The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (18 page)

“But I’m not going to stand before you today and tell you about war,” he said. He raised his thin arms and tossed his shoes
into the sand.

“No, I will not speak of the long night of exile, of what it was to not see my mother or my mother’s land for more than fourteen
years. I will not discourse on such pain. Nor will I tell you of the hell of the South African prisons, or of Cassinga. Of
the bombs that rained that bloody day. No, I will not stand before you and talk of the blood of your brothers and sisters,
your mothers and your fathers.”

The general paused, looked out at us, and grinned. This threw us off. You did not mention the massacre at Cassinga and grin.

The principal launched into a fit of clapping and we did the same.

The general ordered a cease-fire. “No applause. No, my children, I wish to speak of today, of now. My children, you have freedom.
So much freedom. Lord, you even have the freedom to hate.”

He hopped around in an angry circle to show us what hate looked like.

“Yet, I say, do not exercise this right. Hold it, even cherish it, but don’t use it.
Why?
” He did that circle dance again. “Because it’s too easy!” He hopped over and snatched up the principal’s bullhorn and shrieked:
“What’s hard is loving! That’s why I say to you, children of Namibia, saplings of a newly watered nation, I love you. You
think a big man, a comrade such as myself, doesn’t say such a thing. Well, I say it! And I will shock your little ears and
say it again. Tell your mamas what Kangulohi said:
I LOVE YOU
!”

He hopped closer to us.

“All we must do now to build this nation, this beautiful country, is work. Work. Work and learn. Learn. Learn. Learn. Forget
hate, hate, hate and love, love, love.”

We clapped more frantically. The general again waved us away. “’Tis you,” he roared. “I’m no one. ’Tis you!”

We felt light-headed, patriotic, and, yes, loved . . .

He spotted Mavala. “And who, may an old general ask, are you, comrade?”

“Shikongo, sir. Chetequera Camp, Angola. 1986 to 1989.”

“Commanding officer?”

“Elias Haulyondjaba, sir.”

“Elias. Bless his soul. I commend you for your commitment to the struggle in the past, and your commitment to the struggle
in the future, Comrade Shikongo, from the bottom of my heart as well as from my sore foot.”

Laughter, applause, applause.

Obadiah stepped forward. “May our distinguished guest allow a humble teacher to quote the great murdered poet Archilochus?”

“Permission granted, Humble Teacher.”

And Obadiah took off his aviator hat and raised his mouth toward the sky and recited:
“I love not a tall general, not a straddling, nor one proud of his hair nor —”

That she chose her husband’s shining moment to water the hedge of the bush in front of their house should not, in the larger
scheme of Goas, have been surprising. She wasn’t a person to remain invisible any more than Obadiah was.

The nozzle of her hose rose slowly, very slowly, over the fence. One of the soldiers caught sight of it and raised his rifle.

“Wait,” Obadiah shouted. “Don’t fire! That’s my hag. Wife!” The general motioned for the man to lower his gun and looked curiously
at the head that was now peering over the bushes, as if daring him to shoot her face off in the name of love.

If you imagine Goas as a village, which it wasn’t—it was a school on a farm in the otherwise empty veld—but even so, if you
were to think of all of us living in a sort of idyll, the soccer field was our village square, our sacred ground.

It took him a while to hop across it.

We were too far away to hear any of it, but after speaking to her through the fence for five minutes, the general knelt down
and kissed the ground. Then we watched her reach and lug him up by the armpits. Antoinette was a giant compared to that little
general. Then—and you may dismiss this as just another of the daily lies of Goas, but I saw it happen—she clutched his head
and kissed him. Hard and long and slobbery. It was not the kiss of a hag. She talked about it for days after. How he begged
her pardon for his guns and even his cursed uniform. How he said in the future, in the glorious future, we wouldn’t need armies
anymore and that he was only holding on to his for a while longer because there were still people who didn’t believe in love.
She said the man lied so much his lips fell off. What choice did she have but to glue them back on? I’m not a woman without
compassion. Shouldn’t a doomed man, she said, have at least one good memory?

M
y grandfather?”

“Yes.”

“He was a pants jobber. His name was Leo.”

“A what?”

“An apprentice tailor. He also boxed hats and treffed coats. What about yours?”

