The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (2 page)

“Howdy,” I said.

“I see you are having some trouble with our gate.”

“A little.”

“In fact, you are unable to open it?”

“No, actually I can’t.”

“Of course not. You’re the volunteer?”

“Yes.”

“Volunteer of what?”

“Pardon?”

He wore large glasses. Behind them his eyes were tiny, distant, and his head seemed far too small for his body. Behind him,
up the road, a group of boys in powder-blue shirts had gathered to watch us. Under a lone and scraggled tree, a bored cow
gazed at me in that eerie, death-announcing way cows have of looking right through you.

“And your name might be?”

“Larry Kaplanski.”

He pumped my hand from the other side of the cattle gate.

“Pleasure, Mr. Kaplansk. So very good of you —”

“Kaplanski.”

His big head winced. He swatted a fly off his ear.

“And your qualifications, Mr. Kaplansk?”

“Qualifications?”

He took off his glasses and examined me. Without them his eyes got even smaller, receded into his head as if an invisible
thumb had pushed them in like buttons.

“I see. And what have you brought for us?”

I stared at him. Even with all the shit I’d lugged —

“To be expected!” he boomed. “You came under the presumption that you yourself will be of use to us? Oh, erroneous! Oh, so
erroneous!”

“But —”

“Be this as it may, Mr. Kaplansk. Of course it would have been far more advantageous to our development, yes, to our
development,
had you placed cash in an envelope and, well, to be frank, mailed it! Goas, Private Bag 79, Karibib, Namibia, 9000! Alas!
You didn’t!” He turned and raised a thick, baggy hand and swept it across everything in sight, the blue-shirted boys, the
cow, the infinite veld—all of it dry, everything everywhere dry.

“Brother Hermanahildas told me to see the Father.”

“Brother who?”

“From The Hague, Brother Hermana —”

“Listen.” He grasped the gate with both hands as if he were preparing to vault it. Then he leaned toward me and whispered,
“Have you not heard? No man can serve two masters, Mr. Kaplansk.” He backed away, appraised me again, gnawing the inside of
his cheek. “Do you understand the parameters as they’ve been succinctly explained this day of our Lord, March the sixth, nineteen
hundred and ninety-one?”

I nodded frantically.

“Very well! As long as you’re here, you’ll teach Standard Six. English and History.” He about-faced, whistled once, as if
he were followed by a platoon (and it was true, always the principal commanded an invisible army), and marched up the road
toward the cluster of school buildings. Some boys came down and helped me with the gate. The cow, without taking its eyes
off me, took a long, long piss.

T
hey stand up when I walk into the room. Every morning, first period, they leap out of their chairs.
Goed morro, Teacher
. And every morning, my fraudulence more transparent, I plead,
Sit down. I beg you guys.

So cold in the shadows and so unbearably hot in the sun, and no in between. I watch the day rise, then blare, then finally
leak away through the cracked and broken glass. The boys sit in a swath of dusty light with their foreheads sweating but their
feet still cold. The boys who wore their shoes were quietest. The ones who went without, who conserved their shoes for church
or soccer, would rub their dry, chapped feet together, and you’d hear it all through class like a chorus of saws.

Rubrecht, Nestor, Jeremiah, Gideon, Sackeus, Albertus, Demus, Mumbwanje, Kalumbo, Magnus, Fanuel (coughing, always coughing,
always apologizing for it), Stevo, Nghidipo, Ichobod… Later in the term, Fanuel will spend two weeks at the clinic at
Usakos. Bloody lung, Sister Ursula will call it. After Usakos, Fanuel will be transferred to Windhoek General Hospital, and
from there we will lose track of him.

But right now another boy, one of the smallest Standard Sixes, Magnus Axahoes (his feet don’t yet touch the floor), raises
his hand and stands and whispers, “May I, the toilet, Teacher?”

“You may.”

Magnus walks out of the classroom, then runs across the courtyard, his feet kicking up sand that seems to rise but not fall
into the now stark light.

