The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

42. NIGHT

Summer or whatever you called that even hotter time before summer even started when your skin wasn’t used to the night heat yet and the mosquitoes began their bloodlusty moaning. How their noise changed as the night went deeper. At the beginning of the night they were feverish because of the unbearably beautiful proximity of your flesh, and yet the netting and the coils worked for the most part and the lust changed to frustration and you’d listen to their hunger for you rise and dissipate, rise and dissipate, until you sank into a sort of stupor that didn’t feel like sleeping, though you woke up in the morning and realized you had slept, that it hadn’t all been a waiting. And in the morning, the hopeful ones, the hangers-on, were so drowsy from unrequited aching outside the net they were simple to kill, so on hot mornings you’d hear, from every room in the singles quarters, the sound of joyous acrobatic whacking, easy rolled-newspaper slaughter, even from Vilho’s, all that love-thy-neighbor talk and he was as much mass murderer as we were, and then we’d show off the carnage on our walls, give each other mini-tours of death, Got this fucker with my pinkie, all the flat black asterisks, and the lucky ones also, the ones sated with our blood, them massacred now too, us thinking we’ve reaped our revenge, always forgetting that tonight our victories will mean nothing, that they’ll all be reborn, reincarnated fifty, a hundred, a thousand times, and that killing them will always be the same as not killing them.

43. POHAMBA

Spacious days yawned on. We put off everything we had to do, because there would always be time for it later. This afternoon was tomorrow. Night was Madagascar. We’d stand before our classes and say words, slowly, languidly, words. It was as if we were talking under water. These were days Pohamba couldn’t contain himself. He was sweating for it, working long hours of love, going to Karibib every chance he got (hitching rides, taking Festus’s bike), and straggling back to Goas at sunrise and not changing his clothes for school, just appearing in the staff room for morning meeting with enormous ovals of sweat staining his silken armpits. Even the principal respected Pohamba’s work ethic and didn’t ride the Good Book too hard on him.

He’d often run out of money. Only Vilho would still give him any. That saint would look at him with his sad, empathetic eyes and stick the rands in Pohamba’s pocket like a bouquet. And still Pohamba would feel the need to explain it: “Can’t be a sugar daddy without any sugar, hey?”

Those days were hardest on his Standard Sevens. The more fatigued he was, the more he expected of them, up there in front of his class roaring: “Differentiate the following: Y equals 1 plus X divided by the square root of 1 minus X to the second power.”

“But, Teacher —”

A bleary, too-caffeinated man pacing the rows with a ruler in one hand and his big deadly wooden protractor in the other. “Do you want to end up at Goas like me? Don’t you boys see I only want the best for you? No fingers. Calculate!”

44. TOMO

What kind of person hates a baby? That’s no baby. He only looks like a baby. Mavala called him her monstrous, her squirmy, her rodentia, her bedlam. He had squat little legs like a miniature Greco-Roman wrestler. We called him Little Festus. He was not yet two but was seen by reliable witnesses lifting a wheelbarrow over his head. He loved a toilet house, especially when you were in it. (As good a time as any to mention that the only toilet house that locked from the inside was the principal’s private one. It would have been considered tantamount to a coup d’état if anyone else shat in it.) Tomo’s ferrety, chicken-greasy fingers in your pockets. He ate everything. He noticed everything, understood everything. I remember his eyes staring at me through the slats of a chair, just his eyes, holding me, knowing me, hating me back. We were jealous of him. Of what his eyes had the privilege of seeing in person. An outside shower, the spigot in the back of the principal’s house. Tomo sits in the muddied sand while she… she… she. .

I’d try to hold him tender — my false hands — and his body would seize. And that thing. All babies do this, but Tomo did it with particular vengeance. That thing they do. You’d be playing with him, or think you were playing with him, having a good time making gurgling noises and chasing him around, and then he’d fall over and he’d raise his head and think about it a moment, make the calculation. Decide whether it was in his best interest to cry bloody murder. In my case he always wailed like the tornado drill at Wainscott Elementary on North Clifton in Cincinnati. The way he could turn it on, turn it off. Blast. Modulate. Blast.

Upside-down in his car seat, his feet where his head should be (one bootie on, the other long gone), that big head dangling down. How those eyes never seemed to bother with seeing anything superfluous. Like your lying-ass smile. He sneered right through you. He couldn’t talk yet, and maybe this was the true source of his power. Words would only get in the way of his seeing the essentials. Who would hate a baby?

We said Mavala Shikongo never laughed. It wasn’t true. It was that only he could make her do it. I mean laugh. Laugh like a banshee, as if she had the whooping cough, uncontrollable seal barks you could hear all the way from the principal’s house. Small, easy things like brushing his hair with a toothbrush, like stuffing a little mashed potato up his nose, would get her going with her croaking.

45. LATE DUSK

Goats skitter in from the veld through the late dusk, the blue light like falling smoke. Pohamba’s asleep, his early evening nap. I take a tub of Rama out of the food cupboard and scoop the margarine out and toss it onto the garbage pile beyond our fire pit. One of Antoinette’s roosters, the one with the spiky tuft of green hair, immediately converges, stunned — never has such a mother lode been delivered with such nonchalance. I leave him to his wonder. I walk up the road toward the principal’s house. She’s sitting on a bench outside her door, stirring pap over an open fire. Tomo sits up from rolling in the dirt at her feet and glowers at me. I hold up my empty tub.

“Anybody home? We’re out of margarine in the quarters, wondering if —”

Mavala jabs her thumb toward the window. Beyond the curtain I can see the fuzz of the television. The principal can’t get any reception from Windhoek, but he and Miss Tuyeni like to sit there and pretend they’re watching the shows they read about in the paper.

“My sister and her husband are being entertained,” Mavala says. “Would you like to sit and wait, Teacher?”

Her feet are bare. It’s either bare feet or heels. Immense attention is paid to Mavala’s footwear in the quarters.

“I asked if you’d like to sit, Teacher.”

“Sure.” I sit down next to her on the bench. She leans over the pot and stirs some more, then sets the spoon on the bench between us. She crosses her legs one way, then the other. Then leaves them uncrossed.

“You know, I wouldn’t be so fat if I was home working in the mealie fields. In the north, you strap a baby on your back and go to work in the fields.”

We’d been noticing this, that she’d sometimes say things that made you think she’d been having a conversation with herself and your presence was only incidental.

“Who said you’re fat?”

“I heard English whites don’t like fat women. The Boers like them fat.”

“I’m not English.”

“I’m bored,” she says. “Aren’t you bored?”

I watch her scratch her left ankle with her right toes. I stoop and pick up Tomo. I want, for a moment, to be closer to her feet. I start to bounce Tomo on my knees, but he goes for my eyes and I drop him. He snatches up my margarine tub and tosses it in the fire. She doesn’t seem to notice any of this. She looks at me, her eyes too big. Pohamba said no woman should open her eyes that wide, that a woman who advertised like that was either lying or crazy. I stare back at her with what I’m thinking looks like sensuous, but also intellectual, meaning.

She looks back at the pot.

“Why don’t you cook inside in the kitchen?”

“It seems my sister thinks my morals contaminate the food.”

“She said that?”

“She said I’m a slut.”

“Sluts don’t use kitchens?”

“Apparently not.”

I lean toward her sideways, with my eye on the small scoop in her neck, thinking this is the right angle for something, but she’s already off the bench, moving fast into the darkened veld, up and down a small koppie and out of sight.

She shouts to me, “Feed him for me, will you, please? Wait for it to cool.”

I spoon the pap into his bowl and set it on the bench. I watch the steam rise for a while. Then I call the monster and the monster comes. He plumps himself down against my leg and waits for his bowl.

Down the road, Antoinette hollers wash. “You boys, I want you washed, scrubbed, and pious. Ten minutes!” And the boys shout it back in all their languages. A babel of voices hollering wash.

In the house, there’s the subtle flick of the constantly changing white light. Miss Tuyeni laughs at something she thinks she sees. I watch Tomo eat.

46. WALLS

A boy in the hostel has night terrors. We are all accustomed to it now. We wait for him. It’s as if he does our screaming for us.

He’s screaming right now.

Pohamba bangs the wall. “Can’t sleep?”

“No.”

“Which boy do you think it is?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s he afraid of?”

“Look, let’s try and —”

“Mobutu can’t sleep either.”

“What?”

“Mobutu Sese Seko and his leopardskin hat. What keeps him awake? What’s he fear?”

“It’s two in the morning.”

“He fears Patrice Lumumba. Want one? A bedtime story?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Come now. We’ve nowhere to go but sleep. Answer. Why does Mobutu fear Patrice Lumumba?”

“I have no clue.”

“Good. You shouldn’t. Because Lumumba’s gone. They chopped him up in pieces and threw him in a barrel of acid.”

“So he’s dead. Let Mobutu and me go back to sleep.”

“Is the mind always logical? Mobutu lies in his big golden bed and he can’t sleep for fear. So he calls in his security chief and says, ‘Security Chief, I want you to do something for me. Go kill Patrice Lumumba.’ ‘But, master,’ the security chief says, ‘The postal worker’s been dead for years.’ ‘You think I don’t know that? The people — don’t you understand? — the people still love him.’ So the security chief calls his men and tells them what to do. They’re confused also, but the security chief shouts at them, ‘Do I pay you clods to ask questions?’ His men shrug. It’s not hard. They go out and murder a guy. The security chief brings the body to Mobutu. ‘Here’s Lumumba, master.’ ‘Good,’ Mobutu says. ‘Now go and do it again.’”

Pohamba blows his nose, honks. “So every night, in Kinshasa, they murder Patrice Lumumba. Well, it’s Africa, no?”

“Good night,” I say.

“You think this isn’t Africa?”

“What?”

“You’re not afraid?”

“No.”

“I am.”

“Why?”

“I’m afraid I’m Lumumba.”

“Nobody wants to kill you. Sleep.”

Vilho taps the opposite wall lightly, whispers, but these walls make no difference. “Patrice Lumumba was a martyr,” Vilho says.

Pohamba clears his throat like a drumroll. “And how do you know I’m not a martyr?”

Vilho ponders this. We can hear him. He sighs when he ponders. Vilho wears a nightshirt to bed. We can see him tucked in there snug, in sheets so clean they squeak. We find sleep listening to him ponder. The three of us breathe in the dark behind our walls.

47. VILHO

Vilho who is always cold. Unlike the rest of us, whom the sun warms too quickly after the cold mornings, he remains bundled, wool-hatted, scarfed. He accepts chill as his fate. He never complains. We complain. We complain about the heat. We complain about the cold. We complain that Vilho never complains. He’s the confusing sort of lonely person who does not seek to be unlonely. And beyond this, the most alarming fact of all: It’s not the terrible coincidence that Vilho was a learner at Goas and is now marooned here again as a teacher. It’s that it’s not a coincidence. Upon graduating near the top of his class at Dobra, Vilho requested a posting at Goas. “Requested!” Obadiah cried, incredulous. “It means our poor Puck outcasted himself!”

If you didn’t know he was a teacher, you’d mistake him for a learner. His face is so smooth, hairless, supple. He seems, also, not to salivate over women. Not Mavala. Not even Dikeledi. Pohamba says it’s impossible. An African man? Vilho? A moffie? But Obadiah says, if it’s true, we’d certainly be more cosmopolitan, a bit of Cape Town in the scrubveld. Even so, with all Vilho might hide, he’s the only one at Goas who seems unburdened — and so, naturally, we foist our various aches on him. Antoinette knits him scarf after scarf to keep him warm.

48. THE SEVASTOPOL WALTZ

I must say I’m pleased we’re all in the road,” Obadiah said. “Does anyone have a theory as to why?” No one had a theory. No one intended to have a theory. Still, he waited. Morning break and the heat’s already risen and we’re under the single tree closest to school, which happened to be in the road.

“We’re not learners,” Pohamba said. “Aren’t we the teachers?”

“Wrong!” Obadiah shouted. “I’m tickled, good people of Goas, because the place for stories is in the road. You don’t tell stories inside a house. This was my father’s rule. When he wanted to tell a story, he herded us outside. My two brothers and four sisters, the whole family, except for my mother, who used to say my father made dead dogs look unlazy. She’d come out, however, but she never stepped into the road. Now understand, we lived on a dusty street full of rocks and garbage and sleeping tsoties with hats pulled over their eyes, and my father would tell stories of gone days in the Old Windhoek Location, before they came with the bulldozers and moved everybody to Katatura. My father spoke of the Old Location as if it were God’s humble paradise. Then he’d look around at our road, at all the houses — not houses, he never called our houses houses; they were pilchard cans pushed together with our tribe and number on the door — and he’d say, ‘I’m an old man, and they expect me to fight. With what? These shaky hands?’ My father was a proud man, a cultured man, a Pan-Africanist, a Garveyite. He didn’t condemn men for picking up arms, he begged mercy on the devils who forced them to do so. He’d quote Senghor: Lord, forgive those who made guerrillas/of the Askias, who turn my princes/into sergeants. It was only that he was convinced there was a better way. He believed in education as a way to revolution. Books, he’d say, are the great topplers. Tromp the Boers with Tristram Shandy! The poor man. For my mother, it was one settler, one bullet. My father shamed her. She’d only laugh nastily at his memories, which she said weren’t even memories at all — but colonialist propaganda.

“And once, out in the road, my father told us about the dance hall that used to be in the Old Location. ‘So big that dance hall, it felt like being in a small country.’ From the other side of the fence, my mother said, ‘Dance hall? You want to thank them for a dance hall in 1942? Other husbands go to jail.’ Then she spat.”

Obadiah paused a moment to think of his mother. Mavala closed her book, but held her finger in the place where she’d stopped reading. She gazed up at the sky. The sun was faint, like a useless bulb in a day-lit room. Pohamba was marking quizzes. Festus was asleep with his head on his knee.

“No, she wasn’t a lady, my mother,” Obadiah said. “And she would have gone and beat the Boers herself if she didn’t have to prepare mealie pap for six of us. My father feared her, but in public he pretended he didn’t, so he hushed her, told her, ‘Go home, woman. Go make your man some Ovaltine.’ She didn’t move. Neighbors had gathered around. Any activity in the road was better than nothing, and if it wasn’t a riot, at least they could watch my parents battle. ‘Size of Lesotho, that dance hall,’ my father said. ‘And in that great hall they held competitions, fierce dance competitions, and during one such event my wife and I — that belligerent woman standing right there — placed first in the Sevastopol Waltz.’”

