The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (20 page)

Dear Sir,

We beg forthwith to inform you that herein described vehicle, Datsun 180 B, 1979, VIN # 3972268377AC12, currently in your
possession and under your control, is the subject of an ex parte application filed at the magistrate’s court, Windhoek, under
a rule
nisi
attaching said vehicle.
Cur avd vult.
(Dated May 31, 1991.) Duly filed by S. Vivier on behalf of legal practitioners, Tuhadeleni, Enkono, Sheehama & Partners,
Windhoek. Note that said action being duly filed resulting therein from an outstanding balance under a repair lien in the
sum of rand 32,185.11. (Dated April 11, 1977.) Please see standard established under Rule 59 (a) in support thereof, providing
that attachment be made on a vehicle alienated without balance duly forthwithed in full. Please also see Amalgamated Engineering
v.
Minister of Labor (1949) (3) SA (A) 337 at 661, as the person claiming to be lien holder will have direct and substantive
interest in the subject of said lien. Further see
In re:
Tokien Butchery (1974) (4) SA (T) 893.

We sat in the Datsun and read it, reread it.

“I think they want money,” I said.

Obadiah took his glasses off. He blew on one lens, stuck it half in his mouth and huffed, wiped it off. Did the same with
the other one. Then he called a boy over—a Standard Five on punishment named Nashikoto. He’d been hosing out the chicken coop
and, alternately, trying to drown the chickens.

“Go get some help.”

A few minutes later, Nashikoto came back with more boys. We got out of the car and Obadiah stood on the hood in his bathrobe
and read the letter, the entire letter.

When it was over, he said:

Bless this nation, its magistrates, its Minister of Justice, its constitution. But above all, a prayer for the Messers Tuhadeleni,
Enkono, Sheehama & Partners and the poetry they send to Obadiah Horaseb via certified mail. Amen.

He stepped off the rostrum of the hood of the Datsun, his Datsun, and stared at it awhile. “Now bury it,” he said.

It took the rest of the afternoon, but even then the pile still looked like an oafish mound in the shape of a Datsun. Observe
the majesty of the law’s corpus, Obadiah says, arms outstretched, his palms up like the balanced scales of justice.

M
onths since Dikeledi’s rain. The few clumps of green that hung on into summer are now a memory. The only thing that grows
in the veld are those bizarre spiderwebs that seem to have no hold anywhere. They seem to float. They greet us in the morning,
wet with slight dew, across our faces. Other than this, the days are long and dry. The cows have gotten thin again. And everybody
says it’s too hot even for this season.

Pohamba paces back and forth, from the fire pit to his door, from the acacia to his door, his hands behind his back. He looks
me over. I’m sitting against a tire trying to read. He paces more. Undrunk Saturday and no transport to Karibib, his boredom
rising to anger. Fucking Boers, he says. Fucking,
focking
Boers. That it’s the Boers’ fault that we have no transport to town is of course true if you follow the chain of causation
to the beginning, starting with colonialism moving through apartheid all the way to what this school is doing way the hell
out here to begin with, but today, forgive me, I’m only trying to read a little. I toss my teabag to the chickens.

“Listen,” he says. “This happened to a friend of my Uncle Johannes. Late at night, there’s a pound on the door. Like a hammer
to your skull in your dreams. This friend of my Uncle Johannes gets up and answers the door. Military police on a late-night
visit. ‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ ‘Kaffir, we have intelligence that your son’s SWAPO. Now we’re going to punish
the womb that birthed a terrorist.’ And so they drag the old guy out of his house, this friend of my Uncle Johannes. They
tie him to a goat who’s tethered to a tree. They go back inside. His wife of forty-eight years. Why don’t you go and write
this down, Kaplansk? Why don’t you go and get a pen and write it? They stuff a doek in her mouth. Her husband’s in the yard
married to a nanny goat.”

Pohamba sucks his teeth, looks at me. I’m slumped against the door. We sit there awhile. I reread the same sentence:
I wanted to buy three passable horses for my britzka. I wanted to buy three passable horses for my britzka. I wanted to buy
three

“You don’t want to go to the dorp?” he says finally. “If we start now we could have a good night.”

