The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

1. THE TAR ROAD

Boys stand with road-sore feet holding cardboard suitcases. They stand clustered, but not in a group. They’re not together. They don’t talk into the wind; they only wait on the brake lights that so rarely happen. Still, every new car or bakkie or combi or lorry is a new hope, rising and dying like a beating heart glowing and then spending itself on the pavement, only to live again when the next one comes. Out there in their best clothes, trying to get to the school deep in the veld. At certain moments in the early afternoon the tar road looks like it’s burning. A boy kneels and sniffs. There’s always one who thinks he can tell how much longer it will be by smelling the road.

“Stupid,” another says.

“Not stupid, science. It’s about air currents near the pavement’s surface. They change when —”

“Ai, go on.”

“Where? Go on where?”

They’re hungry, but you don’t want to pull out food, because no one would want to be caught chewing if the miracle of car does stop. Imagine a comfortable ride in a bucket seat with the radio playing. They keep their bread in their pockets. Boys have it worst. They are chosen last, after old mammies, mothers with babies, old men. Most of the time their only option is a lorry. Lorries don’t stop, they only slow down, just long enough for the boys to toss their bundles and leap, before the driver shifts gears and accelerates again. Klim op! Then they huddle against each other in the wind and wait for it to be over, as the lorry gains speed and begins to cross bridge after bridge over the dry rivers.

2. POHAMBA

He was a big man and he prayed out loud in a small bed. Through the wall, his face in the mattress, and still we heard him.

Out of the deep I call

To Thee, O Lord, to Thee

Before Thy throne of grace I fall.

Be you merciful to me… Damn you, to me…

During the day he denounced God as residual colonialist propaganda. “Listen, if He was opium, I’d stuff him in a pipe and smoke Him.” Pohamba. Resident Catholic school blasphemer, atheist, revolutionary, provocateur, math teacher. Even he turned to a higher power when the long veld night closed us in. Who else could deliver him from such a place? A farm in the desert? And what kind of god would put a farm in the desert? Pohamba was a man out of options. All traditional and earthly means had failed. He’d sent countless letters to the Ministry of Education begging for a post in a town, any backwater dorp would do. Dear Comrade, I’ll even accept a position south of Windhoek in order to do my share for this budding democracy.

Every one of them went unanswered. He often conjured those letters, talked about them as if they were castaways washed up on some bureaucrat’s desk. And when he got going, a little Zorba in his veins, he’d describe the bureaucrat, Deputy Minister So-and-So. Meneer Deputy Minister Son of Somebody Important in the Movement! Some bastard who spent the war years in Europe while the rest of us sat here ja baasing P. W. Botha. He’d give his bureaucrat a smooth, freshly shaved face and a fat-cat corner office in the Sanlam Building. A wristwatch big as a Volkswagen. And a secretary, of course, in a chafing skirt. White. Make her a white secretary. And he’d imagine his letters, his babies, sitting stacked neat, unread, ignored. “Like to burn that office,” he’d say. “Watch Meneer Deputy Minister Son of Somebody Important melt. Secretary too. Both of them black as char in the morning.”

Nights were different. And some nights it wasn’t Jesus he’d beg to but his mother. These were the longest. It wasn’t that he kept me up when he talked to his mother. It was that I couldn’t hear him. Even with our walls made of envelope, I had to press a coffee cup to the wall to listen. Mama oh Mama. .

She was buried, he once said, behind a garage on a farm north of Otavi.

The hours drag on. Then the inevitable. Through the wall Pohamba moans low. The bedsprings noisy for a while before the death silence of small relief.

But there were, weren’t there, also afternoons when you could have almost called him happy? Pohamba on a rock outside our rooms, cooking bloodwurst, thick German plumpers he bought from the butcher Schmidsdorf in Karibib. Pohamba whistling. His tape player spewing that horrid Afrikaner disco folk. Tinny synthesized drumbeats accompanied by sexy panting.

Saturday languoring. Wind, sand, boredom, sweat, visions of sausages. Eating our only glory then. The rest of us loll in the sweaty shade while Pohamba forks bloodwurst. We lick our fingers, slowly. Pohamba moving in time. A big man but graceful. His feet plap the dust. The rocks beneath our heads get hotter. Sleep refuses. Pohamba bobs. He skids. He twirls, juts, swags. He wiggles a booty at us. In the pan, in the holy grease, our beloveds fatten and splurt.

3. THE VOLUNTEER

A brother from the diocese drove me out there from Windhoek. His name was Brother Hermanahildis. He was a silent man with a bald, sunburned head. The single thing he said to me in four hours was “I am not a Boer, I am pure Dutch. I was born in The Hague.” He drove like a lunatic. I watched the veld wing by, and the towns that were so far between. Brakwater, Okahandja, Wilhelmstal. Brother Hermanahildis seemed to be suffering from an excruciating toothache. At times he took both hands off the wheel and pulled on his face. I was relieved when we reached Karibib and he turned onto a gravel road heading south. Eventually, he let me off at a wind-battered tin sign — FARM GOAS — and told me to follow the road, that the mission was just beyond the second ridge. When you get there, Brother Hermanahildis said, go and see the Father directly.

Ta-ta.

With a suitcase in each hand, one backpack on my back, another on my stomach, I followed the road, a rock-strewn double-track across the veld. There were a number of ridges. I looked for one that might be considered a second one. The short rocky hills made it impossible to see what was ahead on the road, although in the distance I could see a cluster of smallish mountains rising. A few crooked, bony trees here and there. Strawlike grass grew like stubble up out of the gravel. Somehow I thought a purer desert might have been more comforting. Where were the perfect rippled dunes? Where was the startling arid beauty? These plants looked like they’d rather be dead. I listened to the crunch of my own feet as I shuffled up and over ridges. There was no second ridge. There would never be a second ridge.

*

An hour or so later, sweat-soaked, miserable, I stood, weighted and wobbly, and looked down on a place where the land swooped into a kind of valley, a flat stretch of sand and gravel. There was a group of low-slung buildings painted a loud, happy yellow. There was a hill with a tall white cross on top. Hallelujah! As best I could I bumbled down the road until I reached a cattle gate made from bedsprings lashed to a post. The gate was latched closed by a complicated twist of wire. As I struggled with the wire, a rotund man in a khaki suit moved slowly but inevitably down the road toward me, as if being towed by his own stomach. When he reached the other side of the gate he stopped. He faced me for a moment before he spoke much louder than he needed to. “Howdy.”

“Howdy,” I said.

“I see you are having some trouble with our gate.”

“A little.”

“In fact, you are unable to open it?”

“No, actually I can’t.”

“Of course not. You’re the volunteer?”

“Yes.”

“Volunteer of what?”

“Pardon?”

He wore large glasses. Behind them his eyes were tiny, distant, and his head seemed far too small for his body. Behind him, up the road, a group of boys in powder-blue shirts had gathered to watch us. Under a lone and scraggled tree, a bored cow gazed at me in that eerie, death-announcing way cows have of looking right through you.

“And your name might be?”

“Larry Kaplanski.”

He pumped my hand from the other side of the cattle gate.

“Pleasure, Mr. Kaplansk. So very good of you —”

“Kaplanski.”

His big head winced. He swatted a fly off his ear.

“And your qualifications, Mr. Kaplansk?”

“Qualifications?”

He took off his glasses and examined me. Without them his eyes got even smaller, receded into his head as if an invisible thumb had pushed them in like buttons.

“I see. And what have you brought for us?”

I stared at him. Even with all the shit I’d lugged —

“To be expected!” he boomed. “You came under the presumption that you yourself will be of use to us? Oh, erroneous! Oh, so erroneous!”

“But —”

“Be this as it may, Mr. Kaplansk. Of course it would have been far more advantageous to our development, yes, to our development, had you placed cash in an envelope and, well, to be frank, mailed it! Goas, Private Bag 79, Karibib, Namibia, 9000! Alas! You didn’t!” He turned and raised a thick, baggy hand and swept it across everything in sight, the blue-shirted boys, the cow, the infinite veld — all of it dry, everything everywhere dry.

“Brother Hermanahildas told me to see the Father.”

“Brother who?”

“From The Hague, Brother Hermana —”

“Listen.” He grasped the gate with both hands as if he were preparing to vault it. Then he leaned toward me and whispered, “Have you not heard? No man can serve two masters, Mr. Kaplansk.” He backed away, appraised me again, gnawing the inside of his cheek. “Do you understand the parameters as they’ve been succinctly explained this day of our Lord, March the sixth, nineteen hundred and ninety-one?”

I nodded frantically.

“Very well! As long as you’re here, you’ll teach Standard Six. English and History.” He about-faced, whistled once, as if he were followed by a platoon (and it was true, always the principal commanded an invisible army), and marched up the road toward the cluster of school buildings. Some boys came down and helped me with the gate. The cow, without taking its eyes off me, took a long, long piss.

4. CLASSROOM

They stand up when I walk into the room. Every morning, first period, they leap out of their chairs. Goed morro, Teacher. And every morning, my fraudulence more transparent, I plead, Sit down. I beg you guys.

So cold in the shadows and so unbearably hot in the sun, and no in between. I watch the day rise, then blare, then finally leak away through the cracked and broken glass. The boys sit in a swath of dusty light with their foreheads sweating but their feet still cold. The boys who wore their shoes were quietest. The ones who went without, who conserved their shoes for church or soccer, would rub their dry, chapped feet together, and you’d hear it all through class like a chorus of saws.

Rubrecht, Nestor, Jeremiah, Gideon, Sackeus, Albertus, Demus, Mumbwanje, Kalumbo, Magnus, Fanuel (coughing, always coughing, always apologizing for it), Stevo, Nghidipo, Ichobod… Later in the term, Fanuel will spend two weeks at the clinic at Usakos. Bloody lung, Sister Ursula will call it. After Usakos, Fanuel will be transferred to Windhoek General Hospital, and from there we will lose track of him.

But right now another boy, one of the smallest Standard Sixes, Magnus Axahoes (his feet don’t yet touch the floor), raises his hand and stands and whispers, “May I, the toilet, Teacher?”

“You may.”

Magnus walks out of the classroom, then runs across the courtyard, his feet kicking up sand that seems to rise but not fall into the now stark light.

5. THE C-32

I remember the slow roll of a road that seems flat. How it suddenly dips into dry sloots I’d forgotten were there, and that swooning that happens in my stomach. I also think of the old woman who sold rocks at a small wooden table. Who did she sell them to? She sat at a place where the veld seemed to repeat itself, where there was no sense of the land passing, or even of time. Nothing in either direction but fence-line and veld, and then there she is by the side of the road, at the top of a rise. You don’t see her until you are upon her. She’s there, waiting. Everything about her has shriveled in the sun but her hands. They seem to have grown bigger than her face, and she sits there, lording over the common rocks she calls gems. That’s what her sign says: GEMS 4 SALE. She doesn’t shout, wave, or cajole. She lets the truth of the sign speak for itself. Those enormous gnarled hands hovering over the table as if she’s trying to levitate it. And then she’s gone — or we’re gone. We never stopped, not one time, all the times we went back and forth along that road. We never even slowed down. Turn your head and she’s a shroud of dust.

