The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (6 page)

1. The atom bomb is a frightful thing.

2. My father is an Elk.

3. Will you please iron my shirt after you finish the dishes?

4. My sister has a Mexican jumping bean.

Pohamba’s shadow looms across the threshold of my classroom.

“May I have a word, Teacher Kaplansk?”

“Certainly, Teacher Pohamba.”

I go out to the porchway. “What is it? I’ve got another fifty minutes to murder.”

Pohamba cups his hand to my ear, murmurs, “She’s back.”

“Who?”

“Che Guevara.”

“What?”

“In a skirt.”

And then she’s there in his eyeballs, strutting across his undrunk morning pupils.

“Mavala Shikongo?”

“In the exposed flesh.”

“Wow.”

“There’s more.”

“What?”

“She’s with a child.”

“She’s pregnant?”

“Not with. With
a
. Note the article, English teacher. He’s about a year old, maybe a year and six months.”

“Wait. She didn’t look pregnant.”

“Kaplansk! Think. She’s been gone less than a month. It was born already, see? She went somewhere and picked it up.”

I take a step back. “Oh. Hey, how much cologne have you got on? I’m getting dizzy.”

“Not cologne. Eau de toilette. Stag. I’ll get you a bottle.”

“How’d she get here? I didn’t hear any car.”

“Walked.”

“With a baby she walked?”

“All she needs now is a basket on her head. A modern girl, our soldier.”

“Where’s she now?”

“With the Commandant.”

I look down the porchway, toward the principal’s office. The mustard suitcase is in the courtyard, standing on the well-watered
grass where we took our school pictures. On promotion day, the principal would stand on that green patch and hand out pens.
He called it Ireland.

By this time, all my learners have their heads out the windows. Pohamba glares them back to their chairs. Then he whistles
to one of them, the boy closest to the door, Magnus Axahoes. The boy comes out and stands before us. He’s nervous. He comes
up to just about Pohamba’s thigh.

“Go to the principal and get the toilet key,” Pohamba says.

“Yes, Teacher.”

“And come back and tell us what you see in the office.”

“Yes, Teacher.”

But Magnus doesn’t move. He stands there looking up at Pohamba.

“Go.”

Magnus bites his lip. Then, after a moment, he flips around and sprints down the porchway.

“Who’s he?”

“Magnus. Never says a word. Mostly he looks at his feet. He writes well, though. He wrote a composition about a baboon who
becomes a police officer.”

“They’re already baboons.”

“This one drove a flying donkey cart and rescued dogs.”

“Rescued from what?”

“I don’t know. Just rescued.”

“Make him talk. You should hit him.”

“No, quiet’s better. I might start hitting them for asking questions.”

Across the courtyard, from Obadiah’s classroom, the boys are reciting geography. “Labrador, Lagos, Lancashire. Now you try.
Labrador, Lagos, Lancashire
.”

Usually when the principal speaks in his office we can hear him across the farm, but today we hear only Obadiah and his boys.
That mustard suitcase stands like a sentry. Magnus comes back, holding the key, which is attached to a wire, which is coiled
around a brick. He stands there, but he doesn’t say anything.

“Well,” Pohamba says.

“Excuse? Teacher?”

“Tell us what you saw in the office.”

“Mistress Shikongo is there, Teacher. With Master Sir.”

“And what are they doing?”

“Excuse?”

Pohamba nearly shouts: “What are they talking about, you little fool?”

“Not talking.”

“Not talking?”

“Yes, Teacher.”

“So what are they doing? Sitting and looking at each other?”

“No, Teacher. Master Sir is looking at Mistress Shikongo. Mistress Shikongo is looking nowhere.”

“What do you mean nowhere?”

“Not here.”

“What?” Pohamba raises his hand. The boy flinches, but his eyes remain steady—as if he’s trying to show us what not here looks
like. He cradles the brick to his chest. We wait, listen for a moment, as if we can hear all this looking and not looking.
From Obadiah’s class: “Now again, angels, try it again. Lausanne.”

“Looo Zaaaaan!”

“Brilliant! Just as the Swiss —”

“And the child?” I say. “What’s the child doing?”

“The small boy is beating his mother, Teacher.”

And then, from down the porchway, the principal doesn’t laugh at her, he erupts. The noise of him swooping, coughing, happily
retching —

“Take back the key,” Pohamba says.

