The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (13 page)

“So why do you play in church? If this place is so doomed. Why give the boys a false sense?”

She didn’t answer. We reached the principal’s house. It was dark. He and Miss Tuyeni had gone to Karibib. Mavala let go of
Tomo’s hand and he tore off toward their room. He couldn’t reach the knob, so he stepped back and began ramming the door with
his head.

The wind was up. The air had sand in it now and it began to peck our faces. Mavala looked down at the ground as if she’d dropped
something. She had a slight widow’s peak I hadn’t noticed.

“Why do you play?”

“Stop thinking about me.”

“I asked —”

“I’m finished with that.”

“With what?”

“Being thought of.”

She left me and went and stomped toward the kid.

O
ur guru was musing about the difference between certain colonial powers. I don’t remember where we were. We may have been
at the urinals in the rank men’s room behind the Mobil station in Karibib, or at the Dolphin in the location, or at our table
at the Public Bar, or in a lorry heading back to Goas, a week’s worth of groceries between our knees, sweating, passing around
a warm Fanta, so thick it was more like molasses—but it was Fanta and we had it, so we drank it. We might have been out beyond
the dry Kuiseb River, where Goas ended and the real desert began, hunting the spoor of that elusive dwarfed hedgehog of the
central Namib escarpment. We may have been anywhere where Obadiah felt the need to hold forth, to educate us, to alleviate
the burden of our fathomless ignorances.

“Now, the Germans at least were honest. They said they were going to steal our land and they stole our land. They said they
were going to kill us, and by God, they killed us. Now, the British were less—how shall we put it?—forthright. They said our
land was ours and they stole it. They said they were humanitarians and they bombed the Namas. That was in 1922. A year later,
they cut off King Mandume’s head and made a parade of it. So who’s the devil’s favorite? The Germans go before God with reeking,
unwashed hands and say, See, Father, see what I have done. Now judge me. The British? Those khakis knock on heaven’s door
and offer plum pudding.”

Obadiah paused and straightened the collar of his frayed tweed coat. Wherever we may have been, I can say with certainty he
was wearing his piebald-colored tweed coat. He wore it summer or winter, teaching or not, shirt underneath or not. (When he
was shirtless, small tufts of white hair spaghettied out between his lapels.)

“Indeed, we’ve had ample opportunity to observe these two giants of the enlightenment. As an aside, I might say that the Boers
never had to shoulder the burden of being enlightened… But the Germans and the British! Consider the idiot carnage of
what they call the Great War. It even reached us out here at the far-flung edge. Shakespeare versus Goethe in a battle for
thorn scrub. One British general wrote to the King, ‘Your Majesty, this land isn’t fit for baboons or Bushmen.’ Now, one may
well ask, Then why send men all the way down here to die?”

“Good question,” Pohamba said. “Why in hell —”

“Never ask it. The lives of soldiers, even white ones, have never been worth more than baboons or Bushmen.”

“So fuck them both,” Pohamba said.

“Must you vulgarize?”

“Fuck the Swedes.”

And I seem to remember Obadiah squinting at Pohamba then. So maybe we were outside in the glare. Let’s say we were—us tromping
across the veld toward the Erongos.

“What’d the Swedes do to you?” I asked.

Pohamba shrugged. “Fuck Hawaiians.”

“Fuck Bulgarians,” I said.

“God Save the King,” Pohamba said.

Obadiah ignored us and held forth to the afternoon. “The British vanquished the Germans at Korub Aub. In the histories,
their histories,
they call it a white man’s war fought in heathen Africa. As if we weren’t even here at the time. The simple truth is this:
They wouldn’t have won without us. The British promised us land—our own—if we helped them.”

He kicked off one of his sandals and dug a craggy toenail into the dry earth. It was a long time before he spoke again. Afternoon
fell. The mountains ahead of us blued. A cloud, miserably pallid and empty, lazed slowly by. We’d failed at hunting again.

“When it was over,” Obadiah said softly, “there was a great deal of euphoria. A delegation of native soldiers went to military
headquarters to present a petition to the British on behalf of the people. It expressed gratitude to the King and reminded
him of the promise of unconditional return of ancestral lands. The soldiers waited two hours before a sergeant in leather
hip boots appeared.”

Obadiah paused again, gulped some wind. Slowly, he cleaned the dust off his teeth with his tongue. We did the same.

