The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (3 page)

The principal took a breath, crossed himself.

“And yet, I do forgive you, Erastus, I forgive you your filth, your rot, your disease.”

That afternoon, we climbed up the hill and sat beneath the cross. I watched the Erongos retreat beyond the blurry sheen of
afternoon heat. The sky was like watered-down milk. The goats wandered languidly along the paths in the veld. And we talked
and we talked. Pohamba said he had a brother Josiah who worked for CDM in the south and got caught stealing diamonds he’d
shoved up his ass. Obadiah said, You’ve got more brothers than the principal has sins to atone.

“Truth,” Pohamba said. “They caught him on X-ray. He’s still in prison at Oranjemund. That was four and half years ago.”

“How’d they get them out of there?” I asked.

“Laxatives.”

This all got Obadiah started in on the diamond fields and how Adolph Lüderitz bought a tenth of the world’s wealth for three
hundred breechloaders and a wagonload of cheese. And of course Vilho—who everybody said still had faith in God (that’s how
people described him,
Vilho who still has faith in God
)—couldn’t help himself from adding that Lüderitz drowned in the Orange River after his boat tipped over. “He never got rich,”
Vilho said. “The man didn’t live to sell a single stone.”

“And his descendants?” Obadiah shouted. “And his descendants’ descendants’ descendants?”

But Pohamba didn’t want to talk about history or the wicked getting their just deserts or God’s sense of justice. He wanted
to talk about his brother Josiah, who was still in prison at Oranjemund for shoving diamonds up his ass. “One carat,” he said,
and turned around, bent over, and talked to us, his big melon head between his thighs. “Or two?”

Vilho rubbed his hands together. He wanted to pray for the deliverance of Pohamba’s soul, but wouldn’t dare do it in front
of him.

You claim that you are sorry that I do not accept German protection. You seem to think that I am guilty even of this . . .
This is my answer: I have never in my life seen the German emperor and am sure he has never seen me.

HENDRIK WITBOOI, 1885

In the event you should intend to fight me further, I have to ask your Highness to provide me with two more boxes of Henri
Martini cartridges so that I can respond to your attack. So far we have not really fought each other… A great and honest
and civilized nation such as yours should not stop ammunition for its enemy. In the event that I should have enough ammunition,
you are welcome to conquer me.

HENDRIK WITBOOI, 1893

T
he story goes that it was the most savage raid on colonial forces in the whole bloody history of German South-West Africa.
Hendrik Witbooi and his men—answering a call from God—made a surprise attack on the German base at Otjimbingwe. Five thousand
imperial troops led by Herman Goering, hapless father of the more successful future reich marshal, were stationed in the barracks,
fast asleep on a sweltering summer evening. The raid was so successful that Goering himself was forced to flee and, in what
must have been a particular humiliation, reduced to begging the protection of the British garrison at Walfish Bay. Not surprisingly,
the Germans did not allow the attack to go unanswered and stormed back three months later, following the arrival of fresh
recruits from the Fatherland. Witbooi retreated to the uninhabitable sand wastes and clay buttes northwest of Otjimbingwe.

One Monday morning Obadiah, carrying a long stick, marched his class, thirty-eight Standard Threes in those powder-blue button-downs,
holding hands, two by two, away from school, up the dry riverbed. After trudging through the sand for what felt to the boys
like twelve days, Obadiah abruptly stopped. He jammed his stick into the sand.

“Cherubim! Who can tell me what makes this place significant?”

None of the boys said a word. They tried not to even breathe. At that time of day, late morning in March, everything looked
bleached. The sand, trees, bushes, even the cows, were all the color of plaster. Above, the sky allowed for no variation in
the glare. All around the boys was semidesert sameness, and they were hungry, so so hungry. Teacher had made them skip morning
break for this expedition. Pocked across the dry riverbed were hoof- and footprints accumulated since the last time it rained.
Plus all the goat shit in neat little piles, like tiny pyramids. What here could be worth all that walking?

