The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (9 page)

“And do you know what?”

We know. It’s me and Vilho and him, and we’re lounging on the mealie sacks outside the hostel kitchen, waiting for Dikeledi
to hang her laundry. Holy laundry, blessed laundry. Pohamba slides his mirrored sunglasses down his nose and peers at us,
repeats, “And do you know what?”

I stifle a yawn. “I can’t imagine.”

He leans back against the mealie sacks, sighs. Then he drags it out, slowly, dramatically: “He wasn’t a he.”

“Tut,” Vilho says, without looking up from his book. “Tut, tut, tut.”

Pohamba sucks his teeth and starts again. “Once upon a time in the north… You see, the north isn’t like here. Things
happen
in the north. Things
have happened
in the north. This is not a place to live. Cows eat sand for breakfast. In the north, the baobab trees grow so big they use
one as a post office.”

“A baobab isn’t a tree,” Vilho says. “It’s a succulent.”

“Once upon a time in the sacred north,” I say. “An SADF tank is roaming the veld when
suddenly
a man with leaves on his head…”

“. . . begins beating the tank with a stick,” Pohamba says. “And beating and beating and beating and beating…”

“. . . until one of the troopies inside gets tired of it, so he shoots the man…”

“. . . who isn’t really a man,” Vilho says.

“Yes,” Pohamba shouts. “The end!”

We sit there. It’s still too early for Dikeledi’s laundry.

Vilho looks up from his book. “But why would she want to die like that?” he says. “Why would anyone choose such a graceless
death?”

“Graceless?” Pohamba says. Then he stands up and does Christ. This is a new wrinkle in the story. He droops his head, reaches
his arms out wide, contorts his face into his idea of rapturous agony. Crucifixion atop the mealie sacks. “You prefer this?”

“Our Lord didn’t have a choice,” Vilho says, looking up at him. “He didn’t want to die for us, he wanted to live. That’s the
whole message.”

And Jesus did nudge Vilho with his toe. His arms still stretched out, his head lolling, Pohamba says, “You see, they’ve killed
everyone in my village. All the terrorist old women and all the terrorist babies and all the terrorist chickens. Only I was
left alive. So what must I do? I gather leaves. I find a good stick. Now do you understand?”

“Even their abominations do not justify.”

Pohamba twitches and takes a sniff of an armpit. “Whew, brother, too long on the cross!”

“Let her live,” Vilho says, squeezing his eyes shut. “Next time you tell it, let her —”

“What?” Pohamba plops down heavily on the mealie sacks. “You want her to wait around for it like a goat?”

D
rought stories were told the same way war stories were—they filled in the gaps of the longest days—except they were more true
and left less room for dramatic acts of bravery. You don’t fight the Almighty. You don’t sneak up behind lack of rain. You
don’t sabotage clouds. You die. At least back in the old days. Now drought means you breathe up dust and the food prices are
higher at the Pick ’n Pay and salaries remain the same and the government has to import mealies from Zimbabwe. And cattle
suffer.

But in ’79 the drought in the Koakveld (this happened to other people—to be a victim of drought meant you were a farm person,
and no one at Goas was a farm person, Goas being a temporary stop, no matter how many years of your life you spent there)
was accompanied by an epidemic of rats. Rats who became just as hungry as the people. What happened was, a rat ate a baby.
This happened to a family no one knew personally. Antoinette told it while she was hosing down her tiny garden with water
pirated from the science lab. She grew wild onions and radishes and small tomatoes. She was wearing her green Sunday dress.
It was Sunday, after church. During the drought of ’79, in the Koakveld, up in Africa, she said, not here, it didn’t happen
down here, a starving rat ate a starving baby.

I
watch her shadow as she stalks across the courtyard, her heels stabbing the sand. She avoids the patch of the principal’s
Ireland and steps up into the open door of his office. He’s either on the phone or about to be, his big hand reaching for
it. Who he talked to we never knew, although he always seemed to be ordering supplies and books we never saw.

