The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

101. GRAVES

I’m a diversion,” I said.

“Did I say that?”

“A weigh station.”

“No.”

“A break in your action.”

“I said no.”

“An oasis.”

“Fine — you’re an oasis.”

“A pillow to lay your weary head.”

“Yes.”

“No, I’m a grave.”

“Grieta’s?”

“Yes, Grieta’s.”

“What did she die of?”

“Living here.”

“Yes!”

“And she starved.”

“Whites don’t starve.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Name a white that’s starved.”

“The Irish. Jews. Russians. Poles when they weren’t killing Jews. Some Mormons. I am pretty sure some Mormons starved.”

“A round for Kaplansk! Whites suffer too! What else did she die of?”

“Spinsterhood.”

“She died of not having a man? That’s stupid.”

“There’s been documented cases. Look at your sister.”

“Having a man is her problem.”

“Right, that’s true. But all he does is sweat over you.”

“What man doesn’t sweat over me?”

“Vilho.”

“Vilho doesn’t count.”

“Festus.”

“You think Festus would refuse me?”

“You’d sleep with Festus?”

“For ten thousand rand.”

“For ten thousand rand, I’d sleep with both of them.”

“Both who?”

“Dikeledi and Festus.”

“That’s because all you want is Dikeledi. To get her, you’d take Festus.”

“Festus would take up the whole bed. Anyway, forget Dikeledi. There’s only you. You.”

“Only me.”

102. WALLS

Morning meeting slowly rising, and Pohamba pounds.

“I remembered something in my sleep,” he says.

“Can’t you tell it tomorrow?”

I listen to him turn over. I can see him cupping his head in his hands, talking to the ceiling, happily wrecking other people’s sleep.

“You asked me to tell you about independence. I was at the Dolphin the day of the election. The radio was on. You know the matron? Tangeni’s wife?”

“The drunk one?”

“Yes, except it was strange. That day she wasn’t drunk. It was noisy outside in the street, everybody was already celebrating, but in the bar it was quiet, only myself and the matron. A report came on and gave the lead to DTA. It was only in the south, because the polls closed down earlier there. Fewer people, fewer votes to count. But the only thing anybody heard was DTA wins, SWAPO loses. DTA wins, SWAPO loses. And do you know what happened? I saw it all from my stool in the Dolphin. People didn’t shout or curse. Not a word. They sat down in the road. Taxis stopped, and the men who were driving them and the women who were passengers got out and did the same thing. They all sat down in the road. And Tangeni’s wife laughed so hard at them she gagged. I can still hear her.”

Of course, it all turned out to be wrong. The hundreds of thousands of votes in the north got counted. SWAPO won in a landslide. And since it was wrong, and since it ended up not meaning anything, Pohamba wants to know, demands to know, through the wall at five in the morning, “Why am I seeing those people in the road right now? In my pig bed at pig Goas? Tell me —”

I don’t answer.

From his silent room, Vilho doesn’t either.

103. DROUGHT STORIES

The Namibian had already been at it for months, quoting experts, statistics. The isohyets for mean annual rainfall have been falling dangerously … atmospheric and ocean circulation patterns consistent with… climatic change and variability remain constant. . water surface catchment areas are shrinking throughout the central. .

But drought being a negation, an unhappening, it doesn’t make for interesting copy.

We skipped those articles. It came every year. It was only a question of which region would get it worse. No drought was news. Extreme drought was news. Anything else was page 6, after sports. What emergency on earth is duller?

104. CLASSROOM

I, the great general of the German troops, send this letter to the Herero people. The Herero are no longer German subjects. They have murdered and stolen; they have cut off the noses, ears, and other bodily parts of wounded soldiers. And now, because of cowardice, they will fight no more… All Herero must leave the land. If people do not do this, I will force them to do it with the great guns. Any Herero found within German borders, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall no longer receive any women or children, I will drive them back to their people or I will shoot them. This is my decision for the Herero people.

THE GREAT GENERAL OF THE MIGHTY EMPEROR, LOTHAR VON TROTHA, 1904

I await the arrival of the new history text from the Ministry of Education. There’s been a delay. The word is, they’re still rewriting.

Among other things I have taught my learners, out of the old text, is that the Roman Empire brought civilized society to the countries of western Europe — to Britain, Holland, Germany, and so on. So, when the fathers of South Africa settled at the Cape, they brought all these beautiful elements of civilization with them.

Even the feeblest teacher has to draw a line in the sand with his toe. Despite my general ineptitude, I somehow hit upon what I now know to be a time-honored way of killing an hour in the classroom. Strategic use of a guest lecturer. I bring in the big gun to teach Waterberg.

“Scholars, I introduce you to a man who needs no introduction. This man doesn’t teach history, he endures it. When history has a question, it comes to this man to find out what happened, who massacred whom, who cheated whom out of what… Boys, I give you your former Standard Three master, Head Teacher Obadiah Horaseb.” Cheers for Obadiah, who struts in a pith helmet.