“Fortitude,” Obadiah said. “An important word, leprechauns. It means having the courage to fight when your body says,
Asseblief makker
. No more, I beseech You. Hendrik Witbooi had it. Write it in your notebooks when you return to class. Use it in a sentence.
For instance, ‘Witbooi had fortitude, indeed.’ Look at this staff, my children, alone, here in the sand, silent as a pillar.
Even fortitude needs to rest sometimes. The great Hendrik Witbooi, after fleeing the garrison at Otjimbingwe, rode northwest
toward Goas—yes, even Goas has a place in history—and he stopped at this precise spot.”

The boys looked languidly at the stick leaning crookedly out of the sand.

“This spot! Even fortitude must stop and take a breath of pure desert air, this air of freedom. Listen, boys. You hear them?
The
Schutztruppe
in menacing pursuit. Think on it, little men of Goas. Of being chased, of riding for your lives. But think also of all those
killed in their beds. Yes, criminals, colonizers, but also men with beating hearts. Death to them, absolutely. But with their
heads on their pillows? Was it not something Witbooi might have learned from the Germans themselves? Take a pause. A great
man rested here. Was it a victory?”

Obadiah seized the stick, hoisted it to his shoulder, and scanned the line of boys.

“Hendrik Witbooi was the greatest shot with a gun since Jonker Afrikaner’s father.” Obadiah lowered his rifle. “He was also
a Christian down to his eighty-year-old feet. I repeat, think on it. A heroic act of independence? Certainly. But the beginning
of a time of slaughter as well. I bring you here to Witbooi’s place of rest to remember the price of one man’s greatness.”

With this, Obadiah thrust the stick back into the sand and began to walk slowly away, back toward the school. Over his shoulder
he called, “I provide no answers.”

They stood and watched him. They’d heard about this from the boys in the grades above, about drunk Master Obadiah’s stick
in the veld, but now that they were out there alone, they did what other boys before them had also done. They stared at it.
Now more awake, they stared at that stick. All thirty-eight boys, silently, still gripping hands. One boy considered knocking
it down. Another thought of taking it and using it to smack Reginald Eiseb, his enemy. Another, of riding on it, as he’d seen
a white witch do in a picture book. But one boy, Jacobus Tivute, listened for the pant of a hunted man and actually started
to hear it. The noise was coming from the boy whose hand he held, an asthmatic, but it didn’t matter. Jacobus was hearing
that awful gasping. The Germans will hunt Witbooi to the end of the earth. Then they’ll shoot him seventeen times at Vaalgras.
He’d heard that story from his father. Looking around at the cragged trees, the tangled patches of sharp bushes, the wide,
waterless river snaking away ahead, Jacobus thought, Bravery is more hell than cowardice. He hoped to grow taller and never
have either, and he swore to himself he’d remember this. Then Jacobus said a short prayer asking God, politely, to have mercy
and let him leave this desert place one day so he could go live in a town. After that he turned from the stick and, with his
wheezing partner in tow, followed his teacher.

S
ometimes, as now, on the edge of morning, she hears the stifled cries of the Hebrew women giving birth in secret. Pharaoh’s
men are tossing boys into the Nile. Antoinette wakes and stands in the dark and prays for them, and for her own lost, her
first, a daughter, taken away before she had a name. Aren’t daughters supposed to be allowed to live?

She bows her head to pray, but she will never kneel. Not in church, not anywhere. Since she was a child, she’s known this.
To ask something of God is not a humble act. It’s a demand. Why try to disguise it by doing it on your knees?

Eyes closed, she listens for the birth cries of all the lost children. With her rheumatic fingers, she makes her hands into
a basket; but she will never kneel. She waits for the noise of the cries to fade, the voice of her own blood and the blood
of so many others.

They never named her. You don’t name a child until you hear it scream, and this one was born silent. The death certificate,
the only relic holy enough to store in her Bible, is written in highfalutin Afrikaans.
Herewith on said day the following unnamed personage…
They paid ten rands for it. Ten rands for a fact anybody could tell just by listening to her not scream. Still, there are
days when she takes it out and rereads. The paper is worn away from rubbing. At the folds are dirty creases; the certificate
is breaking apart. She thinks how it must have lasted longer than her daughter’s bones.

