The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (10 page)

WINDHOEK

Thus, Dupreez’s proposal (i.e., this farm is so useless you may as well give it back to the natives) failed. He did, however,
establish a precedent of unrequitement that would reign at Goas for the next sixty years: a great urge to leave, matched only
by total practical impossibility. Eleven more years Dupreez hung on in the wind and sand. In March of 1941, he died of gout.
His bloated corpse was buried between his long dead wife and his (still unmarried) daughter, Grieta, who had died of consumption
the year before. Moss doesn’t grow on graves in the desert. At Goas they are known as the Voortrekker graves, in honor of
the great trek the Boers took to reach this paradise of their dreams. In his will, S.J. bequeathed the farm to the only one
who couldn’t refuse it, God, through his fiduciary on earth, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Windhoek. There are two ways
of seeing this at Goas. One is that he may have thought he’d get a place in heaven for this bestowal. In which case, the line
went, he burns in hell for trying to stiff the Almighty. The other: He knew exactly what he was doing. As a Dutch Calvinist,
he wanted to stick it to the Catholics.

The diocese didn’t know what to do with Goas. There was an idea of turning it into a leper colony, but apparently they couldn’t
find enough Catholic lepers. Finally, the bishop sent two German monks, Brother Sebastian and Brother Gerhard, out there to
raise karakul sheep. Even at that time those two monks were well into their last years. But the diocese needed cash, and karakul
was where the money was. Either way you looked at it, a win-win proposition. If the brothers made good and raised capital,
praise be. If they dropped dead out there, God’s will. The plan failed on both counts. The sheep died and Brother Sebastian
and Brother Gerhard didn’t.

In ’42, their inaugural year, drought wiped out half the herd. In ’43, the rains came, but so did blue tongue. In ’45, more
drought. In ’46, they held on. In ’48, they had too much rain. The Swakop River swelled and another third of the sheep drowned.
And yet the two monks lived on—and on—thereby establishing another tenet of Goas: Its misery is hearty. The lashing wind and
the frigid mornings and the eyeball-melting afternoons eventually become what your life was always supposed to amount to.
Two monks, exiled in the wind. Raising karakul even under the best of conditions—they are a finicky, wimpy breed—was an enterprise
born of love and despair. Year follows year and Brother Sebastian and Brother Gerhard don’t die. Their nights are long. The
bleat of the parched lambs keeps them awake. They aren’t exactly missionaries. There are no native heathens here to preach
to. The monks carry God’s Word to a veld that never even sends back an echo. Weren’t there days when they wondered whether
they were still alive, when it occurred to them that they might no longer be living, breathing men, holding sheep shears and
praying?

The fifties were as hot and desiccated as the forties. And yet because of a year like ’53, they endured. In ’53 there was
enough rain. The sheep got fat. The shearing went on into the night for weeks. The sort of year that makes all the suffering
worth it, until the next drought comes and all that’s left is to tell stories of ’53.

You recall ’53, Brother Sebastian?

Oh, happy times, Brother Gerhard. Happy times.

Then one afternoon Brother Gerhard didn’t come home from a walk in the veld, and Brother Sebastian went out and searched for
him. He’s still searching. Of all the ghosts at Goas, and as Obadiah says, for a small place, our ghosts are legion, none
is more bewildered than Brother Sebastian. Awkward, naked, and cold—and dead himself now too—and still Brother Sebastian keeps
searching for Brother Gerhard’s body. He senses him in one place, then another. People hold out hope that Brother Sebastian
will one day stop looking and be at peace. In the meantime, it is Brother Sebastian who digs those strange, unidentifiable
holes we sometimes find by our doors in the morning, too big for a rabbit and too small for a hedgehog. Each one like a tiny,
empty grave.

In 1967, with the Group Areas Act forcing black schoolchildren out of the towns, the Church found another use for Goas. A
school! Why hadn’t anybody thought of that before?

*

It would be difficult to find a place more unlovingly built. Two parallel rows of classrooms, concrete blocks, repainted yellow
each year by Theofilus. The boys’ hostel the same—narrow, barracks-like. A church that could double as a storage area. Small
houses for the married teachers. A bachelors’ quarters for the single males. In spite of the new paint, the place is already
in a state of minor crumble. We live amid newish-looking ruins. And yet after a while you start to see that maybe there’s
a logic to the place, that the buildings of Goas are only as temporary as the people who pass through them.