“Please, I’m only a man, corrupt blood in my veins. Sit. Sit. Now, boys, I understand you are to learn about Waterberg. Let me first say that prior to colonialism this was not a land of angels. This was as brutal a place as any other. And yet when the white devils came — pardon, Teacher Kaplansk — things did become, in a number of ways, worse. This is especially true, given that these adventurers, merchants, missionaries, claimed to come to us in the name of God. Now, skipping ahead to today’s lesson, if I may. May I?”

“Yes, Head Teacher.”

“It’s 1901, and the Herero people — how many Hereros here today? — seven, no eight, good. Yes, the Herero people, after decades of brutality, slavery, impoverishment, one day rose up to challenge the greatest military force known to man. The German army. What made them do it that day? This is a question not answerable by a man with such poor faculties as myself. It is a questions for scholars. Suffice it to say that there always comes a day when a flogged man accepts the last lash. And when, after fighting bravely for years, the Hereros found themselves trapped atop Waterberg Mountain — not only soldiers, but thousands of women and children and cattle as well — surrounded on all sides but one, what did they do? I ask you, sons of the sons of the sons of those valiants, what did they do?”

A hand slowly rises. It’s Magnus Axahoes.

“Child, you aren’t a Herero, are you?”

“No, Teacher.”

“A Damara?”

“Yes, Teacher.”

“A Damara knows the answer! No tribalism here at Goas. Prime Minister Geingob would be proud. We know each other’s histories on this farm. What’s the answer, child?”

“They went to the desert, Teacher.”

And Obadiah goes to Magnus and kneels and whispers something no one can hear.

Then he stands before the boys, lanky in his tweed coat. His arms at his sides, his hands limp. Obadiah once told me he did not believe in the power of hands to convey meaning. If your voice can’t do it, don’t think you can overcome its defects with your sorry hands.

“Yes, they went to the desert. The sea does not part for the Hereros. There is no sea. Only Kalahari sand. Welcome to the Twentieth Century of Apocalypse. And the people die, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, the people die. But understand, my futures, my hopes, understand that they knew it. The moment the Hereros began to head for the desert, they knew the only answer was death. And so might we consider their choice a heroic one?”

105. GRAVES

She’s bored, and she’s got one of those little school scissors, the kind with the rubber handles. She thinks it’s absurd they make them for lefties.

“Why wouldn’t they?”

She looks at me the way she does. Mavala’s eyebrows. Even when her face does nothing to make them, they have a way of seeming arched. Then she points the little scissors at my head. “Talk.”

“About what?”

“Anything. Speak.”

“I have nothing, zero.”

“What sort of name is Larry?”

“French, I think.”

“You’re French?”

“No.”

“Say something else.”

“School?”

“Even that.”

“Obadiah came to my fifth hour and taught about Waterberg.”

“What did the guru say?”

“That it was heroic.”

“What was?”

“For the Hereros to go to the desert rather than get shot by Germans.”

“Heroic?”

“Yes. Biblically heroic.”

“What would you do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’d walk.”

“To not get shot by Germans? Yeah, I’d probably walk.”

“Is that heroic?”

“Slightly.”

“You see, he’s always making things into a poem. Seventy years later, the Boers took a kid and shoved his mouth into the exhaust pipe of a helicopter. What happened?”

“What?”

“It blew him apart. They found pieces of him ten K’s away. Was the boy a hero?”

“Is this an argument?”

“Was the boy a hero or not?”

“That wasn’t a choice. There’s a difference, that’s all I’m saying.”

“And I’m saying it’s a part of a continuum. Which will keep on happening as long as old stupid men tell stories of how heroic it is to be murdered.”

She stands up, brushes herself off like she’s leaving early. She never leaves early. Neither of us ever leaves early.

“You’re leaving?”

“Is having your mouth shoved into an exhaust pipe biblically heroic or not?”

“Are you asking me if there are any helicopters in the Bible?”

“There are chariots.”

“So how would you tell Waterberg?”

“I would say it was a military strategy. That the Hereros meant to live to fight another day.”

“With no ammunition and no water? With women and children? Isn’t that as much of a fantasy as that they were heroes?”

“Yes — but at least then the guru can’t cry for them. The way I see it, they still had it in their minds to murder back the Germans.”

“Will you guest-lecture?”

“No.”

“Will you come here?”

“No.”

106. GRAVES

I see them now. I get it.”

She’s picking at the skin between her toes. She won’t look at me. “Feeling sorry isn’t seeing them,” she says.

“Not feeling sorry. I’m only saying there’s something to be said for letting the land kill you rather than the Germans.”

“Listen. The myth is a lie. As soon as you tell it, you can’t see it anymore. For it to be — I don’t say mean, I say be—you don’t talk it, you just see it. Try, try and imagine it.”

“I’m trying.”