Obadiah leaped up and stood before us. “Like myself, my father was a skinny man. His clothes never fit properly. When he waltzed in the road with my second sister, his shirt flapped in the air so that he resembled a bedraggled bird with shoes.” Obadiah held his arms out and gripped a woman only he saw, his body erect, one hand cupping an elbow, the other flat on an invisible back. “Ready position!” he called. “And a one and a one, and a two and a two. Swing forward, swing back —”

Whatever he was doing didn’t look like a waltz. It didn’t look like much of a dance at all, really. He was still a little drunk from the Zorba he’d had in his morning coffee, and he was flailing — a slow flail in loose loafers. He was a little drunk and loving his father and his father’s story, and we weren’t listening, because it was too hot and we had to haul ourselves up and teach in less than five minutes and we were just trying to get a little rest by the only shade tree.

He was still circling, alone, when Mavala dropped her book in the dust and stood up and joined hands with him. After a bit, he said, “You can’t dance. How can a woman with so much natural finesse —”

“And you’re an old souse,” Mavala said.

“Try,” Obadiah said. “Try and dance.”

And they did try, the two of them, in the road, in the sand. Mavala pulled off her heels. Even without them she was as tall as he was. Still, they were an awkward pair. When he went forward, she went forward, and their heads knocked together. Finally, he dropped his hands and peered at her curiously, as if he were trying to read something in bad light. “There’s something else,” he said. Up the road, the boys were coming back from the dining hall, gripping half-eaten carrots.

“What?” Mavala said.

Obadiah moved toward her, and reached out to her without touching; his hands only hovered over her shoulders. “My father never drank a drop. But — and I have never in my life forgotten this cruelty — that day as my father waxed triumphant in the road about the Sevastopol Waltz, my mother said, softly, because she knew she need not shout it, ‘Better a man drink.’”

Obadiah stood in the road and looked at his feet. Mavala raised her hand and swatted, almost gently, the beak of his TransNamib hat.

The triangle rang, and we stood up and brushed off our pants and gathered our stray pens. There was a knob on Festus’s forehead from his knee. As we started back to our classrooms, Obadiah called out, “May I add an addendum?”

Nobody turned around.

“My mother had, it’s true, exquisitely long legs. Are there not days when a son may imagine how they might have looked?”

49. HYGIENE PATROL

One woman delouser. Pest Control Queen. Antoinette stalking the rows of beds in the boys’ hostel. The only instruments necessary are her hands, long-fingered, clawlike pinchers. No meek shampoos. She needs to feel the crush of death in the skin. One by one she tweaks the lice and squeezes. Hygiene as spectacle and Antoinette the unhooded executioner. Boys at attention! Your bodies are living, breathing, sweating violations! Their bunks are so close together she has to walk sideways. Boys, boys, boys. So many heads to inquisition. Boys, year after year, boys. Scalps! Underarms! Pubic nesting grounds! Lift your arms, Matundu. Pants down, Shepa. Your head, Titus, bow it! And then one day a boy simply says, No. My head is my head. Unhooded halts. Examines recalcitrant. Eyes his eyes, her pupils colossal. Antoinette is less alarmed than fascinated. Being stood up to is always something she’s wondered about. A tyrant without opposition gets very bored. Napoleon was said to have dreamed sweetly of defeat. And didn’t Stalin await the poison, half loving the notion of martyrdom? Antoinette halts, looks the boy up and down. He’s sitting on his bunk. His feet don’t reach the floor. She doesn’t know him. He’s not a thief, a vandal, or an arsonist. The good ones blur together. Why is it we remember only the hoodlums? His defiance isn’t even very spirited, and yet it’s unequivocal. His little legs in shorts. The dirty bottoms of his little feet. His clean powder-blue shirt. (Clearly he follows some regulations.) His slightly ovaled head and bags beneath his eyes. Does this boy ever sleep? He stares: Do what you want to me, old bitch, but my head is my head.

“Surname?”

“Axahoes, Mistress.”

“Common name?”

“Magnus.”

“Standard what?”

“Six, Mistress.”

“So small a Standard Six?”

He doesn’t answer this, looks at his feet as if they explain so small a Standard Six.

“From which place?”

“Andawib West.”

“Farm?”

“Of Meneer Pieterson. Kalkveld district.”

“Parents?”

“Father.”

“Mother?”

He sits silent. One leg twitches.

“Stand up.”

He gets up off the bed. The other boys stand mute, but their eyes are swarming.

“Bow your head.”

“No, Mistress.”

“Why not? You suspect vermin? An infestation? You’re afraid?”

His eyes want nothing, not even for this to end. Such a rare thing. You can’t drain the want out of your eyes no matter how hard you try. Even the dead want everything back, which is why the undertaker either closes their eyes or blocks them with a penny. But this boy. Not even sorrow, as if he knows that above all sorrow is only pride. Train your eye to watch a single mosquito. You can never concentrate enough. Since she was a child, she’s tried to follow the course of just one. It’s impossible. You can only hope to get lucky when it flings back into your vision. But this boy’s eyes, because they see nothing else, could probably do it. She thinks: Your mother, child. The world is full of dead mothers, to the hilt with dead mothers. Jesus in his meekness, and you claim the right to be haughty? Your affliction’s greater? Still, she pities him, she loves him. This is not a standoff. This is a breath before a rout. She raises her hand and breaks him on the hostel floor like a donkey.

50. NOTES ON A MOSTLY ABSENT PRIEST

Storyless lump. To Goas his sole importance was that he had transport. A car, two bakkies, a lorry, a tractor. Our Father of Goas captained a fleet. It was like being on a desert island with half a dozen rescue boats. Except there was a catch. Only Theofilus was permitted to drive any of them, and he could use them solely for official church business, which did not include the business of teachers.

For a mostly doughy man, the Father had very square shoulders. In his robes he looked like a box dressed in a tablecloth. No one knew him well enough to hate him. He’d been at Goas only a few years. He spoke in an oddly high-pitched voice, and, it was said, there was something in it that harked backward. Whether fair or unfair, people sometimes said it was because Father was “coloured,” and so a half-step closer to being white under the old — just recently old — laws. Myself he ignored. He once asked me what my faith was, and when I told him, he said, “So Windhoek sent us a pagan?” Then he shrilled something that might have been a laugh and marched off.

He kept a German shepherd in a pen — sequestered from Auntie Wilhelmina’s whelps. He loved the dog and would feed it fresh kudu bones. One day this pampered dog escaped and stepped on a puff adder in the veld. It dragged itself back home and stood howling in front of the rectory for its master. We all stood around and watched its neck balloon. Then the dog begin to convulse and choke. Eventually, Father came out and brained it with a hammer.

The priest had two rules, as opposed to the principal’s countless ones. No drinking and no fornicating among unmarrieds. The first one wasn’t enforced (the priest was known to indulge in vermouth). The second didn’t need to be.

Why the principal, by far the loudest Catholic on the farm, and Father despised each other was a mystery. It probably had something to do with the nationalization of schools, which happened after independence. This made for a sense of confusion as to who truly ruled Goas. The principal ran the school, but the school was on Church property. The teachers of Goas saw it this way: The principal owns our asses; the priest, whatever’s left of our souls.

There was a strange story about the two of them. An inexplicable story, with no beginning and no end and no point whatsoever.

One morning the priest found the principal asleep on the rectory roof.

What was he doing up there? Spying?

Nobody knows.

Why’d he fall asleep? Was he drunk?

Wouldn’t you get drunk if you had to spend the night on a roof?

Yes. What was he doing on the roof in the first place?

I said, Nobody knows. .

51. ENGLISH NIGHT

Even more than her lipstick and her baby-blue eye shadow and her skimpy skirts, it was Mavala’s enthusiastic organ playing that drove the priest out of his gullet. Wednesday night was officially English night in church. Any ordinary Sunday or daily morning Mass — if he happened to be at Goas, often he wasn’t, the Erongo region being short on priests — the Father spoke a kind of apocalyptic-sounding Afrikaans. Nothing but hell awaits you boys who flout your immorality under God’s all-seeing eyes… Wednesday nights, though, he left off the pulpit fist-banging. It was said that he resented the edict handed down by the bishop in Windhoek, out of deference to the new constitution, that English be spoken in church at least once a week. It seemed that Father wanted to show everyone that Afrikaans was still the language of a thunderous God. So, on English night, he tweeted his homily. And the boys took his cue. They knew it was safe to fall asleep in church on Wednesday. The older boys brought pillows and sprawled out on the back benches. In the front pews the sub b’s fell asleep, collapsed onto one another’s shoulders, their little heads lolling, their tiny kneecaps digging into the wooden slats as they endured painful but merciful sleep.

After dozing through the service, the boys perked up when Mavala played. She said that in spite of everything she was still Catholic. Whether they wanted her or not. The organ didn’t work very well. The pedals often stuck, and the notes reverberated even longer than they were supposed to, creating a sort of bleeding music that layered on itself, as if every note she played were happening at the same time. By the end of a hymn there was always total cacophony. It never mattered. And the boys irritated the Father further by singing in English. O food of exiles lowly, O bread of angels holy… Their voices carried across the farm — out to Theofilus in the veld; up to the top of the hill by the cross, where Pohamba sat alone, boycotting church.

As a supposed living embodiment of the virtues of speaking English, I made a point of going to church on English night. I sat with Vilho in the back pew and tried not to think of her legs pumping, her feet pumping. Mavala closed her eyes when she played, her head tilted slightly toward her right shoulder.

One Wednesday, I waited for her after it was over and everyone but Vilho had filed out. He often remained. He once told me there was something unusually calm about a just-emptied church. Together, Mavala and I walked up the road toward the principal’s house.

“The wind’s up,” I said.

(The wind’s up. The wind’s down. Sometimes we thought it, said it, just to have something to think, to say.)

“Yes,” she said.

“It was down before.”

“Right,” she said. “It was down before, wasn’t it?”

We passed two boys, Obadiah’s Standard Threes, Siggy and Petrus, who were sitting at the remains of the stolen picnic table, practicing introducing themselves in Obadiah’s King’s English; which king was never clear.

“I should be honored, kind sir, if you would favor me with your name.”

“I was christened Siegfried, but please, I insist, call me Siggy. Dare I inquire of yours, friend of my youth?”

“Ah, kindred spirit! I’m known as Petrus.”

They smoked pencils like pipes. They tipped imaginary hats. From their faces they both seemed to be in great pain. English was often associated with constipation.

The two of us went on up the road. “Like a zoo, this place,” she said.

“They love it when you play.”

“Oh, that.”

“You inspire them.”

Mavala popped her forehead with her palm. “You know what? I forgot the kid.”

We headed down the road again, walked across the soccer field to Antoinette and Obadiah’s. Antoinette was standing at her guard post, her open kitchen window. Tomo was doing a headstand on the steps.

“And how was my angel?” Mavala said.

“He abused my chickens. He fouled my radishes.” She shoved down the window. Antoinette’s smiles were vague and fleet. Her face was blurred in the gloom behind the glass.

Mavala scooped up Tomo and kissed him all over. “How could I forget this boy? A boy such as this boy?”

We started back up the road a second time. She put Tomo down and he refused to walk, so she yanked him through the sand and he plowed along like an evil little water skier. Then she dropped him, and he scuttled after us.

“What were you saying?”

“That your playing —”

“Oh yes. That I inspire. On English night I do inspire!” She paused and looked at me. “Don’t I?”

At the missing picnic table, Siegfried and Petrus were still at it.

“And may I inquire from where your people hail?”

“I was born and bred in Swakopmund, my friend.”

“Oh, the sea. Its extravagances.”

Mavala squeezed my elbow. “What do you call that?”

“At least he’s teaching them some English. Better than I can do.”

“What about teaching them to know who they are? Is that who they are? This place is a hole and he’s president. God bless poor Antoinette.”

“I’m running for vice president of the hole,” I said.

“Happy for you. When are the elections?”

“So why do you play in church? If this place is so doomed. Why give the boys a false sense?”

She didn’t answer. We reached the principal’s house. It was dark. He and Miss Tuyeni had gone to Karibib. Mavala let go of Tomo’s hand and he tore off toward their room. He couldn’t reach the knob, so he stepped back and began ramming the door with his head.

The wind was up. The air had sand in it now and it began to peck our faces. Mavala looked down at the ground as if she’d dropped something. She had a slight widow’s peak I hadn’t noticed.

“Why do you play?”

“Stop thinking about me.”

“I asked —”

“I’m finished with that.”

“With what?”

“Being thought of.”

She left me and went and stomped toward the kid.

52. HUNS AND KHAKIS

Our guru was musing about the difference between certain colonial powers. I don’t remember where we were. We may have been at the urinals in the rank men’s room behind the Mobil station in Karibib, or at the Dolphin in the location, or at our table at the Public Bar, or in a lorry heading back to Goas, a week’s worth of groceries between our knees, sweating, passing around a warm Fanta, so thick it was more like molasses — but it was Fanta and we had it, so we drank it. We might have been out beyond the dry Kuiseb River, where Goas ended and the real desert began, hunting the spoor of that elusive dwarfed hedgehog of the central Namib escarpment. We may have been anywhere where Obadiah felt the need to hold forth, to educate us, to alleviate the burden of our fathomless ignorances.

“Now, the Germans at least were honest. They said they were going to steal our land and they stole our land. They said they were going to kill us, and by God, they killed us. Now, the British were less — how shall we put it? — forthright. They said our land was ours and they stole it. They said they were humanitarians and they bombed the Namas. That was in 1922. A year later, they cut off King Mandume’s head and made a parade of it. So who’s the devil’s favorite? The Germans go before God with reeking, unwashed hands and say, See, Father, see what I have done. Now judge me. The British? Those khakis knock on heaven’s door and offer plum pudding.”

Obadiah paused and straightened the collar of his frayed tweed coat. Wherever we may have been, I can say with certainty he was wearing his piebald-colored tweed coat. He wore it summer or winter, teaching or not, shirt underneath or not. (When he was shirtless, small tufts of white hair spaghettied out between his lapels.)

“Indeed, we’ve had ample opportunity to observe these two giants of the enlightenment. As an aside, I might say that the Boers never had to shoulder the burden of being enlightened… But the Germans and the British! Consider the idiot carnage of what they call the Great War. It even reached us out here at the far-flung edge. Shakespeare versus Goethe in a battle for thorn scrub. One British general wrote to the King, ‘Your Majesty, this land isn’t fit for baboons or Bushmen.’ Now, one may well ask, Then why send men all the way down here to die?”

