The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (19 page)

A woman in the pew in front of us hunched over and sobbed wildly. Obadiah made a fucking motion with his hips. “One of Ganaseb’s
girlfriends,” he whispered. “He was into more than her heart.” He reached into his inside coat pocket for his flask. Antoinette’s
crabbed hand whapped across me and seized Obadiah’s wrist like a talon. It remained there—welded to him—for the entire service.

Prayers, hymns, speeches, testimonials, weeping, more testimonials. When Ganaseb was justly honored, we shuffled slowly out
into the sun and followed the casket. The dead man was sticking out of the trunk of his Volvo. The road to the cemetery was
strewn with withered lettuce.

After the burial, we went to the Dolphin. Pohamba bought beers for the men and Cokes for the women (out of deference to Antoinette)
and hard-boiled eggs for everybody. The women sat at a separate table (Tomo under it). The three of them, all beautiful in
their way, sat there like a kind of cabal, a war council. Antoinette lording, trying not to judge everyone around her too
harshly, trying to be a good Christian and love, love… Dikeledi so silent, taking everything in. She rarely came to town.
I never knew she wore glasses. Mavala pops a whole egg in her mouth.

“It’s funny,” Vilho said. “A man dies and we all eat eggs.”

Pohamba took the salt and shook it over Vilho’s head. Then he got down to business. “With Ganaseb gone,” he said, “won’t Karibib
hire a new teacher?”

“Faulty analysis, Teacher,” Festus said. “They’ll double up one classroom. And Kapapu will be the new assistant. Either Kapapu
or Tjaherami.”

“How many learners can fit in one room?”

“As many as they want.”

“What about Hangula for assistant?”

“He’s Ovambo. Hereros control the district. Also, they say Hangula voted DTA.”

Mavala reached across the table and covered Antoinette’s hand with her own. Then she looked my way, found me watching her,
and mouthed,
Where’s O.?

I shrugged.
Don’t know
.

“Wait—Kapapu’s not Herero. Isn’t he Damara?”

“Yes, but his wife’s Herero.”

“Ah. And Ngavirue?”

“Ngavirue’s Herero, but nobody likes Ngavirue.”

Outside, Father began to honk for us. Impatient little priestly beeps.

When we’d all gathered back in the bakkie, it became clear we were still missing one of us. Antoinette groaned. This foray
into decadence was enough for her without further humiliation. Festus and Pohamba checked the other bottle stores. Vilho checked
the reeking public toilet. Then Antoinette sat bolt upright against the spare tire, her dress gathered up in her arms, and
pointed to the cemetery with a long, unequivocal finger.

Together, Mavala and I ran down the rutted road. It was good to run with her. I wanted us to keep going. Near Ganaseb’s grave,
I spotted a single battered loafer. He wasn’t far from his stray shoe, passed out, his face in the gnarled dirt. Mavala shook
him. No movement. She shook him again. A limp hand waved her away.

“Don’t disturb the dead.”

“It’s time.”

“Time? Time for what?”

“Let’s go.” Mavala said. “The priest is snorting.”

He sat up and brushed a dusty sleeve on his forehead. His eyes were past bloodshot now. They were a kind of viscous brown,
murked by tears and sweat. For a moment he sat there and stared at the fresh mound.

“I did it,” he said.

“Did what?” Mavala asked.

“Pissed on him.”

“Why?”

“A long piss. I’d show you, but it’s gone, evaporated. That too dries up.” He laughed, asthmatic, parched. “Didn’t I love
him? Didn’t I?”

We pulled him up by the armpits. He felt light, too light for a man so tall. He looked around at the cemetery, at the rows
of cardboard markers, plastic sunflowers, and sleeping dogs. We walked slowly back. It was late afternoon. Jazz was already
playing in the living room of one of the houses closest to the cemetery road. Dust clouds from the taxis that roamed the location
wafted above us. An old woman passed by wheezing loudly, holding a loaf of bread to her chest. When we reached the bottle
store, the priest was revving the engine. Festus hooted at Obadiah’s dusty suit as the three of us piled into the back with
the others.

S
ame place as always. In front of our doors. Mosquito carcass- bloody morning. Pohamba sitting on a rock and brushing his teeth,
talks like he’s been smoking dagga, but we’re at least a month out of dagga. He spits out the side of his mouth, doesn’t look
at me.