I’m doing a reading-comprehension drill. I have just read them a story about a mischievous boy named Tom and his wily teacher,
Sir Joseph Blinks.
Now the question is: Why does Sir Blinks mistrust Tom?

I stand near my open classroom door. I hear her ask for construction paper. I look back at my class. Most have their heads
down and are doing their best to write something, except for Rubrecht Kanhala, who knows I’m only trying to run out the clock
before third-period break. He’s thumping the end of his nose with a pencil. Sir Blinks doesn’t know shit.

I step out and wander halfway up the porchway and listen.

“You need to fill out a requisition form.”

“Give me a form, then.”

“The forms are finished.”

A long silence. Outside Pohamba’s class a boy whacks two erasers together and gags on the chalky smoke.

The principal is sitting. Mavala is standing. His finger is poised in mid-dial of the rotary. She watches his face. If only
she’d slacken a little, this young sister of his wife, and behave more like a woman is supposed to. He could make things easier
for her. She need not acknowledge his authority—of course she needn’t go that far—but for God’s sake, won’t she look at his
existence as flesh, as a man with hands and blood and cock and need and eyes?

I don’t have to see any of this—it’s all there in the silence. Power is easily spent—you can always get more later—but as
far as she’s concerned, he can keep it and play with it. He sees this, and it only makes him sweat watching her. Her: Go ahead.
Cower beneath me with your principal stomach, your principal key chain, your principal phone in your hand. She doesn’t leave,
only stands there, in her sleeveless blouse, with her bare shoulders. Stands there like a taunt. A few minutes more she’s
in that office. Maybe she’s going too far—stepping on him too much, too easily, too early. She hasn’t been back a month. There’s
no more talk of construction paper or forms.

She leaves empty-handed and heads back across the courtyard—this time she tromps straight across Ireland—toward her class,
which is waiting silently (itself a miracle at Goas). She’ll ask Obadiah for some construction paper. No, a better idea. She’ll
take her boys to the veld and let them draw on the rocks like Bushmen. A few minutes later, I watch them file out, her ducklings,
two by two.

W
hat does she want, then?”

“Not to be a teacher, obviously.”

“Who wants to be a teacher?”

“Not me.”

“You degrade the profession. Shame —”

“Well, she was probably expecting more. Look at Libertine Amathila. Now she’s Minister of Health. Didn’t they name a boulevard
after her in Otjiwarongo?”

“But Libertine Amathila’s a doctor. SWAPO sent her abroad to study. Easy to come back to the country a hero when you’re a
doctor.”

“And now she’s got her own avenue!”

“Boulevard!”

“Yes, even better!”

“Miss Tuyeni says one day she just left and crossed the border. They didn’t hear from her for two years. They thought she
was dead.”

“How old?”

“Seventeen or so. The mother nearly died of grief over it.”

“How did she come to teaching if she hates it so much?”

“She taught school up in the camp.”

“Teacher and a soldier?”

“Yes.”

“Not the only one.”

“Who else?”

“I’d rather not boast.”

“Well, it’s understandable.”

“What is?”

“To want more after something like that. After committing so much to the cause, wouldn’t you expect —”

“What? More than Goas? Everybody deserves —”

“Always more. Why can’t anyone ever —”

“And the kid?”

“Ah, yes—the child.”

“That child’s demonic.”

“Shush—that’s a beautiful lamb.”

J
ust past noon and the boy is, at last, sleeping beneath the kitchen table.
Difficult,
the girl said, as if the child was a problem to solve. Now she understands. There’s some rage within him—his little fists
are constant. Unless, like now, he’s sleeping, his anger gone. As if sleep possesses us, infuses us with a goodness that isn’t
really us. She peeks at the boy, at his tiny unclenched hands, at his dirty elbows, at his stomach rising and falling. Or
what if it is us? What if asleep is the only time we are true? If so, who are we when we’re awake?

She takes Obadiah’s glasses out of her apron. Often he declares them lost and she finds them at various places around the
farm. She begins to read.

Most days she lets the wind decide the page. Other, rarer times, like now, she goes back to the beginning.