“Good question,” Pohamba said. “Why in hell —”

“Never ask it. The lives of soldiers, even white ones, have never been worth more than baboons or Bushmen.”

“So fuck them both,” Pohamba said.

“Must you vulgarize?”

“Fuck the Swedes.”

And I seem to remember Obadiah squinting at Pohamba then. So maybe we were outside in the glare. Let’s say we were — us tromping across the veld toward the Erongos.

“What’d the Swedes do to you?” I asked.

Pohamba shrugged. “Fuck Hawaiians.”

“Fuck Bulgarians,” I said.

“God Save the King,” Pohamba said.

Obadiah ignored us and held forth to the afternoon. “The British vanquished the Germans at Korub Aub. In the histories, their histories, they call it a white man’s war fought in heathen Africa. As if we weren’t even here at the time. The simple truth is this: They wouldn’t have won without us. The British promised us land — our own — if we helped them.”

He kicked off one of his sandals and dug a craggy toenail into the dry earth. It was a long time before he spoke again. Afternoon fell. The mountains ahead of us blued. A cloud, miserably pallid and empty, lazed slowly by. We’d failed at hunting again.

“When it was over,” Obadiah said softly, “there was a great deal of euphoria. A delegation of native soldiers went to military headquarters to present a petition to the British on behalf of the people. It expressed gratitude to the King and reminded him of the promise of unconditional return of ancestral lands. The soldiers waited two hours before a sergeant in leather hip boots appeared.”

Obadiah paused again, gulped some wind. Slowly, he cleaned the dust off his teeth with his tongue. We did the same.

“The sergeant didn’t read it. Instead, he flung that petition across the room. The men watched it float slowly to the floor. Then the sergeant barked: ‘Your hats! All subjects must remove any and all bonnets in the presence of an officer of His Britannic Majesty George V!’ Then some galoots came and tossed that delegation out the door.”

That was it. Enough alleviation of ignorance for a hot and useless day. We followed Obadiah along a goat path, into darkness the color of a new bruise.

53. KARIBIB

A forgettable sun-worn place with too-wide streets (an old German mining town, the boom never quite happened), midway between Windhoek and Swakopmund on the coast. A popular petrol and toilet stop. There’s a tiny (still) white dorp and a location across the rail tracks, north of town, where most people (still) live. There’s a hotel, a grocery, a few shops, and some scattered bottle stores, around which revolve much of the life of the town. So unimportant a place, Pohamba said, that during the struggle SWAPO didn’t even try to blow up the post office.

Still, since we were always trying to get there, we had to pretend Karibib was somewhere. It was our Mecca, our Bangkok. Sometimes we’d go to Ackerman’s, the furniture store in the dorp, and spend the afternoon loitering on the comfortable couches on the showroom floor. Pohamba knew the salesman, a former learner named Wilbard Lilonga. The manager lived in Swakop and came in only on Saturdays. Wilbard would let us laze around. We’d read magazines or just sleep on the deep plush. Love songs gentle on the Muzak. Velour, camel, horsehair, Fontainebleau. Our feet on what Wilbard had once told us were called occasional tables. For what occasions? Ackerman’s had those plastic tints on the windows so the world outside was dyed blue. We’d loiter and watch the blue people walk down the blue street.

Pohamba leans back, his feet on the table, his head resting on the top of the ridge of his loveseat. He looks up at the ceiling.

“Wilbard!”

Wilbard doesn’t answer. He’s in the back smoking, ashing his cigarette on the carpet.

“Who buys all these couches?”

Wilbard still doesn’t answer.

“Wilbard? Wilbard!” Pohamba thunders. “Wake up, you lazy shitter! I want to know, who can pay four hundred rand for a place to sit?”

54. BUTCHER SCHMIDSDORF

The choice is clear-cut: either the West

predominates in South-West Africa, or there will be a triumph of naked barbarism over

Western civilization… The hour is late

and the danger is great.

ANTHONY HARRIGAN,

RED STAR OVER AFRICA

This happens. Two whites alone together as we’re alone together in this tiny butchery next to the Mobil station in Karibib, and it’s back to the war, back to the glories of counter-insurgency. “Think about it.” The butcher Schmidsdorf, one bug eye a widening orb, the other squinting, whispers, “The South Africans would not use their navy because of the Soviet threat.”

“I’d like a kilo and half of pork loin,” I say. “And some lard.”

He takes the pork loin out of the case with one hand and carries it to the slicer. Pork loin’s on special. There’s a sign in the window. He glances toward the door and says, “You must understand. It wasn’t a war. It was a police action. We were fighting Sam Nujoma, not Brezhnev.”

The butcher Schmidsdorf is a very thin, mostly insane man with a flat nose and up-turned nostrils that face you like two black holes, abysses, hairy pistol barrels. He hates Commies, Jews, and kaffirs. A good butcher, Antoinette says. He even makes some cuts like a great butcher, though as a general rule, butchers shouldn’t be so bony. Engelbert Schmidsdorf, famous for his bloodwurst, boerwurst, leberwurst, fleishwurst, weisswurst, zungenwurst, and occasional schinkenwurst, as well as for his chronic wifelessness and the fact that he was one of the few German Southwesters who fought side by side with their ex-enemies, the South Africans (i.e, the British and the Boers), against the only true enemies, Commies, Jews, and kaffir terrorists. .

“You know what?” I say. “Maybe make it two kilos.”

He peeps over the counter at me. “I was stationed at Ruacana. Greenest place in this dry hole of country. And there were terrorists on every side — black shadows.”

He rubs his nose upward with the palm of his hand, and those nostrils have me in their sights again.

“Did you ever see a black with a shadow? Out there at that school? We lived in a guest house, soldiers, and we had maids, black ones in white shoes. In the mornings we went out and got killed, but didn’t we sleep well at night?” He pauses, looks down at the loin on the slicer. “Since then, I am dead.”

This happens also. The butcher says he’s dead. He fondles the pork loin on the slicer. People say it’s the bug eye that does the talking, and that it’s the other eye, the one that squints, that’s the lonely one, the one that never wants you to leave him. Antoinette says the man is so lonely he forgets to eat. All the meat under the sun and the butcher starves. There are days, Antoinette says, she’d like to drag him out to Goas and make him listen to the boys sing in church.

“How fatty your loin?” he says.

I wiggle my hand. “So-so fatty.”

He holds a slice up for my approval.

“Little more.”

He finishes the slicing and wraps up the package, holds it out to me with a bloody paw, just out of my reach. He sneezes, a small, forlorn sneeze. He wipes his nose with some bloody paper.

“How much lard?”

“Five K bucket.”

“No fleishwurst? It is very fresh.”

“Maybe next week.”

*

Outside, I wait for Pohamba. He’s next door in the China Shop buying a pair of snakeskin shoes. You could find anything in the China Shop, including Chinese people. Across the road, in front of the takeaway, I watch two drunks hold each other tenderly, like two drunks.

55. SISTER ZOë

On the wind of talk, word carried — from Usakos to Omaruru to Karibib, and then even out to Goas — that’s no real nun. It had, people said, something to do with her mouth, or more specifically, the way she bit her lip with one jagged, vampirish incisor. People said this wasn’t the way you walked around penitent. Not a bride of Christ, this one. Her catechism is nothing but lies. It was about desire, how it eats away at you when it’s stifled, and just because you hide in the sisterhood doesn’t mean you don’t sweat the sheets. Sister Zoë, her serious, tired face, her generous hands. She was from the south, a Nama from Keetmanshoop. She ran from her mother. She ran from Keetmanshoop. Anybody would run from Keetmanshoop, where the sun does nothing all day but lash your neck and look for plants to kill. At least up here we’ve got three scrawny trees a kilometer.

Now they say she’s back down south for good.

Sister Zoë worked at the clinic at Usakos, and she used to come every first and third Saturday with Sister Ursula and Sister Mary, out to the farm for sick call. The boys would line up in front of the hostel dining hall and go in one by one to be examined. There wasn’t a boy at Goas who wasn’t deathly ill those particular first and third Saturdays. If only to get touched by Zoë’s hands and sent away, condemned healthy. Sister Ursula was German, gaunt and old, with cracked hands. She’s been a nurse so long among blacks, people said, the woman thinks she’s a doctor. Sister Ursula would usually stand off to one side and wait, haughty, for hard cases. She carried antibiotics in a padlocked handbag. Sister Mary was the one the boys went to when they were actually sick, so sick that even the touch of Zoë meant nothing. Sister Mary was a large, shaky-breasted woman with a pocked face. She was from Malemba up on the Caprivi, a place, she’d said, that was so thick in the bush that once you left, you could never find home again. She laughed at the boys who were sick, called them God’s paupers. Come, little pauper, come; we shall take your temperature and then see what we find in Sister Ursula’s magic handbag. Sister Mary always gave out free Q-tips and plastic rosaries in multiple colors. But mostly those Saturdays were about Zoë and her hands on your body. Pohamba would stand and supervise the mob, and every once in a while walk to the front and push his way inside the dining hall and announce to Sister Zoë that he had cancer.

“Cancer all over. Heal the sick, Sister.”

And Sister Zoë would gaze at him from under the habit that people said was fake, a prop, and say in her soft, beautiful English, “Teacher, I counsel repose.” Because her hands were only for the boys. And Pohamba, who when he really loved was a total coward, would go back to policing the line. Later, he’d go on about how all he wanted was to lift her habit, not take it off, only lift it.

We’d see them come up and over the ridge, moving steadily toward the cattle gate. Their walk, how one never got in front of the other. Their white gym shoes. Their habits lifting vertical in the wind like the scarves of old-time pilots. And the boys would catch a glimpse of the top of their heads and begin shouting, “Swestas!” They always parked on the road, because once Sister Ursula got the van stuck in the last dry riverbed and vowed she’d never go through that hell again. Also, didn’t it look better for the Lord’s healers to come on foot?

One day only two appeared over the rise.

The story that got back to us was that she’d gone to administer shots in the location and was raped by a bostoto. Sister Ursula sent her back to Keetmanshoop. The boys — for months and, who knows, maybe years — thought only of her hands, how they barely touched you when they touched you, sending you away. Move on, healthy boy, move on.

56. THEOFILUS

Nothing is beautiful here except the beginning and the end of the day — which is never the beginning or end of his work — so beauty happens in the middle of unfinished jobs. There are dusks when night is less about light than the mountains. When the ridges of the Erongos seem to huddle and move forward, as if they — not the sky — will bury us.

Day work means the veld. Night work means the generator. It runs from around seven-thirty to eleven. Since it is constantly breaking down, Theofilus acts in the capacity of a nurse. He sits beside the generator in the generator shack, listening to the motor, waiting for some wrong sound in all that jangle. Those hours we have electricity, he sits there until eleven. When the lights suddenly pop off early, we know his fingers are working in the dark.

When he does finally go to his bed in the mission garage, he lies there and sips warm beer, if he has any, and falls asleep with his eyes open. His blue jumper hangs on a nail by the door.

57. ZAMBEZI NIGHTS

Night swelt. The only wind is my own breathing. It’s after eleven and I’m marking compositions by candlelight. I’ve invented a candleholder. I propped a candle in a boot and tightened the laces. Boot light. The papers all begin with the line: Out in the veld I saw… Out in the veld I saw a kudu. Out in the veld I saw a broken tree. Out in the veld I saw too many dead people. Out in the veld I saw no money.

There’s a long scratch at my screen. I leap and knock over my chair.

“Who’s out there?”

“Did I scare Teacher?”

I carry my boot to the door. Her face is always different in person than when I think about it. Her face looms so large in my mind that when I see her I’m surprised how small it is. Only her eyes are huge tonight, like bobbing olives in the light of the candle. Tomo is slung on her back, his head lolling over her shoulder. At her feet is her mustard suitcase. She’s got on long pants, a rare thing.

“Scared me? You?”

“I saw you jump.”

“Normally my guests knock.”

“Ask me what I’m doing.”

“Not that I have any guests.”

She sits down on the suitcase.

“What are you doing?”

“Leaving.”

“Again?”

“For the moment, however, I’m moving over here.”

“Here?”

“Next door.”

“Next door? To Kapapu’s old room?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Why?”

“A teacher got stabbed in there. With a bike spoke. You never heard the story? A new teacher comes and falls in love with the wife of another teacher and —”

Mavala snorts. “The stories of this place.” She stands up and seizes the handle of the case. “You aren’t very hospitable. Don’t you want to invite me in?”

I give way and Mavala’s in my squalor. My first official guest after Pohamba and Auntie. Goas is a life lived outside rooms. If our rooms aren’t sanctuaries, at least they are places to hunker in private. Mavala sets Tomo down in my laundry basket. He takes right away to my reeking socks. Then she pushes away my books and papers and clothes and takes a seat on my bed. I go back to my desk. Moths batter against the torn screen and for a while we listen to the soft thumping. Mavala begins to knead the mosquito netting and I remember it’s something my mother used to do when she came home from work exhausted, sit on her bed and knead the blanket.

I point to the candle on the desk. “What do you think of my boot?”

“Why don’t you stick it in a bottle?”

“No. See the boot is the whole point.”

“The whole point of what?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s probably a regulation against it.”

“I’m sure. And isn’t there a regulation against single women living in the quarters? Didn’t the principal do a tale on it?”

“Ask me if I’m going back there.”

“Something about temptation and how to keep it at bay. That the sobering influence of married people acts to tamp down —”

“Go ahead. Ask me.”

“Are you —”

“Die first.”

“I see.”

“I loathe this place.”

“So why’d you come back?”

She doesn’t answer, still that kneading. A moth careens into the flame. It tries to fly with a wing on fire before that’s the end of it. A sound like a wrinkle and smoke.

“Festus said you had a good posting in Grootfontein.”

She sighs, bounces a finger against her lower lip. “There was no Grootfontein.” She looks at Tomo, who is now on his stomach in the basket, his arms spread out like a tired swimmer, a pair of my underwear on his head. “Tomo was Grootfontein. He was waiting, at a friend’s. I never thought I’d come back. Then I thought with him so young, it might be easier here for a while. At least there’s a job, and I thought my sister —”

There’s a slowness in the shadow her elbow makes as she rubs the back of her head. The shadow creeps and retreats in the spastic flame. We watch each other. A mosquito weens in my ear, now soft, now blaring.

“Your sister?”

“Yes. I thought —” She leans back on my bed. “I don’t know what I thought.” Neither of us says anything else for a long time. Mavala stares at the ceiling.

A pound on the wall wrecks it, the silence of the night and of Mavala in my room, on my bed. Then more pounds. Three longs followed by two shorts followed by two more shorts and another long. “Has anyone been alone on this farm?” Mavala says. “For five minutes? Alone?”

