The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (21 page)

“Do you think they are more bored with the box or with each other?” someone said.

“Each other.”

“The box.”

“Each other.”

We moved on to the next box, a lone giant python thick and sedentary as a car tire.

I remember very little else except for the heat and the overall wobbly drunkenness of the day and how the sun glinted against
the glass of the boxes.

On the way back, Mavala put on Obadiah’s touring hat, an argyle pot lid-looking thing he said was most appropriate for motoring
in Scotland. It blew off and sailed like a frisbee into the veld, but Pohamba wouldn’t stop for it. This was his trip. He’d
rented the truck. He’d organized us. Now we were all exhausted and wilted and letting him down because we weren’t whooping
it up anymore, and so he wasn’t stopping for any fucking Scottish hats.

H
ey, Truelove, how’s she tasting?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“Come now, is she satisfying your meatful needs?”

“Kill yourself.”

“Suicide? What about my learners?”

“I’ll cover your classes.”

“What about the Pope?”

“He won’t care, one less pagan.”

“You think I’ve never been in true love, Truelove?”

It’s not a question, it’s a proclamation. I let it hang in the dark. Let him nail it to his forehead. Night is a hole I fall
into, with papery walls and his voice is like a camera eye with a loudspeaker, as if I’m in some low-tech
1984.
I wait for him to say something else. Maybe he’s gone to sleep. All bedsprings silent. No noise of his breathing. Nothing.

U
s lying on Grieta backward. Mavala’s head is hanging off the front of the grave. There’s a scratch on her left cheek from
a thorn. She’s eating cheese. She holds it out to me.

“No, thanks.”

“You don’t like Cheddar?”

“I do. I ate.”

“What did you eat?”

“Tuna and cabbage soup.”

“Who made the soup?”

“Dikeledi sent it over.”

“
Dikeledi, Dikeledi, Dikeledi
. You men like them silent. Why am I so hungry all the time? These condoms. If I’m pregnant, I don’t want a kid that looks
like old butter.”

“I look like old butter?”

She kisses my chin.

“Sorry, but in certain light, yes.”

“I don’t need to listen to this shit. I could be in a real bed. Alone. Unharassed.”

“Why
did
you come here?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“What?”

“To come and save all the dark babies.”

“Come here, Teacher.”

“You come here, Teacher.”

“Tell me more about Snowy Pinkus.”

“Rainy.”

“Snowy’s a bitch.”

Our legs are twined up. She’s still holding the hunk of cheese.

I
want to spit on her,” she says.

“On who?”

“Grieta.”

“Why?”

“You’re asking me why?”

“I’m asking you why.”

“Listen. I heard this story about them once. A train of ox wagons are crossing the Kalahari from the Free State. The great
trek to unknown parts. It’s their second day without water. They’re wandering trackless. A baby dies. There’s no time to stop,
and so the father of the baby tosses it out in the veld—not because he’s cruel, but because he wants to save his other children
and there’s no time. But the mother won’t have this. She leaps out for her dead child. So they stop, outspan long enough to
dig a small hole and say
Our Father.
But before they can move on, another child dies, and so they do it again.
Our Father
. This land beat the Boers into natives, didn’t it?”

“Sounds like it.”

“But when they saw us, they didn’t see themselves.”

“So spit, or not?”

“I say spit.”

“What about us?”

“Us what?”

“Us this. Here. This isn’t desecration?”

“This is nothing, darling.”

And she rolled away from me into the grooves of hot sand, her body wearing it.

L
ook at me. Tell me what you see.”

“Can you flare your nostrils like that on demand? I’ve always —”

“You mean you can’t ? It’s easy, just —”

“I’m trying, I’m trying.”

“Shhh. Be quiet and look at me.”

Her nails dig into my arm, painted pink death—“Look.”

Instead I go closer to her and she blurs, closer until our faces crash.

And Mavala stands and marches away: marching, swinging her arms, her knees like levers, heading farther into the veld, shedding
everything, blouse, necklace, strap-tangled bra, skirt—all in puddled clumps off the goat path, into the trackless veld, heading
for the C-32, across a river of sand, not stopping, me chasing and picking up clothes, her not looking back, shouting, “Leper!
Make way! Leper!”

