The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (7 page)

But not only Miss Tuyeni clucked. It was all of us. Nobody greeted Mavala Shikongo when she returned. And everyone, myself
included, wore an air of Nope, we’re not surprised. We expect nothing less than humiliation here.

In morning meeting, the principal acted as if she’d never left. Vilho had been covering her classroom, running back and forth
across the courtyard. All day, every day, for nearly a month, he had done his best to control two rooms of squalling boys,
his own Standard Fours and her sub b’s. Supposedly, the principal had put a call into the ministry for a replacement teacher,
but no one had turned up, and now no one needed to.

And so the prodigal daughter went back to her class, as if she’d always been a fallen woman and not the up-and-comer in a
new nation. Even true heroes became no one at Goas. That’s what you get for walking around wearing your head so high. Now
we don’t consider ourselves so far beneath you. A similar thing happened with Pohamba. Once, he made good on his daily threat
to leave and was gone five days. His previous record was three and a half. When he slouched back up the road in the same disco
shirt he’d left wearing, no one reminded him of his vow that he’d come back to this farm only as a corpse, and even then his
ghost would flee.

Now we don’t have to be so discreet when we again pilgrim by her classroom on our way to and from the toilet houses. Ignominy
has given us license to spy more openly. She’s taller than she was when she was a myth, and not every move she makes is so
utterly graceful. She stomps around her class with a book open in her hand. Her short-short hair and her eyes that gaze restlessly
up at the ceiling in the middle of a sentence. She does not baby her sub b’s as Vilho did. She reads fast and doesn’t pause
to explain what the words mean. And when she teaches the alphabet, we note with interest that she does not sing it. But the
small boys seem to love her more for not talking down to them, for treating them like her little soldiers of the dangling
feet.

A
nother of the principal’s tortures, a bit of daily imprisonment in the name of holy education.
If they refuse book learning, then we must foist it upon their shoulders so that they may carry it like honorable oxen.

And it’s an hour and a half, not an hour.

Pohamba and I are on duty. We sit bunkered down in the staff room while mayhem reigns in the unsupervised classrooms. From
the Standard Fives, the sound of broken glass. In the courtyard, a couple of Standard Sevens are fencing with our teacher
brooms. We hear nothing, see nothing. We’re eating yesterday’s cold fish and chips and playing War. Fast rounds, plapping
down the cards as quick as we can. It’s the Cincinnati Kid versus the Man. Three out of five for who gets to leave early.
In between chips, Pohamba chews on a chicory root, which is supposed to improve his virility. It isn’t making him very good
at War.

“That was my take,” I say.

“I had a jacko,” Pohamba says.

“Three’s wild.”

“Seven.”

“It was seven last time.”

“Where’s the vinegar? How can the Man eat fish and chips without vinegar? It was seven.”

“Three.”

“Take it. It’s your conscience.”

Next round he loses again. I get up to leave.

“Wait,” he says. “Did she speak to you?”

“No.”

“Look at you?”

“No.”

“Play for Thursday.”

“Your credit’s no good.”

He snaps off a little chicory. “What if I give you some of this here root, Kid?” Whence from beneath the outside ledge of
the staff-room window, a TransNamib hat rises. And a godhead thunders:

Hear this, idle suitors! While you sit there playing games! Know this: During the great Herero rebellion, during a break in
that slaughter, two German officers once played cards—cards!—on the naked buttocks of a captured Herero princess. Imagine
it. Think of a card slapping on flesh and its reverberations. Titillated? Go ahead, be titillated!

Forgive us. We got titillated. Because he invited us, cajoled us, and the hour and a half wasn’t getting any shorter. And
so—mid-War, the cards in our sweaty hands—we indulged. We thought of her young body arching off a table, and cards —

Then the hat in the window rumbled again.

Thrilled? All right, then. You had it your way. Now see it another. Think of how still that girl must have held. How long
the game lasted. What the smoke was like in the tent. Was ash flicked on skin? Was it better than what else she knew could
happen? Or did that happen too? Of course it did. Her relatives who live among us are all the evidence we need. Yes, it certainly
got worse some nights. And you may in the filth of your imaginations take it that far. But I ask that you consider only the
rudimentary evil of the game itself. Now add a voice
—Gruss Gott!—
And laughter and the reek of the cigars . . .