I
remember the slow roll of a road that seems flat. How it suddenly dips into dry sloots I’d forgotten were there, and that
swooning that happens in my stomach. I also think of the old woman who sold rocks at a small wooden table. Who did she sell
them to? She sat at a place where the veld seemed to repeat itself, where there was no sense of the land passing, or even
of time. Nothing in either direction but fence-line and veld, and then there she is by the side of the road, at the top of
a rise. You don’t see her until you are upon her. She’s there, waiting. Everything about her has shriveled in the sun but
her hands. They seem to have grown bigger than her face, and she sits there, lording over the common rocks she calls gems.
That’s what her sign says:
GEMS 4 SALE
. She doesn’t shout, wave, or cajole. She lets the truth of the sign speak for itself. Those enormous gnarled hands hovering
over the table as if she’s trying to levitate it. And then she’s gone—or we’re gone. We never stopped, not one time, all the
times we went back and forth along that road. We never even slowed down. Turn your head and she’s a shroud of dust.

I
n the beginning, none of the other teachers would much talk to me. As I had apparently come to Goas on my own volition, I
was suspect. Those first weeks I spent a lot of time cowering in my room in the singles quarters, pretending to write tediously
detailed lesson plans.

Mine was the room assigned to teachers who came and went. Rooms in the singles quarters were square boxes, each with one window
set low in the wall. From bed, I lived eye-level with the veld. My view was of the toilet houses, and beyond them the Erongo
Mountains that would always be too far to walk to.

The teacher who’d lived in my room before me had papered the walls with the German beer calendars that came free in the
Windhoek Advertiser
. Everywhere you looked were shirtless blonde buxoms in tight shorts. There was one girl in nothing but a red bandanna and
a Stetson staring down from the ceiling above the bed, her breasts like about-to-be-dropped bombs. One day I ripped her down,
and was tearing off the others when there came a knock on the wall. Then a voice, my neighbor’s, Teacher Pohamba’s: “What
are you doing, Teacher?”

“I thought I’d clean up a little.”

The noise of him lifting himself out of bed. He opened his door and came over to my window and squatted down. Then he stuck
his head through the torn screen. Teacher Pohamba yawned at me. It was meant, I think, to be a sympathetic, comradely yawn,
but it came out too big, like a kind of maw. “Hand over the tits, Teacher.”

I gave him the scraps and he stuffed them in his shirt pocket, but he remained outside my window. Teacher Pohamba pitied me.
Me standing there on the cement floor in my Walgreen’s shower shoes. “Go to sleep,” he said finally. “Don’t you know it’s
siesta?”

When the first study-hour triangle rang, he came to my window again and told me to follow him. Together, we walked across
the soccer field to the married teachers’ housing, to the circle of plastic chairs in front of Teacher Obadiah’s. The old
man was holding court. Everybody was still drowsy from sleep and only half listening. Teacher Obadiah wasn’t as old as he
liked to consider himself, but he was one of those people whose age baffles. He might have been fifty-five; he might have
been seventy-five. He reveled in the crevices of his face and his white hair. That day he had a week-old
Namibian
on his knee and was lamenting a story about corruption in the Finance Ministry of the new government. The only thing the
white government did fairly, Obadiah said, was teach the black government how to steal.

Pohamba drummed his cheeks awhile and said, “Politicians: black, white, bowlegged—what’s the difference? Let’s hear the weather.”

Obadiah flipped some pages and read. “In the north, hot. On the coast, hot. In the east, very hot. In the central interior
—”

“Have mercy!”

Eventually, Obadiah turned my way and tried to bring me into the fold of the conversation. He asked me what I thought of noble
Cincinnatus.

“Who?”

“You say you hail from Cincinnati?”

“Yes.”

Obadiah made a roof over his eyes with his hand and peered at me. “Well then, of course, I speak of its namesake, the great
Roman general Cincinnatus. Surely, you must —”

“Sorry, I —”

“And you have come here to teach our children history?”

“Is he in the Standard Six curriculum?”

“By God, if he isn’t he should be! Gentleman farmer, reluctant warrior, honest statesman. When people needed him, he ruled.
When the crisis was over, he returned to a quiet life on his farm. Not a farm like this, a proper farm. Had Cincinnatus lived
here, he wouldn’t have come back. He would have done anything to avoid such a fate—even, I daresay, become a tyrant.” Obadiah
put his hands on his knees and leaned forward on his plastic chair.