N
amibia never made the BBC. What would they have said?
Nothing much raged again today across newly independent
… So we had to be content with Angola or South Africa news, both of which were consistently bloody enough to make the
radio.

One night, I dreamed I heard on the BBC that Jonas Savimbi was assassinated, blown up by a hand grenade. The next morning,
I trumpeted it around school: “Savimbi’s dead!”

“How do you know?”

“I heard it last night on the BBC.”

Hallelujah, the BBC. The BBC! Could the sun rise without the BBC? The earth rotate? The tides roll in? The tides recede?

Mavala shouted from her classroom: “Finally, that Bantustan got what he deserved!”

“The war will be over up there,” Pohamba said.

“And now our illegal nomads will go home,” Vilho said.

That night we gathered at Antoinette and Obadiah’s and waited. Obadiah was soaking his feet in water and salt. He said his
feet had the hardness.
Beep, beep, beep. BBC News. Thirteen hours Greenwich mean time. The main points read by Wynford Vaughn-Thomas: In the Slovenian
capital, Ljubljana, federal troops clashed with demonstrators demanding an independent Slovenian state for a second straight
day… In Angola, UNITA rebel leader Dr. Jonas Savimbi has again failed to honor the cease-fire, and his men are reportedly
on the march toward Huambo. The Zairian president, Mr. Mobutu Sese Seko, has renewed his role as mediator in the conflict
… A reprieve for Galileo. The Vatican announced today that Galileo Galilei has been formally absolved of charges of heresy
and that the earth is in fact round.

Obadiah clicked it off.

“Fine work, Kaplansk,” Pohamba said.

“You’re going to blame me for dreaming?”

“I’ve been punished my whole life for it,” Pohamba said.

“Let’s have a drink,” Obadiah said and poured a little zorba for each of us. “Now I have a question for us to ponder. What
in God’s name is that Mephistopheles a doctor of?”

We pondered.

Gastrology?

Demonology?

Scientology?

“Aaaaaaaaha!” Obadiah raised his feet and showed them to us. Then he put them back and stood up and began to march in place,
splashing water all over. “All that marching. Imagine what such raping and pillaging can do to a man’s arches. The man’s a
podiatrist! ‘Halt, men, show the good doctor your soles. Not your souls, fools! I have no use for your souls!’”

T
hose times when a real catastrophe reached us at Goas, Antoinette would accuse the dead of gossiping. Sister Ursula at the
clinic in Usakos called the principal to say that one of our boys, a Standard Four named Nicholas Kombumbi—coming back from
a weekend with his parents in Windhoek—was killed when the bakkie he was riding in the back of flipped over on the C-32.

Antoinette dropped to the sand, held her hands to her ears, and begged them to stop. Enough, mongers! Enough!

There was a great sense of order in her world of scouring, of washing, of lining the boys up, of feeding them, of punishing
them. Any threat to this universe caused her temporarily to abdicate, to leave us. Obadiah and I helped her up. He tried to
be kind to her when she broke down on account of other people’s misfortunes. It took the focus away from her own misfortunes,
for which he, Obadiah, was responsible. When she was calm again, the three of us sat on the bench by the garden fence and
watched the commotion in front of the principal’s office. The principal was standing in his doorway holding the phone. He
was now publicly—with great ceremony, but not without genuine sorrow—calling the parents of the dead boy. At one point, however,
for all his love of ritual and formality, the principal sat down heavily on the step that led up into his office and slumped
against the door frame. He took the receiver away from his ear. Seeing this sent Antoinette back to cursing the dead and all
their cheap, nasty, behind-the-back talk. Obadiah got angry then, tired of it.

“We are doomed,” he said. “Superstition will be death of this country. Something went wrong. Perhaps the driver was drunk.
Or perhaps he was from Windhoek, unaccustomed to driving on our treacherous gravel roads. There is a rational explanation
why that boy is dead. A peace officer will investigate the true cause and create a public report.”