“Not that’s been documented.”

“What’s he doing?”

“It’s Morse code. You were in a war.”

“We used satellite phones.”

I put my head to the wall and take in the pounds. Now it sounds like he’s using his feet.

“What’s he saying?”

“He says there’s a sale at the Pep Boys in Usakos. Thirty-five percent off on all beachwear and towels.”

She looks down at the bed. Her fingers are still crushing the netting. “Beachwear?”

A moment later, Pohamba’s colossal head rises from below the window. He puckers the screen like a fish. I run to lock the door, but I’m too late and he explodes into the room in nothing but flip-flops and briefs, leaps up on my bed. “Deliverance!” he shouts. “Mercy, mercy me! Comrade Shikongo joins the bachelors!”

“Shhhhhh, the kid,” she says. “You’ll wake the kid.” And Mavala wraps her arms around Pohamba’s bare legs and I watch the two of them leaping and laughing in the now frantic light. I remember this, how I sat there at my desk and watched them.

“Teacher!” Pohamba yells. “Boot’s on fire!”

We mobilize our nightclub, which Pohamba calls Zambezi Nights, after his favorite bottle store in Otavi. I pound the other wall and wake up Vilho, who begs to be allowed to sleep, but later materializes with a half bottle of Fanta. Pohamba goes to fetch Obadiah and Festus. Festus bolts right over. It will take Obadiah a little longer because, as everybody knows, Antoinette sleeps with one Cyclopean eye open. Later, he toddles over with a fresh pint of Cardinal Richelieu. “Brandy in the age-old French tradition,” he says. “For the European in all of us.” Pohamba fixes the tape player with a pen, and we, again, listen to Whitney Houston — before the tape player breaks (again). Pohamba rolls the last of his dagga. I boil spaghetti. Festus and Vilho dance to the memory of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (who loves me).” Mavala and I sit a little out of the circle, away from the fire, beneath the acacia. She takes a slug of the Richelieu and passes it on. Pohamba says Vilho dances like a Boer having a shit. “Move those hips, dear brother!”

“Oh, I gotta feel some heat with somebody,” Festus sings. “Yeah I really gotta…”

“It’s wanna,” Pohamba says. “Wanna feel the heat.”

Speaking of heat, we’ve none left. I’m still amazed by how it disappears in the night, even in summer, torn out of the sand by the dark.

“Is this the piss tree?” Mavala says.

“No, the piss tree’s behind Antoinette’s.”

She sniffs. “Are you certain?”

Mavala droops against me, then wakes, rights herself. Festus and Vilho collapse in a heap. Tomorrow morning looms. Festus gets up and dusts himself off, joins his plump hands in prayer. “Well, I’m off to bed, brothers and sisters. There’s Mass in the morning.”

“The priest is here?” Pohamba says.

“Back this afternoon from Swakop.”

“Bugger the pontiff,” Pohamba says.

“Please,” Obadiah says.

“I’m not Catholic,” Pohamba says. “I’m a Marxist revolutionary, and during the war I —”

“Taught fractions,” Festus says.

Pohamba stands. Sometimes when he’s drunk, he looks for reasons to pummel Festus. And Festus stands there blinking, waiting, trying to decide if he should run. Instead, Pohamba begins to sway — not to our dear Whitney, to something else. He dances by himself for a while, then slowly turns and looks at Mavala and begins to ramble, not angry, quiet, under his breath. “My mother was Catholic, bless her soul. But my own father fought barefoot at Omgulumbashe, and during the struggle I too —”

“I believe you,” Mavala says. “I believe you.”

Obadiah was holding up the bottle, toasting the ungreen earth and all of us impoverished beneath its moon, when the principal stalked into our circle from behind the toilet houses. Even then he wore a tie, yellow and blue stripes for Thursday, rammed up tight under his chin. He stood by what was left of the fire and looked us over. His glasses caught the last spark of flame in the coals. Obadiah crawled over to him on his knees and offered him the final swig of the Richelieu. Then he passed out at his feet. The principal seized the bottle by the neck and tipped it back. Then he nudged Obadiah with the toe of his shoe. “This is the Head Teacher with whom I am to build a new nation out of the ashes of war? Ha! Even Goas will fall into the sea.”

Without moving his head in her direction, he said, “A word, privately, Miss Shikongo?”

This was followed by a brief and strangely quiet exchange between the two of them in Kapapu’s old room. Pohamba held an enamel mug to the door but couldn’t catch a thing. That door, behind which so much else had happened. Then the principal charged out and headed straight across the soccer field toward his office without a word. We watched him unlock it and go inside. He sat there in the dark.

Mavala refused our help, either with her suitcase or the kid, who was in full fury at being woken up and taken from my sweat-reeking clothes. We watched her pull the case through the sand, up the road to the principal’s house, as Tomo flailed at her back.

58. VILHO

Vilho shivering ecstatically in the cold church before the light. His knees on the concrete.

I only want to be alone, and still there’s desire? I don’t want Your blood, only Your touch. Sleep is only a brief reprieve. You watch. I wake slow. I come here and I bring You my tiredness, my empty hands, my inabilities, my bitterness, my unsatisfaction, my disgust, my cold knees. The fierceness of silence in the cold. The way each movement echoes here. You above on the wall. Plaster, broken-off leg. But it’s You, isn’t it?

59. GOAS

An abandoned swing set. A single seat dangling from the crossbar. It was behind the hostel, where the reek of raw sewage made it a no-man’s-land. The smallest and poorest boys would go back there to shit. They couldn’t afford the toll the older boys made them pay to use the toilets. Some boy must have braved the stench to float for a while. You’d hear it. The screech was loud, and you could tell how fast he was flinging himself by the intervals when the swing reached as high as it could and the screws and the rust of the chain contracted. We’d hear it during class and wonder which truant was back there. And we could, if we bothered to, remember what it was like, that jolt, that drop.

60. MORE GOAS LOVE

Festus points to one of Auntie Wilhelmina’s whelps that’s trying to mount another of Auntie’s whelps and says, “That dog’s penis is too big.” Festus says things like this, things you might think but never say. Mid-morning break and us watching it. The dogs in the puddle beneath the standpipe, failing at it. The one dog, the mangle-eyed one, trying, trying again. His terrible red penis. It wasn’t that she was averse.

The dog, front paws paddling the air again, hind legs surging forward, a feeble dance. He’s on again. Whoops. No go.

Why remember this? Why relate it? Things that are not worth telling force themselves out in the open anyway. Like that sad dog’s unrequited erection. Animals fail to fuck and we get a half hour’s free entertainment. Antoinette damns us all to yet another level of hell. We liked to think Festus wasn’t as complicated as we were. He had too great a love of obvious observation. Things you were looking right at. But he was right, wasn’t he? That dog’s penis was too big.

“I didn’t think it was possible,” Mavala says.

“Oh, it’s possible,” Pohamba says. “Either that or her Switzerland’s too small.”

The triangle jangled and we all went back to class, left those dogs to themselves. Except Festus, who stayed to watch.

Later, after school, he told us that she finally gave up on him and bit Mr. Big Cock in the neck. And that’s when I tried, Vilho-like, to yank a moral out of it. I said, There’s something sad about those two unashamed dogs. The public nature of such doomed love. Their complete lack of grace. Those dogs are us, our own pathetic natures, our own fundamental inability to connect. .

Festus taught science. He said it wasn’t sad.

“What, then?”

“A matter of proportionality. It will never fit. I waited. I watched.”

“And if they love? Isn’t it sad that —”

Festus stared at me for a moment. “It doesn’t fit,” he said. “That’s all.” Then he scratched his belly and walked off toward his house, toward Dikeledi, and we watched him, squat and round, walking away. Festus was said to be trying to emulate the principal’s stomach. In this he was succeeding. And we thought of how unfair it all was, of a house free of sadness, of a floor free of sand, of soft underwear (Antoinette, who did our laundry, was morally opposed to fabric softener), of those waiting Dikeledian arms. .

I turned slowly to Pohamba. This our revenge? That Festus and Dikeledi can’t consummate? That no sexual congress convened in the purple house we’re all so jealous of?

Even we don’t wish this on Festus. We tried to think only happy thoughts. Nothing too big, nothing too small. Finally, Pohamba couldn’t help himself.

“Oh, that poor poor poor girl.”

“Don’t you go save her.”

“Do you think I am that low?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “Never to friends.” He brightened. “Wait — Festus isn’t a friend.”

“Close.”

“Close isn’t a friend, friend.” And he bopped off toward the quarters and his waiting bed.

61. SIESTA

I always said, Sure, it’s hot here, but you don’t get the humidity like we do back home in O-hi-o. You see, back home in Hamilton County, we get what we call a wet heat, and no matter how bad it gets around here, there’s no humidity, and so it’s really not so… I stop saying all that.

Bloat of eyeballs. I have returned to a liquid state. I am a broiled pig melted down to sap. No cold water anywhere on the farm. We’d sent a boy around to beg for some, but neither the priest nor the principal would answer their doors. Water from the tap was at least eighty degrees. We had no choice but to remain in the sweaty, greasy shade of our rooms until the principal headed for Karibib and one of us could hitch a ride and bring back some Fanta. I lie on my bed and pant. I try to read Turgenev. Until his dying day, Chertopkhanov remained convinced that the blame for Masha’s treachery lay with a certain neighbor, a retired captain of Lancers by the name of Yaff, who, in Pantelei’s words, got his way just by perpetually twisting his whiskers, thickly oiling his hair and sniffing significantly… I toss Yaff on the floor and lust the walls, try to put together the pieces from the remains of my German calendar girls. Mother of God, to have them back intact. Unhelpful body parts bob across my salt fat eyes: How do you letch an elbow? I can’t sleep, won’t sleep, will never sleep. Too hot even for self-delight, the only exercise any of us ever got during siesta. And then in the swamp of this lost time, a faraway click. A sound like a door opening. I try to sit up and I think I see a blurry vision of Mavala moving toward my bed. She stands and looks down at me. Her eyes are still, but her lips are moving without words. Through the sog, I think I hear her breathing, but it too sounds as if it’s so far away. She kneels and rests her head on my stomach, where it rises and falls with my panting. That’s all. She says nothing.

At three-thirty, I woke up alone to Pohamba gargling.

62. OBADIAH

We of course don’t have anything approximating your autumn here, but I have often imagined it. Beautiful, but also violent, no? Those leaves, not yet deadened, ripped off the only mother they’ve ever known, their hold on a branch. Here the sun beats and beats, and the plants, perhaps, come to expect it. Every day the homicidal sun. Your autumn, I’ve read about it, seems much like a sudden, wrenching death. Or do I misunderstand it from the leaf’s point of view?

63. MORNING MEETING

Murmur not among yourselves.

JOHN 6:43

This morning the principal is lustful by way of Isaiah. Thus: so are we. Yea, we are greedy dogs who can never have enough. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not what? Thou shalt not everything, because, yes, sinners, it’s everywhere. Lust grows out from under the rock like wattle bush. Lust needs no water for a thousand days.

And Mavala, next to Vilho, who’s next to me, reaches her foot over and nips the back of my shin with the tip of her heel. Then she says something into her coffee that I can’t make out. This is how we sometimes communicated, all of us, during the moral tale — through our slurps. And the principal is so loud we can sometimes talk under him. I drink and keep my nose deep in there, lean closer to Vilho, who pretends not to notice. I point my cup her way.

“What?”

“Bored.”

And myself, still early-early-morning dopish, gurgle back: “What?”

“Bored. I’m very bored.”

“Hast thou enough meatflesh, you insatiable whoremongers?” the principal booms.

And the fog begins to lift, and in a greedy yes covetous yes carnal whisper I nearly shriek into my coffee: Okay, so. .

She waits a moment. The principal is working himself up into a hyperventilating frenzy, dramatically flipping pages. “Siesta,” she breathes.

“He goeth after her straightaway as an ox goeth to the slaugh —”

“Where?”

Mavala aims the bottom of her cup at me, her eyes giant over the rim, steady, blinkless. “The graves,” she says. “The Voortrekkers.”

“Or as a fool to the correction of the stocks!”

64. ANTOINETTE

She keeps them in an empty tin next to the Rooibos tea in the kitchen sideboard. Her vice. Her weakness. Her raisins. What is it about them that makes her crave their shriveled little bodies with such abandon? What makes her lust so overpowering there are times when she slinks into her own house in the smack middle of a working day to stuff a pluck of them in her mouth? Ugly emaciated things, like the shriveled tops of fingers left too long in the wash water. She hardly chews one before it’s gone and all she’s left with is an insatiable need for another. Savage gluttony. The original fruit comes wrapped in a package from the Pick ’n Pay. The devil is crafty. There is a psychologist in the office block next to the Mobil station, and there was even a time when she almost knocked on the door. I have only a small question, Doctor, concerning a small fruit. Otherwise I am healthy in the head. All I want is to control the passion. To bring it to heel. To leave a boiling cauldron of mealies, my post, my responsibility, to feed my face? Like an old hoer stealing across the sand to a tin in the sideboard. Hand pushing the door. The glant of sun on the sideboard. Fingers seize the tin. Leave your nose among them. How at first they don’t smell and then they do. A snort of sugared earth up the nostrils. Oh, filth. Ravish them. A vision of herself scurrying across the sand, the midday sun. Soon the boys will be lining up at the dining-hall door for lunch, spoons in hands. Temptation, fulfillment, emptiness. How can it be that the only cure for sin is more sin?

65. GRAVES

Instead of walking up the road by the principal’s, I took the long way around, out past the cattle gate, and doubled back behind Dikeledi and Festus’s. The Boers were buried near the banks of the dry Toanib River, where it looped out toward Krieger’s farm. It was a kind of ghost river. Not only was it dry like the other rivers, but there were days it was gone, when you couldn’t distinguish it from the rest of the veld.

She was already out there, sitting on one of the black granite graves. The graves were three narrow slabs, with a tall headstone at the front of each. The only shiny things at Goas; I wondered how they could still look like this after so many years. Mavala was sitting on Grieta Dupreez, the unmarried daughter. Around Grieta was a moat of white gravel. Below her name: Rus in Vrede. Rest in peace. Beyond the graves, in a small rutlike gully, a place where Theofilus sometimes burned garbage; the ground was strewn with ash.

She was making piles out of the gravel, making piles and then slashing them. She didn’t look up at me. “I thought you weren’t coming.”

“I had to make Pohamba a sandwich.”