Hereby established a Native School (Inboorlingskool) situated south of Karibib and maintained by the Archdiocese of Windhoek
resident at 2013 Peter Mueller Strasse, Windhoek, was duly registered under Sub-section (1)(a) of Section one hundred and
five Education Ordinance, 1962 (27 of 1962) made under the ordinance.

DIRECTOR OF NATIVE EDUCATION

WINDHOEK

27 JULY 1967

And when the wall of night fell on the first boys in the hostel, boys who had come here from all parts of the country, where
did they think they were?

H
e was easy to forget, though he was always among us. At least when he wasn’t in the veld mending a fence or milking the cows
or shooting a kudu for meat for the boys or disinfecting the toilets or regreasing the generator or smoking bats out of the
hostel—or any other of the thousand things he did every day that made us feel our laziness so acutely it was like a wound—Theofilus
was among us. Maybe not even listening, but near. His hands momentarily still. The farm would have collapsed without him within
a week, and yet we so often forgot him. In hindsight, this seems surprising, because, to be honest, he was so shocking-looking.
Theofilus was albino, but this was never mentioned out loud. Not white exactly, his skin was more like faded red leather.
And nobody made any of the usual cuts about black albinos either. Nobody said his eyelids got seared off when God kissed him
out of heaven. Nobody said he was a photographic negative with legs, or a milk kaffir, or that he was the ghost who nibbled
children’s feet at night. People talked only about his graceful, motor oil-stained hands and how there was nothing he couldn’t
fix except Japanese cars, which was all right, since Jesus himself couldn’t have healed Obadiah’s Datsun.

He slept on a cot in the mission garage. His bed was always neatly made with a single blanket. I never saw a pillow on it.
He kept his second pair of boots under the bed, along with a cardboard box where he stored the clothes he wasn’t wearing.
There was also, sometimes, a shadow made by his bed that stretched across the oily pavement of the garage, depending on the
time of day and the angle of the sun coming in through the cracked windows.

Every third Saturday of the month, Theofilus would leave the farm and its cattle and goats in the charge of two Standard Sevens
and take a donkey cart to visit his wife. She was attached to a farm near Wilhelmstal, halfway to Okahandja. It was said she
couldn’t move out to Goas and live with Theofilus because keeping a wife didn’t come with his job. Once a month, he ironed
his suit and white shirt on an old unused door held up by two upturned paint cans. Once a month, his tattered blue jumper
swung in the wind on the line behind the garage, waiting for him to put it on again Monday morning.

The boys were having a soccer tournament that Saturday, so we were out there on the sidelines, sitting on desks we’d dragged
from our classrooms, watching and betting on teams. Bufula Bufula were 2 to 1 over Pepsi All-African Stars, 8 to 1 over Omaruru
Toyota. (Pohamba’s odds.)

Theofilus on his donkey cart in a pressed black suit and shined shoes. He was all hitched up, the cart standing near the far
goal, in front of the mission garage. The unfair thing was, he had always been kind to them, never beat them at all, much
less very hard, and he never picked on the lazier of the two, a nameless grizzle-haired black and brown who often let his
friend, a gray shaggy named Oom Zak, carry most of the weight. He fed those two donkeys more carrots than they could eat.
It was as though they’d talked it over and decided that day to go on strike, Theofilus and his mercy be damned. We could see,
from our seats on the other side of the field, that he at first considered it an aberration. He beat them a few times, gently.
Still, they wouldn’t budge. He beat them harder. Nothing. We watched him look curiously at the stick, as if it were the problem.
Then Theofilus raised the stick over his head and calmly began to flog them.

He kept at it.

