The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (11 page)

He’d often run out of money. Only Vilho would still give him any. That saint would look at him with his sad, empathetic eyes
and stick the rands in Pohamba’s pocket like a bouquet. And still Pohamba would feel the need to explain it: “Can’t be a sugar
daddy without any sugar, hey?”

Those days were hardest on his Standard Sevens. The more fatigued he was, the more he expected of them, up there in front
of his class roaring: “Differentiate the following: Y equals 1 plus X divided by the square root of 1 minus X to the second
power.”

“But, Teacher —”

A bleary, too-caffeinated man pacing the rows with a ruler in one hand and his big deadly wooden protractor in the other.
“Do you want to end up at Goas like me? Don’t you boys see I only want the best for you? No fingers. Calculate!”

W
hat kind of person hates a baby? That’s no baby. He only looks like a baby. Mavala called him her monstrous, her squirmy,
her rodentia, her bedlam. He had squat little legs like a miniature Greco-Roman wrestler. We called him Little Festus. He
was not yet two but was seen by reliable witnesses lifting a wheelbarrow over his head. He loved a toilet house, especially
when you were in it. (As good a time as any to mention that the only toilet house that locked from the inside was the principal’s
private one. It would have been considered tantamount to a coup d’état if anyone else shat in it.) Tomo’s ferrety, chicken-greasy
fingers in your pockets. He ate everything. He noticed everything, understood everything. I remember his eyes staring at me
through the slats of a chair, just his eyes, holding me, knowing me, hating me back. We were jealous of him. Of what his eyes
had the privilege of seeing in person. An outside shower, the spigot in the back of the principal’s house. Tomo sits in the
muddied sand while she… she… she . . .

I’d try to hold him tender—my false hands—and his body would seize. And that thing. All babies do this, but Tomo did it with
particular vengeance. That thing they do. You’d be playing with him, or think you were playing with him, having a good time
making gurgling noises and chasing him around, and then he’d fall over and he’d raise his head and think about it a moment,
make the calculation. Decide whether it was in his best interest to cry bloody murder. In my case he always wailed like the
tornado drill at Wainscott Elementary on North Clifton in Cincinnati. The way he could turn it on, turn it off. Blast. Modulate.
Blast.

Upside-down in his car seat, his feet where his head should be (one bootie on, the other long gone), that big head dangling
down. How those eyes never seemed to bother with seeing anything superfluous. Like your lying-ass smile. He sneered right
through you. He couldn’t talk yet, and maybe this was the true source of his power. Words would only get in the way of his
seeing the essentials. Who would hate a baby?

We said Mavala Shikongo never laughed. It wasn’t true. It was that only he could make her do it. I mean laugh. Laugh like
a banshee, as if she had the whooping cough, uncontrollable seal barks you could hear all the way from the principal’s house.
Small, easy things like brushing his hair with a toothbrush, like stuffing a little mashed potato up his nose, would get her
going with her croaking.

G
oats skitter in from the veld through the late dusk, the blue light like falling smoke. Pohamba’s asleep, his early evening
nap. I take a tub of Rama out of the food cupboard and scoop the margarine out and toss it onto the garbage pile beyond our
fire pit. One of Antoinette’s roosters, the one with the spiky tuft of green hair, immediately converges, stunned—never has
such a mother lode been delivered with such nonchalance. I leave him to his wonder. I walk up the road toward the principal’s
house. She’s sitting on a bench outside her door, stirring pap over an open fire. Tomo sits up from rolling in the dirt at
her feet and glowers at me. I hold up my empty tub.

“Anybody home? We’re out of margarine in the quarters, wondering if —”

Mavala jabs her thumb toward the window. Beyond the curtain I can see the fuzz of the television. The principal can’t get
any reception from Windhoek, but he and Miss Tuyeni like to sit there and pretend they’re watching the shows they read about
in the paper.

“My sister and her husband are being entertained,” Mavala says. “Would you like to sit and wait, Teacher?”

Her feet are bare. It’s either bare feet or heels. Immense attention is paid to Mavala’s footwear in the quarters.

“I asked if you’d like to sit, Teacher.”

“Sure.” I sit down next to her on the bench. She leans over the pot and stirs some more, then sets the spoon on the bench
between us. She crosses her legs one way, then the other. Then leaves them uncrossed.