“No thanks.”

“What are you reading?”

“Still this Turgenev book.”

“Russian?”

“Yeah.”

“Communist?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe socialist.”

“Rich?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“All socialists are rich. That’s why they’re socialist.”

“He supported the serfs.”

“You don’t like my story? You have better stories to listen to now?”

“I like your story fine.”

Pohamba steps over to me and raises a flip-flopped foot to my face. He holds it there, quivering. I drop the book in the sand.

“Why don’t you do it? Smash my head?”

He waggles his foot in my face. “He supported the serfs,” Pohamba says. “Good for him.”

T
hey emerged one morning out of the veld during those days of ruthless heat. It was a Friday and we were in morning meeting.
That morning’s tale concerned, if I remember, the importance of proper dental hygiene in an emerging democracy. The principal
was reading to us from a
Namibian
article about the alarmingly high incidence of tooth decay in Ombalantu. “Citizens must floss. A nation must maintain its
oral health. I prefer waxed. Watch me now.”

We hardly had our eyes open. Caffeine never did much for us on Fridays. Then there was a knock on the door, which was strange,
because the boys knew better than to disturb this ritual. The principal was working on a trouble spot in the back of his mouth.
He pointed to Mavala: “Open it.” He loved to give her orders in public. And Mavala, more out of curiosity than the command,
did it. When she saw them, she dropped to her knees, still holding her cup of coffee. After, she said she didn’t know why,
only that there was something so heavy about them. They weren’t bedraggled. The most alarming thing was how scrubbed clean
they looked. But they ignored Mavala’s outstretched arms. They seemed to understand immediately that the one in the tie flossing
his teeth was boss. Of the two boys, one was tall and gangly, with extremely thin arms and long hands. The other was squat,
with roving eyes that seemed to troll over us, summing us up. We were pampered. We knew nothing of suffering. All we cared
about in the world was our coffee and egg-and-tomato sandwiches at mid-morning break. You never see yourself as plainly as
through the eyes of children who aren’t children anymore.

The girl never looked up. She only gazed at her feet, which were sun-cracked and blistered, but somehow too clean. Her not
looking up didn’t seem to be out of fear exactly. She appeared past any notion of being scared of anything. She wore a light
blue dress with delicately embroidered frills around the edges. Mavala said it looked like a communion dress she once wore.
The tall one was probably her brother. They had similar eyes, smallish, worried. He stood next to her, the edge of his bare
feet touching hers. The squat one spoke to the principal.

“We greet Teacher.”

“Greetings, child. Where are you coming from?”

“North, Teacher.”

“How far north?”

The boy hesitated. “The border.”

“The other side of it?”

“Yes.”

“Running?”

“Yes.”

“From what?”

The boy hesitated again. “The fighting, Teacher.”

“Savimbi?”

The boy knew better than to take sides, even in another country, even as far south as Goas. “Only from the fighting, Teacher.”

“Parents?”

“None.”

“How did you come here? Who brought you?”

“We walked, Teacher.”

“Walked! From Angola!”

“Yes.”

“Impossible!” the principal cried. “It’s eight hundred kilometers!”

The squat boy’s expression didn’t change. He seemed to be sizing the principal up, seeing he wasn’t a fool, only bombastic.

Quietly he repeated it: “We walked, Teacher.”

The principal looked down at their feet, the first time he had. “You’re hungry?”

“No, Teacher.”

“You need a place to sleep?”

“No.”

“What do you want, then?”

This time the boy didn’t hesitate. “School.”

“What?”

“We want to go to school, Teacher.”

The simple truth of it. Not food, not a place to sleep, only school. The principal shrugged, pleased they’d come to him instead
of the priest. Had it been Father who sheltered these lambs, the principal would have been on the farm line to the police
barracks in Karibib and those three might have been deported within a day, shipped back to more civil war, to Dr. Savimbi,
in the back of a cattle lorry.

“There is room, children,” he said, “in our inn.”