“The sergeant didn’t read it. Instead, he flung that petition across the room. The men watched it float slowly to the floor.
Then the sergeant barked: ‘Your hats! All subjects must remove any and all bonnets in the presence of an officer of His Britannic
Majesty George V!’ Then some galoots came and tossed that delegation out the door.”

That was it. Enough alleviation of ignorance for a hot and useless day. We followed Obadiah along a goat path, into darkness
the color of a new bruise.

A
forgettable sun-worn place with too-wide streets (an old German mining town, the boom never quite happened), midway between
Windhoek and Swakopmund on the coast. A popular petrol and toilet stop. There’s a tiny (still) white dorp and a location across
the rail tracks, north of town, where most people (still) live. There’s a hotel, a grocery, a few shops, and some scattered
bottle stores, around which revolve much of the life of the town. So unimportant a place, Pohamba said, that during the struggle
SWAPO didn’t even try to blow up the post office.

Still, since we were always trying to get there, we had to pretend Karibib was somewhere. It was our Mecca, our Bangkok. Sometimes
we’d go to Ackerman’s, the furniture store in the dorp, and spend the afternoon loitering on the comfortable couches on the
showroom floor. Pohamba knew the salesman, a former learner named Wilbard Lilonga. The manager lived in Swakop and came in
only on Saturdays. Wilbard would let us laze around. We’d read magazines or just sleep on the deep plush. Love songs gentle
on the Muzak. Velour, camel, horsehair, Fontainebleau. Our feet on what Wilbard had once told us were called occasional tables.
For what occasions? Ackerman’s had those plastic tints on the windows so the world outside was dyed blue. We’d loiter and
watch the blue people walk down the blue street.

Pohamba leans back, his feet on the table, his head resting on the top of the ridge of his loveseat. He looks up at the ceiling.

“Wilbard!”

Wilbard doesn’t answer. He’s in the back smoking, ashing his cigarette on the carpet.

“Who buys all these couches?”

Wilbard still doesn’t answer.

“Wilbard? Wilbard!” Pohamba thunders. “Wake up, you lazy shitter! I want to know, who can pay four hundred rand for a place
to sit?”

The choice is clear-cut: either the West

predominates in South-West Africa, or there will be a triumph of naked barbarism over

Western civilization… The hour is late

and the danger is great.

ANTHONY HARRIGAN,

RED STAR OVER AFRICA

T
his happens. Two whites alone together as we’re alone together in this tiny butchery next to the Mobil station in Karibib,
and it’s back to the war, back to the glories of counter-insurgency. “Think about it.” The butcher Schmidsdorf, one bug eye
a widening orb, the other squinting, whispers,
“The South Africans would not use their navy because of the Soviet threat.”

“I’d like a kilo and half of pork loin,” I say. “And some lard.”

He takes the pork loin out of the case with one hand and carries it to the slicer. Pork loin’s on special. There’s a sign
in the window. He glances toward the door and says, “You must understand. It wasn’t a war. It was a police action. We were
fighting Sam Nujoma, not Brezhnev.”

The butcher Schmidsdorf is a very thin, mostly insane man with a flat nose and up-turned nostrils that face you like two black
holes, abysses, hairy pistol barrels. He hates Commies, Jews, and kaffirs. A good butcher, Antoinette says. He even makes
some cuts like a great butcher, though as a general rule, butchers shouldn’t be so bony. Engelbert Schmidsdorf, famous for
his bloodwurst, boerwurst, leberwurst, fleishwurst, weisswurst, zungenwurst, and occasional schinkenwurst, as well as for
his chronic wifelessness and the fact that he was one of the few German Southwesters who fought side by side with their ex-enemies,
the South Africans (i.e, the British and the Boers), against the only true enemies, Commies, Jews, and kaffir terrorists .
. .

“You know what?” I say. “Maybe make it two kilos.”

He peeps over the counter at me. “I was stationed at Ruacana. Greenest place in this dry hole of country. And there were terrorists
on every side—black shadows.”

He rubs his nose upward with the palm of his hand, and those nostrils have me in their sights again.

“Did you ever see a black with a shadow? Out there at that school? We lived in a guest house, soldiers, and we had maids,
black ones in white shoes. In the mornings we went out and got killed, but didn’t we sleep well at night?” He pauses, looks
down at the loin on the slicer. “Since then, I am dead.”