“See them?” Mavala whispers. “They’re so delirious they can no longer remember where the secret boreholes are, and the ones that are known to the Germans are patrolled by soldiers with orders to kill. So they start to dig — anywhere. No divining rod, no intuition. They aren’t even thirsty anymore. There’s only something in their throats that feels like a scream. And so they dig, the people dig. And what happens?”

I sit up and grab her arm, pull her hand away from her feet.

“They dug their own graves. I get it.”

“No. You’re going too fast. When they started to claw that ground, they were looking for the water that might be down there. I’m talking about the moment they understood what they’d built — not when they got down into it. I’m talking about when they looked down into the hole. What did they see?”

107. ABRAM

He lived for a few months up near Auntie and her whelps. His toes poked out of his shoes. One side of his face was caved in. It could have been from a rifle butt or a bullet, but he made no claims to either. He arrived like other castaways before him. He said he was a farmhand, that he’d lived all his life on a farm near Khorixas. After the elections, his baas sold out and left him with nothing and nowhere to live. It was another familiar story. He’d trekked south to Goas. The priest gave him a job helping Theofilus with the goats.

Nobody believed him. His command of languages made us suspicious. There wasn’t a language in the country he couldn’t speak. He could talk to every boy at Goas in his mother tongue, and for this he was soon famous. Some days he’d lead the goats to the courtyard, careful to keep them off Ireland, and stand and talk, ringed by a group of boys begging him to speak to them personally.

He also spoke Portuguese.

What choice did we have but to gossip? A farmhand as far south as Khorixas speaking Portuguese? It was all anybody needed. It put him on the border during the war. And if he was on the border during the struggle — and he didn’t want to boast about it — there was only one answer to the question of what he’d been doing up there. He’d been a stooge.

At first, nobody made anything of it. The war was still too close. He wasn’t the only one at Goas hiding something. And the man seemed to know his place now. He was doing his penance, like any honest traitor would. To the Church, to God, to whomever. His toes poked out of his shoes. Someone had caved his face in. Now he watched goats look for something to swallow during a drought. How much lower can a man descend?

The principal didn’t see it this way. But whether Abram had sold out freedom fighters during the struggle didn’t matter to him. What bothered the principal was the possibility that the new shepherd might be smarter than he was. He couldn’t have some farmhand wearing his head so high. Obadiah could very well be brilliant — if that’s what being brilliant is like — so long as he remained a foolish drunk. This new Abram only drank cooldrink. The problem, though, was that as an employee of the Church, Abram wasn’t his to banish.

“Teacher Festus?”

“Yes, Master Sir?”

“Would you step into my office a moment?”

“With pleasure.”

It didn’t take our lovable henchman long. We were drinking by the fire. It was a Saturday night. After a few lagers, Festus said, “Abram?”

“Teacher?”

“I have a curiosity.”

“Yes?”

“We live in a new nation, am I correct?”

“Yes, Teacher.”

“One in which it is possible for a man to rise?”

“I suppose so, Teacher.”

“Then I must ask you this: Why do you remain a slave? You don’t want to do more than tend goats? Comrade Nujoma says we must all do our share. Brother, why are you still asleep?”

Someone stoked the fire by nudging it with a shoe. Abram didn’t make a sound with his mouth. He seemed to be laughing from somewhere deep down in his stomach. It was unsettling. We hadn’t heard him laugh before. He took a long gulp of his Pepsi. Then he laughed with his mouth. He wasn’t a big man, but his laugh in the dark made him seem like one. We took a step back from the fire. Finally, I thought, someone’s going to murder Festus.

“It’s interesting to be asked such a question by a black man such as you seem to be, Teacher,” Abram said.

Someone murmured, Amen.

Then Abram tossed his Pepsi on the fire (half full, it sizzled) and stepped away into the night. We listened to his slow steps across the rocks. When he was out of earshot, Festus was bold again.

“See the way he threatens? Isn’t it obvious?” Festus paused and sucked his teeth. “The man’s an assassin.”

“Who’s he here to kill?”

“I place my vote for Master Sir.”

“No, better the priest. Better to keep the devil we know —”

“No, let them live. Auntie.”

“Yes, Auntie!”

“All in favor say aye?” Pohamba said.

Chorus of ayes, with one mouth silent.

“Vilho?”

“All right. Auntie,” Vilho said. “In certain circumstances, even the Lord would condone —”

Obadiah squeezed my elbow. “Who wasted an honest beer?”

“It’s Pepsi. Abram’s.”

“Ai, die Pepsi.”

Even so. Assassin? Doesn’t the word itself carry its own hiss of truth? And don’t rumors have a way of overcoming the artlessness of their spreader? So it was born. Abram, the new farmhand, had been in the pay of the Boers, a member of a hit squad during the war. Ferreting out traitors never gets dull. And didn’t they train him well? Who better than a champion linguist? What part of the country couldn’t the man infiltrate? And why else would someone have caved his face in like that? There he is in the courtyard. The murderer. Look at the man now. Goats, he tends goats. Safe in the doorways of our classrooms, the boys are silently laughing, their mouths opening and closing like mocking fish.