“Why are you here, young Cincinnatus?”

“I have no idea.”

“He tore down Nakale’s calendars,” Pohamba said.

Obadiah stood and began to pace the dust, his hands behind his back. “The beer girls? Interesting. I must admit that on occasion
I peeped in there to have a look. I too once had desires. I have since forgotten what they were.” He wheeled and faced me.
“Why did you do it? Were you intending to moralize?”

“I wanted to be alone,” I said.

“Ah!” Obadiah brought his hands together as if to applaud me, but stopped short and whispered, more to himself than to me,
“Don’t worry. You’re alone.”

M
orning noise: The murmurs of the boys coming from church, the slap of their bare feet on the concrete porchway, the slow
whish whish
of the lazy classroom sweepers, boys on punishment from the day before.

Every morning meeting, before school, the principal told a moral tale. We’d stand more or less at attention, half listening,
gripping our coffee, watching the unburnished gray light leak through the staff room’s single window. Not the sun; full sun
wouldn’t happen for an eternity.

Often the principal’s stories came from the Bible. Other times the lessons were taken from the newspaper or from some gossip
he picked up at the Hotel Rossman in Karibib. Most of the time—wherever they came from—they were somehow related to the principal’s
guilt over one of his own vices. That morning he must have been suffering pangs over his embezzlement from the school till.

He wore a different tie for each day of the week. It’s how we knew what day it was. As he spoke, his Adam’s apple thrashed
beneath his yellow Wednesday tie, as if, as Obadiah once said, his poor conscience was trying to escape his lying throat.

“Listen, colleagues,” he commanded. “Seriously and piously. This happened near Angra Pequena a hundred years ago, but indeed,
it could have happened yesterday.” He paused and swallowed, allowed this thundering fact to settle upon us. “Let us say it
did happen yesterday. Yes, yesterday. Three skeletons were found in the unforgiving sands of the Namib. God didn’t create
our desert. Hark! The Namib was born of God’s forgetting. He’d always meant to come back and put something here, but alas,
he didn’t. So it goes with this country. Let us return to today’s tale: Two of the skeletons were found together, the third
on a dune about a kilometer away. All three were partially covered by sand and of similar age and weathering.”

He paused and eyed us all, one by one. He lingered at Pohamba, who was teetering, fighting hard to keep his eyes open and
his knees from buckling.

“Erastus?” the principal said.

Pohamba had a new girl in Karibib. He hadn’t landed on his own bed in two days. He still had on his white ducks and silky
disco shirt #7. The principal was the only one at Goas who called him Erastus.

“Erastus, will you summarize?”

Pohamba licked his chapped lips. “Three skeletons,” he said. “Two found together. The other not far away. It is curious. In
fact, I would even say it smells.”

The principal resumed, not satisfied, but not willing to derail the tale at this point for the sake of telling Pohamba what
he thought of him. “Indeed. The first two skeletons were found with their heads staved in. The head of the third was uncrushed.
And in the thin whitened bones that once enjoyed the skin of a fist, the third held”—he pointed a vicious finger at Pohamba—“what?”

“His member,” Pohamba said.

Even the principal laughed, his cheeks filling up and exhaling like bellows. The problem was, we laughed longer, and whenever
that happened, he changed sides. He ducked under the table and returned with his shoe and proceeded to pound, Khrushchev-like,
for order.

“No, Erastus, he didn’t need that anymore. And mark me:
Yours too will wither
. No, I speak of something far more lasting. In the hand of the third skeleton… diamonds! After he murdered his two friends,
he was going to leave the desert a king. In the wind and sand, he gripped those immaculate stones. Imagine how tight and with
what hope he must have clutched them in the long Namib night!”

Now the principal guffawed, happy to pawn his shame off on someone else. “Oh, you smelled something, Erastus.” He brought
his fingers to his nose and gave them a smell. “Oh yes. And I do also. Satan lurks this morning. I smell corruption. I smell
evil. Is not lust merely another form of avarice? God forgot the Namib, but he remembered to punish the third man, and He,
in All His Glory, won’t forget grown teachers who chase young strumpets and neglect their duties to learners either. When
are you going to be too old, Erastus? For the love of God, woe unto you, woe!”