6. WALLS

In the beginning, none of the other teachers would much talk to me. As I had apparently come to Goas on my own volition, I was suspect. Those first weeks I spent a lot of time cowering in my room in the singles quarters, pretending to write tediously detailed lesson plans.

Mine was the room assigned to teachers who came and went. Rooms in the singles quarters were square boxes, each with one window set low in the wall. From bed, I lived eye-level with the veld. My view was of the toilet houses, and beyond them the Erongo Mountains that would always be too far to walk to.

The teacher who’d lived in my room before me had papered the walls with the German beer calendars that came free in the Windhoek Advertiser. Everywhere you looked were shirtless blonde buxoms in tight shorts. There was one girl in nothing but a red bandanna and a Stetson staring down from the ceiling above the bed, her breasts like about-to-be-dropped bombs. One day I ripped her down, and was tearing off the others when there came a knock on the wall. Then a voice, my neighbor’s, Teacher Pohamba’s: “What are you doing, Teacher?”

“I thought I’d clean up a little.”

The noise of him lifting himself out of bed. He opened his door and came over to my window and squatted down. Then he stuck his head through the torn screen. Teacher Pohamba yawned at me. It was meant, I think, to be a sympathetic, comradely yawn, but it came out too big, like a kind of maw. “Hand over the tits, Teacher.”

I gave him the scraps and he stuffed them in his shirt pocket, but he remained outside my window. Teacher Pohamba pitied me. Me standing there on the cement floor in my Walgreen’s shower shoes. “Go to sleep,” he said finally. “Don’t you know it’s siesta?”

When the first study-hour triangle rang, he came to my window again and told me to follow him. Together, we walked across the soccer field to the married teachers’ housing, to the circle of plastic chairs in front of Teacher Obadiah’s. The old man was holding court. Everybody was still drowsy from sleep and only half listening. Teacher Obadiah wasn’t as old as he liked to consider himself, but he was one of those people whose age baffles. He might have been fifty-five; he might have been seventy-five. He reveled in the crevices of his face and his white hair. That day he had a week-old Namibian on his knee and was lamenting a story about corruption in the Finance Ministry of the new government. The only thing the white government did fairly, Obadiah said, was teach the black government how to steal.

Pohamba drummed his cheeks awhile and said, “Politicians: black, white, bowlegged — what’s the difference? Let’s hear the weather.”

Obadiah flipped some pages and read. “In the north, hot. On the coast, hot. In the east, very hot. In the central interior —”

“Have mercy!”

Eventually, Obadiah turned my way and tried to bring me into the fold of the conversation. He asked me what I thought of noble Cincinnatus.

“Who?”

“You say you hail from Cincinnati?”

“Yes.”

Obadiah made a roof over his eyes with his hand and peered at me. “Well then, of course, I speak of its namesake, the great Roman general Cincinnatus. Surely, you must —”

“Sorry, I —”

“And you have come here to teach our children history?”

“Is he in the Standard Six curriculum?”

“By God, if he isn’t he should be! Gentleman farmer, reluctant warrior, honest statesman. When people needed him, he ruled. When the crisis was over, he returned to a quiet life on his farm. Not a farm like this, a proper farm. Had Cincinnatus lived here, he wouldn’t have come back. He would have done anything to avoid such a fate — even, I daresay, become a tyrant.” Obadiah put his hands on his knees and leaned forward on his plastic chair.

“Why are you here, young Cincinnatus?”

“I have no idea.”

“He tore down Nakale’s calendars,” Pohamba said.

Obadiah stood and began to pace the dust, his hands behind his back. “The beer girls? Interesting. I must admit that on occasion I peeped in there to have a look. I too once had desires. I have since forgotten what they were.” He wheeled and faced me. “Why did you do it? Were you intending to moralize?”

“I wanted to be alone,” I said.

“Ah!” Obadiah brought his hands together as if to applaud me, but stopped short and whispered, more to himself than to me, “Don’t worry. You’re alone.”

7. MORAL TALE

Morning noise: The murmurs of the boys coming from church, the slap of their bare feet on the concrete porchway, the slow whish whish of the lazy classroom sweepers, boys on punishment from the day before.

Every morning meeting, before school, the principal told a moral tale. We’d stand more or less at attention, half listening, gripping our coffee, watching the unburnished gray light leak through the staff room’s single window. Not the sun; full sun wouldn’t happen for an eternity.

Often the principal’s stories came from the Bible. Other times the lessons were taken from the newspaper or from some gossip he picked up at the Hotel Rossman in Karibib. Most of the time — wherever they came from — they were somehow related to the principal’s guilt over one of his own vices. That morning he must have been suffering pangs over his embezzlement from the school till.

He wore a different tie for each day of the week. It’s how we knew what day it was. As he spoke, his Adam’s apple thrashed beneath his yellow Wednesday tie, as if, as Obadiah once said, his poor conscience was trying to escape his lying throat.

“Listen, colleagues,” he commanded. “Seriously and piously. This happened near Angra Pequena a hundred years ago, but indeed, it could have happened yesterday.” He paused and swallowed, allowed this thundering fact to settle upon us. “Let us say it did happen yesterday. Yes, yesterday. Three skeletons were found in the unforgiving sands of the Namib. God didn’t create our desert. Hark! The Namib was born of God’s forgetting. He’d always meant to come back and put something here, but alas, he didn’t. So it goes with this country. Let us return to today’s tale: Two of the skeletons were found together, the third on a dune about a kilometer away. All three were partially covered by sand and of similar age and weathering.”

He paused and eyed us all, one by one. He lingered at Pohamba, who was teetering, fighting hard to keep his eyes open and his knees from buckling.

“Erastus?” the principal said.

Pohamba had a new girl in Karibib. He hadn’t landed on his own bed in two days. He still had on his white ducks and silky disco shirt #7. The principal was the only one at Goas who called him Erastus.

“Erastus, will you summarize?”

Pohamba licked his chapped lips. “Three skeletons,” he said. “Two found together. The other not far away. It is curious. In fact, I would even say it smells.”

The principal resumed, not satisfied, but not willing to derail the tale at this point for the sake of telling Pohamba what he thought of him. “Indeed. The first two skeletons were found with their heads staved in. The head of the third was uncrushed. And in the thin whitened bones that once enjoyed the skin of a fist, the third held”—he pointed a vicious finger at Pohamba—“what?”

“His member,” Pohamba said.

Even the principal laughed, his cheeks filling up and exhaling like bellows. The problem was, we laughed longer, and whenever that happened, he changed sides. He ducked under the table and returned with his shoe and proceeded to pound, Khrushchev-like, for order.

“No, Erastus, he didn’t need that anymore. And mark me: Yours too will wither. No, I speak of something far more lasting. In the hand of the third skeleton… diamonds! After he murdered his two friends, he was going to leave the desert a king. In the wind and sand, he gripped those immaculate stones. Imagine how tight and with what hope he must have clutched them in the long Namib night!”

Now the principal guffawed, happy to pawn his shame off on someone else. “Oh, you smelled something, Erastus.” He brought his fingers to his nose and gave them a smell. “Oh yes. And I do also. Satan lurks this morning. I smell corruption. I smell evil. Is not lust merely another form of avarice? God forgot the Namib, but he remembered to punish the third man, and He, in All His Glory, won’t forget grown teachers who chase young strumpets and neglect their duties to learners either. When are you going to be too old, Erastus? For the love of God, woe unto you, woe!”

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.

8. A SPOT NORTHWEST OF OTJIMBINGWE

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

The 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.

9. ANTOINETTE

Sometimes, 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.

10. A DROWNED BOY

Among 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.

11. GOAS

Seasons 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.

12. STORY OF A TEACHER’S WIFE

Tuesday and the beautiful and sleek and unsmiling and too good for us Mavala Shikongo is gone. The only single woman teacher to bless an all-boys boarding school so far in the veld even the baboons feel sorry for us. They come and shit by our doors. Yes, Mavala Shikongo has escaped Goas after a scant three weeks. Three weeks; the universe had only just begun to be merciful. The word is, she’s found a better posting at a junior primary in Grootfontien. But twenty-one days was enough for us all, single or divorced, or wanting to be divorced, decrepit or spry, morally repugnant or generally decent — every last one of us — to fall, to stagger, to cave into love with Mavala Shikongo.

She had arrived not long after I had. No longer was I the new teacher. Anyway, my novelty was short-lived. I wore pants. The brief moment she graced the farm, Mavala Shikongo lived a quarter mile up the road, cloistered, in a room that had once been the principal’s attached garage. She was Miss Tuyeni’s, the principal’s wife’s, sister.

She ignored us. Three weeks we were invisible. Long school-day afternoons she never once stopped by Auntie Wilhelmina’s fence to monger the latest lies, only went back to her room at the back of the principal’s house, to her books. Festus reported, having spied the mail, that she was studying for a university course in England by correspondence. She’s not satisfied, it was said. She doesn’t even want to be a teacher, it was said. She wants to be an accountant. This was swooned over. She’s going somewhere in this world, Mavala Shikongo is. She’s not going to lie down with the cows at Goas. Women rise higher now. The war did it. Because — not only skirts, not only textbooks — Mavala Shikongo’s a genuine hero of the struggle herself. An ex-PLAN fighter. Not even twenty-five and this girl’s shot her share of Boers. Those blinkless eyes, it isn’t hard to imagine them staring down a barrel. How many times those days did we moon by her classroom windows? On our way to the toilets, just to catch a glimpse. Three weeks we circled, coward vultures from a distance. And now look: Mavala Shikongo’s battered mustard suitcase is riding away in the back of the priest’s bakkie. How are we going to get up in the morning without the sight of her charging across the sand in her saucy black heels, those inspiring city shoes? Only Mavala Shikongo could lure us away from our dirty dreams on the coldest mornings. Days when our fingers cracked like the branches in the coffee fire and our scrotums didn’t loosen until after third period break. How to warm a desert winter now?

We’re all deep in mourning in the singles quarters and nobody feels like walking out to the road to wait for a hike into Karibib. Obadiah wanders over to my room and offers me a freshly peeled carrot. He invites me for an afternoon drink in his Datsun. I follow him out to the car. Obadiah’s Datsun is mired in the sand behind his house, near Antoinette’s chicken coops and laundry lines. An old Windhoek taxi, it will never, come the Second Coming or even the Third, drive anywhere again. Still, Obadiah has prophecies. Prophecies of the engine one day combusting, the carburetor carborating, the upholstery growing fur again. In the meantime, we talk in it. I take a nip of Zorba and say, Farewell, Mavala, if only we could have opened that mustard suitcase, taken one final whiff of you.

Obadiah adjusts the rearview. He’s wearing his TransNamib hat, the hat his cousin Elias gave him when he retired from the railroad. Its peak grazes the top of the crumbling roof of the car, which, every time he moves his head, snows chunks of old yellow foam.

With his left hand at the top of the steering wheel, he gets right into it. It’s another story, he says. A good many years ago, he says, another new teacher arrived at Goas. He hadn’t been here long. Three weeks, perhaps. But three weeks is always enough for a man to fall in love with another man’s wife. The Roman Empire? It took Nero one drunken night and a box of matches to burn the place down. The Hundred Years’ War? An exaggeration. Advertising for Joan of Arc. God’s Flood? You think he needed forty days and forty nights to drown every man and beast and creeping thing? He — how do you put it? — overdid it. He was irritated. Wouldn’t you be? Five chapters in and already you’ve got to start again.