For a week or so, they sat quietly in our classrooms. When there weren’t enough chairs, they sat on the floor. We gave them
pencils and paper, but they rarely wrote anything down. They rotated from class to class like benevolent versions of the dreaded
school inspectors who descended on Goas once a term with their checklists, rating us on the old Bantu education scale from
Goed
to
Swak
. They often started their days in Mavala’s class of sub b’s and ended them in Pohamba’s Standard Sevens, each day an entire
trajectory of whatever we had (or didn’t have) to offer, which was probably more school than they’d had in mind. They didn’t
talk to the boys or even among themselves. Even the squat one, after his initial boldness, settled down to the life of just
another silent learner. Once, Mavala tried to talk to him, to ask him what happened to them. She said she might understand,
but he only turned away without a word.

Out at the graves she said, “He only talks when he needs to. I forgot the virtue of that.”

“You don’t tell anything.”

She shrugged. It was a lying-down shrug, and the sand made a dull rasp.

“I’ve nothing to tell.”

“I don’t believe you.”

We never learned their names, or anything about what they’d been through. Of course, we had Obadiah’s radio and week-old newspapers.
We had an idea. We could have imagined things if we were up to it. Soldiers tossing babies in the air and shooting them in
front of their mothers. But who can truly see this?

They never lingered. The three of them arrived at school in the morning after the second triangle and left promptly after
last class. At break, they went out into the veld by themselves.

In class, silent or not, the girl was the only lesson. You could smell the boys sweating over her. Her eyes had a kind of
sad vagueness as she looked straight ahead at the board. She seemed unaware of the boys’ agitation. The only time she showed
any real expression was when she looked at her brother. Sometimes, in class, she touched the side of his face, and the boys
swooned. The squat one could obviously take care of himself. But of her timid brother—always next to her, his feet touching
hers—she seemed to wonder, What will become of you?

When they were gone from us, a boy discovered they’d been living out by the road. Theofilus must have known this. We figured
he also gave them food, and they may well have accepted it from someone as unobtrusive as Theofilus. He never mentioned it
either way. But when they were among us, nobody, not even the most lawless of the Standard Sevens, followed them back to where
they slept. The only way I can explain this is to suggest that for some reason all of Goas recognized—without it being decreed
from on high—that a part of the veld out toward the road was, for a time, theirs, in a place where they were like stowaways.

They left us as abruptly as they’d come. Nobody chased them.

W
e rented a bakkie from Felix Desconde. According to Pohamba, Desconde was the richest man in Karibib, and he had a fleet of
Toyotas he rented out at usurious prices. Desconde owned the grocery, the hardware, and the marble works on the edge of town.
He was also a man of the people, and wanted to live among them, so he built the only two-story house in the location, a mock
castle with a four-car garage, a razor-wire security fence, and eight roaming dogs.

All of us were going. Just as we were pulling away from Goas, Auntie ran—the first time anybody had seen this happen—and lunged
at us. Her breasts caught on the open back gate of the bakkie, and we had no choice but to haul her up. As we rattled down
the Goas road toward the C-32, we saw Miss Tuyeni out walking in the veld. She was becoming more ignored than Auntie. Alone,
she looked more like Mavala than when they were near each other. They had the same shoulders. Vilho suggested we invite her
along, but Pohamba didn’t hear him over the noise of the radio. As we passed her, Miss Tuyeni didn’t look at us. She stooped,
took off a shoe, and jiggled a rock out of it.

The Erongo Snake Park was down the C-32 toward Otjimbingwe and run by an ancient Polish couple. Who knows how they got marooned
at a tourist attraction on a road where not a single tourist ever strayed, but they’d been there since long before independence.
A decrepit Mercedes was parked in front of a small flat house with the windows boarded up. The Poles were incredibly tiny,
sun-shrunk people. The Mercedes was apparently their ticket office, as well as, perhaps, their house. They were both sitting
in it when we pulled up. The snake park consisted of seven or eight glass boxes. The glass hadn’t been cleaned in years. It
was hard to see the snakes. Inside the boxes were rocks and sand that looked very much like the rocks and sand outside the
boxes. In one of them we could see, past the green slime of the glass, the outlines of two Neilson vipers looped together
in a pretzeled twist.