Antoinette, still looking at the principal, who had not yet responded to the wailing we could practically hear, stooped and
picked up a rock at her feet. Without saying anything, she caressed it for a while. I wondered if she was going to smash Obadiah’s
face with it. Instead, she went down to her knees again and began to beat the ground with the rock. Slowly, methodically,
one thud after another. Obadiah just sat there, stiff, not watching her, only hearing her, as he stared helplessly at the
now completely silent crowd in front of the principal’s office.

O
ur fences, unlike Krieger’s gleaming razor wire (talk that he went out there and barbed it himself when he wasn’t busy running
down children), were mostly patchworks made up of hubcaps, sheet metal, plywood, car parts, bedsprings, hammered barrel lids,
plastic crates, bricks, goatskins, crushed cans, assorted broken furniture, and in spite of Theofilus’s constant repairs,
they didn’t do much but lean away from the wind. Although the cows mostly stayed on the farm, any and all predators—jackals,
baboons, hyenas, Kalahari foxes, our friends the dwarfed hedgehogs, leopards, carnivorous bush rabbits, warthogs, neighboring
thieving farmhands—all were absolutely welcome at Goas. Our saddest fences, though, were the ones that didn’t even try. Those
sections of fence line where the land dipped into dry tributaries and the fence couldn’t follow suit were called “flying fences,”
the most useless man-made things in the universe. A bit of cordoned-off void, winging across nothing, the only true mascot
of Goas.

O
utside Goas church. After the funeral for Nicholas Kombumbi, Vilho and I sit across from each other on the benches that used
to be part of the stolen picnic table. The table must have been a monster to lift. It was a solid slab of concrete. We imagine
it is out in the veld somewhere, although nobody has come up with a satisfactory motive for taking it, other than to prove
that if it’s stealable, Pohamba’s Standard Sevens will light the way. Vilho and I shuffle our best shoes in the sand. We’ve
stopped trying to talk about it. The boy Nicholas was his. Not his best learner, but not his worst either, so he didn’t know
him very well. Now he feels he failed the boy. The boy’s mediocrity was a mask that prevented Vilho from seeing an individual
soul. Now he goes to his final reward unknown by the people entrusted to remember him. I have given up trying to talk him
out of this. So here we sit. We watch the priest lock the door of the church. He greets us with a slow, solemn nod and disappears
behind the tall rectory gate. A pair of goats wander by, their ribs protruding. Vilho is trying to remember a single thing
about this boy. His body has already left for Karibib, followed by cars and bakkies loaded with relatives and friends. There’s
a whistle in the late-afternoon wind. Vilho stops shuffling his feet and looks as though something has occurred to him. I
watch his face tighten. Grief is useless without memory, yet he might be making progress. Everybody else has gone to sleep,
or to Obadiah’s for a nip, then sleep.

H
ot gray light, Christmas afternoon. Those who could have gone somewhere have. Antoinette and Obadiah to their kids in Windhoek.
Festus and Dikeledi to her family in Gobabis. The principal and Miss Tuyeni to the north. By car, by lorry, by bakkie, by
donkey cart—foot—people have fled. The farm is beyond quiet without the stampede. At night, with the boys asleep, all their
breathing still made the place feel alive. Now we are walking around listening to the churn of our own feet in the sand. The
wind’s relented. There’s no service. The priest has gone to say Mass at Otjimbingwe. We who’ve been left behind go on our
own to church and sit in the silence, listening to the echoes of our own respectful coughs. Mavala chants softly:
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. Whosoever
liveth and believeth in me shall never die
.

I whisper, “Isn’t that what you say when someone dies? It’s Christmas.”

“Someone didn’t die?” She whispers back. “What about Vilho’s learner? What was his name?”

“Kombumbi.”

“Yes, Kombumbi. And others, so many others.” She leans forward and sinks her face in her hands.

And that was it, just Mavala, Tomo, me, Auntie, and Pohamba, who only went to church because the priest wasn’t there, and
some boys who for whatever reason couldn’t make it home.