“He was Tshaanika, eighteenth Onganjera king.”

“Oh.”

Mavala stretched her arms and yawned. On the underside of her right breast, a birthmark in the shape of a bean.

P
orkpie, boater, homburg, fore and aft, bombardier, Panama, betty tilt, Ascot, chimney pot, cockade, tiara, bucket, ten-gallon,
beanie, turban, bowler, Montecristi, Stetson, Borsalino… The very notion of haberdashery is fantastical. Hail the helmet
of Mambrino! It’s why their names are so picaresque. That a mere piece of felt or wool or, yes, even metal, could provide
protection from God’s ultimate wrath—yet we don these illusions daily. We cover our heads. As a sign of defiance? Of faith?
Of respect? Of fear? Yes. But above all, my friends, above all—hats are love. No helmet in the universe more powerful than
the belief that covering one’s head will make a difference to God… Consider the case of Kaplansk’s Jews: skullcaps? A
thin layer, a mere chimera, and yet don them they do. As do we all.

“Hey, Kaplansk, you heathen, where’s your yarmulke?… Kaplansk?”

“He’s asleep.”

“Again? At six o’clock in the evening?”

L
ate Monday afternoon, and Obadiah and I are contemplating each other’s existences in the plastic chairs in front of his house.
Soccer goes on. The thud of the ball like the irregular heartbeat of Goas. Pohamba’s curtains are pulled. Weekend sinners
sleep away Monday. Beneath the acacia, Festus is barbering boys with his battery-powered razor. One desk chair beneath the
tree, a plastic bag for a bib shoved up under each customer’s chin. Festus is not a subtle barber. He balds the boys, and
one after another they walk away, shiny eggs.

Obadiah groans. “The mouth arriveth,” he says. Moments later we watch her approach. She gets larger and larger, and yet Auntie
doesn’t move exactly; she oozes. She manifests. She heads toward us, calls out to Obadiah, “All men who have said I am beautiful
have died. Except one. I see a shroud over your face, Head Teacher.”

“But, my dear,” Obadiah says, “never once have I ever said that a hirsute woman such as yourself was —”

“Happy death, Head Teacher,” she says, and without stopping veers toward the field and begins to cross through the middle
of the game. She picks up speed as she gets closer to her prey, which is clearly the fuzzless tennis ball the boys have been
using since the latest soccer ball got punctured.
Ignore, ignore, ignore, but how can you when she’s after the ball?
When she reaches it, Auntie savors the moment. Before she swipes anything, she always licks each of her fingers. She does
this right now, agonizingly slowly, before swooping, reaching, snatching. She shoves the tennis ball down the front of her
dress.

“Come, boys, come and get it.”

For the first time in recorded history, the boys rush toward the hostel an hour before wash call. Auntie turns her sights
next on the singles quarters. Obadiah and I watch. She reaches Pohamba’s door. She knocks. He doesn’t answer. She knocks more.
Then Auntie begins to pound on Pohamba’s door with both fists. Still no answer. She thrusts her wide corpus delicti against
the door. Whap. Whap. We’re surprised she doesn’t break it down. Auntie insults easy. She knows he’s in there. I recall the
double-ply toilet paper we brought from the dorp on Wednesday, after weeks of forgetting to buy it. (We’d been using pages
from old Afrikaans paperback novels.) Pohamba keeps the stash in his wardrobe. The door cracks open. Pohamba—in his lucky
lilac undershirt—exhausted, slumped, bows, greets her. We watch from across the field. Then Pohamba stands straighter and
crosses his arms over his chest as if he’s barring the door. A mere boast. We know he’ll give way. That he’ll let her in,
let her take what she wants.
Take the Charmin, woman
. But it doesn’t happen, the giving way you do for Auntie when she comes a-calling. He—we can see this plain as day—is
listening
to her. The time to dodge the monologue has passed, and still Pohamba stands before her. It’s an emergency—and us two cowards,
we don’t twitch. There is no hue and cry from the plastic chairs. Festus’s buzzing razor clicks off, and we know he’s hypnotized
as well.

