The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (16 page)

“The inspector? What would I say? My brother-in-law stands outside my door and breathes heavy?”

“Why not?”

“Like a dog out there, aching. I listen to him. I’ll give this to him: The man’s a revulsion, but he has rhythm. I sleep to
him—huh, huh, huh.”

“Huh, huh, huh?”

“Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh.”

P
ohamba had a sign on the wall opposite his bed. It said:
COME AS A FRIEND NOT A SPY
. I think of him now at dusk on those rare cooler days when for once the sky was more blue than white. Some weeks we were
so berated by the heat that when it did seep away we missed it, because now our laziness had no excuses. A good time to plan
our lessons, so we slept. Or tried to sleep. Pohamba lying on his bed rereading that sign, because his eyes are restless and
he’s out of magazines. A learner made it for him. In addition to math, Pohamba taught the only two electives offered at Goas,
physical training and woodworking/mechanical arts. PT consisted of a few sets of jumping jacks and laps around the soccer
field. Woodworking was once a week, on Wednesdays, in the mimeograph-machine shack, which was also the tool shack, which was
also the place where boys on severe punishment were taken to be flogged. In math, Pohamba would assign problems, and then
the boys would take their copy books up to his desk. If they got it wrong, Pohamba would feel betrayed.
I teach you and I teach you and I teach you and this is the thanks? Zero is nothing but a tool for coping with reality. Haven’t
I told you this x times? Nullify the value and then divide into negation. There is no end to our negative subparts.
But on Wednesdays, in the mimeograph shack, amid his tools and his wood, he talked to the boys, told them even more practical
things about life. One of the things he had told them had ended up on that sign. He was proud of it. The day the boy gave
it to him, he called me into his room. The sign was painted blue, red, and green, SWAPO colors.

He was just lying there, his hands folded across his chest, his feet hanging off the bed, admiring it.

“Nice,” I said. “Who made it?”

“Eiseb’s brother.”

We both looked at the sign for a while. Then I went back to my own bed and thought about spies, about seeming to be one person
and being another. Or were you both? Neither? At Goas, Pohamba was so completely
Pohamba
. What he wanted, what we all wanted, at times, was to be not only somewhere else but someone else. A friend, what was the
challenge in that?

I mostly remember him in motion. Even when he was still, much about him was in motion. His eyes, his mouth, his jiggling knees.
But the times I need to return to now are the rare moments he’s at peace. Him on that saggy mattress that’s too big for him.
His head on his extorted pillows. His wardrobe door is open and his shirts hang neatly in plastic. His walls are bone-colored.
Plaster crumbles in spots. On the same wall as the sign there’s a long, jagged crack that runs from the ceiling to the floor.
(Sometimes we pour hot water in our cracks to kill the ants.) He’s there, reading his sign. A secret history of Pohamba? What
of the horror of not having one, of being the person people think you are?

S
ampie Prinsloo sells us vegetables. A jovial old-time Boer farmer who dresses the part. Veldskoens and no socks, khaki shorts,
skinny legs holding up a belly like a small hillock. A cucumber dangling lazy out of his mouth like a cigar. No hat, just
an exuberant bush of dusty hair. He’s also the Republic of Namibia’s most vocal local cheerleader. (“I’m a tough old bastard,”
he’d say. “If I can survive forty years in this forsaken place, I can live through President Nujoma.”) Prinsloo was the first
white in Karibib to line up for a new driver’s license. His bakkie is festooned with patriotic bumper stickers.

GLORY TO OUR PLAN HEROES.

TO EVERY BIRTH ITS BLOOD.

ONE NATION, ONE NAMIBIA, SOUND YOUR HOOTER.

Once or twice a month, he and his wife pull up to the cattle gate and Prinsloo jams that hooter. Then he gets out and waits.
His wife stays in the car. Apparently she doesn’t share his enthusiasm for getting to know the neighbors now that things have
changed so much. The boys come running out of the hostel or off the soccer field, springing over to him, and Prinsloo shouts,
“Go back and get your money, boys!”

And the boys say, “We’re poor, meneer, very poor boys. We have nothing, meneer, nothing.”

“You think this fruit of the earth is free? You think I’m Communistic?”

