The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (17 page)

“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.

S
peak, 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!”

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.

F
or 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.

H
e 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.

A
nd 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.

A
ntoinette 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 circumstances.”

“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.

General Zacharias Kangulohi (combat alias Ho Chi Minh) was our famous alumnus. He rose from farm-boy dust to a great man in
SWAPO. He’d lived in exile in London, Dar es Salaam, New York, Lusaka, Stockholm. We stood by the newly painted mural of Hendrik
Witbooi with Namibian flags for his eyes and a scroll of the constitution in his hand. We waited. Each boy wore something
around his neck that resembled a tie. Ribbons, scarves, cowhide, socks, braided plastic bags. One boy used a piece of biltong,
which he nibbled on as morning wasted into noon. We waited. Mavala stood at attention in full camouflage, her green shirt
buttoned to her neck, her pants tucked into her boots and blooming out. Her right fist clenched. Her short short hair and
bullet head. Her ears stuck out from under the edge of her cap. God, I wanted to bite them. Whatever bitterness she had over
the way she was decommissioned (one last paycheck and so long, comrade) was at least temporarily displaced by her sense of
ceremony. She was back in the sweat of it—if not of war, something.

Our guest of honor was hours late, and the principal held us there at gunpoint with his bullhorn. He couldn’t get enough of
the sound of his amplified voice. The flesh-gnawing horseflies couldn’t get enough of us. They descended en masse.
Move in for the chew, boys!
We didn’t want cold water anymore, or shade. We prayed only that the sun kill us faster. I’ve heard the same is true of freezing.
After a certain point, it’s blissful. We stood; we waited. When the general’s motorcade did arrive, it was like an alien landing—a
battalion of motorcycles, land cruisers, jeeps, a limousine, even a mobile home. We stood there as the parade rushed across
the soccer field and formed a horseshoe in front of us. When the kicked-up dust settled on our slickened faces, we stood up
straighter. The lines of the new anthem quivered on our lips, ready to burst:

Na-mib-ia

Our country

Na-mib-ia, motherland, we love… (Thee!)

Nothing happened. Two minutes, five minutes. We waited on the edge of shrieking at the first sight of the great man. Sirens
whirled. The cops on motorcycles spoke furtively into walkie-talkies. The noise of their engines revving, idling, revving.
The windows of the limousine were tinted. We thought he was in there having a late lunch. Or maybe he was in the motor home
having a nap after the long trip out to Goas from the capital. Sweat was beginning to show through the back of the principal’s
suit jacket. Pretty soon he would need to be wrung out. This a man who prided himself on never working hard enough to perspire.
He was supposedly an old school chum of the general’s. Our knees had buckled already (but we were packed so close together,
we didn’t fall), when we heard the gate clank. Our eyes moved as one, and we saw, at the cattle gate, a tiny man, his body
weighed down by a jacket full of medals. He was carrying his shoes.

“I walked,” he shouted. “I walked to my beloved Goas like the farm boy I used to be!”

The principal started toward him, breasts juggling under his lapels, panting into his bullhorn. “Oh, my dear Zacharias, welcome
back! Your kindness to visit us here is really beyond the call of any —”

The general didn’t take the principal’s hand. Instead, we all watched him raise a tiny foot and show the bottom of it to the
principal. “Fetch me a thorn, Charles.”

Into the bullhorn, the principal continued to burble: “That you created time for these children, to help us, to inspire, to
enlighten —”

“A thorn, Charles.”

“Humble place such as this our school, that you should return —”

“If you don’t put that thing down, I’ll have you shot.”

And we watched in amazement as the principal himself, not a minion, dashed off into the closeveld and stooped beneath an acacia
and picked up a thorn. It was long, nail-like, and the principal carried it back to the general in the palm of his hand, gently,
like a wounded bird.

“Inject it.”

“Zacharias!”

“Now!”

We watched this also. The principal stuck a thorn in Comrade General’s Kangulohi’s foot, and the general cried, “See? Still
rock-hard! Myself in cushiony exile! My bemedaled chest!”

He hopped toward us on one leg, ostrich-like, the thorn still sticking out of his foot. Now came the speech. The general said
he’d learned everything he ever needed to know right here at Goas, that they were the happiest days of his life, but that
the Boers ended that happiness for him, for everybody. He stood on one leg and espoused.