The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (12 page)

Obadiah leaped up and stood before us. “Like myself, my father was a skinny man. His clothes never fit properly. When he waltzed
in the road with my second sister, his shirt flapped in the air so that he resembled a bedraggled bird with shoes.” Obadiah
held his arms out and gripped a woman only he saw, his body erect, one hand cupping an elbow, the other flat on an invisible
back. “Ready position!” he called. “And a one and a one, and a two and a two. Swing forward, swing back —”

Whatever he was doing didn’t look like a waltz. It didn’t look like much of a dance at all, really. He was still a little
drunk from the Zorba he’d had in his morning coffee, and he was flailing—a slow flail in loose loafers. He was a little drunk
and loving his father and his father’s story, and we weren’t listening, because it was too hot and we had to haul ourselves
up and teach in less than five minutes and we were just trying to get a little rest by the only shade tree.

He was still circling, alone, when Mavala dropped her book in the dust and stood up and joined hands with him. After a bit,
he said, “You can’t dance. How can a woman with so much natural finesse —”

“And you’re an old souse,” Mavala said.

“Try,” Obadiah said. “Try and dance.”

And they did try, the two of them, in the road, in the sand. Mavala pulled off her heels. Even without them she was as tall
as he was. Still, they were an awkward pair. When he went forward, she went forward, and their heads knocked together. Finally,
he dropped his hands and peered at her curiously, as if he were trying to read something in bad light. “There’s something
else,” he said. Up the road, the boys were coming back from the dining hall, gripping half-eaten carrots.

“What?” Mavala said.

Obadiah moved toward her, and reached out to her without touching; his hands only hovered over her shoulders. “My father never
drank a drop. But—and I have never in my life forgotten this cruelty—that day as my father waxed triumphant in the road about
the Sevastopol Waltz, my mother said, softly, because she knew she need not shout it, ‘Better a man drink.’”

Obadiah stood in the road and looked at his feet. Mavala raised her hand and swatted, almost gently, the beak of his TransNamib
hat.

The triangle rang, and we stood up and brushed off our pants and gathered our stray pens. There was a knob on Festus’s forehead
from his knee. As we started back to our classrooms, Obadiah called out, “May I add an addendum?”

Nobody turned around.

“My mother had, it’s true, exquisitely long legs. Are there not days when a son may imagine how they might have looked?”

O
ne woman delouser. Pest Control Queen. Antoinette stalking the rows of beds in the boys’ hostel. The only instruments necessary
are her hands, long-fingered, clawlike pinchers. No meek shampoos. She needs to feel the crush of death in the skin. One by
one she tweaks the lice and squeezes. Hygiene as spectacle and Antoinette the unhooded executioner. Boys at attention! Your
bodies are living, breathing, sweating violations! Their bunks are so close together she has to walk sideways. Boys, boys,
boys. So many heads to inquisition. Boys, year after year, boys. Scalps! Underarms! Pubic nesting grounds! Lift your arms,
Matundu. Pants down, Shepa. Your head, Titus, bow it! And then one day a boy simply says, No. My head is my head. Unhooded
halts. Examines recalcitrant. Eyes his eyes, her pupils colossal. Antoinette is less alarmed than fascinated. Being stood
up to is always something she’s wondered about. A tyrant without opposition gets very bored. Napoleon was said to have dreamed
sweetly of defeat. And didn’t Stalin await the poison, half loving the notion of martyrdom? Antoinette halts, looks the boy
up and down. He’s sitting on his bunk. His feet don’t reach the floor. She doesn’t know him. He’s not a thief, a vandal, or
an arsonist. The good ones blur together. Why is it we remember only the hoodlums? His defiance isn’t even very spirited,
and yet it’s unequivocal. His little legs in shorts. The dirty bottoms of his little feet. His clean powder-blue shirt. (Clearly
he follows some regulations.) His slightly ovaled head and bags beneath his eyes. Does this boy ever sleep? He stares: Do
what you want to me, old bitch, but my head is my head.

“Surname?”

“Axahoes, Mistress.”

“Common name?”

“Magnus.”

“Standard what?”