I wonder now if fear would have been easier for him to take. That man standing there in those raggy shoes, bewildered. He seemed to like Pohamba and me. He used to come by the quarters with some of his home brew and share it with us. But in the end we weren’t any more helpful to him than Festus.

Even Mavala said it was probably true about Abram, and if not that, something else. She was writing a lesson plan, a notepad propped on her knees. Sometimes she was practical with our time. I groped her. She fended me off.

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, anything. Maybe he hit his wife. Maybe he kicked a dog.”

“So he pays for it this way?”

She didn’t look up from her writing.

“There’s been worse injustice, no?”

Thursday, and the skeletal goats wander into the grassless courtyard alone. The last we hear of Abram, he’s working day labor at the gravel pit near Pawkwas.

108. GRAVES

Antoinette would say that we’d been cavorting in the stench of sin. She wouldn’t be surprised, or blame us. She expected it. She expected it of everybody. What else do people do but ultimately degrade themselves? She’d say we have as much control over our sinning as we do against the wind, because we are born to it — unless every day, every hour, every minute, we are vigilant. She made no claims to being any better. She was only a humble servant of the Lord and of boys. Because defeating the devil is merely work. And since we were lazy, since we wanted only to enjoy, it was only a matter of time before we would cave in to his desires. Afternoons of shut-up rooms and Mavala and me out there. You couldn’t call it an escape, because we didn’t go far and we didn’t go long and we didn’t close our eyes and we didn’t care about our knees in the sand or the rocks in our backs, or even the sun-dried goat shit, nothing.

“Like a couple of baboons in the veld.”

“As if this farm didn’t have any beds!”

“The girl who fought in the struggle, the one with the baby and —”

“Yesssss! I remember. And the volunteer. From where was that volunteer?”

Us becoming a story, then, if not much of one — we were only an hour a day on weekdays, an hour and fifteen minutes if we were bold. Still, something people might tell years from now just because it was something to tell. It made us feel slightly famous.

What did the kid see when he saw us fucked-out, sweat-glazed, the sun lashing us and we’re too tired to move? The last thing I remember before we slept was that Mavala splayed her toes and grasped some sand and threw it with her foot at Grieta — and then we both were out. We had it down. Eight minutes of sleep before Tomo air-raided us. And then the footfall, and I wake up and see the kid running backward, the face of my Standard Six Magnus Axahoes — disgusted? sad? — and then him whirling around, his untucked shirt flapping like a cape.

“It doesn’t matter,” she says.

“No. Why would it matter?”

109. POHAMBA

Dead center of a Sunday, Pohamba singing in the shower, doorless shower, trickly spigot. Hot water rare. It spouts forth now only in the middle of the day, when it’s the last thing you want, but since it’s so rare, you’ve got to love it. The rapture of wasting water in a drought. Pohamba slathered up and screeching Please, please, please, please.

On a rock near the spigot, a Standard Four waits, a bored valet. Over his arm, a towel; in his hand, a cup of cold tea.

110. GRAVES

Lonely hot afternoon and our shoes, all four of them, in a line on the grave. Us shoulder to shoulder on the tablecloth.

She tries to scratch her back.

“Will you?”

I shift around and scratch her.

“Harder,” she says.

“You go,” I say.

“What?”

“Tell something. Anything. What about your mother?”

“I haven’t seen her in five years.”

“Tell me —”

“She loves handbags. Or at least she used to.”

“Handbags.”

“Yes, my mother always said a lady should never be seen in public without a handbag. Even at the market at Ondangwa, where there weren’t any of the ladies she was talking about. What ladies was she talking about? My sister and I walked around like queens because my father was an assistant headman, because he worked in an office. A sell-out, my father. But I loved the market. Bream fish, barbell fish, sour milk. Dry beans, cassava, cabbage. The fat koeks in the bubbling oil. All I wanted on earth was a fat koek in greasy paper. That first bite was like eating a peach, only better. And one was never enough. Sometimes Tuyeni gave me half of hers.”

“Tell me more.”

“Don’t stop. Keep scratching.”

“Go on.”

“She never let go of our wrists. Always so many men around. And they letched the assistant headman’s daughters. Men. There are always, everywhere, so many men. Have you noticed?”

“I notice here.”

“And there was a war, and still my mother walked around as if she never heard of it. Four years later I was gone. Tuyeni says after I left, my mother wouldn’t be seen in the market. Went off where? To fight for whom? An assistant headman’s daughter?”

“And Tuyeni?”

“What about her?”

“Your sister.”

“Wife now, not sister.”

111. GRAVES

Sharing a bag of crisps. I’m trying to share. Mavala’s munching most of them, in between repainting her toenails. I’m loving the smell of the polish.

“Nothing else?” she says. “Your entire life?”