Obadiah moves the steering wheel only slightly, as if we’re moseying along a mostly straight road. Outside, around the car, the scrabbling chickens peck the dust.

So, Obadiah says, three weeks and the new teacher is insanely, lunatically, in love with another teacher’s wife. The teacher with the wife taught Standard Four math and the new teacher taught Standard Five Afrikaans. One day the husband noticed that the new teacher’s class was cacophonous, more cacophonous than usual. He went and stuck his head in the window of his new colleague’s classroom. Where’s Teacher? he asked. Thirty, forty voices answered, We know not, Teacher. But the teacher with the wife could see something in the eyes of those boys. They were mocking him. This happened in the seventies. Boys were less innocent then. The war made them more worldly. These boys didn’t want to study fractions, they wanted to kill whites. They used to climb up the hill by the cross and shout: Boers back to Kakamas! And what is it about war and lust? So yes, they mocked that teacher. Although their lips were tight, he could see the laughter in their eyes. While the cat’s away, the mice will play! The teacher then walked slowly toward the singles quarters. He didn’t knock on the new teacher’s door. It happened, by the way, in Kapapu’s old room, the room next to yours. A few minutes later, his wife followed him home across the sand, naked and guilty as Eve, clutching her clothes to her chest. We all watched — I am shamed to confess it — from our classroom windows. Neither the teacher nor his wife nor the new teacher left their room for the rest of the day. That night the teacher with the wife returned to the new teacher’s room and killed him with a bicycle spoke. But here is the strange part. His wife accompanied him. In the morning we found them together, leaning against each other outside the new teacher’s door, sleeping. Odd thing that, except for the blood on their clothes, they could have been angels. Lovers entwined. Romantic. The magistrate at Usakos sentenced them both. Eventually the husband was released — his offense being merely a crime of passion — but the wife remained in prison, she being guilty, under the laws of the time, of not one but two heinous crimes.

Obadiah reaches across me and pulls a rusty nail clipper out of the glove compartment and begins to trim his cuticles. Now that he’s stopped driving, the coming of the winter night, the flat dim bluelessness we wear along with our double sweaters and bed socks, gives me a weird sense that we’ve really gone somewhere. I watch the shadows Obadiah’s billowing shirts make as they swing on the line in the wind. Near the ashes of the fire pit are the remains of a laceless tennis shoe and the torn cellophane of an empty potato-crisp bag pecked clean by the roaming chickens.

The room next to mine?

Obadiah nods. To kill a man with a bicycle spoke is an ugly thing, he says, as he sweeps the nail slices off his shirt into his hand and tosses them out of what used to be a window. The new teacher’s stomach was so ripped apart, Obadiah says, the constables had to collect his insides up in a bucket. To many people the question was: Did she take part, or did she only watch? Yet I was never interested in this question. To myself the murder itself has never meant very much. It was the vigil by the door. Over the years what has remained is the way we found them slumped in the morning. Vengeance, true, but something else perhaps, something more difficult to define. I ask this: However it came about, there must have been satisfaction in such exhaustion, no? A sense of things being finished at last? Might it be that those two spent their best hours out there waiting for the light?

He stoops and begins to work on his toes.

Antoinette comes from around the front of the house and, without hesitation, chooses a bird from the coop, twirls it by the neck. It’s a circling. You flap your useless wings, you splay your crooked feet. Maybe Mavala Shikongo will hate Grootfontien, I say. Maybe she’ll come back.

Obadiah is too polite to laugh at anybody. Nor does he point out every time you’re a goon. He says nothing. In the waning, in the doomed light, I watch Antoinette raise a rusty cleaver on dinner.

13. UP ON THE HILL BY THE CROSS

The school hunkers in the center of the farm, near the intersection of three dry rivers. It was thought that this would ensure enough groundwater to support the teachers and the learners, even during the driest years.

The view from the top of the hill extends all the way from the mission — the school buildings, the church, the hostel — to the base of the Erongo Mountains. And you can see all three rivers, channels of grassless sand, meeting for a stretch near Goas and then parting for good. The Gamikaub heads straight north across the veld, ridged as a tar road, while the Kuiseb meanders west, where it snakes a narrow gorge into the Erongos, the beginning of its long desert haul to the Atlantic. The Toanib River, the Goas favorite, has no sense where it’s going. It winds beneath Krieger’s gleaming razor-wire fence, but then wanders back onto Goas, twisting south, where it seems to die out in the scrub.

Every evening the five of us — Pohamba, Obadiah, Festus, Vilho, and I — we’d stretch out on cushions stolen from the staff-room chairs and pass around a two-week-old Windhoek Advertiser. You didn’t read the Advertiser for news. You read The Namibian for news. But who wanted news? After a week in the classroom, we wanted the real dirt, the smut and the glory. A fifty-thousand-rand sweepstakes on page 3 and multiple sets of naked breasts (in rainbow colors, spirit of the new nation) on the foldout. It was a good newspaper. Pohamba had it first and read out loud a sampling of that day’s headlines:

IDI AMIN HAS ADVANCED SYPHILIS

NAMIBIAN WHITES PLAN MASS EXODUS TO PARAGUAY

US VP QUAYLE TO VISIT WINDHOEK

DOG POISONER ACTIVE IN TSUMEB

TWISTED AND HORNY, WIFE TAKES GRANDPA LOVER

MISS NAMIBIA PAGEANT BATHING SUIT MISHAP. PHOTOS, PAGE 5

“Hey, let’s see those last two,” Festus said.

And when we were through with the paper, I’d either sleep or watch the veld. Pohamba liked to say the only absolute of Goas is this: The same veld that wishes you good night will kick you in the head in the morning.

But Obadiah would say, That’s blindness. “Empty? The veld? You must be looking into your own heart, Teacher Pohamba.” Obadiah would say the veld changes so much, it’s hard to keep track. One day you’ll be out walking beyond the Voortrekker graves, and there, in a place where there had been nothing the day before but nameless scrub, will be a rare clump of stinkbush. Another day, in that same spot, poison mustard berries, or the more deadly euphorbia. It’s not that nothing grows on Goas, it’s only that it’s nothing we can eat. And the grass? The Boers call it upslang because it shoots up overnight. After rain, it’s green for a day. The next day it’s dry as straw. Watch the dry grass alone, he would say. How some hours it leans with the wind, other hours fights against it. And more than movement — consider the light. In late morning, the Erongos to the west look like mounds of peppered cheese. And think of the mirages that pool at the base of those mountains. You walk and you walk and that water stretches away, but also, at every step, gets bigger. A pond becomes a lake, becomes an ocean. It’s merely a collision of heated and unheated air causing an optical refraction. But what, I ask, do climatological proofs matter to a thirsty man?

14. CLASSROOM

Let the truth out: Kaplansk has no grammar. I am an American from the 1970s. In Miss Eckersley’s English class, we sewed puppets while Miss Eckersley played guitar and sang.

Again, today, I drone onward, reading to my learners out of the book. English Lesson 12: The Simple Future. I drone as if droning itself is to have faith in something. .

“To express a promise, willingness, as well as futurity, we use I (we) will and not I (we) shall. Remember, for the interrogative we use Shall I? in all cases, not Will I? Now, Shall I or Shall we? often has the meaning Do you want me to…? or Would you like me to…? E.g., Shall I open the window? Shall I get you a cup of tea? Shall we go to the theater tonight? Will, on the other hand, is another can of worms entirely. Will expresses not a question but rather a determination. For instance, I will study my grammar during study hour. I will not beat children who are smaller than I. This sort of thing. Any questions? Confusions? Bafflements? Things of this nature?”

“The simple future as opposed to what?” Rubrecht Kanhala, class genius and sweat-inducing burden on the teacher, asks.

“Excellent question, Rubrecht. As opposed to, well, the complicated future, which we don’t have to worry about right now.”

Resume drone.

The other boys’ heads remain steady; for a while the droop is only in their eyes. Then slowly, one after another, their heads begin to drop, and I watch them catch their heads without their hands, raise them again, and try so hard to listen.

“All right, then. Does anybody remember what an interrogative is?”

Silence, tomb-like. Even Rubrecht is tired of this. None of the boys wear watches and there’s no clock on the wall, but Jeremiah Puleni, famous for knowing the time in his bones, has begun to rub his feet on the sandy floor. Half an hour left now and everybody knows I’ll talk it to the grave. Jeremiah, barefoot farm kid so much taller than the other boys, older too. He started school years late because he was needed on the farm. His brother was up north in the fighting. He’s never caught up. He just sits in class after class and smiles. Jeremiah Puleni smiles across years. Not a word of English, he speaks only Damara and Afrikaans. When I look at him, he’s always staring, silent, concentrating. I wonder, Concentrating on what, Jeremiah? A big oaf of a kid, always looking for a reason to laugh. We know he’s doomed, and for this we all love him more. Goas is a haven for some. No one wants to think about what will happen to Jeremiah Puleni when he finally finishes Standard Seven and there’s no primary school left for him.

“Good. Now copy this chart.”

I watch the sun streak through the tall windows. Dusty yellow bars reach across the room, crashing into the heads of the taller boys. Jeremiah’s face awash in light, and still he narrows his eyes at the rules on the board, copied by Teacher but not understood by Teacher. To this day, not understood by Teacher. And Jeremiah Puleni? Him staring politely, his lips quivering, as if it all makes perfect sense, is perfectly reasonable.

15. GOAS MORNING

Not yet morning and Obadiah sits in the paling darkness in his blue chair and caresses his new Grundig radio. The batteries are spent and the generator’s been off for hours, but still he imagines what it might tell him or what song it might play. So much going on — even now, even all the way out here — in this silent little box. A cacophony of unheard voices, and here he sits in a robe and slippers listening to possibility. Astonishing, isn’t it, that there is ever silence in a world so vast and full of voices? Today in class he will yank out all the great maps from the locked cabinet and tack them up all over the walls, show the children the North Pole, Siberia, Alaska, the Philippines, Addis Ababa, Cairo, Montevideo. He will thrill the children with the possibilities of maps. The world sits flat and conquerable. All pilgrimages possible! Maps — his heart soars — is there anything so glorious as a map? Even for a man who rarely ventures farther than the Pick ’n Pay in Karibib?

Antoinette sleeps. In the darkness he sees her without needing to look toward the half-open bedroom door. She sleeps with her feet sticking out from under the blankets like two paddles she’d smack him with. Her mouth gripped tight. She sleeps with her teeth clenched, in case she should die. Her soul might escape, she says. She breathes, noisy, out her nose. When they were younger, he used to kiss her as she slept. He’d pry her mouth open with his tongue. Was that myself? I’d like to do it now. Why can’t I? He lets go of the radio, but remains where he is, looking at nothing and everything. The newspaper photographs thumbtacked to the wall behind his head. Nkrumah, Bobby Kennedy, Miriam Makeba, a handcuffed Zephania Kameeta. They all stare at him, waiting for him to do something. Do what? What would you gallants have me do? He’d like a nip. A half-pint’s in his closet, waiting for him in a worn-out loafer, its copper top peeping out like a baby’s head. In the hostel, the boys are sleeping. In Windhoek, his sons, Thomas and Matti (both employed), are sleeping. In Tehran, two lovers, Tehranians, sleep. In Moscow, old cosmonauts gracefully sleep. In Peru, Morocco, Flanders. Why? Why can’t I?