“You know, I wouldn’t be so fat if I was home working in the mealie fields. In the north, you strap a baby on your back and
go to work in the fields.”

We’d been noticing this, that she’d sometimes say things that made you think she’d been having a conversation with herself
and your presence was only incidental.

“Who said you’re fat?”

“I heard English whites don’t like fat women. The Boers like them fat.”

“I’m not English.”

“I’m bored,” she says. “Aren’t you bored?”

I watch her scratch her left ankle with her right toes. I stoop and pick up Tomo. I want, for a moment, to be closer to her
feet. I start to bounce Tomo on my knees, but he goes for my eyes and I drop him. He snatches up my margarine tub and tosses
it in the fire. She doesn’t seem to notice any of this. She looks at me, her eyes too big. Pohamba said no woman should open
her eyes that wide, that a woman who advertised like that was either lying or crazy. I stare back at her with what I’m thinking
looks like sensuous, but also intellectual, meaning.

She looks back at the pot.

“Why don’t you cook inside in the kitchen?”

“It seems my sister thinks my morals contaminate the food.”

“She said that?”

“She said I’m a slut.”

“Sluts don’t use kitchens?”

“Apparently not.”

I lean toward her sideways, with my eye on the small scoop in her neck, thinking this is the right angle for something, but
she’s already off the bench, moving fast into the darkened veld, up and down a small koppie and out of sight.

She shouts to me, “Feed him for me, will you, please? Wait for it to cool.”

I spoon the pap into his bowl and set it on the bench. I watch the steam rise for a while. Then I call the monster and the
monster comes. He plumps himself down against my leg and waits for his bowl.

Down the road, Antoinette hollers wash. “You boys, I want you washed, scrubbed, and pious. Ten minutes!” And the boys shout
it back in all their languages. A babel of voices hollering wash.

In the house, there’s the subtle flick of the constantly changing white light. Miss Tuyeni laughs at something she thinks
she sees. I watch Tomo eat.

A
boy in the hostel has night terrors. We are all accustomed to it now. We wait for him. It’s as if he does our screaming for
us.

He’s screaming right now.

Pohamba bangs the wall. “Can’t sleep?”

“No.”

“Which boy do you think it is?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s he afraid of?”

“Look, let’s try and —”

“Mobutu can’t sleep either.”

“What?”

“Mobutu Sese Seko and his leopardskin hat. What keeps him awake? What’s he fear?”

“It’s two in the morning.”

“He fears Patrice Lumumba. Want one? A bedtime story?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Come now. We’ve nowhere to go but sleep. Answer. Why does Mobutu fear Patrice Lumumba?”

“I have no clue.”

“Good. You shouldn’t. Because Lumumba’s gone. They chopped him up in pieces and threw him in a barrel of acid.”

“So he’s dead. Let Mobutu and me go back to sleep.”

“Is the mind always logical? Mobutu lies in his big golden bed and he can’t sleep for fear. So he calls in his security chief
and says, ‘Security Chief, I want you to do something for me. Go kill Patrice Lumumba.’ ‘But, master,’ the security chief
says, ‘The postal worker’s been dead for years.’ ‘You think I don’t know that? The people—don’t you understand?—the people
still love him.’ So the security chief calls his men and tells them what to do. They’re confused also, but the security chief
shouts at them, ‘Do I pay you clods to ask questions?’ His men shrug. It’s not hard. They go out and murder a guy. The security
chief brings the body to Mobutu. ‘Here’s Lumumba, master.’ ‘Good,’ Mobutu says. ‘Now go and do it again.’”

Pohamba blows his nose, honks. “So every night, in Kinshasa, they murder Patrice Lumumba. Well, it’s Africa, no?”

“Good night,” I say.

“You think
this
isn’t Africa?”

“What?”

“You’re not afraid?”

“No.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid I’m Lumumba.”

“Nobody wants to kill you. Sleep.”

Vilho taps the opposite wall lightly, whispers, but these walls make no difference. “Patrice Lumumba was a martyr,” Vilho
says.

Pohamba clears his throat like a drumroll. “And how do you know I’m not a martyr?”

Vilho ponders this. We can hear him. He sighs when he ponders. Vilho wears a nightshirt to bed. We can see him tucked in there
snug, in sheets so clean they squeak. We find sleep listening to him ponder. The three of us breathe in the dark behind our
walls.