And the boys in chorus say:
“Not Communistic. Meneer is very generous.”

Prinsloo sighs and cackles and takes his cucumber out of his mouth and spits and shows his golden teeth and then yanks out
a box of small carrots and starts tossing them in the air. The boys leap for the carrots. High in the air for those runt carrots.
Not because they’re hungry, but because they’re free and this is a game they still enjoy.

Dankie my baas! Dankie my baas!

Eventually, we the teachers walk down the road. We take our time. We are dignified teachers and we will not jump for carrots.
No Boer’s monkeys are the teachers. Antoinette carries down her knives. (Prinsloo is also the local knife sharpener.) And
we look over the merchandise like discriminating shoppers. Prinsloo watches me put back a pumpkin.
What? The United States doesn’t appreciate my vegetables? How about a nice squash for the U S of A?
How about green peppers, Brussels sprouts, oranges, corn, spinach, kumquats, lemons, pawpaws, okra, pears, pomegranates,
eggplant (aubergine, Obadiah corrects)? Because there is nothing Prinsloo can’t grow. The man grows cotton on the edge of
the Namib. We pay our money to his wife, who watches us with small, suspicious eyes behind the dirty windshield. Then we head
toward our rooms, our arms now piled high with the bounty of a suddenly miraculously generous earth. It helps that Prinsloo
has the only irrigable standing water of any farm along the C-32. Still, he pretends it has less to do with his groundwater
levels than his magic hands. Prinsloo’s hands, gnarled, fattish, beet-red.

Q
uiet out here during most of the bad years leading to independence. The eighties were years of calm, when Goas settled into
its mission of churning out farm boys with sufficient arithmetic, Afrikaans, and Fear of the Lord. The shooting at the Old
Location in this country, Soweto, Sharpeville, Steven Biko in South Africa—all that happened on some other planet. Yet it
is true that one boy did burn down a classroom here in 1985, an event that now stands as Goas’s proudest antiapartheid moment.
At the time it was considered pure terrorism. The boy, Lucas Nambela, was sent down south to the juvenile prison in Mariental.
That it was our current principal who whipped Lucas Nambela is an unspoken truth and one of the contradictions by which Goas
runs. The principal does not discuss the particulars of back then. The revised truth is that everyone who was here believed
in the cause of righteousness, all are survivors of apartheid’s unmitigated evil and oppression. Lucas Nambela was a freedom
fighter. The classroom he burned down was the school science lab. Four years later, on the eve of independence, the diocese
in Windhoek sent Goas new equipment. Men came out with state-of-the-art everything: lab tables, sinks with running water,
microscopes. There are beakers and flasks. Safety goggles. Hazardous chemicals. Bunsen burners! To this day no boy has touched
any of it. The principal keeps the place locked up like a gleaming shrine. The Lucas Nambela Memorial Classroom. Even Festus,
who’s the science teacher, can’t use it.

The principal Scotch-taped his edict to the door:

The equipment inside this room is very expensive. It took many years after the patriotic incident of 1985 for this equipment
to arrive. There is too much risk involved in the use of this equipment at the present time. An inventory is being conducted.
Following this inventory, the lab will be opened in limited circumstances. The public shall be apprised of any progress in
this matter.

Meanwhile, we all peek in and look at the shiny hardware. Our own museum of the future, right there, two classes down from
the principal’s office. A form of worship to look at all that new stuff through the glass.

Across the courtyard, Festus teaches photosynthesis. Sometimes he points to the shackled class and says, “Behind that door,
all that I’m telling you may be proved before your eyes.” A sort of heaven waiting. There were times we wondered if it wasn’t
for the best. Bunsen burners get clogged. Beakers shatter. Crucibles rust. Theories go to hell. Let all remarkable things
remain in the realm of perfection, of order . . .

T
here are no nights to remember, because we never had any. Out there by the graves after lunch. Only those stark early afternoons
when the day died a little and everybody else wilted on their beds. Could we have snuck some nights? Probably, but first of
all there was Tomo, and second, there was something about the lunacy of anybody being out in the veld during siesta. Weekdays
only. (Weekends were too risky; Saturday and Sunday were like all-day random siestas, and you never knew who’d wander out
in the veld.) We bucked the schedule of life at Goas, and this was somehow a small thrill, the best we could muster. We’d
come from different directions and be shocked to see each other.

