I believe a silent prayer is called for. Yes, for dead authors and their fleshless hands, only bones and silence now.
But also for ourselves, my boys, for all the stories you have yet to tell.

Amen.

Now concerning this copy of
Bleak House:
I will extend the due date ten days. Standard Sevens have increased privileges, so you may have it for up to two weeks provided
you write a book report. Rubrecht? Petrus Matunda? Petrus Goraoab? Skinny Hilunda? Jeremiah? Members of the esteemed faculty?
Anybody? Theofilus?

H
e pants at my door.”

“Who?”

“Von Swine.”

“The principal? When?”

“Call him von Swine.”

“Okay. When does von Swine pant?”

“In the middle of the night.”

“What does he want?”

“At three in the morning? To give me a new box of chalk.”

“Is the door locked?”

“The door has no lock.”

“Miss Tuyeni?”

“She sleeps heavy. Since we were girls. One morning my father hit her with a bottle.”

“So he pants?”

“Yes.”

“Why doesn’t he just walk in? It isn’t like he’s shy.”

“He’s being polite. He’s waiting for an invitation.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Do?”

“Can’t you call the school inspector? Report him.”