The windmill behind the mission garage begins to move, one hesitant creech, then another and another until it reaches full squeal. He sees it looming above the mission garage in the dark. Aermotor Chicago. On the other blue chair is Antoinette’s unfinished needlework. He wants to touch it. Touch whatever it is she’s making now, to twist his fingers in that scrumble of yarn, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t reach for it. Only thinks about what it would feel like if he did. Which is different, isn’t it? He listens to her gusty breathing in the bedroom as the light turns from fog to yellow. Antoinette’s cocks crow all night. They never sleep either. To them it’s always dawn. Even so, he thinks, isn’t there always a darkening before morning? Why not touch? Why not go to her now? Why are there times — he’s thought this before — we’d rather want than grasp?

16. DIKELEDI

With Mavala Shikongo gone, our lusts still maintained a constant: Dikeledi. Pohamba once worked up the equation: p = d = 2 r = Dikeledi. Impossible that she was Festus’s wife, and yet she wore it proudly. She dominated Festus in ways we didn’t even try to fantasize about. It was rumored that when she wanted him — as in when she wanted him wanted him — she rang a little bell, a little tinkle tinkle only he could hear. These were the sorts of disgusting particulars we had to endure. Festus and Dikeledi were the farm’s abhorrent newlyweds. It was said she washed her teeth in fresh goat’s milk every morning. We all wished she’d sleepwalk over to the singles quarters, because that was the only way she’d come near us. She must have cleaned their little purple house all day. Somehow she successfully banished every grain of sand, every crunchable beetle underfoot. I used to watch her looking out the window. She didn’t seem to have any interest in watching our soccer field antics up close, but she always watched from the window. And so we made a point of putting on shows out there for her. That time Pohamba challenged every boy in Standard Five to wrestle him all at once. My job was to make certain no older boys snuck into the match, so I’d lined them up and crosschecked them against the Standard Five register. I set them up in three clusters, ripping off a dumb line from my junior high gym teacher: All right, halfwits, listen up. I want half of youse over here, half of youse over here — and half of youse over here. Pohamba with all those boys hanging from his neck, and the rest of us jeering him to scrum the Standard Sixes too. I look toward Festus’s purple house and there’s Dikeledi in the window.

Her head was shaped like an egg we all wanted to cradle. Sometimes she’d send a boy with marinated chicken and rice and syrupy peach halves to the singles quarters. Other times, potatoes and creamed corn from a can. But this was only charity. Her love for Festus unnerved us. Her face hid nothing. It was there in those teeth, in her nose, in the delicate porches of her ears. She looked at him a hundred different ways, but the one I remember most was curiosity, as if one of the reasons she loved him was that she was unsure of what he’d do next. No one at Goas was more predictable than Festus. He was the farm’s most unsecret agent. He was so reliably duplicitous, he circled back around to trustworthy. Festus was a man who cahootsed with both sides of the Goas power balance. When the principal wanted something, Festus hopped to it, believing one day he’d become assistant principal, should the principal ever deign to appoint one. Same went for the priest, though the reward might have been more intangible. (Then again, maybe not. It was said that the Father was a hoarder of both money and frozen steaks.) Above all, what Festus cherished were his hushed conferences in either the rectory or the principal’s office, his proximity to power.

But the question was: Why couldn’t he just be content to make love to Dikeledi? What makes an already rich man need more? Everybody was waiting for her to get pregnant, as this would, we thought, take the sting out of her being so close and yet always behind that window. Obadiah wrote it in a poem. May we rejoice in the sadness /of your milkplump breasts.

17. TYPING

It was rumored Pohamba had a wife, an actual wife, and that she lived in Otavi, and that some nights he would lock himself in his classroom and bang out letters to her on the school’s ancient Olivetti.

Festus and I would knock on the classroom door. We’d call out to him that we were going hunting, one of Pohamba’s favorite leisures. We hunted for the spoor of the elusive dwarfed hedgehog (Potamochoerus porcus) of the central Namib escarpment. Hunting entailed borrowing a couple of Auntie Wilhelmina’s whelps and marching around the veld with umbrellas. Pohamba said this is how real men hunted. So when he was holed up in there, we’d slip him notes under the door with bloody drawings of bludgeoned hedgehogs.

But when he was typing he never answered the door. We’d stand outside and listen to the rattle of the typewriter. Festus said that the wife had run away with a Boer. When the Boer tired of her she went back to Pohamba, but he wouldn’t take her, and neither would any of her people, so she had to go live in a cave up in the mountains of Damaraland. Festus said Pohamba sometimes took pity on her and every once in a while sent her a letter, which was delivered to her by a man on a donkey.

Obadiah said nonsense. He said Pohamba was just in love and that he wasn’t writing to his wife but to a floozy in Windhoek. He said the girl’s father was a SWAPO bigwig in the Justice Ministry and had forbidden her to marry a failed math teacher with a big strutting stride. That Pohamba had once tried to meet Bigwig at his office in the capital, but Bigwig’s secretary said he had to make an appointment two months in advance. After that Pohamba smashed his fist on the glass reception table and started shouting that this was his independence too, and that if he wanted to see a government employee in his own country — the one he fought for, the one the blood of his comrades gave birth to — then he wasn’t waiting two minutes, forget two months. So they threw him out, and almost arrested him, Obadiah said.

All I really know — and this is only conjecture, because Pohamba never said one way or the other — is that the typing, whomever he was typing to, was one of the few things he refused to make a farce out of. I think he was writing to someone, but that someone was either dead or so far gone from him it amounted to the same thing.

When Pohamba wasn’t around, we used to hunt his stuff for the pages, but we never found anything. He might have burned them. Or maybe he saved on paper by not using any, banging away at a dead ribbon.

One night I outlasted Festus and read as I listened to him type. I sat against Pohamba’s classroom door. In the early evenings, boys would climb the hill and do pull-ups on the cross. Every night, there were these silhouettes rising and falling in the half-light. Rubrecht Kanhala was up there then. I knew it was him because he was the best. His long body flinging itself up and over the horizontal bar of the cross. Rubrecht did what looked like fifty or so pull-ups, and the boys were chanting his name, begging for more. I gave up reading when there was no light left, but Pohamba plowed on, without a candle, the typewriter ringing as he reached the end of line after line.

18. RAIN

Rain, those few times it came without thunder. You could feel something bloated about the air when you breathed, and you knew. You also knew it would disappear as quickly as it arrived, that by tomorrow the dark stain in the sand would be as gone as the silence of the rain itself. I’d learned at least this, that the rain carried its own engulfing silence, and that it, too, would leave us. As if none of it ever happened. Then the Erongos would emerge from the clouds and loom again, and the relentless sun would pierce our thin walls, and we would curse the rain for bothering us in the first place.

It had been a glorious downpour, but it had gone on for nearly three hours. It was no longer a miracle, and however fleeting and teasing, it always started as a miracle. Now it was just rain again. We were waiting for after rain, when the sun would rise, battered, like a wet loaf. When Antoinette’s chickens would shake out their dirty feathers and saunter again. When the younger boys would start whittling sticks to spear the fantasy fish the older boys lied to them about: Don’t you know? They swim down from Ovamboland when the heavy rains come. Those boys — lying on their stomachs, watching the amazing river of actual water, looking for barbel or pink-bellied scroot. But the only thing the momentarily flowing Kuiseb carried along was a few drowned mice.

The earth slogged. The water curdled in our footprints in the sand. All was mud now. We’d all retreated to our rooms when Pohamba knocked on the wall. “Mother Goas has birthed another lunatic!” Then he came to my door and ordered: “Come and see.” Wet feet, towels over our heads, we went out to the edge of the soccer field. And there was Dikeledi at mid-field, whirling. The rain was still falling in gray veils. Festus was out there too, on his back, playing his fatty chest like bongos. She was wearing his stupid straw hat and laughing, her arms stretched out, her wet breasts swinging as if they were trying to reach out to her hands. Rain-worn, we craved her more. Pohamba kicked his door shut and yowled about his fucking toe. I rammed my door also. For once our envy of Festus spoke with one voice. It was too much. We shut up our windows and listened to the silence of our rooms, of our beds, as the dread rain pounded, pounded our corrugated roofs.

19. OBADIAH

My love’s been out rescuing the laundry from the rain. Sad that we must save our clothes from what’s so welcome. She flings a heap on the kitchen table and begins draping our sheets, our pillowcases. Over the table, over the stove, the counters, chairs. From the light fixtures, from the doors. She hangs an undershirt off the back of my own head. Our life as shrouds. When she’s done, she crosses the worn linoleum in her wet feet, slapping prints with detached toes. Where’d your toes go, my Toinette? She fills the kettle with a bit of water to rinse it, not too much, dumps it in the basin, fills it again. The drum of the water draining into the kettle joins the rain. How easy, how simple it is to merely fall. As if it never forgot. As if it always fell like this. She rips a match. The suck of the gas of the Primus. The flames reaching out from under the kettle like desperate blue tongues. Soon the kettle will scream as if it’s screaming only for her. Then her pruned hands will hold a mug. My wife or my mother? Am I remembering this or seeing it? What house of my life doesn’t have wires for laundry behind it? What kitchen of my life doesn’t house a woman making tea? Your drenched body, its outlines. If I could pull you close. Three hours of hard rain at Goas? Did gorging ever make a man starve slower?

20. SECOND COMING

My sweaty hand is writing sentences on the board for copying. Days of woozy heat have followed what is now known as the “Deluge of Dikeledi.” It was three days ago and already we’re lying about it. It rained for twelve hours. No, twenty-six. Theofilus had to go around and rescue the goats with a canoe.

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.

21. BROTHERS

Late. 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.

22. TO RETURN

We 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.

But not only Miss Tuyeni clucked. It was all of us. Nobody greeted Mavala Shikongo when she returned. And everyone, myself included, wore an air of Nope, we’re not surprised. We expect nothing less than humiliation here.

In morning meeting, the principal acted as if she’d never left. Vilho had been covering her classroom, running back and forth across the courtyard. All day, every day, for nearly a month, he had done his best to control two rooms of squalling boys, his own Standard Fours and her sub b’s. Supposedly, the principal had put a call into the ministry for a replacement teacher, but no one had turned up, and now no one needed to.

And so the prodigal daughter went back to her class, as if she’d always been a fallen woman and not the up-and-comer in a new nation. Even true heroes became no one at Goas. That’s what you get for walking around wearing your head so high. Now we don’t consider ourselves so far beneath you. A similar thing happened with Pohamba. Once, he made good on his daily threat to leave and was gone five days. His previous record was three and a half. When he slouched back up the road in the same disco shirt he’d left wearing, no one reminded him of his vow that he’d come back to this farm only as a corpse, and even then his ghost would flee.

Now we don’t have to be so discreet when we again pilgrim by her classroom on our way to and from the toilet houses. Ignominy has given us license to spy more openly. She’s taller than she was when she was a myth, and not every move she makes is so utterly graceful. She stomps around her class with a book open in her hand. Her short-short hair and her eyes that gaze restlessly up at the ceiling in the middle of a sentence. She does not baby her sub b’s as Vilho did. She reads fast and doesn’t pause to explain what the words mean. And when she teaches the alphabet, we note with interest that she does not sing it. But the small boys seem to love her more for not talking down to them, for treating them like her little soldiers of the dangling feet.