That night we staked ourselves out on the blue chairs in Antoinette and Obadiah’s living room and waited. The shelves of musty
books made everything smell like old cheese. It was a crowded little room. The floor was scattered with open books, facedown,
and various unmatched slippers. One naked bulb hung over our heads, muted by a scarf fashioned into a shade. In the corner
was Antoinette’s dressmaker’s dummy. We pretended to listen to the radio while we waited for Obadiah to proclaim whatever
there was to proclaim.

The chimes of Big Ben ring out. What’s some clock in London to Mavala Shikongo? The news we wanted wasn’t on the BBC. Our
oracle stood on a piece of carpet sample and curled his toes. He turned up the radio so he could talk more freely. Antoinette
was in the kitchen, plonking silverware, one crash after another. Whatever it took to call us lazy. “She went to see my fedder,”
Obadiah said quietly, under the noise of the radio.

“Your what?”

“My distaff.”

“Huh?”

“This long disease called wife.”

“Will you simply tell us,” Pohamba moaned, as he reached out to fondle the breasts of the dummy. “One time, simply talk straight.”

The cricket news:
Pakistan eight wickets over Malaysia in a test match
. . .

Obadiah sighed. “This modern age. You want it all right off. Nobody has time for a preface anymore. There was a time when
the beauty of a story was in the meander. Take your hand off Magdalena. All right. Your pretty soldier asked my wife to watch
the boy while she teaches. She said the boy might be a bit difficult to handle. She even offered to pay —”

“And so?”

“You don’t know my wife? ‘Pay me to care for a child!’ Even before the girl came to her, she had dragged up an ancient universe
from under the house. A crib, a high chair, a stuffed giraffe, a bassinet—You see, this is how women join clubs. It’s true
that men often join secret societies, but the societies of women are so secret even they don’t precisely know —”

“Where’d she get it?” I said.

“The bassinet? From beneath the house. Didn’t I —”

“The kid. Where’d she get the —”

And so we began to wonder. Us in the blue chairs, Obadiah on the carpet sample, wondering, which led to conjuring, which led
to certain lovely visions of coitus. Latin, Obadiah informed, from the past participle
coire
.

“Virgin birth,” Pohamba said. “Who could get their sausage anywhere near her but Him?”

“Wait, what’s a past participle?”

Antoinette appeared. Cotton balls in her ears to keep out the noise of us, but even so, she heard every word anybody ever
said. Your own thoughts unsafe—she channeled them through her cotton balls. She didn’t say anything, only raised a fork, tiny,
but in the light of that single bulb, in that cave-like room, it loomed. She’d skewer us gossips up like shish kebab.

And maybe she was more imposing now than she was in the old days, the days Obadiah often waxed over.
Had she been Turkish,
he’d say,
my wife would have been a pasha.
Her standing there in her brutally ironed gray dress, holding that fork. Why waste words when you can lash with your eyes?
Cowards. Leave that girl’s life alone. Enough for her already without you sloths mongering. Father? What father? Who cares
about a father? Any.

L
ate. Pohamba pounds the wall. “My dreams are too loud,” he says. “Aren’t yours?”

“No.”

“It’s her. She’s walking on my head with those heels.”

“Go to sleep.”

“She’s put me, you know, in a manly state.”

“I don’t want to hear about it.”

“And you’re not hungry?”

We had chunk meat for dinner, which I now can’t remember eating. “What have you got?”

“Canned snoek.”

“Use the Primus?”

“No. Outside.”

In front of our rooms he builds a small fire by the garbage pit. I hold my flashlight while he pours oil into one of Antoinette’s
big black pots. He slaps the fish out of the tin. “One-sixty k from the ocean,” he says. “You wouldn’t know it from the fish
we eat.”

I listen to the crackle of the oil. Above, a crowded bowl of stars and a dented orange moon so low in the sky, it looks like
it’s squatting in the veld.

“Another thing.”

“What?”

“Lowest population density of any country in the world, and I live in a two-and-a-half-by-four-meter room. Explain the incongruity.”

“I can’t.”

“Have I told you about my brother Moola, the scientific socialist?” he asks.

“Is he the one who lost his hand at the canning factory?”

The wind is so dead at this hour, I can hear him swallow. He doesn’t laugh. “That was Simeon.”

“Oh.”