Born in peace, weren’t you?

*

She leaves her house and her sleeping husband (asleep again in his chair) and heads across the sand to the boys’ hostel. It
will be another half hour before the light spills over the mountains and floods the veld.

A
mong the farm’s ghosts was the soul of a Standard Five. One morning, nineteen years earlier, the boy had drowned while swimming
in the far dam, up near the ruined, roofless buildings of what was still called Old Goas, where the original farm had been.
In theory, we lived at New Goas, but nobody called it that. Back then, the far dam had been used for the cows’ midday drinking.
This was when Goas had more cows. There had once been a fence around it so the farmhands could check for missing cows after
they were corraled. Now the fence was gone, as gone as the water, although you could see the remnants of it flattened into
the dust by years of hooves.

He wasn’t a very demanding ghost. Some mornings he’d come and stand by our coffee fire. In the lingering dark, we’d huddle,
jostling each other with our empty cups, waiting for the coffee to percolate. You knew he was there, because the smoke started
wafting in the wrong direction, into the wind. Obadiah said the boy was using whatever breath he had left to push the smoke
out of his eyes. The dead can’t use their hands, Obadiah said. He also said the boy was a Twsana, the only Twsana at Goas
at the time he drowned, and that he visited us for some warmth and to be remembered a little. A boy who died so far from his
people. There’s nothing criminal about needing to be spoken of once in a while. But it happened so long ago, no one remembered
anything else about him other than that he died and that he was a Tswana. So whenever anybody claimed the smoke wasn’t behaving
according to certain meteorological laws, we made things up. It didn’t matter who said what on those mornings. We were too
cold to care, and people murmured into their coats. We all claimed the mantle of being as lonely as that boy must have been
the moment he went under.

“Born in Gobabis, son of a rich chief,” said one voice.

“True,” said another. “His father—before the drought of seventy-nine made him a poor man—owned four hundred head of cattle.”

A third voice, or maybe it was the first. “But at Goas, the boy roamed in bloody feet.”

“Why bleeding feet?”

“Someone stole his shoes.”

“Ah yes, and rich men’s sons are tender-footed.”

“That’s true.”

“Tender-footed, but he knew how to swim.”

“True. He had lessons at the swimming pool for whites in Windhoek.”

“So what happened? If he knew how to swim, why’d he drown?”

“Sadness.”

“I see, yes.”

“And then he sank.”

“There was enough water to drown?”

“A rare year.”

“And they didn’t find him until the cows began acting strange.”

“They wouldn’t drink any of that water.”

“Then they trampled the fence.”

“Yes, and then a shepherd—not Theofilus, this was even before Theofilus—pulled himself up and looked over the edge.”

“That boy’s head was floating like a cabbage.”

Our feet were cold, our hands; we crowded to the fire and hunched toward it with our empty coffee cups. We watched each other’s
breath more than we listened to any words. Those mornings, it was less that the sun would rise than that the darkness would
simply pale. And it always, always came back to his loneliness, how he was the single Tswana on a farm of Hereros, Damaras,
Namas, Coloureds, Ovambos. There were even two Bushmen at Goas then, two Bushmen who could at least talk to each other. We
forgot about the stampeding cows, something nobody ever believed anyway. Cows at Goas never did anything that dramatic.

Our voices in the changing light:

“Forsook, the boy was.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Our Lord, the same.”

“And he didn’t call for help. He knew nobody would come. The one certain thing about calling for help.”

“And the cows?”

It was a rare woman’s voice that answered, a voice we didn’t recognize.

“The cows watched.”

Nobody said anything after that. There was the slow rise of the smoke. Then it wandered away, toward the boulders beyond the
toilet houses.

S
easons at Goas, as much as you can call cold, hot, and more hot seasons, catapult into each other. Days too. Winter mornings
bleed to summer afternoons. And memory is as much a heap of disorder as it is a liar.

The spiraled ash of a spent mosquito coil. A book with a broken spine lying facedown. A row of tiny socks drying on the edge
of a bucket.