23. STUDY HOUR

Another of the principal’s tortures, a bit of daily imprisonment in the name of holy education. If they refuse book learning, then we must foist it upon their shoulders so that they may carry it like honorable oxen.

And it’s an hour and a half, not an hour.

Pohamba and I are on duty. We sit bunkered down in the staff room while mayhem reigns in the unsupervised classrooms. From the Standard Fives, the sound of broken glass. In the courtyard, a couple of Standard Sevens are fencing with our teacher brooms. We hear nothing, see nothing. We’re eating yesterday’s cold fish and chips and playing War. Fast rounds, plapping down the cards as quick as we can. It’s the Cincinnati Kid versus the Man. Three out of five for who gets to leave early. In between chips, Pohamba chews on a chicory root, which is supposed to improve his virility. It isn’t making him very good at War.

“That was my take,” I say.

“I had a jacko,” Pohamba says.

“Three’s wild.”

“Seven.”

“It was seven last time.”

“Where’s the vinegar? How can the Man eat fish and chips without vinegar? It was seven.”

“Three.”

“Take it. It’s your conscience.”

Next round he loses again. I get up to leave.

“Wait,” he says. “Did she speak to you?”

“No.”

“Look at you?”

“No.”

“Play for Thursday.”

“Your credit’s no good.”

He snaps off a little chicory. “What if I give you some of this here root, Kid?” Whence from beneath the outside ledge of the staff-room window, a TransNamib hat rises. And a godhead thunders:

Hear this, idle suitors! While you sit there playing games! Know this: During the great Herero rebellion, during a break in that slaughter, two German officers once played cards — cards! — on the naked buttocks of a captured Herero princess. Imagine it. Think of a card slapping on flesh and its reverberations. Titillated? Go ahead, be titillated!

Forgive us. We got titillated. Because he invited us, cajoled us, and the hour and a half wasn’t getting any shorter. And so — mid-War, the cards in our sweaty hands — we indulged. We thought of her young body arching off a table, and cards —

Then the hat in the window rumbled again.

Thrilled? All right, then. You had it your way. Now see it another. Think of how still that girl must have held. How long the game lasted. What the smoke was like in the tent. Was ash flicked on skin? Was it better than what else she knew could happen? Or did that happen too? Of course it did. Her relatives who live among us are all the evidence we need. Yes, it certainly got worse some nights. And you may in the filth of your imaginations take it that far. But I ask that you consider only the rudimentary evil of the game itself. Now add a voice—Gruss Gott! — And laughter and the reek of the cigars. .

There were afternoons when any sort of idle entertainment spurred his umbrage. Such diversions, Obadiah said, contributed to the disintegration of civilization. Thus, he ambushed us with history, rose up from the window, and bombasted.

“Revolted?” he said.

We nodded.

“It won’t do. Revulsion only makes a man turn away. I demand you look at her again, see her again —”

“Demand?” Pohamba said. “We’re only trying to get through the day here.”

Obadiah raised the brim of his hat and peered at Pohamba. Of all things, this he understood, but when he was sober, he pretended he didn’t. Drunk, he carried his own aches. Sober, he lugged the burdens of the world. Today on his back were the miseries of a long-dead Herero princess. He left us, slowly, hunched over. I slid the fish and chips to Pohamba; he slid them back to me. A six of diamonds and a body seized beyond fear into stillness. Fingers clenching the edge of the table.

24. AUNTIE

If you bothered to wash up at Goas, acceptance, or at the very least toleration, was pretty much guaranteed. Auntie Wilhelmina was an exception, as ignored as she was ubiquitous. She was the minor character who always insisted she star.

A Wednesday? A Saturday midnight? Auntie was all day all days. The most prominent thing of many prominent things was the noise of her. Her fat twangling, her fulumping down the ridge toward the singles quarters. The jangle of her hundreds of stolen bronze bracelets. The barking of her retinue of sycophantic dogs. The heaving of her breasts. She was a big heaver of her breasts; Auntie heaved at the slightest provocation. Her turtled skin. Parts of it were long past withered; other parts were new, infantile, as if she had the power of selective regeneration. You see, once you start to describe her, there is no end of her. A wildebeestian woman, the only answer is to look away, but it’s impossible. Her eyes — no, stay clear of her eyes. Her cheeks sag off her face like grocery bags overstuffed with fruit. Her teeth, cruel, sharp, heinously white — on the days she wore them in. Without them, her mouth looked full of bloody thumbs. There was a fresh wart on her chin, not like a dead thing, but a happy thing, very much alive. She groomed her beard a lot like Obadiah’s, a bit pointy off the chin. Beyond ugly, Auntie Wilhelmina, beyond ghastly, and this was the fundamental problem. The woman was a fascination. The boys said that if you stared at Auntie Wilhelmina long enough from a certain angle, you’d never stop wanting her. Ever.

She lived at Old Goas, in a ruined pondookie up and over the ridge, only half of which was roofed. Vilho, who was here that far back as a learner, remembered that one day she materialized. That one day Auntie Wilhelmina was simply in the veld, rooted, like something that had always been right where it was. You just hadn’t seen her. Like a hill beyond another hill. Or as if, Vilho put it, Goas had come to her, not the opposite. Obadiah refused to indulge in anything so metaphysical about Auntie. He only said: That old bitch talks too much.

Auntie Monologued

She had an extremely hoarse voice, like an old dog’s after it’s spent the day barking and can hardly do it anymore — but bark onward it must. In that terrible voice, she would go on about her royal lineage and her family’s personal relationship to Jesus. She said she could trace her family back to Kambonde on her father’s side and Impinge on her mother’s. She said her paternal grandmother’s eldest brother was Mpingana, who was assassinated by Nehale. And she said Mpingana’s son, Kwedhi, her great-uncle, was the one who, after banishment, started to associate with the Germans. She said the Germans might have had their faults, but we must always bless them for bringing the word of God to this heathen place. Eventually Kwedhi was baptized and declared himself king — hence, as she, Auntie, was the great man’s niece, everyone owed her fealty for freeing them from the bondage of paganism. In Auntie’s universe, four hundred years of colonialism and apartheid never happened. And she carried her namesake, the last Kaiser — Wilhelm II! — proudly.

“Murdering fop of a Kaiser,” Obadiah said. “And there is nothing, zero, in the historical or anthropological record to support a lick of her stories. That obese woman bastardizes history! Christianization was a gradual process. It occurred over decades, centuries. No one man determined anything. Her Kwedhi was no Constantine, and for that matter, neither was Constantine. Faith is not something commanded by a despot. The woman’s a fake and a liar.”

“A fake what?”

Obadiah didn’t answer. He was going to condemn her for making up stories? For exploitation of history to suit her own ends? For lying for the sake of the good of the story? This sin?

Auntie Filched

Initially the priest had hired Auntie Wilhelmina as an undercook in the hostel kitchen. Then one day she walked off with two forty-kilo bags of carrots. Dragged them behind her in broad daylight, her philosophy being that stealing in public is no sin. Robbing His children under His watchful eye is no transgression. If it was, she said, wouldn’t there be thunder and lightning? How do you argue with this? The priest fired her, but he didn’t have either the heart or the stomach to banish her off the farm for good. So he let her live up there in her half-roofless house with the dogs she stole as whelps from farmers up and down the C-32. A good, quasi-socialist thing about Auntie Wilhelmina was that she stole only expensive things from the government (rands from the tuition scholarship fund) and the Church (a year’s supply of communion wafers and a golden chalice). From us, she took double-A batteries, lightbulbs, mosquito coils, your last nub of toothpaste. Her dogs were especially fond of gnawing rolls of toilet paper. She’d knock on your door and there she’d be, every glorious boozy inch of her. “I bestow my blessment upon this dwelling.” And you’d be faced with a choice that wasn’t really a choice. Let her in and let her take whatever the hell she wanted. Or listen to her.

“Come on in, Auntie. I was actually just on my way to choir practice. Make yourself at home.”

“Sing well, White Child, raise high your voice.”

Auntie Promised She’d Die

Like all descendants of Kavango royalty, Auntie said, she could not allow herself to die a natural death. As with Jesus, as with the lineage of Kwedhi. When her time came, she said, the oldest male was supposed to strangle her to death. She often hinted that such time was nigh, but Obadiah, overanxious, would ask, “Is it not yet time to perish, O Queenly Queen of Queenishness?”

And she’d say, “Patience, little brother, patience. Soon, soon, the royal murder.”

And Obadiah would stroke his old callused hands as if to sharpen them.

25. UP ON THE HILL BY THE CROSS

Mavala Shikongo walking along the road to the principal’s house. Us watching from the top of the hill, the gust in our faces. Obadiah says, There are sixteen kinds of wind, but only one that lifts a skirt like that.

He stands and whaps the cross with his hat.

26. GOAS LOVE

And still the bedraggled pigeons fuck. Everywhere they do it. No place is sacred, or depending on how you looked at it, all places sacred. Every mapone, every acacia. Toilet pit, dam, trough. They fuck on the road to Krieger’s farm. We blame it on the late freak rain, the theory being that somehow it had lodged into their chickpea brains that the world was all greenfull and pleasure from now on. Couldn’t they see the land was already parched again? Obadiah caught nine of them orgying in the backseat of his Datsun and attacked them with a broom, which seemed only to increase the rapture all around. The noise of their foul love deafening but indescribable, and yet I hear them still in my sleep. That gurgly, broody, out-of-breath whorling. Ecstatic death throes that went on deathlessly across dusk, night, dawn, coffee — feather-flapping fuckery. They do not do normal pigeon activities. They do not roost. They do not sun themselves. They do not harass your feet while you are eating an egg sandwich. They fuck. After that they fuck. Pigeon-mating season was supposed to last two weeks in the drier season — dry, drier, drought — and so was considered by the regional government to be only a minor plague on the list. As it has now gone on a month, we would welcome any other wrath, because those birds are such an affront to the general celibacy of Goas. Toads, serpents, locusts, boils, blains — at least they wouldn’t mock us. Leprosy? Give us the spots. Of course, Vilho counsels love, his finger holding his place in Matthew 13:37. He calls them doves, not pigeons. “He that soweth the good seed,” he says. “What would Jesus say?”

Pohamba blows him a kiss. “Jesus would stomp these flying rats with a fat hairy sandaled foot.”

*

A moment of reprieve. Mercy of a soft thud. One drops dead in the soccer field right in the middle of it. Just rolls off and that’s it, motionless feathers. We go out there and hold an impromptu funeral. We ring around him, we figure it’s a him. “Same thing happened to Nelson Rockefeller,” I say. “Died on top of his secretary.” People ignore this, like a lot of things I tend to say.

Beerless, we raise plastic cups of lukewarm water and toast this pigeon’s flight to hell. Sheeny blue-green body, deviled orange eyes. All around, his countryman haven’t noticed, haven’t flagged. A fundamental truth we didn’t want to be reminded of: You die, everybody else goes on fucking. That’s when Vilho, smelling our vulnerability, flaps back to the Old Testament, starts in about the murder of the Kenite, Sisera, by Jael, the wife of Heber. How Jael, clever wench, lured the sex-starved Sisera into her tent with the promise of her favors, her charms. How she gave Sisera butter. Then, as soon as Sisera got comfortable, she smote him on the head with a nail. “At her feet, he bowed, he fell, he lay down. A Kenite,” Vilho says. “God reviled him, but still his death is grace. Who among us will not die on a bed of sin?”