“Sooooooooo.”

“What?”

“Been good,
ja bassie?
”

“What?”

“Good afternoons,
ja?
Siesta. No sleepy-peepy time for
bassie
.”

“Why are you talking like that?”

“Veld? Thorny but good,
ja?
No need sleep. Oh,
bassie
got juicy thing, happy!”

He brushes his teeth some more, sticks his tongue out, wiggles it, brushes it.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Say?”

And then him looking at me as if he’s only seeing me now for the first time. He points his toothbrush at me. “Don’t say anything.”
Then in a low, officious growl: “
Sir, I’m afraid that’s highly classified, confidential information
.” He sticks his brush back in his mouth.

A hen struts by and Pohamba stands, toothbrush-mouthed, tries to wallop it, misses. His flip-flop airborne into the acacia.
The hen flutters, then begins to mosey around again like nobody just tried to murder her. Pohamba goes inside his room to
rinse his mouth.

L
et us now blame Kaplansk’s mother, Sylvia. At the League of Women Voters of Greater Cincinnati, Avendale Chapter, she mentioned
it offhandedly to Ruthie Goldblatt, who mentioned it to Kitty Levine, who mentioned it to Bebe Pomerantz. Which was all it
took. Sylvia’s son is teaching at an adorable little school somewhere in deepest Africa. I forget where.
New Bubia?
Anyway, they’re in direful need of donations. Simply in direful need. What sort of donations? Oh, any donation! A donation
is a donation is a donation! And besides, Bebe, Kitty says, Sylvia says these children have nothing,
nothing.
Well, I do seem to remember an old piano in my basement, Bebe Pomerantz says. I think it was Miles’s mother’s sister’s. Died
young, poor thing. They say she won contests.

Tremendous idea! Send Chopin! Send Debussy!

Four weeks later a wooden box weighing upward of two tons landed at the postkantoor in Karibib with the fanfare of a meteor.
It had been delivered from Walvis Bay in its own lorry, and the postmaster called the principal personally to announce the
arrival of a “mighty crate.”

Mavala proclaimed the creation of a Goas music department. She had some boys on punishment clear out the storage room. The
piano was the lead story in the first edition of
The Goas Harbinger
.

Obadiah wrote:

What is significant, friends, brethren, Goasonians, about music and our impending new piano is that it is the physical embodiment
of God’s infinite varieties. Eighty keys! Give me eighty keys and I give you the miracle of creation itself. On behalf of
Goas, I wish to extend our heartfelt gratitude to Kaplansk’s long-suffering mother, Saint-in-waiting Sylvia Kaplansk, for
this remarkable bestowal upon our humble institute of learning . . .

Festus, Pohamba, and I rode out in the priest’s lorry, Theofilus driving, to fetch it. And, returning, we were like triumphant
combatants. Pohamba stood on the crate and gyrated, drunkenly fingering “Tea for Two” on Festus’s head. So many boys wanted
to help lift the box that two Standard Fours got trampled. Even the priest and the principal stood side by side at a small
ceremony in the piano’s honor, the crate at their powerful feet. The two of them stood there with their pregnant-looking stomachs
and refused to look at each other. Church versus state in the battle of the chubbies. The principal announced music, the great
equalizer, the future of African democracy. The priest offered that music was the most direct path to salvation of our corrupted
souls. Mavala wept with joy for music. Tomo waddled over and took a chomp of the crate.

So. All night. All night we tried. Maybe because at heart we were optimists, even Pohamba. Maybe at our cores we adhered to
Vilho’s benevolent view of mankind. All night we hammered. We sawed. We nailed. We glued. We prayed. We schemed. We didn’t
leave the new music room until eight o’clock the next morning, when we held a press conference in the courtyard to announce
that the random shit in the box could no more be made into a piano than the feathers of a slaughtered dinner rooster could
be pushed back together to make a live bird. Mavala wept again, this time with rage.

“Who are you people to send that across the ocean?”

I found myself defending Bebe Pomerantz and the good people of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was possible, wasn’t it, that the stuff
in the box—some wood planks, a multitude of keys, some wires, brass pedals—could have had a prior career as an actual piano?

“Rough passage?” I suggested.