This happens also. The butcher says he’s dead. He fondles the pork loin on the slicer. People say it’s the bug eye that does
the talking, and that it’s the other eye, the one that squints, that’s the lonely one, the one that never wants you to leave
him. Antoinette says the man is so lonely he forgets to eat. All the meat under the sun and the butcher starves. There are
days, Antoinette says, she’d like to drag him out to Goas and make him listen to the boys sing in church.

“How fatty your loin?” he says.

I wiggle my hand. “So-so fatty.”

He holds a slice up for my approval.

“Little more.”

He finishes the slicing and wraps up the package, holds it out to me with a bloody paw, just out of my reach. He sneezes,
a small, forlorn sneeze. He wipes his nose with some bloody paper.

“How much lard?”

“Five K bucket.”

“No fleishwurst? It is very fresh.”

“Maybe next week.”

*

Outside, I wait for Pohamba. He’s next door in the China Shop buying a pair of snakeskin shoes. You could find anything in
the China Shop, including Chinese people. Across the road, in front of the takeaway, I watch two drunks hold each other tenderly,
like two drunks.

O
n the wind of talk, word carried—from Usakos to Omaruru to Karibib, and then even out to Goas—that’s no real nun. It had,
people said, something to do with her mouth, or more specifically, the way she bit her lip with one jagged, vampirish incisor.
People said this wasn’t the way you walked around penitent. Not a bride of Christ, this one. Her catechism is nothing but
lies. It was about desire, how it eats away at you when it’s stifled, and just because you hide in the sisterhood doesn’t
mean you don’t sweat the sheets. Sister Zoë, her serious, tired face, her generous hands. She was from the south, a Nama from
Keetmanshoop. She ran from her mother. She ran from Keetmanshoop. Anybody would run from Keetmanshoop, where the sun does
nothing all day but lash your neck and look for plants to kill. At least up here we’ve got three scrawny trees a kilometer.

Now they say she’s back down south for good.

Sister Zoë worked at the clinic at Usakos, and she used to come every first and third Saturday with Sister Ursula and Sister
Mary, out to the farm for sick call. The boys would line up in front of the hostel dining hall and go in one by one to be
examined. There wasn’t a boy at Goas who wasn’t deathly ill those particular first and third Saturdays. If only to get touched
by Zoë’s hands and sent away, condemned healthy. Sister Ursula was German, gaunt and old, with cracked hands. She’s been a
nurse so long among blacks, people said, the woman thinks she’s a doctor. Sister Ursula would usually stand off to one side
and wait, haughty, for hard cases. She carried antibiotics in a padlocked handbag. Sister Mary was the one the boys went to
when they were actually sick, so sick that even the touch of Zoë meant nothing. Sister Mary was a large, shaky-breasted woman
with a pocked face. She was from Malemba up on the Caprivi, a place, she’d said, that was so thick in the bush that once you
left, you could never find home again. She laughed at the boys who were sick, called them God’s paupers. Come, little pauper,
come; we shall take your temperature and then see what we find in Sister Ursula’s magic handbag. Sister Mary always gave out
free Q-tips and plastic rosaries in multiple colors. But mostly those Saturdays were about Zoë and her hands on your body.
Pohamba would stand and supervise the mob, and every once in a while walk to the front and push his way inside the dining
hall and announce to Sister Zoë that he had cancer.

“Cancer all over. Heal the sick, Sister.”

And Sister Zoë would gaze at him from under the habit that people said was fake, a prop, and say in her soft, beautiful English,
“Teacher, I counsel repose.” Because her hands were only for the boys. And Pohamba, who when he really loved was a total coward,
would go back to policing the line. Later, he’d go on about how all he wanted was to lift her habit, not take it off, only
lift it.

We’d see them come up and over the ridge, moving steadily toward the cattle gate. Their walk, how one never got in front of
the other. Their white gym shoes. Their habits lifting vertical in the wind like the scarves of old-time pilots. And the boys
would catch a glimpse of the top of their heads and begin shouting, “Swestas!” They always parked on the road, because once
Sister Ursula got the van stuck in the last dry riverbed and vowed she’d never go through that hell again. Also, didn’t it
look better for the Lord’s healers to come on foot?