We look at Vilho. We look at the deceased. As if one or the other could provide an answer, but to what? Even Pohamba is silent. Butter — absolutely — but to be smote on the head? Theofilus brings back a shovel from the mission garage, and we, bereft, bury our old tormenter amid the racket of the continuing deliciousness of his fellow foul fowls.

27. MID-MORNING BREAK

She never laughed. Even during break, when Obadiah would retell that morning’s moral tale, doing his best imitation of the principal’s self-flagellation (which was, by his kind of osmosis, our flagellation):

Oh, savage gluttony! Ye who fare sumptuously while others go without. Do ye not ache for your lack of guilt? Consider for once the Ethiopians, the Irish, the Chinese. Have you no pity? No, it is only, More meat, more crackers, more cheese. Ye who would not offer a finger dipped in water to a thirsty —

Mavala sitting in the sand, leaning against a barrel, unpeeling a hard-boiled egg. Not hearing a thing. Us all trying not to watch her bite the top off that egg. Obadiah said it was the struggle. All those years of believing the end of the war would usher in Paradise. He said Mavala Shikongo was even more beautiful for believing in all that. Now she carries an attendance register and wipes snot from under sub b noses? She’s old, Obadiah said. No matter what her legs look like. It’s all that believing. A woman with a Kalashnikov isn’t anything new. My Lord, think of the Amazons of Dahomey. But believing — it’s like seeing a bronze-winged courser this far west of Gobabis.

28. SIESTA

We must raise the political and social

status of teachers. They should command

the respect not only of their students, but

also of the whole community.

DENG XIAOPING

After classes, after lunch. A consecrated time of languishment. A flopped, dead-eyed hour. Our beds damp oases, narrow paradises of our own orificial excretions. And here we wallow in moist, sweat-clammy bliss, until the study-hour triangle rings us back to bondage.

One siesta — hark — treason! A boy (ruffian! villain! bandit!) whistles — loudly — as he wanders by Obadiah’s open bedroom window. The insomniac inside just so happens to be asleep this day. (Taped to Obadiah’s screen, facing out for the world to be inspired by, is a photo of Mandela after his release: that peppered hair, that raised fist, that loving-even-my-jailers smile.) But Obadiah, now that he is awake, is no gentle spirit of the nation today. He’s belligerent. Nonetheless, to temper his fury, he uses the language of diplomacy. Hence, the following resolution is translated from the French:

Be it known that Head Teacher Obadiah Horaseb of the Goas Primary School RC calls upon all boys of Goas to heed the following… That Head Teacher recognizes the need for spontaneous joy in young plebeians who do not yet comprehend that life on earth amounts to nothing but sorrow, regret, failure, and, ultimately, humiliation. Furthermore, that Head Teacher reaffirms such young plebeians’ inherent, nay, inalienable right to express such bonhomie in certain proscribed instances, such as the Lord granting me a decent night sleep. However, be it known that Head Teacher henceforth forbids the expression of any such jollity — particularly by way of infernal whistling — at any time during siesta, which, be it also known, is the only remaining solace for those who do understand that life on earth amounts to nothing but sorrow, regret, failure, etc., etc. The Head Teacher decrees that punishment for whistling — which may, in the instant case, be defined, to wit, as: to emit or utter from the mouth or beak a shrill sound or series of sounds — shall be the SEVERANCE of said offender’s lips from said offender’s mouth, through the deployment of Theofilus’s unsharpened sickle.

Mindful of this day of non-repose,

Head Teacher Horaseb

Adieu.

29. SHOE WAR

Miss Tuyeni had much of her sister’s beauty, but wore it all wrong. She had the same long legs, the same jutting chin and huge blinkless eyes. But Tuyeni scowled constantly, so, unlike her sister’s, there was no mystery on her face. The world never ceased to find ways to disappoint Miss Tuyeni. We noticed her much more after Mavala came back. Before that, she had seemed to be merely a better-looking appendage of the principal. She was childless. As far as anybody knew, she’d never been pregnant. This led to all kinds of talk, most involving the besmirchment of the principal’s manhood. But it wasn’t true that she was a complete nonentity. She wielded a quiet sort of power in her own right, and you could sometimes feel it during staff meetings. When she didn’t like something he’d said, she had a way of letting him know. All of sudden he would veer away from a topic, and we knew it had something to do with her. But we never cracked their intimate marital code. Mostly she kept to herself. She never was treated quite like a traitor. After all, she had to live with him, and people couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her for that. The only person she ever talked to was Antoinette, as if Miss Tuyeni, for her part, acknowledged the one true authority on the farm.

Still, as I say, the fact of Mavala made Miss Tuyeni more present, because how could we not compare them? And maybe she realized this and tried to compensate. Even though Mavala had dishonored her family in the eyes of the Lord, Miss Tuyeni started wearing high heels to school. She had no mastery of this delicate art. The truth: We all took sadistic joy in watching Miss Tuyeni totter across the sand toward morning meeting. The treacherous crossing, books in arm, one unnimble step after another. Sometimes she would tip over and the principal would send a boy to help her up.

Then Mavala would come charging down the road, always on the edge of being late. We speculated that the reason Mavala was so good in heels, her gravity-defying sense of balance, had something to do with — combat. Everything that was wonderful about Mavala Shikongo had to do with combat. You see how she twisted us?

30. MOSES

The boy who the priest caught jerking off to the statue of the Virgin in the church grotto. The boy who burned down the science class. The boy who tried to poison the farm’s water supply with diesel. The boy who stole Festus’s classroom door. The boy who… The boy who… None was mightier than Moses, the Standard Seven who slaughtered a neighboring farmer’s cow with a pocketknife and lived off it in the veld for two weeks. Moses out there alone, a small cooking fire, only the eyes of the dead cow for company. But he’s eating meat; Lord, is he eating meat. A boy who got tired of mealies every day. He was a poor boy, an orphan. Yet a child born of this earth is entitled to some meat now and then. Is he not?

“In those days the boys ate meat only on holidays,” Antoinette says. “Now we try to give it to them twice a week, if we have enough paraffin for the refrigerator.”

Antoinette speaks of Moses in the way a lonely mother might go on about the antics of the favored bad child. If anything remotely like this happened on her watch now, she’d thrash him. Uncountable lashes for a boy so bold. But Moses — she’d pull him to her bosom. Have some tea with four sugars, my wayward boy.

We are in the kitchen of the hostel dining hall, a wide, cavernous, many-windowed building beyond the soccer field. It reminds me of an air hangar or a floor of an abandoned factory. The windows are fogged from the steam rising from a vat of burbling pap. The boys are lined up outside the door, banging one another on the head with impatient spoons.

She lays out clean bowls on the tables as she talks. Antoinette tells stories only during the heat of work. A Moses without a basket. A Moses without a people to lead. Only his own poor hunger. After the constables finally found him, they beat him until they got bored. What could they take from him other than his blood? Then they brought him to the farmer, who beat Moses until he too got bored with it, and that was the end of it. God only knows where the boy is today.

Outside, the boys begin to clamor louder. Antoinette walks the tables slowly, ladling thick pap into bowl after bowl. Today is krummelpap with a side of toast with jam.

“But forget the end,” Antoinette says. “Go back to the beginning, think of murdering a cow with a pocketknife. Cows don’t fight back, but this doesn’t mean they die easy. They stand and bleed. It took hours. It took the boy all night. It wasn’t rage. It was work.”

She points to the door. I open it. Then she steps past me and stands before the motley line of boys and raises her oven-mitted hands for silence. The boys file in, trying to be slow, trying not to dash, the big ones yanking the little ones back, toward their waiting, steaming bowls.

31. BY THE PISS TREE

Obadiah and I doing our part, watering the desert.

“Teacher Kaplansk?”

“Yes?”

“I should like to know your candid opinion of Woodrow Wilson. It’s my contention that despite his having a horse-like face, he had a certain fastidious decorum. And I do not doubt his sincerity. And yet, I must tell you straight out, and you must pardon any offense: Your man Woodrow was a cabbage. Not only was he ultimately responsible for fascism, he also left us, our dear insignificant country, in the lurch for seventy years. And South-West Africa shall be a sacred trust of civilization. Sacred trust of whom?”

“He wore a top hat,” I said.

“I wonder why. To make himself taller? Napoleon did that.”

“I think he was tall to begin with.”

“Hmm. Interesting. A tall man in a tall hat. May I ask you another question? Apropos perhaps of nothing?”

“Sure.”

“Your quite un-Wilsonian surname. What sort of name is Kaplansk? It seems highly original.”

“It was Jewish Polish until the principal lopped off an —”

“Polish! I should have known! How many names under the sun rhyme with Gdansk? Ah, and a Semite? But your hair —”

“What?”

“It’s orange.”

“Yes.”

He leaned toward me and examined my face. I breathed in his sweet, malty breath. “Hmm. Yes, well, Hosanna! My first Jew! I’ve waited a long time.”

“You’re my first Damara.”

“Half. My father came from Angola.”

“First half-Angolan also.”

“My father’s dead. Yours?”

“No.”

“Jewish as well?”

“Yes.”

“A rebbe?”

“No.”

“A scholar?”

“Not really.”

“A dealer in ancient manuscripts and maps? A cabbalist? A loan officer? Pardon any offense.”

“He’s a dentist.”

Obadiah thought a moment, a bit dejected, but after he zipped up, he brightened. “Ah yes, a most basic and elemental human need fulfilled, no doubt honorably, by your Hebrew father.”

“He left my mother. Ran off to Memphis with a hygienist named Brenda.”

“I see, nonetheless, teeth…”

32. OBADIAH (3 A.M.)

Every moment is a death. We may go back and haunt them, but we may never possess them again. Who designed such a cruel mechanism as memory? Imagine yourself on a train. You see a boy walking the veld. He begins to raise his arm, his mouth widens. He’s about to shout to you — and then nothing. The boy’s gone before you even started to see him. I was on a train only once, the most dawdling train anybody ever bothered to build — the Windhoek-Swakop line. Pushing a team of wheelbarrows across the Namib would be faster. But even the slowest train in creation is still a train. Even a wooden seat in a third-class carriage rocks you like a mother. See him out there beside the tracks? Trousers too short for him, shirtless, carrying a staff tied off with a red kerchief? And still I can’t hold him, his rising arm, his almost shout. I float by. Something he needed to tell me? Something I needed to know? So I died then. That was twenty-five years ago, the occasion of my exile. Are that boy’s words still on the wind? A warning? At the temple courts, Jesus wrote with his finger, in the dust. What words? Nobody knows. Do you see what I’m trying to say?

33. IN THE NORTH

I’m not talking about some fucking Gandhi refusing to step on ants,” Pohamba says.