There were afternoons when any sort of idle entertainment spurred his umbrage. Such diversions, Obadiah said, contributed
to the disintegration of civilization. Thus, he ambushed us with history, rose up from the window, and bombasted.

“Revolted?” he said.

We nodded.

“It won’t do. Revulsion only makes a man turn away. I demand you look at her again, see her again —”

“Demand?” Pohamba said. “We’re only trying to get through the day here.”

Obadiah raised the brim of his hat and peered at Pohamba. Of all things, this he understood, but when he was sober, he pretended
he didn’t. Drunk, he carried his own aches. Sober, he lugged the burdens of the world. Today on his back were the miseries
of a long-dead Herero princess. He left us, slowly, hunched over. I slid the fish and chips to Pohamba; he slid them back
to me. A six of diamonds and a body seized beyond fear into stillness. Fingers clenching the edge of the table.

I
f you bothered to wash up at Goas, acceptance, or at the very least toleration, was pretty much guaranteed. Auntie Wilhelmina
was an exception, as ignored as she was ubiquitous. She was the minor character who always insisted she star.

A Wednesday? A Saturday midnight? Auntie was all day all days. The most prominent thing of many prominent things was the noise
of her. Her fat twangling, her fulumping down the ridge toward the singles quarters. The jangle of her hundreds of stolen
bronze bracelets. The barking of her retinue of sycophantic dogs. The heaving of her breasts. She was a big heaver of her
breasts; Auntie heaved at the slightest provocation. Her turtled skin. Parts of it were long past withered; other parts were
new, infantile, as if she had the power of selective regeneration. You see, once you start to describe her, there is no end
of her. A wildebeestian woman, the only answer is to look away, but it’s impossible. Her eyes—no, stay clear of her eyes.
Her cheeks sag off her face like grocery bags overstuffed with fruit. Her teeth, cruel, sharp, heinously white—on the days
she wore them in. Without them, her mouth looked full of bloody thumbs. There was a fresh wart on her chin, not like a dead
thing, but a happy thing, very much alive. She groomed her beard a lot like Obadiah’s, a bit pointy off the chin. Beyond ugly,
Auntie Wilhelmina, beyond ghastly, and this was the fundamental problem. The woman was a fascination. The boys said that if
you stared at Auntie Wilhelmina long enough from a certain angle, you’d never stop wanting her. Ever.

She lived at Old Goas, in a ruined pondookie up and over the ridge, only half of which was roofed. Vilho, who was here that
far back as a learner, remembered that one day she materialized. That one day Auntie Wilhelmina was simply in the veld, rooted,
like something that had always been right where it was. You just hadn’t seen her. Like a hill beyond another hill. Or as if,
Vilho put it, Goas had come to her, not the opposite. Obadiah refused to indulge in anything so metaphysical about Auntie.
He only said: That old bitch talks too much.

She had an extremely hoarse voice, like an old dog’s after it’s spent the day barking and can hardly do it anymore—but bark
onward it must. In that terrible voice, she would go on about her royal lineage and her family’s personal relationship to
Jesus. She said she could trace her family back to Kambonde on her father’s side and Impinge on her mother’s. She said her
paternal grandmother’s eldest brother was Mpingana, who was assassinated by Nehale. And she said Mpingana’s son, Kwedhi, her
great-uncle, was the one who, after banishment, started to associate with the Germans. She said the Germans might have had
their faults, but we must always bless them for bringing the word of God to this heathen place. Eventually Kwedhi was baptized
and declared himself king—hence, as she, Auntie, was the great man’s niece, everyone owed her fealty for freeing them from
the bondage of paganism. In Auntie’s universe, four hundred years of colonialism and apartheid never happened. And she carried
her namesake, the last Kaiser—Wilhelm II!—proudly.

“Murdering fop of a Kaiser,” Obadiah said. “And there is nothing, zero, in the historical or anthropological record to support
a lick of her stories. That obese woman bastardizes history! Christianization was a gradual process. It occurred over decades,
centuries. No one man determined anything. Her Kwedhi was no Constantine, and for that matter, neither was Constantine. Faith
is not something commanded by a despot. The woman’s a fake and a liar.”