The beginning? Does one remember being born? I was always at Goas. Even before I was at Goas, I was at Goas. Before the dry
land was the water and the firmament. Out this window, I see the dry land. At night, I see the firmament. Where’s the water?

They say there was an ocean here once. It must have dried up.

And the boy, scrambling out from under the table, makes for the door.

Two souls abide, alas, within my breast,

And each one seeks riddance from the other.

The one clings with a dogged love and lust

With clutching parts unto this present world.

The other surges fiercely from the dust

Unto sublime ancestral fields.

GOETHE,
FAUST

I
stand before this mirror an orphan. Of my own body I would say I have decidedly mixed feelings. It is tall. It carries my
head. It seems my left leg is longer than my right, but this has never been proven. There are days when I see my feet as if
from a great distance. When I was young, in my vanity, I favored turtleneck sweaters to accentuate what I considered to be
my Corinthian neck. That I am now ugly is of no concern. My mottled, sagging skin. My berried nose. That my face fails to
present my beauty and originality is not a failure of my maker. Rather, it is a testament to the unsung nature of my uniqueness.
That the philistines cannot recognize my soaringness only makes it truer. More than truth. Is there a higher highest? A truthlier
truth? My head carries my thoughts and my legs carry my body. And yet touch—physical—I long for it again.
Don’t you remember?
When you used to do do do Meneer Oblongsky? Remember? Your thimbled fingers? When I was poor but also beautiful? Now I’m
poor and ugly? Meneer Oblongsky hangs limp like a wrung chicken’s neck, and still I’m sick with desire? Lame men make lusty
husbands? Would it were so, Poet. Now I ride the donkey by memory. And yet it isn’t merely youth I lust for, but last week.
Give me back last week. My Antoinette in her chair rubbing her feet with camphor.

and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

L
ove? You want to know where love went?

Easy. Same place as all the water. Now enough. I have stomachs to satisfy.

T
he first recorded attempt to escape Goas occurred in 1930, when a Boer farmer named S. J. Dupreez tried to trade the farm
for a lusher parcel upcountry.

OFFICE OF THE MAGISTRATE

KARIBIB

12 JULY 1930

My dear Sir,

As you no doubt know I have been a heavy loser of stock, having lost all owing to the latest drought. It was my intention
to quit the country altogether but owing to the pleas of my motherless and unmarried daughter Grieta I have decided to try
again but in another district. With this end in view I paid a visit to the north and was very much taken with the east side
of Outjo District, particularly the vacant farm Weiseenfels. What I propose to do is effect an exchange of my farm Goas with
that of Farm Weiseenfels, the hectarage being roughly the same. Goas as you know is occasionally well watered, and will no
doubt make a most valuable addition to the Otjimbingwe Native Reserve, an opportunity for an enterprising kaffir. In penning
you these lines I do so in the hope that you will kindly forward same with your recommendation to the proper quarters.

Your Obedient Servant,
S. J. Dupreez

SECRETARY FOR SOUTHWEST AFRICA

F. P. COURTNEY CLARK

WINDHOEK

8 DECEMBER 1930

RE: FARM GOAS

SIR, I beg to forward herewith for your consideration a letter received from Mr. S. J. Dupreez, owner of the farm Goas in
this district. There has been no rain on the farm since early last year, and Mr. Dupreez has lost all his cattle throught
[
sic
] drought. I have informed Mr. Dupreez that the Administrator does not contemplate purchasing any of the farms adjoining the
Otjimbingwe Native Reserve owing to the depletion of stock therein, and there is little likelihood of his proposal being accepted.

Acting Magistrate
T. Miller

OFFICE OF THE MAGISTRATE

KARIBIB

12 DECEMBER 1930

RE: FARM GOAS

With reference to your minute No. 2/4/2/4 of the 8th instant, I shall be glad if you will kindly inform Mr. Dupreez that it
is regretted that the administration is not at this time prepared to entertain his generous offer.

SECRETARY FOR SOUTHWEST AFRICA

F. P. COURTNEY CLARK