That night we went out to Goas Stonehenge—an assortment of large granite boulders lacking in mystery—and roasted a goat on
the remains of that piano. Festus slit its throat, I held it down with my knees as if it were Bebe Pomerantz and reveled in
its childlike screams. And we drank to that piano’s second and final destruction. Mavala stood up in her heels on one of the
boulders and, with a fist of meat in one hand, said, “Tonight, I curse Cincinnati, curse it beyond —”

“It’s already cursed,” I said.

And Mavala, drunk and furious, ignoring me and the rest of us, twisting and wiggling in the windblown smoke, in the hectic
light of the fire. I wanted to stand up there and let her rail in my ear, but I stayed in the shadows in my Ohio shame and
composed:

Dear Kaplansk’s Long-Suffering Mother,

I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry for so many things, and so please understand that I am even more sorry than usual to say that
I will never, as long as live, and may this apply also to my corpse, set one cold toenail again in Cincinnati, Ohio. Rest
assured, I’m in good hands. Her name is Mavala Shikongo. You always said you were the first person to admire spunk. I think
of your passion for Geraldine Ferraro. I’d like you to meet my destiny, my destination, my disintegration. A former guerrilla
fighter. She can take apart an AK-47 in seventeen seconds. Now she teaches kindergarten. Please tell Bebe thanks so much for
the piano.

All my love,
Kaplansk

Other days it was less that the sun rose than that the veld seemed to pull itself up out of the darkness on its own volition.
I woke up drowsy to the horizon’s slow bleed. In my left hand was a high heel. Everybody else had somehow managed to get back
to their beds. Only Obadiah and I were still out there. The piano was no longer, except some keys hadn’t burned. They were
scarred and blackened but intact, as if mocking our attempts to incinerate them.

I shook Obadiah awake and we started back. I carried Mavala’s shoe stuffed in my pants. A rare dawn wind lifted the veld,
and we moved slowly against the gusting sand, our bodies weighing nothing.

S
he’s gnawing a pear, and pauses in chewing to accuse me of not having any money. Since Americans are supposed to have money,
I must have thought coming here was an easy way to make a fortune—typical colonialist model, I’m out here only to loot.

“What’s here to loot?”

“That’s what I can’t understand.”

“Anyway, I’ve got money.”

“How much?”

“A little.”

“Where is it?”

“Stocks.”

“Stocks! Capitalist carnivore,
It’s in stocks
… You could, though, have a bigger enogo. Isn’t that what they say in America, that the blacks have these monster penises?
Do people believe such things?”

“My grandfather was a pants jobber. I’m the proletariat.”

“So you have no comment on this penis issue?”

Words dissolving, muffled so as not to wake Tomo—rolling across the tablecloth we hid in the rocks. It was an old checkered
one. Antoinette had given it to us so that Pohamba and I would eat less like jackals. Every time we went out there, we had
to shake the sand out of it. Gradually we began to smuggle other stuff and hide it behind the graves. A pillow, a mattress
cover, an umbrella (which we used to protect us from the sun, but that made us too hot), a can of Doom for the ants, library
books. Afternoons of flung clothes. You couldn’t call it an escape, because we didn’t go far and we didn’t go long. Mavala
unbuttons slow. One button at a time, and then she stands and yanks off her dress. And I have to think it again, remember
it again. Unbuttoning slow, pushing plastic through penny slits. Not looking at me, looking at the veld. Then she stands and
yanks her dress over her head. She yawns. No claims about the sex we had, only the sex we didn’t have. The sex we imagined
was superior. The sex we had was hurried, diminished by the heat, sand-irritated. She rips open a condom with her teeth. And
then only us and the sand crickets we try not to roll over and kill.

“Davey?”

“Yeah?”

“Davey Concepcion?”

“Yeah.”

“Touch me.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“Here?”

“And a little lower.”

“And here. Wait, Davey, slow, Davey, too fast, Davey —”

The court decrees that the porter who ate his bread by the smoke of the roast has duly and civilly paid the cook by the jingle
of his money… Case dismissed.

RABELAIS

P
rogress, Obadiah would often espouse, is having an efficient legal system based solely on principles of fairness and blind
justice. One day he received a certified letter from the law firm of Tuhadeleni, Enkono, Sheehama & Partners, Windhoek.