She made a roof with her hand and squinted, looked me over. “Are you the houseboy now?”

“We switch off.”

“What kind of sandwich?”

“Turkey with chutney.”

“Chutney?”

“What’s wrong with chutney?”

She drank from a water bottle she’d been holding between her knees. The water spilled out from the edges of her mouth and ran down her neck, soaking her shirt.

“Is it all right?” she said.

“Is what all right?”

“To come here.”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to sleep?”

“No.”

“You look tired.”

“I guess I’ve gotten used to siesta.”

“So go back to bed.”

“I’m fine.”

“I don’t need sleep.”

“I don’t either.”

“I never need sleep.”

“Neither do I.”

“I only wanted to talk — without all of them — always —”

“I know.”

“They’re always —”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell them?”

“No.”

“Not Pohamba?”

“No.”

“He has a mouth. They all have mouths.” She looked at me, looked away, looked at me. “I only wanted to talk without them,” she said. “Why is that so difficult?”

“Where’s the kid?” I asked.

“Behind us. Asleep in his car seat. I hope asleep. I bribed him with Twix.”

“His car seat?”

“Now I need a car. Sit?”

“Here?”

“Why not? These dead Boers are comfortable chairs.”

66. APOSTLE JOHN

Apostle John at the Mobil station in Karibib will always God bless you even if you don’t give him any money. There’s John in his wheelchair without tires, his slow rumble across the oily pavement, one hand out, the other doing his best to steer. His shoes are tied to his knees to remind you he’ll never need them again. Some days Apostle John is blind. Other days he isn’t. He says he got blown to Christ up north in the struggle. You try not to look at him. Apostle John rolling toward you, palm up — and still it doesn’t matter, even if you don’t give him a single rand. Still, it’s God bless you. Apostle John’s not a miser with the Almighty’s love. You ignorer. You of the undeserving horde. Yes, you. You. I’m speaking to you. God bless you.

67. ANNUAL LIBRARY LECTURE (EXCERPTED)

Honorable Obadiah Horaseb

Chief Librarian

. . while the Hindus, for instance, say that behind every book is a set of hands. Now in the context of a library, a lending institution (a lovely idea, no?), we may carry this golden idea further. The more a book is borrowed, the more hands have held it, cradled it. Would you have the imprint of a human soul go untouched? And yet what of those books that go years, nay, decades, unread, their words silent, waiting? Contemplate this a moment. Do unread words continue speaking? If so to whom? Is it not the lonely, unheard chattering of the dead? Is a closed book not a tomb? Oh, mourn the unborrowed books. Here’s one. A fine copy of Bleak House published in 1957 by Black International, Hudson, New York. Last borrowed from this library in 1973. 1973! Would it were a crime, citizens. This book, these words, dormant? A book with the boldest first sentence ever composed! “London.” That’s all. “London.” Amazing conjurement. Imagine you hold a book in your hands. Open it. “Goas.” One of you boys might very well be the future crafter of such an evocation. A feeble example from a man of little poetic gifts might go something like this:

Goas. Second term finally over and His Highness, the majordomo, is sitting on his patch of grass outside his princely office. Unflinching drought. As much sand in the air as if the wind had but newly broomed up the desert itself, and it would not be fantastical to meet a sun-crazed grampus-like woman hulumphing down the road from her fence line. .

Thus, I propose a moment of silence, not only for stories unread, but for stories untold. Was it not Cioran who said a book should both cure old wounds and inflict new ones? Thus, an unread book is what? A festering sore? A cancer? What then, I ask, is an unwritten book? I believe a silent prayer is called for. Yes, for dead authors and their fleshless hands, only bones and silence now. But also for ourselves, my boys, for all the stories you have yet to tell.

Amen.

Now concerning this copy of Bleak House: I will extend the due date ten days. Standard Sevens have increased privileges, so you may have it for up to two weeks provided you write a book report. Rubrecht? Petrus Matunda? Petrus Goraoab? Skinny Hilunda? Jeremiah? Members of the esteemed faculty? Anybody? Theofilus?

68. GRAVES

He pants at my door.”

“Who?”

“Von Swine.”

“The principal? When?”

“Call him von Swine.”

“Okay. When does von Swine pant?”

“In the middle of the night.”

“What does he want?”

“At three in the morning? To give me a new box of chalk.”

“Is the door locked?”

“The door has no lock.”

“Miss Tuyeni?”

“She sleeps heavy. Since we were girls. One morning my father hit her with a bottle.”

“So he pants?”

“Yes.”

“Why doesn’t he just walk in? It isn’t like he’s shy.”

“He’s being polite. He’s waiting for an invitation.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Do?”

“Can’t you call the school inspector? Report him.”

“The inspector? What would I say? My brother-in-law stands outside my door and breathes heavy?”

“Why not?”

“Like a dog out there, aching. I listen to him. I’ll give this to him: The man’s a revulsion, but he has rhythm. I sleep to him — huh, huh, huh.”

“Huh, huh, huh?”

“Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh.”

69. SPIES

Pohamba had a sign on the wall opposite his bed. It said: COME AS A FRIEND NOT A SPY. I think of him now at dusk on those rare cooler days when for once the sky was more blue than white. Some weeks we were so berated by the heat that when it did seep away we missed it, because now our laziness had no excuses. A good time to plan our lessons, so we slept. Or tried to sleep. Pohamba lying on his bed rereading that sign, because his eyes are restless and he’s out of magazines. A learner made it for him. In addition to math, Pohamba taught the only two electives offered at Goas, physical training and woodworking/mechanical arts. PT consisted of a few sets of jumping jacks and laps around the soccer field. Woodworking was once a week, on Wednesdays, in the mimeograph-machine shack, which was also the tool shack, which was also the place where boys on severe punishment were taken to be flogged. In math, Pohamba would assign problems, and then the boys would take their copy books up to his desk. If they got it wrong, Pohamba would feel betrayed. I teach you and I teach you and I teach you and this is the thanks? Zero is nothing but a tool for coping with reality. Haven’t I told you this x times? Nullify the value and then divide into negation. There is no end to our negative subparts. But on Wednesdays, in the mimeograph shack, amid his tools and his wood, he talked to the boys, told them even more practical things about life. One of the things he had told them had ended up on that sign. He was proud of it. The day the boy gave it to him, he called me into his room. The sign was painted blue, red, and green, SWAPO colors.

He was just lying there, his hands folded across his chest, his feet hanging off the bed, admiring it.

“Nice,” I said. “Who made it?”

“Eiseb’s brother.”

We both looked at the sign for a while. Then I went back to my own bed and thought about spies, about seeming to be one person and being another. Or were you both? Neither? At Goas, Pohamba was so completely Pohamba. What he wanted, what we all wanted, at times, was to be not only somewhere else but someone else. A friend, what was the challenge in that?

I mostly remember him in motion. Even when he was still, much about him was in motion. His eyes, his mouth, his jiggling knees. But the times I need to return to now are the rare moments he’s at peace. Him on that saggy mattress that’s too big for him. His head on his extorted pillows. His wardrobe door is open and his shirts hang neatly in plastic. His walls are bone-colored. Plaster crumbles in spots. On the same wall as the sign there’s a long, jagged crack that runs from the ceiling to the floor. (Sometimes we pour hot water in our cracks to kill the ants.) He’s there, reading his sign. A secret history of Pohamba? What of the horror of not having one, of being the person people think you are?

70. PRINSLOO

Sampie Prinsloo sells us vegetables. A jovial old-time Boer farmer who dresses the part. Veldskoens and no socks, khaki shorts, skinny legs holding up a belly like a small hillock. A cucumber dangling lazy out of his mouth like a cigar. No hat, just an exuberant bush of dusty hair. He’s also the Republic of Namibia’s most vocal local cheerleader. (“I’m a tough old bastard,” he’d say. “If I can survive forty years in this forsaken place, I can live through President Nujoma.”) Prinsloo was the first white in Karibib to line up for a new driver’s license. His bakkie is festooned with patriotic bumper stickers.

GLORY TO OUR PLAN HEROES.

TO EVERY BIRTH ITS BLOOD.

ONE NATION, ONE NAMIBIA, SOUND YOUR HOOTER.

Once or twice a month, he and his wife pull up to the cattle gate and Prinsloo jams that hooter. Then he gets out and waits. His wife stays in the car. Apparently she doesn’t share his enthusiasm for getting to know the neighbors now that things have changed so much. The boys come running out of the hostel or off the soccer field, springing over to him, and Prinsloo shouts, “Go back and get your money, boys!”

And the boys say, “We’re poor, meneer, very poor boys. We have nothing, meneer, nothing.”

“You think this fruit of the earth is free? You think I’m Communistic?”

And the boys in chorus say: “Not Communistic. Meneer is very generous.”

Prinsloo sighs and cackles and takes his cucumber out of his mouth and spits and shows his golden teeth and then yanks out a box of small carrots and starts tossing them in the air. The boys leap for the carrots. High in the air for those runt carrots. Not because they’re hungry, but because they’re free and this is a game they still enjoy.

Dankie my baas! Dankie my baas!

Eventually, we the teachers walk down the road. We take our time. We are dignified teachers and we will not jump for carrots. No Boer’s monkeys are the teachers. Antoinette carries down her knives. (Prinsloo is also the local knife sharpener.) And we look over the merchandise like discriminating shoppers. Prinsloo watches me put back a pumpkin. What? The United States doesn’t appreciate my vegetables? How about a nice squash for the U S of A? How about green peppers, Brussels sprouts, oranges, corn, spinach, kumquats, lemons, pawpaws, okra, pears, pomegranates, eggplant (aubergine, Obadiah corrects)? Because there is nothing Prinsloo can’t grow. The man grows cotton on the edge of the Namib. We pay our money to his wife, who watches us with small, suspicious eyes behind the dirty windshield. Then we head toward our rooms, our arms now piled high with the bounty of a suddenly miraculously generous earth. It helps that Prinsloo has the only irrigable standing water of any farm along the C-32. Still, he pretends it has less to do with his groundwater levels than his magic hands. Prinsloo’s hands, gnarled, fattish, beet-red.

71. GOAS

Quiet out here during most of the bad years leading to independence. The eighties were years of calm, when Goas settled into its mission of churning out farm boys with sufficient arithmetic, Afrikaans, and Fear of the Lord. The shooting at the Old Location in this country, Soweto, Sharpeville, Steven Biko in South Africa — all that happened on some other planet. Yet it is true that one boy did burn down a classroom here in 1985, an event that now stands as Goas’s proudest antiapartheid moment. At the time it was considered pure terrorism. The boy, Lucas Nambela, was sent down south to the juvenile prison in Mariental. That it was our current principal who whipped Lucas Nambela is an unspoken truth and one of the contradictions by which Goas runs. The principal does not discuss the particulars of back then. The revised truth is that everyone who was here believed in the cause of righteousness, all are survivors of apartheid’s unmitigated evil and oppression. Lucas Nambela was a freedom fighter. The classroom he burned down was the school science lab. Four years later, on the eve of independence, the diocese in Windhoek sent Goas new equipment. Men came out with state-of-the-art everything: lab tables, sinks with running water, microscopes. There are beakers and flasks. Safety goggles. Hazardous chemicals. Bunsen burners! To this day no boy has touched any of it. The principal keeps the place locked up like a gleaming shrine. The Lucas Nambela Memorial Classroom. Even Festus, who’s the science teacher, can’t use it.

The principal Scotch-taped his edict to the door:

The equipment inside this room is very expensive. It took many years after the patriotic incident of 1985 for this equipment to arrive. There is too much risk involved in the use of this equipment at the present time. An inventory is being conducted. Following this inventory, the lab will be opened in limited circumstances. The public shall be apprised of any progress in this matter.

Meanwhile, we all peek in and look at the shiny hardware. Our own museum of the future, right there, two classes down from the principal’s office. A form of worship to look at all that new stuff through the glass.

Across the courtyard, Festus teaches photosynthesis. Sometimes he points to the shackled class and says, “Behind that door, all that I’m telling you may be proved before your eyes.” A sort of heaven waiting. There were times we wondered if it wasn’t for the best. Bunsen burners get clogged. Beakers shatter. Crucibles rust. Theories go to hell. Let all remarkable things remain in the realm of perfection, of order. .

72. GRAVES

There are no nights to remember, because we never had any. Out there by the graves after lunch. Only those stark early afternoons when the day died a little and everybody else wilted on their beds. Could we have snuck some nights? Probably, but first of all there was Tomo, and second, there was something about the lunacy of anybody being out in the veld during siesta. Weekdays only. (Weekends were too risky; Saturday and Sunday were like all-day random siestas, and you never knew who’d wander out in the veld.) We bucked the schedule of life at Goas, and this was somehow a small thrill, the best we could muster. We’d come from different directions and be shocked to see each other.

What a surprise —

Couldn’t sleep. The heat.

And how is Grieta today?

Still dead, I’m afraid.

Her hands always smelled of the lotion she was continually rubbing on the backs of Tomo’s dry arms. In the bleak light, the two of us leaning against the graves. Her making small piles of gravel with her fingers, then smoothing them. Her fingers were always busy. Tomo on the other side of the graves, drunk off chocolate in his car seat, strapped in, an umbrella propped over him. I was more exhausted after lunch than at night. I lied. Mavala lied. We said we didn’t need sleep. Sometimes we couldn’t help it, and in that light it was like falling asleep under interrogation.

Even then she was restless, talking to herself and fisting and unfisting her hands.

73. KRIEGER

Obadiah said: All our whites are demented in one way or another. It would indeed be interesting to come to America for the sole purpose of observing normal whites. This is not to say that our blacks are lacking in idiosyncrasies. Do you think it’s the sun?

Our closest neighbor, Krieger, we saw only behind the wheel of a speeding bakkie. When he drove across Goas, he scattered anything in his path; boys, goats, teachers. It happened twice a day. Krieger on his way to and from the dorp. Krieger’s truck wings around the church, rumbling across the ruts in the sandy road, then careens across the soccer field in the middle of a game. A fluffy-white-haired honking murderous Santa bellowing, Halloo! Halloo!

According to the principal, Krieger had a binding legal right to drive straight across the soccer field. Once, I spoke up about it during morning meeting. I usually kept quiet, but I felt the behavior of a white was something within my purview to comment on.

“Seems a little dangerous,” I said.

“He holds an easement,” the principal said. “I’ve seen the document, which was duly notarized in Windhoek.”

“He can’t drive around the field?”

“Why should he drive around when the document gives him the right?”

“To spare life and limb.”

“Did I not say the document was duly notarized?”