“A fake what?”

Obadiah didn’t answer. He was going to condemn her for making up stories? For exploitation of history to suit her own ends?
For lying for the sake of the good of the story? This sin?

Initially the priest had hired Auntie Wilhelmina as an undercook in the hostel kitchen. Then one day she walked off with two
forty-kilo bags of carrots. Dragged them behind her in broad daylight, her philosophy being that stealing in public is no
sin.
Robbing His children under His watchful eye is no transgression.
If it was, she said, wouldn’t there be thunder and lightning? How do you argue with this? The priest fired her, but he didn’t
have either the heart or the stomach to banish her off the farm for good. So he let her live up there in her half-roofless
house with the dogs she stole as whelps from farmers up and down the C-32. A good, quasi-socialist thing about Auntie Wilhelmina
was that she stole only expensive things from the government (rands from the tuition scholarship fund) and the Church (a year’s
supply of communion wafers and a golden chalice). From us, she took double-A batteries, lightbulbs, mosquito coils, your last
nub of toothpaste. Her dogs were especially fond of gnawing rolls of toilet paper. She’d knock on your door and there she’d
be, every glorious boozy inch of her. “I bestow my blessment upon this dwelling.” And you’d be faced with a choice that wasn’t
really a choice. Let her in and let her take whatever the hell she wanted. Or listen to her.

“Come on in, Auntie. I was actually just on my way to choir practice. Make yourself at home.”

“Sing well, White Child, raise high your voice.”

Like all descendants of Kavango royalty, Auntie said, she could not allow herself to die a natural death. As with Jesus, as
with the lineage of Kwedhi. When her time came, she said, the oldest male was supposed to strangle her to death. She often
hinted that such time was nigh, but Obadiah, overanxious, would ask, “Is it not yet time to perish, O Queenly Queen of Queenishness?”

And she’d say, “Patience, little brother, patience. Soon, soon, the royal murder.”

And Obadiah would stroke his old callused hands as if to sharpen them.

M
avala Shikongo walking along the road to the principal’s house. Us watching from the top of the hill, the gust in our faces.
Obadiah says, There are sixteen kinds of wind, but only one that lifts a skirt like that.

He stands and whaps the cross with his hat.

A
nd still the bedraggled pigeons fuck. Everywhere they do it. No place is sacred, or depending on how you looked at it, all
places sacred. Every mapone, every acacia. Toilet pit, dam, trough. They fuck on the road to Krieger’s farm. We blame it on
the late freak rain, the theory being that somehow it had lodged into their chickpea brains that the world was all greenfull
and pleasure from now on. Couldn’t they see the land was already parched again? Obadiah caught nine of them orgying in the
backseat of his Datsun and attacked them with a broom, which seemed only to increase the rapture all around. The noise of
their foul love deafening but indescribable, and yet I hear them still in my sleep. That gurgly, broody, out-of-breath whorling.
Ecstatic death throes that went on deathlessly across dusk, night, dawn, coffee—feather-flapping fuckery. They do not do normal
pigeon activities. They do not roost. They do not sun themselves. They do not harass your feet while you are eating an egg
sandwich. They fuck. After that they fuck. Pigeon-mating season was supposed to last two weeks in the drier season—dry, drier,
drought—and so was considered by the regional government to be only a minor plague on the list. As it has now gone on a month,
we would welcome any other wrath, because those birds are such an affront to the general celibacy of Goas. Toads, serpents,
locusts, boils, blains—at least they wouldn’t mock us. Leprosy? Give us the spots. Of course, Vilho counsels love, his finger
holding his place in Matthew 13:37. He calls them doves, not pigeons. “He that soweth the good seed,” he says. “What would
Jesus say?”

Pohamba blows him a kiss. “Jesus would stomp these flying rats with a fat hairy sandaled foot.”

*

A moment of reprieve. Mercy of a soft thud. One drops dead in the soccer field right in the middle of it. Just rolls off and
that’s it, motionless feathers. We go out there and hold an impromptu funeral. We ring around him, we figure it’s a him. “Same
thing happened to Nelson Rockefeller,” I say. “Died on top of his secretary.” People ignore this, like a lot of things I tend
to say.