What a surprise —

Couldn’t sleep. The heat.

And how is Grieta today?

Still dead, I’m afraid.

Her hands always smelled of the lotion she was continually rubbing on the backs of Tomo’s dry arms. In the bleak light, the
two of us leaning against the graves. Her making small piles of gravel with her fingers, then smoothing them. Her fingers
were always busy. Tomo on the other side of the graves, drunk off chocolate in his car seat, strapped in, an umbrella propped
over him. I was more exhausted after lunch than at night. I lied. Mavala lied. We said we didn’t need sleep. Sometimes we
couldn’t help it, and in that light it was like falling asleep under interrogation.

Even then she was restless, talking to herself and fisting and unfisting her hands.

O
badiah said: All our whites are demented in one way or another. It would indeed be interesting to come to America for the
sole purpose of observing normal whites. This is not to say that our blacks are lacking in idiosyncrasies. Do you think it’s
the sun?

Our closest neighbor, Krieger, we saw only behind the wheel of a speeding bakkie. When he drove across Goas, he scattered
anything in his path; boys, goats, teachers. It happened twice a day. Krieger on his way to and from the dorp. Krieger’s truck
wings around the church, rumbling across the ruts in the sandy road, then careens across the soccer field in the middle of
a game. A fluffy-white-haired honking murderous Santa bellowing, Halloo! Halloo!

According to the principal, Krieger had a binding legal right to drive straight across the soccer field. Once, I spoke up
about it during morning meeting. I usually kept quiet, but I felt the behavior of a white was something within my purview
to comment on.

“Seems a little dangerous,” I said.

“He holds an easement,” the principal said. “I’ve seen the document, which was duly notarized in Windhoek.”

“He can’t drive around the field?”

“Why should he drive around when the document gives him the right?”

“To spare life and limb.”

“Did I not say the document was duly notarized?”

*

Soccer. A round-robin tournament. We’re holding a set of Pohamba’s betting forms. That wet mimeograph ink, that deep indigo
you couldn’t wash off. It dyed your hands purple for weeks. Made you high if you sniffed it and we sniff it. The pool is set
at fifteen rand with a double on the last match. It’s been nil-nil for as long as anybody can remember. We’re wilting in our
seats like unwatered geraniums.

“Watched high soccer is a lot more interesting,” I say.

Pohamba shouts, “Can’t you get it right?
Football.
It’s an offense on our culture.”

I wave him away. I’ve discovered something else. If you watch the ones without the ball it’s even better. Their feet. How
every move is a beautiful anticipation. The ball is only incidental to the dance. Which is the answer to the mystery. Not
only isn’t it about scoring, it isn’t even about the ball. I sniff the betting forms, understanding soccer, proud, loving
it, between being bored and sleepy, when suddenly from around the church comes Krieger, roaring, barreling, honking, hallooing.
His white arm banging the outside of the door, his fury of white hair waving in the wind. “Run for your lives, boys!” And
the boys do. They dive, they tumble. They think it’s hilarious. They think everything’s hilarious. Krieger drives on toward
the C-32. Play resumes.

“One of these days that Nazi is going to kill an innocent,” I say.

Obadiah raises a Sherlockian brow. “Nazi?”

“Why not? He’s the right age.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily mean —”

“The Nazis here never even had to learn Spanish.”

“Is not a central tenet of your justice system the transcendent concept of innocent before proven guilty?”

“This isn’t a court. This is Goas.”

“That’s true,” Pohamba says. “No justice here.”

Mavala stands. “You’re all ridiculous.” She slaps twenty rand on Pohamba’s desk. “Put it on United Africa in the next round.”

We watch her walk up the road. Tomo remains. He’s digging a tunnel beneath Vilho’s chair.

I turn to Obadiah. “Look, I’m simply asking for a little empathy for another marginalized people.” (Residual phrase fortuitously
recalled from Prof E. L. Cloyd’s Sociology 202, Bowling Green State, Larry Kaplanski’s final grade: C+)