*

Soccer. A round-robin tournament. We’re holding a set of Pohamba’s betting forms. That wet mimeograph ink, that deep indigo you couldn’t wash off. It dyed your hands purple for weeks. Made you high if you sniffed it and we sniff it. The pool is set at fifteen rand with a double on the last match. It’s been nil-nil for as long as anybody can remember. We’re wilting in our seats like unwatered geraniums.

“Watched high soccer is a lot more interesting,” I say.

Pohamba shouts, “Can’t you get it right? Football. It’s an offense on our culture.”

I wave him away. I’ve discovered something else. If you watch the ones without the ball it’s even better. Their feet. How every move is a beautiful anticipation. The ball is only incidental to the dance. Which is the answer to the mystery. Not only isn’t it about scoring, it isn’t even about the ball. I sniff the betting forms, understanding soccer, proud, loving it, between being bored and sleepy, when suddenly from around the church comes Krieger, roaring, barreling, honking, hallooing. His white arm banging the outside of the door, his fury of white hair waving in the wind. “Run for your lives, boys!” And the boys do. They dive, they tumble. They think it’s hilarious. They think everything’s hilarious. Krieger drives on toward the C-32. Play resumes.

“One of these days that Nazi is going to kill an innocent,” I say.

Obadiah raises a Sherlockian brow. “Nazi?”

“Why not? He’s the right age.”

“Which doesn’t necessarily mean —”

“The Nazis here never even had to learn Spanish.”

“Is not a central tenet of your justice system the transcendent concept of innocent before proven guilty?”

“This isn’t a court. This is Goas.”

“That’s true,” Pohamba says. “No justice here.”

Mavala stands. “You’re all ridiculous.” She slaps twenty rand on Pohamba’s desk. “Put it on United Africa in the next round.”

We watch her walk up the road. Tomo remains. He’s digging a tunnel beneath Vilho’s chair.

I turn to Obadiah. “Look, I’m simply asking for a little empathy for another marginalized people.” (Residual phrase fortuitously recalled from Prof E. L. Cloyd’s Sociology 202, Bowling Green State, Larry Kaplanski’s final grade: C+)

“A little empathy?” Obadiah says. “If empathy was money —”

Score! Kanhala with the header.

Krieger’s other claim to fame is that he shoots zebra in the Erongos and donates the meat to the school. Zebra meat has a distinctive stink. It’s acrid and gamey at the same time. Only the most meat-hungry boys eat it. But it does make for good biltong. When it’s dried out, you can’t smell it as much. Very chewy. So chewy you could chew it like gum, for hours. My own Standard Six Jeremiah Puleni walks around in the late afternoons and hawks zebra biltong to us for small change or old eraserless pencils.

74. GRAVES

Speak, quiet one.”

“About what?”

“About where you’re from.”

“You want to hear about Cincinnati?”

“Yes.”

“Not much to tell.”

“Try.”

I tell her about Cincinnati.

“That’s all?”

“Oh yeah. And at Christmas they put these white lights up at the zoo. It’s very beautiful. And there’s Taft.”

“Who?”

“William Howard Taft. Obesest president. Once he got stuck in a bathtub. They had to come chop him out with hammers. And Christ, Davey Concepcion. How could I forget Davey Concepcion? It must be the heat.”

“Who’s he?”

“You see the thing about Davey was that he wasn’t the superstar. I mean, we’re talking about a team with Johnny Bench, Caesar Geronimo, Tony Pérez, Joe Morgan. And Pete Rose. Hail, Pete Rose. In Cincinnati, he’s lord of earth and sky and hell. Fuck the Hall of Fame. Yes, but it was Davey who had something you couldn’t really name. Davey was the one with the intangibles. No ego, a little bat, just that great glove, but it was his spirit, his loyalty —”

“Like Kaplansk. He’s vice president.”

“Listen: I’d burn down this farm to be Davey Concepcion.”

“Tell me more.”

“He was a humanitarian. He’d send half his salary back to the poor people of the Dominican —”

“About you.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Anything.”

“I once loved a girl named Rainy Pinkus.”

“Her name was Rainy?”

“Yes. Rainy Pinkus.”

“Why not Snowy?”

“It was Rainy.”

“Did she love you back?”

“Not really.”

“Tell me another thing.”

“What?”

“About your childhood.”

“I herded goats at dawn.”

“Lies!”

75. INTOXICATIONISTS IN A DATSUN

Bottle of Zorba on the dash, long since emptied. Obadiah and Kaplansk. All that’s left are their voices, their bodies are gone, floated up, evaporated, poofed.

OBADIAH: I understand that many Talmudic blessings require repetition as a way of ritualizing one’s contact with God.

KAPLANSK: Really?

OBADIAH: In other words, God not as a bolt of thunder but there in the simple everyday moments, in the tying and retying of one’s shoes. In a belch, if you will.

KAPLANSK: Interesting. I hadn’t —

OBADIAH: I myself believe in absolutely nothing. At least not today. This of course is the paradox. One never knows when faith — like love — will wander back like an old dog you thought was dead. It would all be easier if it stayed away for good. Don’t you think?

KAPLANSK: Probably, but —

OBADIAH: Would you like a mint?

KAPLANSK: Please.

76. ANTOINETTE

For her, it’s nearly a love story. She tells it as she beats a carpet she’s hung off the mapone in her garden. She beats the carpet with a wooden spoon the size of a small child’s head. At her feet the wash towels are boiling. Her apron is tight around her chest like body armor.

Thump. Dust waffles up.

There was once a man who stuck his wife’s hand with a fork to prove he loved her, and she walked around with this scar, proudly showing it to people. Then one morning she hacked off his legs with a panga and he bled to death in bed.

Thump. Dust waffles up.

But even after that, she showed her hand with pride. Four little valleys pronged in the flesh. Thy will be done. On earth as it is in heaven.

Thump. Thump. Dust waffles up.

77. MAGNUS AXAHOES

He runs barefoot in the limp sand of the riverbed. He loves the feel of it between his toes. That sound, that shish shish, of sand being thrown behind him. There are days it is the sound alone that keeps his feet moving. That beautiful grinding. One day he’ll run as fast as Rubrecht Kanhala. To run with a pucker thorn in your foot is better, because then you feel no fatigue in the muscles, only the wound in your foot. The pain builds more than endurance. It creates forgetting — and if you can forget, that’s all that matters. He’s read this in a runners’ magazine. A Kenyan said it and it’s the truth.

78. POHAMBA

And the goats snoofing each other’s asses and us sprawled, dunking buttermilk rusks in cold tea, and Pohamba’s got another brother.

“God have mercy,” Festus howls. “Spread-leg woman gave birth to an army.”

Pohamba’s on his stomach. A Standard Two he’s hired to do some chiropractic work walks up and down on his back as he talks.

“Abner, my fourth brother. He worked at the Budget on Peter Mueller Strasse. My other Windhoek brother. He cleaned the cars when the tourists brought them back from a week of chasing elephants at Etosha. Dirty dirty cars, and my brother Abner washed them like babies’ arses. The thick dust of Etosha made him sneeze and sneeze, but he washed and wiped and scrubbed and hosed. But this isn’t what I want to tell you. What I want to tell you is, the baas wouldn’t let him use the toilet to shit. The man was enlightened. He said my brother could piss in the toilet, but not shit in it. For that he had to go across the street to the takeaway.”

“How would the baas know he was shitting?”

“Easy, if it was too quiet, he’d start pounding on the door.”

(Obadiah, offstage left, from behind the mapone, where he’s been dozing: “What the baas of course didn’t know is that one’s posterior is eighty percent cleaner on average than one’s hands. Thus —”)

“Thus what?” Pohamba says. He stands up. The Standard Two drops off his body like a free-falling Lilliputian. “Thus what?”

We wait. His brother could piss, but not shit. Thus what?

Obadiah comes out from behind the tree and, as if this were some proper debate in some proper debating place, concedes defeat, bows to Pohamba, his left arm swooping through the dust.

79. A VISIT FROM COMRADE GENERAL KANGULOHI

Antoinette enthroned on a plastic chair amid her wilted tomato plants and rock-hard radishes. The rest of us are frantic. On her sun-ravished face is the serenity of absolute truth. Not only wasn’t she going to kiss the ring of any general, she wasn’t going to grace him with a single wash of her eyes. Two of her nephews went north to fight the Boers. One came back in a plastic bag; the other didn’t come back at all.

But that wasn’t it. She said she didn’t blame any general for what had happened to those boys. They were heading for it, even before they got the ridiculous idea they were men. This is the way of boys. They go off to war and come back dead, or not at all. She wasn’t blaming the general for those boys, she was blaming the general for being a general.

Antoinette said we were so ignorant we didn’t know the difference between Jesus and the devil’s houseboy. “And make no mistake, your general is in Lucifer’s pay,” she said. Antoinette, radical pacifist, pontificating lazily, shockingly. As I swung around her house with a loaded wheelbarrow, I paused to ask, “So how do soldiers come home from war if they happen to still be alive?”

“Where are you taking that garbage?”

“Behind the toilet houses.”

“Go farther.”

“All right.”

“What did you ask?”

“You think fighting the South Africans was righteous?”

She shook her head.

“If not righteous, then justifiable?”

“Acceptable under the circumstances.”

“So then how does a soldier return?” I stood there with my garbage. Antoinette, calm in her plastic chair, began to soar, her eyes fanatical. “ON HIS KNEES!”

The door of their house flapped open and Obadiah stepped out in an aviator hat with earmuff flaps. “Bravo, wife! Oratory! But it’s only pomp, and pomp never hurt a soul. Now, come, puss-puss, go slip on your green dress. It goes so well with the venom in your eyes.”

No one had ever heard him call her puss-puss before. Maybe she hadn’t either. She didn’t blink. “In holy hell, my green dress.”

Thus, Antoinette refused to lift a finger during the most comprehensive clean-up operation in the history of the farm. We buried random scrap metal. We skoffled the weeds. We picked up goat shit pellet by pellet. The principal had even ordered some boys to rake the veld, the entire veld, which is a bit like trying to siphon off the Atlantic, and they were doing it. The sand rippled out in crests in every direction. It was difficult to know where to walk, the scalloped veld looked so good. I thought of sand traps at the country club I used to caddy at before I got fired for being more interested in the cabana girls.

General Zacharias Kangulohi (combat alias Ho Chi Minh) was our famous alumnus. He rose from farm-boy dust to a great man in SWAPO. He’d lived in exile in London, Dar es Salaam, New York, Lusaka, Stockholm. We stood by the newly painted mural of Hendrik Witbooi with Namibian flags for his eyes and a scroll of the constitution in his hand. We waited. Each boy wore something around his neck that resembled a tie. Ribbons, scarves, cowhide, socks, braided plastic bags. One boy used a piece of biltong, which he nibbled on as morning wasted into noon. We waited. Mavala stood at attention in full camouflage, her green shirt buttoned to her neck, her pants tucked into her boots and blooming out. Her right fist clenched. Her short short hair and bullet head. Her ears stuck out from under the edge of her cap. God, I wanted to bite them. Whatever bitterness she had over the way she was decommissioned (one last paycheck and so long, comrade) was at least temporarily displaced by her sense of ceremony. She was back in the sweat of it — if not of war, something.

Our guest of honor was hours late, and the principal held us there at gunpoint with his bullhorn. He couldn’t get enough of the sound of his amplified voice. The flesh-gnawing horseflies couldn’t get enough of us. They descended en masse. Move in for the chew, boys! We didn’t want cold water anymore, or shade. We prayed only that the sun kill us faster. I’ve heard the same is true of freezing. After a certain point, it’s blissful. We stood; we waited. When the general’s motorcade did arrive, it was like an alien landing — a battalion of motorcycles, land cruisers, jeeps, a limousine, even a mobile home. We stood there as the parade rushed across the soccer field and formed a horseshoe in front of us. When the kicked-up dust settled on our slickened faces, we stood up straighter. The lines of the new anthem quivered on our lips, ready to burst:

Na-mib-ia

Our country

Na-mib-ia, motherland, we love… (Thee!)

Nothing happened. Two minutes, five minutes. We waited on the edge of shrieking at the first sight of the great man. Sirens whirled. The cops on motorcycles spoke furtively into walkie-talkies. The noise of their engines revving, idling, revving. The windows of the limousine were tinted. We thought he was in there having a late lunch. Or maybe he was in the motor home having a nap after the long trip out to Goas from the capital. Sweat was beginning to show through the back of the principal’s suit jacket. Pretty soon he would need to be wrung out. This a man who prided himself on never working hard enough to perspire. He was supposedly an old school chum of the general’s. Our knees had buckled already (but we were packed so close together, we didn’t fall), when we heard the gate clank. Our eyes moved as one, and we saw, at the cattle gate, a tiny man, his body weighed down by a jacket full of medals. He was carrying his shoes.

“I walked,” he shouted. “I walked to my beloved Goas like the farm boy I used to be!”

The principal started toward him, breasts juggling under his lapels, panting into his bullhorn. “Oh, my dear Zacharias, welcome back! Your kindness to visit us here is really beyond the call of any —”

The general didn’t take the principal’s hand. Instead, we all watched him raise a tiny foot and show the bottom of it to the principal. “Fetch me a thorn, Charles.”

Into the bullhorn, the principal continued to burble: “That you created time for these children, to help us, to inspire, to enlighten —”

“A thorn, Charles.”

“Humble place such as this our school, that you should return —”

“If you don’t put that thing down, I’ll have you shot.”

And we watched in amazement as the principal himself, not a minion, dashed off into the closeveld and stooped beneath an acacia and picked up a thorn. It was long, nail-like, and the principal carried it back to the general in the palm of his hand, gently, like a wounded bird.

“Inject it.”

“Zacharias!”

“Now!”

We watched this also. The principal stuck a thorn in Comrade General’s Kangulohi’s foot, and the general cried, “See? Still rock-hard! Myself in cushiony exile! My bemedaled chest!”

He hopped toward us on one leg, ostrich-like, the thorn still sticking out of his foot. Now came the speech. The general said he’d learned everything he ever needed to know right here at Goas, that they were the happiest days of his life, but that the Boers ended that happiness for him, for everybody. He stood on one leg and espoused.

“But I’m not going to stand before you today and tell you about war,” he said. He raised his thin arms and tossed his shoes into the sand.

“No, I will not speak of the long night of exile, of what it was to not see my mother or my mother’s land for more than fourteen years. I will not discourse on such pain. Nor will I tell you of the hell of the South African prisons, or of Cassinga. Of the bombs that rained that bloody day. No, I will not stand before you and talk of the blood of your brothers and sisters, your mothers and your fathers.”