V
ilho who is always cold. Unlike the rest of us, whom the sun warms too quickly after the cold mornings, he remains bundled,
wool-hatted, scarfed. He accepts chill as his fate. He never complains. We complain. We complain about the heat. We complain
about the cold. We complain that Vilho never complains. He’s the confusing sort of lonely person who does not seek to be unlonely.
And beyond this, the most alarming fact of all: It’s not the terrible coincidence that Vilho was a learner at Goas and is
now marooned here again as a teacher. It’s that it’s not a coincidence. Upon graduating near the top of his class at Dobra,
Vilho requested a posting at Goas.
“Requested!”
Obadiah cried, incredulous. “It means our poor Puck outcasted himself!”

If you didn’t know he was a teacher, you’d mistake him for a learner. His face is so smooth, hairless, supple. He seems, also,
not to salivate over women. Not Mavala. Not even Dikeledi. Pohamba says it’s impossible. An African man? Vilho? A moffie?
But Obadiah says, if it’s true, we’d certainly be more cosmopolitan, a bit of Cape Town in the scrubveld. Even so, with all
Vilho might hide, he’s the only one at Goas who seems unburdened—and so, naturally, we foist our various aches on him. Antoinette
knits him scarf after scarf to keep him warm.

I
must say I’m pleased we’re all in the road,” Obadiah said. “Does anyone have a theory as to why?” No one had a theory. No
one intended to have a theory. Still, he waited. Morning break and the heat’s already risen and we’re under the single tree
closest to school, which happened to be in the road.

“We’re not learners,” Pohamba said. “Aren’t we the teachers?”

“Wrong!” Obadiah shouted. “I’m tickled, good people of Goas, because the place for stories is in the road. You don’t tell
stories inside a house. This was my father’s rule. When he wanted to tell a story, he herded us outside. My two brothers and
four sisters, the whole family, except for my mother, who used to say my father made dead dogs look unlazy. She’d come out,
however, but she never stepped into the road. Now understand, we lived on a dusty street full of rocks and garbage and sleeping
tsoties with hats pulled over their eyes, and my father would tell stories of gone days in the Old Windhoek Location, before
they came with the bulldozers and moved everybody to Katatura. My father spoke of the Old Location as if it were God’s humble
paradise. Then he’d look around at our road, at all the houses—not houses, he never called our houses houses; they were pilchard
cans pushed together with our tribe and number on the door—and he’d say, ‘I’m an old man, and they expect me to fight. With
what? These shaky hands?’ My father was a proud man, a cultured man, a Pan-Africanist, a Garveyite. He didn’t condemn men
for picking up arms, he begged mercy on the devils who forced them to do so. He’d quote Senghor:
Lord, forgive those who made guerrillas/of the Askias, who turn my princes/into sergeants.
It was only that he was convinced there was a better way. He believed in education as a way to revolution. Books, he’d say,
are the great topplers. Tromp the Boers with
Tristram Shandy
! The poor man. For my mother, it was one settler, one bullet. My father shamed her. She’d only laugh nastily at his memories,
which she said weren’t even memories at all—but colonialist propaganda.

“And once, out in the road, my father told us about the dance hall that used to be in the Old Location. ‘So big that dance
hall, it felt like being in a small country.’ From the other side of the fence, my mother said, ‘Dance hall? You want to thank
them for a dance hall in 1942? Other husbands go to jail.’ Then she spat.”

Obadiah paused a moment to think of his mother. Mavala closed her book, but held her finger in the place where she’d stopped
reading. She gazed up at the sky. The sun was faint, like a useless bulb in a day-lit room. Pohamba was marking quizzes. Festus
was asleep with his head on his knee.

“No, she wasn’t a lady, my mother,” Obadiah said. “And she would have gone and beat the Boers herself if she didn’t have to
prepare mealie pap for six of us. My father feared her, but in public he pretended he didn’t, so he hushed her, told her,
‘Go home, woman. Go make your man some Ovaltine.’ She didn’t move. Neighbors had gathered around. Any activity in the road
was better than nothing, and if it wasn’t a riot, at least they could watch my parents battle. ‘Size of Lesotho, that dance
hall,’ my father said. ‘And in that great hall they held competitions, fierce dance competitions, and during one such event
my wife and I—that belligerent woman standing right there—placed first in the Sevastopol Waltz.’”