“All right. I remember running through an airport once. I was about to miss a plane. There was a woman in front of me, young, she had a kid with her. Maybe he was five. She was late for the same plane and was trying to run with the kid, but it wasn’t working. I came up behind them and took the kid’s other hand, and we held him up in the air as we ran. The kid was loving it, him flying and he hasn’t even gotten on the plane yet. The whole time we didn’t say a word.”

“This is what you remember of your life?”

“Basically.”

“Did you make it to the plane?”

“Yes.”

“Then what happened?”

“That was it. She thanked me. I think I bowed. I never saw her again.”

“You bowed?”

“Why not? Why not bow?”

“Daddy, husband, alone — how long did that take?”

“About four minutes. Come back with me.”

“Where?”

“I’ll get a job, go to graduate school. I’ve got to do something.”

“Me? What will I do?”

“You could go to school. You said you wanted to go back to school. You could study accounting again.”

“Tomo?”

“Of course.”

“Our volunteer has gone amuck.”

“Why?”

“Start with the visa problem. The other thing is, well, the kid does hate you.”

“I knew it. The whole time —”

“A joke, Davey! He bites what he loves.”

“So we get married. Goas could use a wedding.”

She nearly hyperventilates, gulps air and holds her stomach, writhes around in the sand. And Tomo — as if he hasn’t been asleep, as if he’s heard every word — starts right then to rev up the siren on the other side of the tombs.

“Hand me the polish.”

“Why?” she says.

“I want to smell it harder.”

“Don’t be jealous.”

“Of who?”

She looks away. Then, with her eyes half-closed, kisses me.

“Tell me.”

“Isn’t it time?”

112. GRAVES

The dry yellow veld is moving. It takes a long stare to see that it’s a herd of springbok leaping, as one. No one can take this away from me. Because it’s real. It’s grace. The Green Hills of Africa. There isn’t a green hill in this entire country. Who needs green anything? The springbok are leaping toward the long shadows of the Erongos.

“Look,” I say.

She watches for a while. We’re out of the dagga I stole from Pohamba’s new stash. We’re sharing her last van Ryn. Her knees under the tablecloth are like small bumps. Tomo’s on the edge of awake. I can hear him, his pre-wake snorfle. He’s onto us now. Mavala’s bribes have become less effective. Yesterday, after she topped his pap with cinnamon and brown sugar, he knocked it over.

She hands me the last nub of cigarette.

“What? You want to go on safari? They have these tours out of Windhoek, why don’t you —”

“Fuck off.”

She lifts her neck a little and holds it toward the sun with her eyes closed.

“Three yet?”

She doesn’t answer.

The sun belligerent, slackless. She rolls over on her back and talks. “Up at the camp we used to hunt springbok in the jeep, drunk off peach schnapps. We wouldn’t shoot. It was part of the game not to shoot. You had to separate one from the herd and ram it down. Someone in the unit learned it from a Boer farmer. A good thing about the Boers. You can always blame your sins on them. Springbok have the tenderest meat. They say it tastes better when it’s bloody, but that’s a lie.”

“Did you get this from Pohamba?”

I watch her. She digs the nail of her thumb into her cheek.

“It wasn’t easy. You know, buck zigzag. You had to be careful not to hit trees. Harder because we did it at night, without lights, because the planes patrolled —”

“You did it at night?”

“Yes.”

“A few things I’d like to do at night.”

She holds her hand over her mouth. Maybe she winces, it’s hard to tell in the glare.

“You think I’m on vacation?”

She doesn’t raise her head.

“You think I don’t know I’m on vacation?”

She doesn’t answer. She looks back at the place where the buck had been leaping.

“Once, I drove. When I hit her, I didn’t hit her hard enough, only wounded her. She staggered away. I chased her again, rammed her down again. She was so quiet. I remember wanting her to scream, whimper, something, anything, but she didn’t. Like this was natural — as if all her life she expected to be crushed to death by a jeep full of Marxists drunk off peach schnapps.”

She holds her face to the sun again, holds it there for a while. I’m drowsy. I reach for her. She winces.

113. OBADIAH (3 A.M.)

Words in a small moon of light. History, at night, by torch, is the guiltiest of pleasures. Turn the page and there’s always more mayhem. In 1827, at Moordkoopie, south of Okahandja, an Orlam chief ordered the hands and feet of two hundred women captives lopped off so he could have their silver bangles. They were the wives, daughters, and concubines of his enemy. Couldn’t he have simply shouted: All right, ladies, take off those beautiful bangles or I’ll kill you? Do I repeat myself? How much is too much when there’s always another page? Why is the only rule that innocents pay?

Theophrastus said throwing a stone is less fatiguing than throwing emptiness. Don’t I know it. I talk in my head, and even I don’t listen. And my wife? While I mutter she sleeps, and even then she grasps the blankets as if they contain work she could get done in a dead hour. How do you say that even when she’s asleep your wife’s hands crave creation?