The general paused, looked out at us, and grinned. This threw us off. You did not mention the massacre at Cassinga and grin.

The principal launched into a fit of clapping and we did the same.

The general ordered a cease-fire. “No applause. No, my children, I wish to speak of today, of now. My children, you have freedom. So much freedom. Lord, you even have the freedom to hate.”

He hopped around in an angry circle to show us what hate looked like.

“Yet, I say, do not exercise this right. Hold it, even cherish it, but don’t use it. Why?” He did that circle dance again. “Because it’s too easy!” He hopped over and snatched up the principal’s bullhorn and shrieked: “What’s hard is loving! That’s why I say to you, children of Namibia, saplings of a newly watered nation, I love you. You think a big man, a comrade such as myself, doesn’t say such a thing. Well, I say it! And I will shock your little ears and say it again. Tell your mamas what Kangulohi said: I LOVE YOU!”

He hopped closer to us.

“All we must do now to build this nation, this beautiful country, is work. Work. Work and learn. Learn. Learn. Learn. Forget hate, hate, hate and love, love, love.”

We clapped more frantically. The general again waved us away. “’Tis you,” he roared. “I’m no one. ’Tis you!”

We felt light-headed, patriotic, and, yes, loved. .

He spotted Mavala. “And who, may an old general ask, are you, comrade?”

“Shikongo, sir. Chetequera Camp, Angola. 1986 to 1989.”

“Commanding officer?”

“Elias Haulyondjaba, sir.”

“Elias. Bless his soul. I commend you for your commitment to the struggle in the past, and your commitment to the struggle in the future, Comrade Shikongo, from the bottom of my heart as well as from my sore foot.”

Laughter, applause, applause.

Obadiah stepped forward. “May our distinguished guest allow a humble teacher to quote the great murdered poet Archilochus?”

“Permission granted, Humble Teacher.”

And Obadiah took off his aviator hat and raised his mouth toward the sky and recited: “I love not a tall general, not a straddling, nor one proud of his hair nor —”

That she chose her husband’s shining moment to water the hedge of the bush in front of their house should not, in the larger scheme of Goas, have been surprising. She wasn’t a person to remain invisible any more than Obadiah was.

The nozzle of her hose rose slowly, very slowly, over the fence. One of the soldiers caught sight of it and raised his rifle.

“Wait,” Obadiah shouted. “Don’t fire! That’s my hag. Wife!” The general motioned for the man to lower his gun and looked curiously at the head that was now peering over the bushes, as if daring him to shoot her face off in the name of love.

If you imagine Goas as a village, which it wasn’t — it was a school on a farm in the otherwise empty veld — but even so, if you were to think of all of us living in a sort of idyll, the soccer field was our village square, our sacred ground.

It took him a while to hop across it.

We were too far away to hear any of it, but after speaking to her through the fence for five minutes, the general knelt down and kissed the ground. Then we watched her reach and lug him up by the armpits. Antoinette was a giant compared to that little general. Then — and you may dismiss this as just another of the daily lies of Goas, but I saw it happen — she clutched his head and kissed him. Hard and long and slobbery. It was not the kiss of a hag. She talked about it for days after. How he begged her pardon for his guns and even his cursed uniform. How he said in the future, in the glorious future, we wouldn’t need armies anymore and that he was only holding on to his for a while longer because there were still people who didn’t believe in love. She said the man lied so much his lips fell off. What choice did she have but to glue them back on? I’m not a woman without compassion. Shouldn’t a doomed man, she said, have at least one good memory?

80. GRAVES

My grandfather?”

“Yes.”

“He was a pants jobber. His name was Leo.”

“A what?”

“An apprentice tailor. He also boxed hats and treffed coats. What about yours?”

“He was Tshaanika, eighteenth Onganjera king.”

“Oh.”

Mavala stretched her arms and yawned. On the underside of her right breast, a birthmark in the shape of a bean.

81. OBADIAH (HATS)

Porkpie, boater, homburg, fore and aft, bombardier, Panama, betty tilt, Ascot, chimney pot, cockade, tiara, bucket, ten-gallon, beanie, turban, bowler, Montecristi, Stetson, Borsalino… The very notion of haberdashery is fantastical. Hail the helmet of Mambrino! It’s why their names are so picaresque. That a mere piece of felt or wool or, yes, even metal, could provide protection from God’s ultimate wrath — yet we don these illusions daily. We cover our heads. As a sign of defiance? Of faith? Of respect? Of fear? Yes. But above all, my friends, above all — hats are love. No helmet in the universe more powerful than the belief that covering one’s head will make a difference to God… Consider the case of Kaplansk’s Jews: skullcaps? A thin layer, a mere chimera, and yet don them they do. As do we all.

“Hey, Kaplansk, you heathen, where’s your yarmulke?… Kaplansk?”

“He’s asleep.”

“Again? At six o’clock in the evening?”

82. AUNTIE

Late Monday afternoon, and Obadiah and I are contemplating each other’s existences in the plastic chairs in front of his house. Soccer goes on. The thud of the ball like the irregular heartbeat of Goas. Pohamba’s curtains are pulled. Weekend sinners sleep away Monday. Beneath the acacia, Festus is barbering boys with his battery-powered razor. One desk chair beneath the tree, a plastic bag for a bib shoved up under each customer’s chin. Festus is not a subtle barber. He balds the boys, and one after another they walk away, shiny eggs.

Obadiah groans. “The mouth arriveth,” he says. Moments later we watch her approach. She gets larger and larger, and yet Auntie doesn’t move exactly; she oozes. She manifests. She heads toward us, calls out to Obadiah, “All men who have said I am beautiful have died. Except one. I see a shroud over your face, Head Teacher.”

“But, my dear,” Obadiah says, “never once have I ever said that a hirsute woman such as yourself was —”

“Happy death, Head Teacher,” she says, and without stopping veers toward the field and begins to cross through the middle of the game. She picks up speed as she gets closer to her prey, which is clearly the fuzzless tennis ball the boys have been using since the latest soccer ball got punctured. Ignore, ignore, ignore, but how can you when she’s after the ball? When she reaches it, Auntie savors the moment. Before she swipes anything, she always licks each of her fingers. She does this right now, agonizingly slowly, before swooping, reaching, snatching. She shoves the tennis ball down the front of her dress.

“Come, boys, come and get it.”

For the first time in recorded history, the boys rush toward the hostel an hour before wash call. Auntie turns her sights next on the singles quarters. Obadiah and I watch. She reaches Pohamba’s door. She knocks. He doesn’t answer. She knocks more. Then Auntie begins to pound on Pohamba’s door with both fists. Still no answer. She thrusts her wide corpus delicti against the door. Whap. Whap. We’re surprised she doesn’t break it down. Auntie insults easy. She knows he’s in there. I recall the double-ply toilet paper we brought from the dorp on Wednesday, after weeks of forgetting to buy it. (We’d been using pages from old Afrikaans paperback novels.) Pohamba keeps the stash in his wardrobe. The door cracks open. Pohamba — in his lucky lilac undershirt — exhausted, slumped, bows, greets her. We watch from across the field. Then Pohamba stands straighter and crosses his arms over his chest as if he’s barring the door. A mere boast. We know he’ll give way. That he’ll let her in, let her take what she wants. Take the Charmin, woman. But it doesn’t happen, the giving way you do for Auntie when she comes a-calling. He — we can see this plain as day — is listening to her. The time to dodge the monologue has passed, and still Pohamba stands before her. It’s an emergency — and us two cowards, we don’t twitch. There is no hue and cry from the plastic chairs. Festus’s buzzing razor clicks off, and we know he’s hypnotized as well.

There’s an unusual stillness in Pohamba, a tranquilizing of his spirit. His body, in the door frame, now limp. He’s enchanted. It’s here I make an obvious link, but still one I’ve never made before — between stealing and monologing. When she monologued us, she robbed us of our life’s time, and maybe this is why she never quite aged like a normal person. Our time fattened her. We watch Pohamba grin. He backs into his room. This is a different sort of giving way. He does it willfully, joyfully, meltingly. Goodbye, friend, so long. It’s been good to —

At the same time, I can’t help but wonder, as Obadiah gags, what if it works? What if she could filch them? Our tormented desires. Our desires tormented. The door closes behind Auntie’s enormous ass, like the gate of a bakkie on a load of mealie sacks. A few moments later a hand — not Pohamba’s, a thick, soft, braceleted hand — appears out Pohamba’s window. The hand holds a tennis ball. Then the hand’s fingers spread open — all five fingers wide, ecstatic — and the ball, like a tiny skull, drops into the dust.

83. GRAVES

She hounded me about my cold feet, my literally cold feet, and she thought it hilarious that the desert didn’t make any difference, that I could be sweating all over and my feet were still like ice water, and she asked once if I wanted her to blow on them, and I said, No, please, just stay away from them, don’t call attention to them. And she asked how such a thing could happen. I said, I’m from North America, basically I’m an Eskimo. That, and the fact that my feet sweat and then they cool off too quickly. She didn’t accept this explanation.

“Are they ugly? Ugly albino rabbits? Why are white people so afraid of their feet? Please, just a look —”

“Never.”

In socks, nothing but socks, half off, bunched.

84. THE ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL

News off the farm line that Obadiah’s old friend Ganaseb has died in town. I’ve been summoned by a boy to the Datsun. Normally Obadiah savors, today he palms the bottom of the bottle and drinks as if he’s trying to shove it down his throat. “Naturally,” he says, taking a break, “you will attend the funeral.”

“But I never knew Ganaseb.”

“Not important. The man was a teacher here. You and he are of the same family now, whether you choose to accept this onus or not, our families being nothing if not onuses. Follow me? By the way, have you written your father to forgive him his trespasses?”

“When’s the funeral?”

“You see, Ganaseb was blessed. That was the difference. He escaped and enjoyed Goas only in his memory, the only true way to live here. You should have heard Ganaseb talk. The long veld nights, the clean air, the russet sunsets.”

“I’ve got to go open the library.”

“You’re the librarian?”

“Sub-deputy chief.”

“Who’s chief?”

“You.”

“In that case, I declare a day of mourning. All public institutions must be closed out of respect.”

“I’ve got reading group.”

“What are you reading?”

“Mowgli.” I start to climb up and over the door.

“That tripe? Wait,” he says. “Ganaseb was a big man, an important man, an assistant principal. Not once since he left did he return to visit us. I always met him in town.” He seizes my arm. “And do you want to know the vicious truth of it?”

“What?”

“The man had a Volvo.”

The priest drove us into Karibib in the back of the bakkie. The women wore black dresses they looked too comfortable in, as if death were a uniform waiting in the closet. Antoinette gripped Tomo by the neck, like a puppet under arrest. Mavala held the tarts Antoinette had baked for Ganaseb’s widow. Pohamba tried to sneak his hand under the foil and grab some crust off a tart. Mavala tucked the tarts under her dress, which didn’t stop Pohamba’s mission. As we pulled away, some boys chased us, shouting, “Teachers, buy us Lion Chips!” Antoinette commanded they desist with a flick of her wrist, and the boys fell away one by one, laughing and throwing their arms around one another.

Ganaseb had got so free of Goas, he deserted the Catholic Church. The Lutheran parish in the location was packed. People swelled out the doors. Old women wailed on the steps outside. Boys dangled from the windows. The air was thick with competing perfumes. Obadiah led our entourage down the aisle, saying, “Pardon us, old friends, pardon us.” We made it to the third pew and squeezed in. I tried not to look at Mavala, who was wedged between Vilho and Dikeledi. She tried not to look at me. At that time everything about us — to us — was thrilling. I loved being close enough to touch her and to pretend I didn’t want to. I tried to differentiate the smell of her sweat from everybody else’s.

At last, the pastor began. Obadiah translated bits of the Afrikaans. “He says Ganaseb has only changed homes. From his modest house in Karibib to the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet he remains in our hearts.”

A woman in the pew in front of us hunched over and sobbed wildly. Obadiah made a fucking motion with his hips. “One of Ganaseb’s girlfriends,” he whispered. “He was into more than her heart.” He reached into his inside coat pocket for his flask. Antoinette’s crabbed hand whapped across me and seized Obadiah’s wrist like a talon. It remained there — welded to him — for the entire service.

Prayers, hymns, speeches, testimonials, weeping, more testimonials. When Ganaseb was justly honored, we shuffled slowly out into the sun and followed the casket. The dead man was sticking out of the trunk of his Volvo. The road to the cemetery was strewn with withered lettuce.

After the burial, we went to the Dolphin. Pohamba bought beers for the men and Cokes for the women (out of deference to Antoinette) and hard-boiled eggs for everybody. The women sat at a separate table (Tomo under it). The three of them, all beautiful in their way, sat there like a kind of cabal, a war council. Antoinette lording, trying not to judge everyone around her too harshly, trying to be a good Christian and love, love… Dikeledi so silent, taking everything in. She rarely came to town. I never knew she wore glasses. Mavala pops a whole egg in her mouth.

“It’s funny,” Vilho said. “A man dies and we all eat eggs.”

Pohamba took the salt and shook it over Vilho’s head. Then he got down to business. “With Ganaseb gone,” he said, “won’t Karibib hire a new teacher?”

“Faulty analysis, Teacher,” Festus said. “They’ll double up one classroom. And Kapapu will be the new assistant. Either Kapapu or Tjaherami.”

“How many learners can fit in one room?”

“As many as they want.”

“What about Hangula for assistant?”

“He’s Ovambo. Hereros control the district. Also, they say Hangula voted DTA.”

Mavala reached across the table and covered Antoinette’s hand with her own. Then she looked my way, found me watching her, and mouthed, Where’s O.?

I shrugged. Don’t know.

“Wait — Kapapu’s not Herero. Isn’t he Damara?”

“Yes, but his wife’s Herero.”

“Ah. And Ngavirue?”

“Ngavirue’s Herero, but nobody likes Ngavirue.”

Outside, Father began to honk for us. Impatient little priestly beeps.

When we’d all gathered back in the bakkie, it became clear we were still missing one of us. Antoinette groaned. This foray into decadence was enough for her without further humiliation. Festus and Pohamba checked the other bottle stores. Vilho checked the reeking public toilet. Then Antoinette sat bolt upright against the spare tire, her dress gathered up in her arms, and pointed to the cemetery with a long, unequivocal finger.