He tells this often. It happened up north in the bush near Oshikuku, he says. An SADF tank is roaming the veld looking for terrorists, when suddenly — Pohamba loves the word “suddenly”—an old man with leaves on his head jumps out from beyond a clump of bush and begins to beat the tank with a stick. The two troopies inside watch him for a while through the heavy windows. It’s a pretty good show after two months of wet Ovambo heat. They listen to the crazy smacking, which reverberates, so that for every hit they hear it twice. Someone’s knocking on the door, one troopie sings. Someone’s ringing the bell. He points to the other troopie, who opens the hatch and shoots the man with leaves on his head once in the arm, but this doesn’t stop him. He keeps at it. Whack whack. The troopie shoots him again. Single pistol shots sound almost funny in a bush war like this, Pohamba says. Normally you hear only the bursts of automatics. But the second shot doesn’t slow him down either. The man with leaves on his head is dancing now. Dancing around the tank, bleeding and hitting. Now the tank is polka-dot red. It takes two helmeted troopies ten shots, Pohamba says, and even then he never lets go of the stick.

“And do you know what?”

We know. It’s me and Vilho and him, and we’re lounging on the mealie sacks outside the hostel kitchen, waiting for Dikeledi to hang her laundry. Holy laundry, blessed laundry. Pohamba slides his mirrored sunglasses down his nose and peers at us, repeats, “And do you know what?”

I stifle a yawn. “I can’t imagine.”

He leans back against the mealie sacks, sighs. Then he drags it out, slowly, dramatically: “He wasn’t a he.”

“Tut,” Vilho says, without looking up from his book. “Tut, tut, tut.”

Pohamba sucks his teeth and starts again. “Once upon a time in the north… You see, the north isn’t like here. Things happen in the north. Things have happened in the north. This is not a place to live. Cows eat sand for breakfast. In the north, the baobab trees grow so big they use one as a post office.”

“A baobab isn’t a tree,” Vilho says. “It’s a succulent.”

“Once upon a time in the sacred north,” I say. “An SADF tank is roaming the veld when suddenly a man with leaves on his head…”

“. . begins beating the tank with a stick,” Pohamba says. “And beating and beating and beating and beating…”

“. . until one of the troopies inside gets tired of it, so he shoots the man…”

“. . who isn’t really a man,” Vilho says.

“Yes,” Pohamba shouts. “The end!”

We sit there. It’s still too early for Dikeledi’s laundry.

Vilho looks up from his book. “But why would she want to die like that?” he says. “Why would anyone choose such a graceless death?”

“Graceless?” Pohamba says. Then he stands up and does Christ. This is a new wrinkle in the story. He droops his head, reaches his arms out wide, contorts his face into his idea of rapturous agony. Crucifixion atop the mealie sacks. “You prefer this?”

“Our Lord didn’t have a choice,” Vilho says, looking up at him. “He didn’t want to die for us, he wanted to live. That’s the whole message.”

And Jesus did nudge Vilho with his toe. His arms still stretched out, his head lolling, Pohamba says, “You see, they’ve killed everyone in my village. All the terrorist old women and all the terrorist babies and all the terrorist chickens. Only I was left alive. So what must I do? I gather leaves. I find a good stick. Now do you understand?”

“Even their abominations do not justify.”

Pohamba twitches and takes a sniff of an armpit. “Whew, brother, too long on the cross!”

“Let her live,” Vilho says, squeezing his eyes shut. “Next time you tell it, let her —”

“What?” Pohamba plops down heavily on the mealie sacks. “You want her to wait around for it like a goat?”

34. DROUGHT STORIES

Drought stories were told the same way war stories were — they filled in the gaps of the longest days — except they were more true and left less room for dramatic acts of bravery. You don’t fight the Almighty. You don’t sneak up behind lack of rain. You don’t sabotage clouds. You die. At least back in the old days. Now drought means you breathe up dust and the food prices are higher at the Pick ’n Pay and salaries remain the same and the government has to import mealies from Zimbabwe. And cattle suffer.

But in ’79 the drought in the Koakveld (this happened to other people — to be a victim of drought meant you were a farm person, and no one at Goas was a farm person, Goas being a temporary stop, no matter how many years of your life you spent there) was accompanied by an epidemic of rats. Rats who became just as hungry as the people. What happened was, a rat ate a baby. This happened to a family no one knew personally. Antoinette told it while she was hosing down her tiny garden with water pirated from the science lab. She grew wild onions and radishes and small tomatoes. She was wearing her green Sunday dress. It was Sunday, after church. During the drought of ’79, in the Koakveld, up in Africa, she said, not here, it didn’t happen down here, a starving rat ate a starving baby.

35. MAVALA

I watch her shadow as she stalks across the courtyard, her heels stabbing the sand. She avoids the patch of the principal’s Ireland and steps up into the open door of his office. He’s either on the phone or about to be, his big hand reaching for it. Who he talked to we never knew, although he always seemed to be ordering supplies and books we never saw.

I’m doing a reading-comprehension drill. I have just read them a story about a mischievous boy named Tom and his wily teacher, Sir Joseph Blinks. Now the question is: Why does Sir Blinks mistrust Tom?

I stand near my open classroom door. I hear her ask for construction paper. I look back at my class. Most have their heads down and are doing their best to write something, except for Rubrecht Kanhala, who knows I’m only trying to run out the clock before third-period break. He’s thumping the end of his nose with a pencil. Sir Blinks doesn’t know shit.

I step out and wander halfway up the porchway and listen.

“You need to fill out a requisition form.”

“Give me a form, then.”

“The forms are finished.”

A long silence. Outside Pohamba’s class a boy whacks two erasers together and gags on the chalky smoke.

The principal is sitting. Mavala is standing. His finger is poised in mid-dial of the rotary. She watches his face. If only she’d slacken a little, this young sister of his wife, and behave more like a woman is supposed to. He could make things easier for her. She need not acknowledge his authority — of course she needn’t go that far — but for God’s sake, won’t she look at his existence as flesh, as a man with hands and blood and cock and need and eyes?

I don’t have to see any of this — it’s all there in the silence. Power is easily spent — you can always get more later — but as far as she’s concerned, he can keep it and play with it. He sees this, and it only makes him sweat watching her. Her: Go ahead. Cower beneath me with your principal stomach, your principal key chain, your principal phone in your hand. She doesn’t leave, only stands there, in her sleeveless blouse, with her bare shoulders. Stands there like a taunt. A few minutes more she’s in that office. Maybe she’s going too far — stepping on him too much, too easily, too early. She hasn’t been back a month. There’s no more talk of construction paper or forms.

She leaves empty-handed and heads back across the courtyard — this time she tromps straight across Ireland — toward her class, which is waiting silently (itself a miracle at Goas). She’ll ask Obadiah for some construction paper. No, a better idea. She’ll take her boys to the veld and let them draw on the rocks like Bushmen. A few minutes later, I watch them file out, her ducklings, two by two.

36. COFFEE FIRE

What does she want, then?”

“Not to be a teacher, obviously.”

“Who wants to be a teacher?”

“Not me.”

“You degrade the profession. Shame —”

“Well, she was probably expecting more. Look at Libertine Amathila. Now she’s Minister of Health. Didn’t they name a boulevard after her in Otjiwarongo?”

“But Libertine Amathila’s a doctor. SWAPO sent her abroad to study. Easy to come back to the country a hero when you’re a doctor.”

“And now she’s got her own avenue!”

“Boulevard!”

“Yes, even better!”

“Miss Tuyeni says one day she just left and crossed the border. They didn’t hear from her for two years. They thought she was dead.”

“How old?”

“Seventeen or so. The mother nearly died of grief over it.”

“How did she come to teaching if she hates it so much?”

“She taught school up in the camp.”

“Teacher and a soldier?”

“Yes.”

“Not the only one.”

“Who else?”

“I’d rather not boast.”

“Well, it’s understandable.”

“What is?”

“To want more after something like that. After committing so much to the cause, wouldn’t you expect —”

“What? More than Goas? Everybody deserves —”

“Always more. Why can’t anyone ever —”

“And the kid?”

“Ah, yes — the child.”

“That child’s demonic.”

“Shush — that’s a beautiful lamb.”

37. ANTOINETTE

Just past noon and the boy is, at last, sleeping beneath the kitchen table. Difficult, the girl said, as if the child was a problem to solve. Now she understands. There’s some rage within him — his little fists are constant. Unless, like now, he’s sleeping, his anger gone. As if sleep possesses us, infuses us with a goodness that isn’t really us. She peeks at the boy, at his tiny unclenched hands, at his dirty elbows, at his stomach rising and falling. Or what if it is us? What if asleep is the only time we are true? If so, who are we when we’re awake?

She takes Obadiah’s glasses out of her apron. Often he declares them lost and she finds them at various places around the farm. She begins to read.

Most days she lets the wind decide the page. Other, rarer times, like now, she goes back to the beginning.

The beginning? Does one remember being born? I was always at Goas. Even before I was at Goas, I was at Goas. Before the dry land was the water and the firmament. Out this window, I see the dry land. At night, I see the firmament. Where’s the water?

They say there was an ocean here once. It must have dried up.

And the boy, scrambling out from under the table, makes for the door.

38. OBADIAH (SHAVING)

Two souls abide, alas, within my breast,

And each one seeks riddance from the other.

The one clings with a dogged love and lust

With clutching parts unto this present world.

The other surges fiercely from the dust

Unto sublime ancestral fields.

GOETHE,FAUST

I stand before this mirror an orphan. Of my own body I would say I have decidedly mixed feelings. It is tall. It carries my head. It seems my left leg is longer than my right, but this has never been proven. There are days when I see my feet as if from a great distance. When I was young, in my vanity, I favored turtleneck sweaters to accentuate what I considered to be my Corinthian neck. That I am now ugly is of no concern. My mottled, sagging skin. My berried nose. That my face fails to present my beauty and originality is not a failure of my maker. Rather, it is a testament to the unsung nature of my uniqueness. That the philistines cannot recognize my soaringness only makes it truer. More than truth. Is there a higher highest? A truthlier truth? My head carries my thoughts and my legs carry my body. And yet touch — physical — I long for it again. Don’t you remember? When you used to do do do Meneer Oblongsky? Remember? Your thimbled fingers? When I was poor but also beautiful? Now I’m poor and ugly? Meneer Oblongsky hangs limp like a wrung chicken’s neck, and still I’m sick with desire? Lame men make lusty husbands? Would it were so, Poet. Now I ride the donkey by memory. And yet it isn’t merely youth I lust for, but last week. Give me back last week. My Antoinette in her chair rubbing her feet with camphor.

39. ANTOINETTE

and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

L ove? You want to know where love went?

Easy. Same place as all the water. Now enough. I have stomachs to satisfy.

40. GOAS

The first recorded attempt to escape Goas occurred in 1930, when a Boer farmer named S. J. Dupreez tried to trade the farm for a lusher parcel upcountry.

OFFICE OF THE MAGISTRATE

KARIBIB

12 JULY 1930

My dear Sir,

As you no doubt know I have been a heavy loser of stock, having lost all owing to the latest drought. It was my intention to quit the country altogether but owing to the pleas of my motherless and unmarried daughter Grieta I have decided to try again but in another district. With this end in view I paid a visit to the north and was very much taken with the east side of Outjo District, particularly the vacant farm Weiseenfels. What I propose to do is effect an exchange of my farm Goas with that of Farm Weiseenfels, the hectarage being roughly the same. Goas as you know is occasionally well watered, and will no doubt make a most valuable addition to the Otjimbingwe Native Reserve, an opportunity for an enterprising kaffir. In penning you these lines I do so in the hope that you will kindly forward same with your recommendation to the proper quarters.