There’s an unusual stillness in Pohamba, a tranquilizing of his spirit. His body, in the door frame, now limp. He’s enchanted.
It’s here I make an obvious link, but still one I’ve never made before—between stealing and monologing. When she monologued
us, she robbed us of our life’s time, and maybe this is why she never quite aged like a normal person. Our time fattened her.
We watch Pohamba grin. He backs into his room. This is a different sort of giving way. He does it willfully, joyfully, meltingly.
Goodbye, friend, so long. It’s been good to —

At the same time, I can’t help but wonder, as Obadiah gags, what if it works? What if she could filch them? Our tormented
desires. Our desires tormented. The door closes behind Auntie’s enormous ass, like the gate of a bakkie on a load of mealie
sacks. A few moments later a hand—not Pohamba’s, a thick, soft, braceleted hand—appears out Pohamba’s window. The hand holds
a tennis ball. Then the hand’s fingers spread open—all five fingers wide, ecstatic—and the ball, like a tiny skull, drops
into the dust.

S
he hounded me about my cold feet, my literally cold feet, and she thought it hilarious that the desert didn’t make any difference,
that I could be sweating all over and my feet were still like ice water, and she asked once if I wanted her to blow on them,
and I said, No, please, just stay away from them, don’t call attention to them. And she asked how such a thing could happen.
I said, I’m from North America, basically I’m an Eskimo. That, and the fact that my feet sweat and then they cool off too
quickly. She didn’t accept this explanation.

“Are they ugly? Ugly albino rabbits? Why are white people so afraid of their feet? Please, just a look —”

“Never.”

In socks, nothing but socks, half off, bunched.

N
ews off the farm line that Obadiah’s old friend Ganaseb has died in town. I’ve been summoned by a boy to the Datsun. Normally
Obadiah savors, today he palms the bottom of the bottle and drinks as if he’s trying to shove it down his throat. “Naturally,”
he says, taking a break, “you will attend the funeral.”

“But I never knew Ganaseb.”

“Not important. The man was a teacher here. You and he are of the same family now, whether you choose to accept this onus
or not, our families being nothing if not onuses. Follow me? By the way, have you written your father to forgive him his trespasses?”

“When’s the funeral?”

“You see, Ganaseb was blessed. That was the difference. He escaped and enjoyed Goas only in his memory, the only true way
to live here. You should have heard Ganaseb talk. The long veld nights, the clean air, the russet sunsets.”

“I’ve got to go open the library.”

“You’re the librarian?”

“Sub-deputy chief.”

“Who’s chief?”

“You.”

“In that case, I declare a day of mourning. All public institutions must be closed out of respect.”

“I’ve got reading group.”

“What are you reading?”

“Mowgli.” I start to climb up and over the door.

“That tripe? Wait,” he says. “Ganaseb was a big man, an important man, an assistant principal. Not once since he left did
he return to visit us. I always met him in town.” He seizes my arm. “And do you want to know the vicious truth of it?”

“What?”

“The man had a Volvo.”

The priest drove us into Karibib in the back of the bakkie. The women wore black dresses they looked too comfortable in, as
if death were a uniform waiting in the closet. Antoinette gripped Tomo by the neck, like a puppet under arrest. Mavala held
the tarts Antoinette had baked for Ganaseb’s widow. Pohamba tried to sneak his hand under the foil and grab some crust off
a tart. Mavala tucked the tarts under her dress, which didn’t stop Pohamba’s mission. As we pulled away, some boys chased
us, shouting, “Teachers, buy us Lion Chips!” Antoinette commanded they desist with a flick of her wrist, and the boys fell
away one by one, laughing and throwing their arms around one another.

Ganaseb had got so free of Goas, he deserted the Catholic Church. The Lutheran parish in the location was packed. People swelled
out the doors. Old women wailed on the steps outside. Boys dangled from the windows. The air was thick with competing perfumes.
Obadiah led our entourage down the aisle, saying, “Pardon us, old friends, pardon us.” We made it to the third pew and squeezed
in. I tried not to look at Mavala, who was wedged between Vilho and Dikeledi. She tried not to look at me. At that time everything
about us—to us—was thrilling. I loved being close enough to touch her and to pretend I didn’t want to. I tried to differentiate
the smell of her sweat from everybody else’s.

At last, the pastor began. Obadiah translated bits of the Afrikaans. “He says Ganaseb has only changed homes. From his modest
house in Karibib to the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet he remains in our hearts.”