Together, Mavala and I ran down the rutted road. It was good to run with her. I wanted us to keep going. Near Ganaseb’s grave, I spotted a single battered loafer. He wasn’t far from his stray shoe, passed out, his face in the gnarled dirt. Mavala shook him. No movement. She shook him again. A limp hand waved her away.

“Don’t disturb the dead.”

“It’s time.”

“Time? Time for what?”

“Let’s go.” Mavala said. “The priest is snorting.”

He sat up and brushed a dusty sleeve on his forehead. His eyes were past bloodshot now. They were a kind of viscous brown, murked by tears and sweat. For a moment he sat there and stared at the fresh mound.

“I did it,” he said.

“Did what?” Mavala asked.

“Pissed on him.”

“Why?”

“A long piss. I’d show you, but it’s gone, evaporated. That too dries up.” He laughed, asthmatic, parched. “Didn’t I love him? Didn’t I?”

We pulled him up by the armpits. He felt light, too light for a man so tall. He looked around at the cemetery, at the rows of cardboard markers, plastic sunflowers, and sleeping dogs. We walked slowly back. It was late afternoon. Jazz was already playing in the living room of one of the houses closest to the cemetery road. Dust clouds from the taxis that roamed the location wafted above us. An old woman passed by wheezing loudly, holding a loaf of bread to her chest. When we reached the bottle store, the priest was revving the engine. Festus hooted at Obadiah’s dusty suit as the three of us piled into the back with the others.

85. POHAMBA

Same place as always. In front of our doors. Mosquito carcass- bloody morning. Pohamba sitting on a rock and brushing his teeth, talks like he’s been smoking dagga, but we’re at least a month out of dagga. He spits out the side of his mouth, doesn’t look at me.

“Sooooooooo.”

“What?”

“Been good, ja bassie?”

“What?”

“Good afternoons, ja? Siesta. No sleepy-peepy time for bassie.”

“Why are you talking like that?”

“Veld? Thorny but good, ja? No need sleep. Oh, bassie got juicy thing, happy!”

He brushes his teeth some more, sticks his tongue out, wiggles it, brushes it.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Say?”

And then him looking at me as if he’s only seeing me now for the first time. He points his toothbrush at me. “Don’t say anything.” Then in a low, officious growl: “Sir, I’m afraid that’s highly classified, confidential information.” He sticks his brush back in his mouth.

A hen struts by and Pohamba stands, toothbrush-mouthed, tries to wallop it, misses. His flip-flop airborne into the acacia. The hen flutters, then begins to mosey around again like nobody just tried to murder her. Pohamba goes inside his room to rinse his mouth.

86. A PIANO FOR GOAS

Let us now blame Kaplansk’s mother, Sylvia. At the League of Women Voters of Greater Cincinnati, Avendale Chapter, she mentioned it offhandedly to Ruthie Goldblatt, who mentioned it to Kitty Levine, who mentioned it to Bebe Pomerantz. Which was all it took. Sylvia’s son is teaching at an adorable little school somewhere in deepest Africa. I forget where. New Bubia? Anyway, they’re in direful need of donations. Simply in direful need. What sort of donations? Oh, any donation! A donation is a donation is a donation! And besides, Bebe, Kitty says, Sylvia says these children have nothing, nothing. Well, I do seem to remember an old piano in my basement, Bebe Pomerantz says. I think it was Miles’s mother’s sister’s. Died young, poor thing. They say she won contests.

Tremendous idea! Send Chopin! Send Debussy!

Four weeks later a wooden box weighing upward of two tons landed at the postkantoor in Karibib with the fanfare of a meteor. It had been delivered from Walvis Bay in its own lorry, and the postmaster called the principal personally to announce the arrival of a “mighty crate.”

Mavala proclaimed the creation of a Goas music department. She had some boys on punishment clear out the storage room. The piano was the lead story in the first edition of The Goas Harbinger.

Obadiah wrote:

What is significant, friends, brethren, Goasonians, about music and our impending new piano is that it is the physical embodiment of God’s infinite varieties. Eighty keys! Give me eighty keys and I give you the miracle of creation itself. On behalf of Goas, I wish to extend our heartfelt gratitude to Kaplansk’s long-suffering mother, Saint-in-waiting Sylvia Kaplansk, for this remarkable bestowal upon our humble institute of learning. .

Festus, Pohamba, and I rode out in the priest’s lorry, Theofilus driving, to fetch it. And, returning, we were like triumphant combatants. Pohamba stood on the crate and gyrated, drunkenly fingering “Tea for Two” on Festus’s head. So many boys wanted to help lift the box that two Standard Fours got trampled. Even the priest and the principal stood side by side at a small ceremony in the piano’s honor, the crate at their powerful feet. The two of them stood there with their pregnant-looking stomachs and refused to look at each other. Church versus state in the battle of the chubbies. The principal announced music, the great equalizer, the future of African democracy. The priest offered that music was the most direct path to salvation of our corrupted souls. Mavala wept with joy for music. Tomo waddled over and took a chomp of the crate.

So. All night. All night we tried. Maybe because at heart we were optimists, even Pohamba. Maybe at our cores we adhered to Vilho’s benevolent view of mankind. All night we hammered. We sawed. We nailed. We glued. We prayed. We schemed. We didn’t leave the new music room until eight o’clock the next morning, when we held a press conference in the courtyard to announce that the random shit in the box could no more be made into a piano than the feathers of a slaughtered dinner rooster could be pushed back together to make a live bird. Mavala wept again, this time with rage.

“Who are you people to send that across the ocean?”

I found myself defending Bebe Pomerantz and the good people of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was possible, wasn’t it, that the stuff in the box — some wood planks, a multitude of keys, some wires, brass pedals — could have had a prior career as an actual piano?

“Rough passage?” I suggested.

That night we went out to Goas Stonehenge — an assortment of large granite boulders lacking in mystery — and roasted a goat on the remains of that piano. Festus slit its throat, I held it down with my knees as if it were Bebe Pomerantz and reveled in its childlike screams. And we drank to that piano’s second and final destruction. Mavala stood up in her heels on one of the boulders and, with a fist of meat in one hand, said, “Tonight, I curse Cincinnati, curse it beyond —”

“It’s already cursed,” I said.

And Mavala, drunk and furious, ignoring me and the rest of us, twisting and wiggling in the windblown smoke, in the hectic light of the fire. I wanted to stand up there and let her rail in my ear, but I stayed in the shadows in my Ohio shame and composed:

Dear Kaplansk’s Long-Suffering Mother,

I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry for so many things, and so please understand that I am even more sorry than usual to say that I will never, as long as live, and may this apply also to my corpse, set one cold toenail again in Cincinnati, Ohio. Rest assured, I’m in good hands. Her name is Mavala Shikongo. You always said you were the first person to admire spunk. I think of your passion for Geraldine Ferraro. I’d like you to meet my destiny, my destination, my disintegration. A former guerrilla fighter. She can take apart an AK-47 in seventeen seconds. Now she teaches kindergarten. Please tell Bebe thanks so much for the piano.

All my love,

Kaplansk

Other days it was less that the sun rose than that the veld seemed to pull itself up out of the darkness on its own volition. I woke up drowsy to the horizon’s slow bleed. In my left hand was a high heel. Everybody else had somehow managed to get back to their beds. Only Obadiah and I were still out there. The piano was no longer, except some keys hadn’t burned. They were scarred and blackened but intact, as if mocking our attempts to incinerate them.

I shook Obadiah awake and we started back. I carried Mavala’s shoe stuffed in my pants. A rare dawn wind lifted the veld, and we moved slowly against the gusting sand, our bodies weighing nothing.

87. GRAVES

She’s gnawing a pear, and pauses in chewing to accuse me of not having any money. Since Americans are supposed to have money, I must have thought coming here was an easy way to make a fortune — typical colonialist model, I’m out here only to loot.

“What’s here to loot?”

“That’s what I can’t understand.”

“Anyway, I’ve got money.”

“How much?”

“A little.”

“Where is it?”

“Stocks.”

“Stocks! Capitalist carnivore, It’s in stocks… You could, though, have a bigger enogo. Isn’t that what they say in America, that the blacks have these monster penises? Do people believe such things?”

“My grandfather was a pants jobber. I’m the proletariat.”

“So you have no comment on this penis issue?”

Words dissolving, muffled so as not to wake Tomo — rolling across the tablecloth we hid in the rocks. It was an old checkered one. Antoinette had given it to us so that Pohamba and I would eat less like jackals. Every time we went out there, we had to shake the sand out of it. Gradually we began to smuggle other stuff and hide it behind the graves. A pillow, a mattress cover, an umbrella (which we used to protect us from the sun, but that made us too hot), a can of Doom for the ants, library books. Afternoons of flung clothes. You couldn’t call it an escape, because we didn’t go far and we didn’t go long. Mavala unbuttons slow. One button at a time, and then she stands and yanks off her dress. And I have to think it again, remember it again. Unbuttoning slow, pushing plastic through penny slits. Not looking at me, looking at the veld. Then she stands and yanks her dress over her head. She yawns. No claims about the sex we had, only the sex we didn’t have. The sex we imagined was superior. The sex we had was hurried, diminished by the heat, sand-irritated. She rips open a condom with her teeth. And then only us and the sand crickets we try not to roll over and kill.

“Davey?”

“Yeah?”

“Davey Concepcion?”

“Yeah.”

“Touch me.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“Here?”

“And a little lower.”

“And here. Wait, Davey, slow, Davey, too fast, Davey —”

88. MAJESTY OF THE LAW

The court decrees that the porter who ate his bread by the smoke of the roast has duly and civilly paid the cook by the jingle of his money… Case dismissed.

RABELAIS

Progress, Obadiah would often espouse, is having an efficient legal system based solely on principles of fairness and blind justice. One day he received a certified letter from the law firm of Tuhadeleni, Enkono, Sheehama & Partners, Windhoek.

Dear Sir,

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

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

“I think they want money,” I said.

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

“Go get some help.”

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

When it was over, he said:

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

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

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

89. POHAMBA

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

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

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

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

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

“No thanks.”

“What are you reading?”

“Still this Turgenev book.”

“Russian?”

“Yeah.”

“Communist?”

“I don’t think so. Maybe socialist.”

“Rich?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

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

“He supported the serfs.”

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

“I like your story fine.”

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

“Why don’t you do it? Smash my head?”

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

90. THE ILLEGALS

They emerged one morning out of the veld during those days of ruthless heat. It was a Friday and we were in morning meeting. That morning’s tale concerned, if I remember, the importance of proper dental hygiene in an emerging democracy. The principal was reading to us from a Namibian article about the alarmingly high incidence of tooth decay in Ombalantu. “Citizens must floss. A nation must maintain its oral health. I prefer waxed. Watch me now.”

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

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

“We greet Teacher.”

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

“North, Teacher.”

“How far north?”

The boy hesitated. “The border.”

“The other side of it?”

“Yes.”

“Running?”

“Yes.”

“From what?”

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

“Savimbi?”

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

“Parents?”

“None.”

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

“We walked, Teacher.”

“Walked! From Angola!”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

“No, Teacher.”

“You need a place to sleep?”

“No.”

“What do you want, then?”

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

“What?”

“We want to go to school, Teacher.”

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

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

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

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

“You don’t tell anything.”

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

“I’ve nothing to tell.”

“I don’t believe you.”

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

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

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

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

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

91. SNAKE PARK

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

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

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

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

“Each other.”

“The box.”

“Each other.”

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

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

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

92. WALLS

Hey, Truelove, how’s she tasting?”

“I’m not answering that.”

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

“Kill yourself.”

“Suicide? What about my learners?”

“I’ll cover your classes.”

“What about the Pope?”

“He won’t care, one less pagan.”

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

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

93. GRAVES

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

“No, thanks.”

“You don’t like Cheddar?”

“I do. I ate.”

“What did you eat?”

“Tuna and cabbage soup.”

“Who made the soup?”

“Dikeledi sent it over.”

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

“I look like old butter?”

She kisses my chin.

“Sorry, but in certain light, yes.”

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

“Why did you come here?”

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

“What?”

“To come and save all the dark babies.”

“Come here, Teacher.”

“You come here, Teacher.”

“Tell me more about Snowy Pinkus.”

“Rainy.”

“Snowy’s a bitch.”

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

94. GRAVES

I want to spit on her,” she says.

“On who?”

“Grieta.”

“Why?”

“You’re asking me why?”

“I’m asking you why.”

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

“Sounds like it.”

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

“So spit, or not?”

“I say spit.”

“What about us?”

“Us what?”

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

“This is nothing, darling.”

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

95. GRAVES

Look at me. Tell me what you see.”

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

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

“I’m trying, I’m trying.”

“Shhh. Be quiet and look at me.”

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

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

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

96. DR. SAVIMBI

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

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

“How do you know?”

“I heard it last night on the BBC.”

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

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

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

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

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

Obadiah clicked it off.

“Fine work, Kaplansk,” Pohamba said.

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

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

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

We pondered.

Gastrology?

Demonology?

Scientology?

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

97. ANTOINETTE AND OBADIAH

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

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

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

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

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

98. GOAS

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

99. VILHO

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

100. GOAS CHRISTMAS

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

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

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

“Kombumbi.”

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

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

*

The church cool in the shadows in spite of the heat outside. A cement cavern with a roof that is also used to store feed and diesel-engine parts. A dusty gold cloth draped over the altar. There was no vestry, just that one room. A velvet robe hung on a nail. Nothing on the walls but a one-legged crucifixion dangling precariously above the altar. Occasionally Christ fell and Theofilus had to nail him back up. The strange thing was that it had been built to be a church. It wasn’t converted from something else, which would have given it some excuse. A piece of plastic covering a broken window flapped now and then in the feeble breeze.

Mavala didn’t play the organ. She only sang a little. Then she left early. Stood up, crossed herself, and walked out. She had to go to the dining hall to cook for the few boys who remained.

Pohamba and I made some spaghetti and sauce. Pohamba talked into the night about Christmas in Otavi, with his enormous family. He said there was sometimes so much family they had to rent a hall. Cold spaghetti is Christmas? How is it possible? I wondered why he hadn’t gone this year. The house up the road empty of the principal. I could feel my not going to her in my stomach, and his not wanting to be alone, practically demanding it, talking on about Christmas in Otavi, how this could not be Christmas. Music, dancing, roasted pigs, and beer.

“And liver, we always have liver on Christmas in Otavi.”

“Liver?”

“Why don’t you go to her?”

“It’s fine.”

“She’s alone on Christmas.”

“No, she’s got Tomo. It’s fine.”

Us by the fire late, until the heat gave out and the chill woke us up.