Speak to me, won’t you speak to me? I want to know of the pain in your hands. You carry a potato in your pocket. You think I haven’t seen you rub it? Is being born alone our transgression? My wife has hands and feet. She wears a thin gown that hangs loosely off her thinning body. Talk to me. Tell me about the pain in your hands.

114. ANTOINETTE

You want it in words, everything in words. All right, then, here are words:

My hands are His hands, and I don’t call it pain. Now come to bed.

115. DROUGHT STORIES

MAGISTRATE MCHUGH: I have come to see how you people live. I have heard you have had a very hard time during the latest drought, but hope you will soon recover.

FREDERICH MUKAUAMBI: We greet the magistrate. We are glad to see the magistrate here today. We have no rain and there is nothing left for the stock to eat. The people are shouting for water. The dams are dry. May we not trek to the east?

MAGISTRATE MCHUGH: No. All the ground you are thinking about has now been occupied and there is no further land available. Both the Europeans and the natives are in the same position and must depend on Providence — it is all we can do.

LOT OPPOSEMAB: We have nothing more to say.

At this stage permission was given to smoke.

— From the minutes of the quarterly meeting at the Otjimbingwe Native Reserve, presided by Magistrate M. J. McHugh, Esq., 16 February 1949.

116. GRAVES

Line going around Goas: How do you know Mavala Shikongo’s war stories are true?

Because she never tells any.

“War,” I say. “Now.”

“All right.” She pauses. She runs her tongue around her lips twice. “War. Yes. I remember. You are woman, they said. Woman! The men gave many speeches saying we were the soul and the strength of the movement. A commander would say, ‘Ladies, your Kalashnikov is an extension of your arm. Now, go do the wash. Go teach the little ones school. Wait, before you go, my darling, bring me a tea. Three sugars!’”

“That’s not a war story.”

“Isn’t it? What about this? I’d been sent to scout the food lorry. A good job for a woman. It was days late. We were living off refried pap and chocolate bars. Sometimes UNITA ambushed the lorries, so we never knew when, or if, the food would come. I walked about three kilometers from camp to wait. I was leaning against a tree when a man, one of ours, came out of the bush. He wasn’t a commander. He was only a new recruit. He’d just come up from the Kavango. I outranked him three levels. He raised a pistol at me and told me to drop my Kalashnikov. I told him he didn’t need a gun. Comrade, I said, we’re all here together. Long camp days, long camp nights. I think I insulted him by the suggestion. He wanted it by force or not at all. So he went away.”

“He did?”

“Yes.”

“Were you serious?”

“About what?”

“You know, giving yourself.”

“I don’t know.”

“You believed in it? That you were all comrades?”

“Listen, I’m tired.”

“Of what?”

“Of talk.”

“I’m only asking.”

“All right, I shot him. When he was turned away, I picked up my gun and shot him. Do you like that story better? Or should I try another? I have other versions.”

She rolls away from me. I watch the drought for a while. I look at the trails the cows have made across the veld, the way they loop and crisscross and join and separate again. I shake her.

“Was that guy Tomo’s father?”

Only her face turns back toward me. “Where did you — no — God, no.” And out of nowhere she smiles in a way I hadn’t seen. The way people do. When they’re remembering a face, another face?

“Why don’t you tell me anything?”

“I just did.”

“Tell me more.”

“No.”

117. DROUGHT STORIES

Morning, cusp of the first ring of the triangle. I groggle over to the tap and nothing happens. I knock on Pohamba’s wall. “There’s no water.”

“None?”

“Check your tap.”

He checks his tap. “There’s no water.”

Through the wall, Vilho calls, “There’s no water.”

“We’re a chorus,” Pohamba says. “Let’s all sing. There’s no —”

“It’s the drought,” Vilho says. “The water levels in the dams —”

Pohamba groans. “How are we going to have coffee?”

“I’ll eat it dry out of the can,” I say.

“Theofilus!” Pohamba shouts. “Theofilus!”

It came out later in the day that Theofilus had diverted our drinking water to try to save the cows. It was such a brazen act of love, he wasn’t even called to task for it by either the principal or the priest (who was gone to Swakop during the crisis). The principal finally had to call the municipality in Karibib, and the town council arranged for a water truck to come out to the farm. We had a holiday drinking water and spraying each other with the hose attached to the truck. For a week, nobody bathed. The classrooms got a little rank, but it was all right. You got to know other people better. You got to know yourself better. Being from Ohio, I have always thought of death as something cold. The bones of my grandfather in the cemetery in Walnut Hills in February, the snow falling lightly on his chiseled name. No longer.

*

It made for days of stink by the graves. Together we were festering. Not only the sand and pebbles that clung to us, but everything. Naked, we wore loose change, buttons, peanut shells, toenail clippings.

“Teacher, you smell malodorous.”

“I smell malodorous?”