“My father’s sister’s child. To myself, this is a brother. I called him Moola. His mother called him Bonifacius. We went to
junior primary together at Otavi. Then to Dobra for high school. The boy liked to dance, I tell you. Run also. Up in the mountains
above school. Had he lived he would have become as fast as Frankie Fredricks. Running in the Olympics. Money, cars, women.
He also read more than any of us. Fuck this school, he said. He said the rest of us—no matter how poor our fathers—were peons
of the whites. Sellouts. He said he was willing to die so we could rule ourselves and work together, because, he said, you,
my friends are the
proletariat
… It was going to be beautiful. We were going to build community halls, post offices. He always talked like that, us
holding hands and building post offices together.”

The oil in the pot splutters and Pohamba pokes at the fire with the edge of his boot.

“We formed an underground organization—Moola called it the League of the Just. We would meet in the veld, and Moola would
teach us, lecture us. So when the time came, I left school and followed Moola north and joined the struggle. Understand, we
hardly had boots. They had planes and tanks. But wasn’t our cause righteous, eh? ”

He pauses, cracks his knuckles, all of them.

“Myself and Brother Moola. We were part of a platoon that worked reconnaissance. In country. We’d spend our days sleeping
in the bush. Nights, we’d sabotage. We were saboteurs. Ha! Our job was to create fear. Not to win, only to keep the whites
afraid. We’d get them while they slept. We’d steal their women, their children. We were spooky terrorists. We were the gorilla
in guerrilla, get it? Oh, were we good! And Moola was our fearless leader. Then—it happens. We’re all sleeping in the bush,
middle of the day, up near their air base at Ruacana, and—suddenly—a helicopter lands on us like a weaver coming home to roost.
Two Boers hanging off that metal bird with howitzers. Out of seven comrades, four dead, rest of us wounded. Myself in the
left leg.”

He swallows loud, and rolls up his left pants leg.

It’s small for shrapnel, it seems to me. Still, I gasp.
Holy shit.

He’s quiet for a while, satisfied. Lets the thud-like truth of the wound settle.

“Only one of us, you see, wasn’t there. One of us, you see, had,
fortuitously,
crept away before the ambush. Have a good sleep, my comrades. Oh, he used to cheer the good fight with his right hand raised!
Mandela! Nujoma! Toivo ja Toivo! We tracked him the next day.” Pohamba burps, looks at me over the pot. “Watch the ones who
talk too much.”

“Why’d he do it?”

Now he laughs, waves his spoon around. “Why does anybody do anything? Money or women. In this case it was money.” He sings,
“
Money makes the world go round the world go round the world…
We found five hundred rand in his boots. A few thousand more in his underwear. My dear brother sold us. He was trying to get
out. Maybe he wanted to preach the revolution in Paris or somewhere. Fuck some French girls for Trotsky. I don’t blame him.
Do you think I blame him?”

He reaches into the pot and feels the fish with his fingers.

“The fish is done.”

“What did you do to him?”

“Oh, the natural thing.” Pohamba takes his spoon and glops some fish on my plate.

“What’s that?”

“Eat your fish. Don’t you want some chutney?”

I point the light in his face.

“What’s the natural thing?”

He yawns. “We tied him to the back of a lorry and drove. Drove till the veld shaved the skin off his body. You could hear
him moaning on the Champs-Elysées. Then we cut him loose and let the birds eat out his eyes.”

Pohamba takes the pot off the fire and sets it on a rock. I hand him back my plate. I want to believe him. I want to believe
him in the way you want to believe the one story people tell (he told so many, but he really told only one) to be the truth.
He’s stacking himself up against the soldier.

“She’s not that hot,” I say.

“No, only that arse.”

He hands me back my plate heaped with blackened snoek. I shove the fish in my mouth with my hands. When I’m through with my
second plate, I watch him eat. Pohamba’s a dainty eater. He changes the subject, tells me how he’d like to open a shop at
Goas and sell cooldrink and candy to the boys. Easy money, he says. A monopoly. Some cooldrink, some chocolate. Simba raisins
and peanuts. “Wouldn’t you like to open a shop?” he says.

W
e pretended not to notice. Bastard children were normal for country people, farm people. Or men. (Pohamba claimed legions.)
Not for a woman teacher. Not for a woman teacher at a Catholic school. And certainly not for a woman teacher at a Catholic
school where her brother-in-law is principal. To parade around as if it was nothing (as Miss Tuyeni put it to Antoinette,
overheard by Obadiah, who reported to us) was more than an embarrassment; it was a disgrace. The girl goes off to fight a
war and now look at her, toting a child without a husband. Which is what men want. Any man. To plant seeds without staying
around to water the garden. The price respectable women charge is marriage. There is no other fee.