Your Obedient Servant,

S. J. Dupreez

SECRETARY FOR SOUTHWEST AFRICA

F. P. COURTNEY CLARK

WINDHOEK

8 DECEMBER 1930

RE: FARM GOAS

SIR, I beg to forward herewith for your consideration a letter received from Mr. S. J. Dupreez, owner of the farm Goas in this district. There has been no rain on the farm since early last year, and Mr. Dupreez has lost all his cattle throught [sic] drought. I have informed Mr. Dupreez that the Administrator does not contemplate purchasing any of the farms adjoining the Otjimbingwe Native Reserve owing to the depletion of stock therein, and there is little likelihood of his proposal being accepted.

Acting Magistrate

T. Miller

OFFICE OF THE MAGISTRATE

KARIBIB

12 DECEMBER 1930

RE: FARM GOAS

With reference to your minute No. 2/4/2/4 of the 8th instant, I shall be glad if you will kindly inform Mr. Dupreez that it is regretted that the administration is not at this time prepared to entertain his generous offer.

SECRETARY FOR SOUTHWEST AFRICA

F. P. COURTNEY CLARK

WINDHOEK

Thus, Dupreez’s proposal (i.e., this farm is so useless you may as well give it back to the natives) failed. He did, however, establish a precedent of unrequitement that would reign at Goas for the next sixty years: a great urge to leave, matched only by total practical impossibility. Eleven more years Dupreez hung on in the wind and sand. In March of 1941, he died of gout. His bloated corpse was buried between his long dead wife and his (still unmarried) daughter, Grieta, who had died of consumption the year before. Moss doesn’t grow on graves in the desert. At Goas they are known as the Voortrekker graves, in honor of the great trek the Boers took to reach this paradise of their dreams. In his will, S.J. bequeathed the farm to the only one who couldn’t refuse it, God, through his fiduciary on earth, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Windhoek. There are two ways of seeing this at Goas. One is that he may have thought he’d get a place in heaven for this bestowal. In which case, the line went, he burns in hell for trying to stiff the Almighty. The other: He knew exactly what he was doing. As a Dutch Calvinist, he wanted to stick it to the Catholics.

The diocese didn’t know what to do with Goas. There was an idea of turning it into a leper colony, but apparently they couldn’t find enough Catholic lepers. Finally, the bishop sent two German monks, Brother Sebastian and Brother Gerhard, out there to raise karakul sheep. Even at that time those two monks were well into their last years. But the diocese needed cash, and karakul was where the money was. Either way you looked at it, a win-win proposition. If the brothers made good and raised capital, praise be. If they dropped dead out there, God’s will. The plan failed on both counts. The sheep died and Brother Sebastian and Brother Gerhard didn’t.

In ’42, their inaugural year, drought wiped out half the herd. In ’43, the rains came, but so did blue tongue. In ’45, more drought. In ’46, they held on. In ’48, they had too much rain. The Swakop River swelled and another third of the sheep drowned. And yet the two monks lived on — and on — thereby establishing another tenet of Goas: Its misery is hearty. The lashing wind and the frigid mornings and the eyeball-melting afternoons eventually become what your life was always supposed to amount to. Two monks, exiled in the wind. Raising karakul even under the best of conditions — they are a finicky, wimpy breed — was an enterprise born of love and despair. Year follows year and Brother Sebastian and Brother Gerhard don’t die. Their nights are long. The bleat of the parched lambs keeps them awake. They aren’t exactly missionaries. There are no native heathens here to preach to. The monks carry God’s Word to a veld that never even sends back an echo. Weren’t there days when they wondered whether they were still alive, when it occurred to them that they might no longer be living, breathing men, holding sheep shears and praying?

The fifties were as hot and desiccated as the forties. And yet because of a year like ’53, they endured. In ’53 there was enough rain. The sheep got fat. The shearing went on into the night for weeks. The sort of year that makes all the suffering worth it, until the next drought comes and all that’s left is to tell stories of ’53.

You recall ’53, Brother Sebastian?

Oh, happy times, Brother Gerhard. Happy times.

Then one afternoon Brother Gerhard didn’t come home from a walk in the veld, and Brother Sebastian went out and searched for him. He’s still searching. Of all the ghosts at Goas, and as Obadiah says, for a small place, our ghosts are legion, none is more bewildered than Brother Sebastian. Awkward, naked, and cold — and dead himself now too — and still Brother Sebastian keeps searching for Brother Gerhard’s body. He senses him in one place, then another. People hold out hope that Brother Sebastian will one day stop looking and be at peace. In the meantime, it is Brother Sebastian who digs those strange, unidentifiable holes we sometimes find by our doors in the morning, too big for a rabbit and too small for a hedgehog. Each one like a tiny, empty grave.

In 1967, with the Group Areas Act forcing black schoolchildren out of the towns, the Church found another use for Goas. A school! Why hadn’t anybody thought of that before?

*

It would be difficult to find a place more unlovingly built. Two parallel rows of classrooms, concrete blocks, repainted yellow each year by Theofilus. The boys’ hostel the same — narrow, barracks-like. A church that could double as a storage area. Small houses for the married teachers. A bachelors’ quarters for the single males. In spite of the new paint, the place is already in a state of minor crumble. We live amid newish-looking ruins. And yet after a while you start to see that maybe there’s a logic to the place, that the buildings of Goas are only as temporary as the people who pass through them.

Hereby established a Native School (Inboorlingskool) situated south of Karibib and maintained by the Archdiocese of Windhoek resident at 2013 Peter Mueller Strasse, Windhoek, was duly registered under Sub-section (1)(a) of Section one hundred and five Education Ordinance, 1962 (27 of 1962) made under the ordinance.

DIRECTOR OF NATIVE EDUCATION

WINDHOEK

27 JULY 1967

And when the wall of night fell on the first boys in the hostel, boys who had come here from all parts of the country, where did they think they were?

41. THEOFILUS

He was easy to forget, though he was always among us. At least when he wasn’t in the veld mending a fence or milking the cows or shooting a kudu for meat for the boys or disinfecting the toilets or regreasing the generator or smoking bats out of the hostel — or any other of the thousand things he did every day that made us feel our laziness so acutely it was like a wound — Theofilus was among us. Maybe not even listening, but near. His hands momentarily still. The farm would have collapsed without him within a week, and yet we so often forgot him. In hindsight, this seems surprising, because, to be honest, he was so shocking-looking. Theofilus was albino, but this was never mentioned out loud. Not white exactly, his skin was more like faded red leather. And nobody made any of the usual cuts about black albinos either. Nobody said his eyelids got seared off when God kissed him out of heaven. Nobody said he was a photographic negative with legs, or a milk kaffir, or that he was the ghost who nibbled children’s feet at night. People talked only about his graceful, motor oil-stained hands and how there was nothing he couldn’t fix except Japanese cars, which was all right, since Jesus himself couldn’t have healed Obadiah’s Datsun.

He slept on a cot in the mission garage. His bed was always neatly made with a single blanket. I never saw a pillow on it. He kept his second pair of boots under the bed, along with a cardboard box where he stored the clothes he wasn’t wearing. There was also, sometimes, a shadow made by his bed that stretched across the oily pavement of the garage, depending on the time of day and the angle of the sun coming in through the cracked windows.

Every third Saturday of the month, Theofilus would leave the farm and its cattle and goats in the charge of two Standard Sevens and take a donkey cart to visit his wife. She was attached to a farm near Wilhelmstal, halfway to Okahandja. It was said she couldn’t move out to Goas and live with Theofilus because keeping a wife didn’t come with his job. Once a month, he ironed his suit and white shirt on an old unused door held up by two upturned paint cans. Once a month, his tattered blue jumper swung in the wind on the line behind the garage, waiting for him to put it on again Monday morning.

The boys were having a soccer tournament that Saturday, so we were out there on the sidelines, sitting on desks we’d dragged from our classrooms, watching and betting on teams. Bufula Bufula were 2 to 1 over Pepsi All-African Stars, 8 to 1 over Omaruru Toyota. (Pohamba’s odds.)

Theofilus on his donkey cart in a pressed black suit and shined shoes. He was all hitched up, the cart standing near the far goal, in front of the mission garage. The unfair thing was, he had always been kind to them, never beat them at all, much less very hard, and he never picked on the lazier of the two, a nameless grizzle-haired black and brown who often let his friend, a gray shaggy named Oom Zak, carry most of the weight. He fed those two donkeys more carrots than they could eat. It was as though they’d talked it over and decided that day to go on strike, Theofilus and his mercy be damned. We could see, from our seats on the other side of the field, that he at first considered it an aberration. He beat them a few times, gently. Still, they wouldn’t budge. He beat them harder. Nothing. We watched him look curiously at the stick, as if it were the problem. Then Theofilus raised the stick over his head and calmly began to flog them.

He kept at it.

Finally, even the boys noticed and stopped the game to watch Theofilus crack those donkeys so hard and for so long that we could see the blood of the lazy nameless one flicking off the stick. The whole time he stared straight ahead, like none of this was happening, as if the whole farm weren’t watching. A man on his way to see his wife but not going anywhere. His long legs at perfect right angles, so that they looked, from where we all were sitting, like a solid table. We all watched — the teachers and the boys. Him pretending it wasn’t happening, even as the blood began to splatter his clean suit, and still those two stood motionless, as if today they were no longer farm donkeys but dignified statues of their supposed cousins, horses.

Theofilus straddled up there in his best now-ruined clothes. There was something almost obscene about how we couldn’t take our eyes off it. It was Mavala Shikongo who finally said something. She was sitting with that baby, Tomo, clawing around, biting her ankles. She’d begun to join us. Tomo had come first. He couldn’t be contained in that little room that used to be the principal’s garage. And Mavala had followed. What else was there to do at Goas, ultimately, but join us?

She gets him a day a month?

I didn’t hear it when she said it. Do you know what I mean? At first, you don’t hear something, and then you play it back in your head and you hear it perfectly?

She didn’t say anything else. Still, she shamed us. We hadn’t thought of his wife. Maybe we figured we didn’t need to. We’d seen so many like her, old mammies walking along the goat paths that ran beside the tar roads, scarves wrapped tight around their heads. Why be more specific?

Theofilus didn’t break the bastard stick across his knees. He set it down on the floor of the cart like it was made of glass. He looked exhausted, as if he really had gone to her and come back. His pale, sun-ravaged face. He got off the cart and unbuckled the harnesses the same gentle way he always did. Then he walked to the mission garage and hoisted the door and went inside. The boy who had been closest to the cart, the keeper, Skinny Hilunda, walked up and gave the donkeys a few punches in their flanks. They didn’t notice. Later, both of them wandered away to the veld, because they felt like wandering away to the veld. Theofilus didn’t work that day. He didn’t come out of the garage. And we sat by the soccer field and thought of her watching the road he wouldn’t come home on, wondering if somehow after all these years she had got the wrong Saturday. Are you next week, Theo? Always she hears him before she sees him. The axles beneath the cart shriek, and if there’s no wind, she can practically hear him from as far as Vogelslang — then him coming into view over a rise in the highway.