118. WHELPS

There was cause for minor celebration. Auntie collapsed in the heat while trying to pry a hubcap off the principal’s car. It was three in the afternoon. Festus saw her flop over face-first in the sand. He waited for her to twitch. When she didn’t, he ran around the farm telling everybody she was dead. She wasn’t. Theofilus drove her to the clinic at Usakos to be examined. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? Clean sheets and pills and male orderlies? Why live anywhere else?

Her whelps suffered for it. They started roaming like the pack of wolves they almost were, living off our garbage — emptied pilchard cans, the last bit of dust at the bottom of a box of dried milk. Antoinette began leaving them scraps at the back of the hostel dining hall. They had mottled, thorn-bitten fur and sorrowful eyes. They no longer came close enough to allow us to pet them, as if the absence of Auntie had ended their official association with human hands. At night they’d yowl for their lost mother, who’d stolen them and pampered them, who’d shampooed them and fed them rotten hamburger. The whelps looked so much alike, they were always nameless to us — Antoinette called them her starvelings — but somebody remembered they did have names, names like Shaka and Beethoven and Rasputin. The too-well-endowed one with his eye gouged out she called Houdini. They didn’t live up to their names. They weren’t nearly so bold as their benefactor, and they didn’t steal, which surprised us. They’d only creep slowly, reticently, as if they didn’t want to bother anybody with their hunger.

“If that woman doesn’t come back,” Antoinette said, “we’ll have to drown them.”

“In what water?” Obadiah said.

119. GRAVES

She unbuttons and rebuttons her shirt as she talks. She’s been talking since the beginning of our hour.

“I wasn’t the only young mother in the camp. There were others. I remember thinking how calm they seemed. Nursing and cooing. I never gained it. I could teach myself so many other things. But that beautiful mothering. So I told myself they were cows.”

“Cows,” I repeat.

She sits up and looks at me. What was I doing in the sand with her? Goas is still asleep, but it’s that time when you can feel the silence about to be trampled.

“Are you calm now?”

“No,” she says.

I listen to her breathing, to her hand piling and smoothing the gravel. Leaning against Grieta’s grave, we don’t face the mountains, only the scorched plain, the rocks, the dry tufts bent to the wind. I reach for her. She uncoils slowly toward me.

120. POHAMBA

He leans against the wall outside his room. He’s marking homework assignments. Long division. His red pen flinging. He had little tolerance for messy papers and would sometimes mark off for it even if they got the answer right. His shadow plump and flattened next to him, squashed by the angle of the early-afternoon sun. His door is held open by a brick, but in this glare you can see nothing of his room but a hole in the dark. He stops his pen for a moment and stares out at the veld. As if it isn’t distance but time he’s looking at. His shoulder blades tense. Not his, this parch. His place is Otavi, where it always rains at least twice after the fifteenth of February. He takes up the pen again and continues to slash.

121. COMRADE YANAYEV

And still nothing happens here. We walk the veld and the dry puckerthorns explode beneath our feet. Where the dead grass has gusted away, there are deep fissures in the dirt. The sun squashes and the weeks pass flat. And then an occurrence: Obadiah loses his TransNamib hat. A farmwide search has yielded no suspects. Standard Sevens, under heavy questioning, deny any involvement. Then, off the radio, still more news. Gorbachev’s been murdered. An hour later he’s resurrected, but now imprisoned on treason charges, in his dacha, in the Crimea. The BBC intones: All seven phone lines leading into the vacation house are reported to have been cut.

And somebody named Gennady Yanayev declares a renewal of Soviet proletarian fortunes.

“Sounds like a putsch.”

“Tasty putsch?” Pohamba says.

“Yanayev? Who the hell’s Yanayev?”

And Obadiah sermonizes, hatless, during mid-morning break: “Wherefore I ask: Who will deliver our Daniel from the ferocity of the lions?”

Empires keel. And still the goats come in from the veld on wobbly legs, and still they don’t know they’re starving.

122. DROUGHT STORIES

It is said that goats eventually go mad. When this happens, they refuse to obey their shepherd and flee to the open desert, where they roam like the great wild horses of the Namib until they die alone, proud, and free of the shackles of bondage and unforgiving husbandry. .

Our goats never got the chance. When they stopped recognizing Theofilus, he loaded them on the lorry and trucked them north to a farm near Tsumeb. But Father refused to send the cows. He told Theofilus the grazing fee per head for cattle was more than our poor church could afford.

So the cows go it on their own now. They starve more gently. Poor fat-witted things. They do not go mad. They do not roam. They simply graze where there’s nothing to graze. When they’re thirsty, they simply plunk their noses in the empty dams and huff around.

123. GRAVES

There are afternoons now when to so much as touch is the last thing either of us wants. An hour we stay apart. Her up on the grave, me down on the tablecloth. What little grass is left is so dry it pokes through the tablecloth like freshly sharpened pencils. I’m spraying a beetle with Doom to see how much it can take before it dies.

“I don’t know why,” she says.

“Why what?”