“Six, Mistress.”

“So small a Standard Six?”

He doesn’t answer this, looks at his feet as if they explain so small a Standard Six.

“From which place?”

“Andawib West.”

“Farm?”

“Of Meneer Pieterson. Kalkveld district.”

“Parents?”

“Father.”

“Mother?”

He sits silent. One leg twitches.

“Stand up.”

He gets up off the bed. The other boys stand mute, but their eyes are swarming.

“Bow your head.”

“No, Mistress.”

“Why not? You suspect vermin? An infestation? You’re afraid?”

His eyes want nothing, not even for this to end. Such a rare thing. You can’t drain the want out of your eyes no matter how
hard you try. Even the dead want everything back, which is why the undertaker either closes their eyes or blocks them with
a penny. But this boy. Not even sorrow, as if he knows that above all sorrow is only pride. Train your eye to watch a single
mosquito. You can never concentrate enough. Since she was a child, she’s tried to follow the course of just one. It’s impossible.
You can only hope to get lucky when it flings back into your vision. But this boy’s eyes, because they see nothing else, could
probably do it. She thinks: Your mother, child. The world is full of dead mothers, to the hilt with dead mothers. Jesus in
his meekness, and you claim the right to be haughty? Your affliction’s greater? Still, she pities him, she loves him. This
is not a standoff. This is a breath before a rout. She raises her hand and breaks him on the hostel floor like a donkey.

S
toryless lump. To Goas his sole importance was that he had transport. A car, two bakkies, a lorry, a tractor. Our Father of
Goas captained a fleet. It was like being on a desert island with half a dozen rescue boats. Except there was a catch. Only
Theofilus was permitted to drive any of them, and he could use them solely for official church business, which did not include
the business of teachers.

For a mostly doughy man, the Father had very square shoulders. In his robes he looked like a box dressed in a tablecloth.
No one knew him well enough to hate him. He’d been at Goas only a few years. He spoke in an oddly high-pitched voice, and,
it was said, there was something in it that harked backward. Whether fair or unfair, people sometimes said it was because
Father was “coloured,” and so a half-step closer to being white under the old—just recently old—laws. Myself he ignored. He
once asked me what my faith was, and when I told him, he said, “So Windhoek sent us a pagan?” Then he shrilled something that
might have been a laugh and marched off.

He kept a German shepherd in a pen—sequestered from Auntie Wilhelmina’s whelps. He loved the dog and would feed it fresh kudu
bones. One day this pampered dog escaped and stepped on a puff adder in the veld. It dragged itself back home and stood howling
in front of the rectory for its master. We all stood around and watched its neck balloon. Then the dog begin to convulse and
choke. Eventually, Father came out and brained it with a hammer.

The priest had two rules, as opposed to the principal’s countless ones. No drinking and no fornicating among unmarrieds. The
first one wasn’t enforced (the priest was known to indulge in vermouth). The second didn’t need to be.

Why the principal, by far the loudest Catholic on the farm, and Father despised each other was a mystery. It probably had
something to do with the nationalization of schools, which happened after independence. This made for a sense of confusion
as to who truly ruled Goas. The principal ran the school, but the school was on Church property. The teachers of Goas saw
it this way: The principal owns our asses; the priest, whatever’s left of our souls.

There was a strange story about the two of them. An inexplicable story, with no beginning and no end and no point whatsoever.

One morning the priest found the principal asleep on the rectory roof.

What was he doing up there? Spying?

Nobody knows.

Why’d he fall asleep? Was he drunk?

Wouldn’t you get drunk if you had to spend the night on a roof?

Yes.
What was he doing on the roof in the first place?

I said, Nobody knows . . .