Finally, even the boys noticed and stopped the game to watch Theofilus crack those donkeys so hard and for so long that we
could see the blood of the lazy nameless one flicking off the stick. The whole time he stared straight ahead, like none of
this was happening, as if the whole farm weren’t watching. A man on his way to see his wife but not going anywhere. His long
legs at perfect right angles, so that they looked, from where we all were sitting, like a solid table. We all watched—the
teachers and the boys. Him pretending it wasn’t happening, even as the blood began to splatter his clean suit, and still those
two stood motionless, as if today they were no longer farm donkeys but dignified statues of their supposed cousins, horses.

Theofilus straddled up there in his best now-ruined clothes. There was something almost obscene about how we couldn’t take
our eyes off it. It was Mavala Shikongo who finally said something. She was sitting with that baby, Tomo, clawing around,
biting her ankles. She’d begun to join us. Tomo had come first. He couldn’t be contained in that little room that used to
be the principal’s garage. And Mavala had followed. What else was there to do at Goas, ultimately, but join us?

She gets him a day a month?

I didn’t hear it when she said it. Do you know what I mean? At first, you don’t hear something, and then you play it back
in your head and you hear it perfectly?

She didn’t say anything else. Still, she shamed us. We hadn’t thought of his wife. Maybe we figured we didn’t need to. We’d
seen so many like her, old mammies walking along the goat paths that ran beside the tar roads, scarves wrapped tight around
their heads. Why be more specific?

Theofilus didn’t break the bastard stick across his knees. He set it down on the floor of the cart like it was made of glass.
He looked exhausted, as if he really had gone to her and come back. His pale, sun-ravaged face. He got off the cart and unbuckled
the harnesses the same gentle way he always did. Then he walked to the mission garage and hoisted the door and went inside.
The boy who had been closest to the cart, the keeper, Skinny Hilunda, walked up and gave the donkeys a few punches in their
flanks. They didn’t notice. Later, both of them wandered away to the veld, because they felt like wandering away to the veld.
Theofilus didn’t work that day. He didn’t come out of the garage. And we sat by the soccer field and thought of her watching
the road he wouldn’t come home on, wondering if somehow after all these years she had got the wrong Saturday. Are you next
week, Theo? Always she hears him before she sees him. The axles beneath the cart shriek, and if there’s no wind, she can practically
hear him from as far as Vogelslang—then him coming into view over a rise in the highway.

FARTHER INTO THE VELD

God preserve me from love.

— BESSIE HEAD

S
ummer or whatever you called that even hotter time before summer even started when your skin wasn’t used to the night heat
yet and the mosquitoes began their bloodlusty moaning. How their noise changed as the night went deeper. At the beginning
of the night they were feverish because of the unbearably beautiful proximity of your flesh, and yet the netting and the coils
worked for the most part and the lust changed to frustration and you’d listen to their hunger for you rise and dissipate,
rise and dissipate, until you sank into a sort of stupor that didn’t feel like sleeping, though you woke up in the morning
and realized you had slept, that it hadn’t all been a waiting. And in the morning, the hopeful ones, the hangers-on, were
so drowsy from unrequited aching outside the net they were simple to kill, so on hot mornings you’d hear, from every room
in the singles quarters, the sound of joyous acrobatic whacking, easy rolled-newspaper slaughter, even from Vilho’s, all that
love-thy-neighbor talk and he was as much mass murderer as we were, and then we’d show off the carnage on our walls, give
each other mini-tours of death, Got this fucker with my pinkie, all the flat black asterisks, and the lucky ones also, the
ones sated with our blood, them massacred now too, us thinking we’ve reaped our revenge, always forgetting that tonight our
victories will mean nothing, that they’ll all be reborn, reincarnated fifty, a hundred, a thousand times, and that killing
them will always be the same as not killing them.

S
pacious days yawned on. We put off everything we had to do, because there would always be time for it later. This afternoon
was tomorrow. Night was Madagascar. We’d stand before our classes and say words, slowly, languidly, words. It was as if we
were talking under water. These were days Pohamba couldn’t contain himself. He was sweating for it, working long hours of
love, going to Karibib every chance he got (hitching rides, taking Festus’s bike), and straggling back to Goas at sunrise
and not changing his clothes for school, just appearing in the staff room for morning meeting with enormous ovals of sweat
staining his silken armpits. Even the principal respected Pohamba’s work ethic and didn’t ride the Good Book too hard on him.