E
ven more than her lipstick and her baby-blue eye shadow and her skimpy skirts, it was Mavala’s enthusiastic organ playing
that drove the priest out of his gullet. Wednesday night was officially English night in church. Any ordinary Sunday or daily
morning Mass—if he happened to be at Goas, often he wasn’t, the Erongo region being short on priests—the Father spoke a kind
of apocalyptic-sounding Afrikaans.
Nothing but hell awaits you boys who flout your immorality under God’s all-seeing eyes…
Wednesday nights, though, he left off the pulpit fist-banging. It was said that he resented the edict handed down by the bishop
in Windhoek, out of deference to the new constitution, that English be spoken in church at least once a week. It seemed that
Father wanted to show everyone that Afrikaans was still the language of a thunderous God. So, on English night, he tweeted
his homily. And the boys took his cue. They knew it was safe to fall asleep in church on Wednesday. The older boys brought
pillows and sprawled out on the back benches. In the front pews the sub b’s fell asleep, collapsed onto one another’s shoulders,
their little heads lolling, their tiny kneecaps digging into the wooden slats as they endured painful but merciful sleep.

After dozing through the service, the boys perked up when Mavala played. She said that in spite of everything she was still
Catholic. Whether they wanted her or not. The organ didn’t work very well. The pedals often stuck, and the notes reverberated
even longer than they were supposed to, creating a sort of bleeding music that layered on itself, as if every note she played
were happening at the same time. By the end of a hymn there was always total cacophony. It never mattered. And the boys irritated
the Father further by singing in English.
O food of exiles lowly, O bread of angels holy…
Their voices carried across the farm—out to Theofilus in the veld; up to the top of the hill by the cross, where Pohamba sat
alone, boycotting church.

As a supposed living embodiment of the virtues of speaking English, I made a point of going to church on English night. I
sat with Vilho in the back pew and tried not to think of her legs pumping, her feet pumping. Mavala closed her eyes when she
played, her head tilted slightly toward her right shoulder.

One Wednesday, I waited for her after it was over and everyone but Vilho had filed out. He often remained. He once told me
there was something unusually calm about a just-emptied church. Together, Mavala and I walked up the road toward the principal’s
house.

“The wind’s up,” I said.

(
The wind’s up. The wind’s down
. Sometimes we thought it, said it, just to have something to think, to say.)

“Yes,” she said.

“It was down before.”

“Right,” she said. “It was down before, wasn’t it?”

We passed two boys, Obadiah’s Standard Threes, Siggy and Petrus, who were sitting at the remains of the stolen picnic table,
practicing introducing themselves in Obadiah’s King’s English; which king was never clear.

“I should be honored, kind sir, if you would favor me with your name.”

“I was christened Siegfried, but please, I insist, call me Siggy. Dare I inquire of yours, friend of my youth?”

“Ah, kindred spirit! I’m known as Petrus.”

They smoked pencils like pipes. They tipped imaginary hats. From their faces they both seemed to be in great pain. English
was often associated with constipation.

The two of us went on up the road. “Like a zoo, this place,” she said.

“They love it when you play.”

“Oh, that.”

“You inspire them.”

Mavala popped her forehead with her palm. “You know what? I forgot the kid.”

We headed down the road again, walked across the soccer field to Antoinette and Obadiah’s. Antoinette was standing at her
guard post, her open kitchen window. Tomo was doing a headstand on the steps.

“And how was my angel?” Mavala said.

“He abused my chickens. He fouled my radishes.” She shoved down the window. Antoinette’s smiles were vague and fleet. Her
face was blurred in the gloom behind the glass.

Mavala scooped up Tomo and kissed him all over. “How could I forget this boy? A boy such as this boy?”

We started back up the road a second time. She put Tomo down and he refused to walk, so she yanked him through the sand and
he plowed along like an evil little water skier. Then she dropped him, and he scuttled after us.

“What were you saying?”

“That your playing —”

“Oh yes. That I inspire. On English night I do inspire!” She paused and looked at me. “Don’t I?”

At the missing picnic table, Siegfried and Petrus were still at it.

“And may I inquire from where your people hail?”

“I was born and bred in Swakopmund, my friend.”

“Oh, the sea. Its extravagances.”

Mavala squeezed my elbow. “What do you call that?”

“At least he’s teaching them some English. Better than I can do.”

“What about teaching them to know who they are? Is that who they are? This place is a hole and he’s president. God bless poor
Antoinette.”

“I’m running for vice president of the hole,” I said.

“Happy for you. When are the elections?”