“Sometimes in the morning I’m lying in bed and all I want to do is lie in bed. How can you want something you’re already doing?”

“My grandfather used to say when you’re dead you spend your time wishing you could pay taxes.”

The beetle’s not dead yet. “It isn’t the work. That beyond this bed there’s work I have to do. All those little boys. Tomo. Soon he’ll be awake and pulling on the edge of my sheets. He might be already awake and doing that. Because times like this I only know what I’m thinking, not what’s happening.”

“I understand. Tomo. It’s difficult.”

“I said, it isn’t Tomo. It’s the wanting —”

“But wanting what?”

“Didn’t I just explain it to you?”

124. THE PHARAOH’S DREAM

To give them hope, Antoinette read Genesis to the cows. She brought her Bible out to the veld and read to them.

“And Pharaoh said unto Joseph, In my dream, behold, I stood upon the bank of a river:

“And, behold, there came up out of the river seven kine, fat fleshed and well favored; and they fed in a meadow.”

(Kine, Antoinette explained to them, means you.)

“And, behold, seven other kine came up after them, poor and very ill favored, such as I never saw in all the land of Egypt for sadness:

“And the lean and ill favored kine did eat up the first seven fat kine.”

The cows stood there and listened to her. Their eyes were hardly visible through the dust that coated them. They had dug their faces into the earth till the earth blinded them.

What she left out, she told me later as she fiddled with the nozzle of the paraffin can in order to stoke the Primus — the swoop of the paraffin catching, its muted steady roar — was what happened after the ill favored kine ate the fat ones. Her Bible on the counter, a pen holding the spot, her hand reaching for it.

She reads, “And when they had eaten them up, it could not be known that they had eaten them; but they were still ill favored, as at the beginning. So I awoke.”

The stove, a perfect circle of blue flame. The tiny black flecks in the flame. Antoinette closes the book.

That night we listened to their raspy lows from our beds. Night being the only time they expressed their displeasure toward God at being ill favored.

125. GOAS THEATER

A new Goas tradition. In honor of independence, Obadiah would write a play for Cassinga Day, May 4. And so weekends he sequestered himself in the mimeograph shack with the big crank machine, the chemicals, and the spiders. He had some boys carry over his personal library. He’d refuse to eat anything other than rusks and cold tea. Through the grimy window we watched him, surrounded by all those tented books. Occasionally he’d emerge lost in thought. We knew this because if you happened to be passing by when he was standing outside the door, he’d say, “Yes, well, I’m lost in thought.” Then, if you laughed he stared at you, not at your face, at your heart, as if something was missing there. We did not understand the tribulations.

A knock on the door. “Head Teacher?”

“Come in.”

A boy, a Standard Two named Tonderai, famous around Goas as the one who loves to run messages back and forth for teachers, enters the writer’s chamber shyly.

“Ah, Muse, I thought you’d forsaken me. I must say I was expecting someone taller.”

“Auntie will be back to tomorrow, Teacher. Sister Ursula phoned.”

Obadiah uncaps a pen and hands it to the boy.

“Slay me.”

“Excuse, Teacher?”

“With this lance — do it.”

126. UP ON THE HILL BY THE CROSS

I climb up the hill to the cross and find Vilho up there by himself. He’s reading and doesn’t say anything to me, and I don’t say anything to him.

When Vilho read, he had a strange way of squinching his eyes. It occurs to me now that this might have been because he was rereading sentences. He would hold the book close to his face and remain on the same page for a long time. On a farm full of readers, he might have been the only one who read with pure delight.

I sit bookless and read the names of boys left on the rocks near the base of the cross: Absalom Shipanga ’81, Phillemon Silvanus ’77, Nestor Nashongo ’74, Titus Mueshihua ’86, Matundu Kapute ’77, Erwin Mbando ’70, Rodney Goaseb ’87, Adonis Gowab ’84, Abraham Haifiku ’73, Petrus Van Weyk ’73, Johannes Isack ’77, Rueben Holongo ’79, Ihepa Enkono ’82, Stephanus Nami ’81, Andreas Kati ’75, Joseph Manasse ’77, David Visser ’74, Phineas Shivute ’82.

After a while, Vilho peers over the rim of his book. “Do you know what today is?”

“Thursday.”

“Maundy Thursday.”

“What’s that?”

“The day in John when the supplicants wash the feet of the poorest.”

“Whose poorest?”

“How much do you have?” Vilho says.

We empty our pockets of rands, toss the money in the sand. Four rand, sixty total. The light retreats like another traitor. Neither of us washes the other’s feet. We sit in the gray silence, our socks off. Absalom Shipanga. Phillemon Silvanus. Nestor Nashongo. Titus Mueshihua. Matundu Kapute. Erwin Mbando. Rodney Goaseb. Adonis Gowab. Abraham Haifiku. Petrus Van Weyk. Johannes Isack. Rueben Holongo. .

127. MORNING MEETING

Nothing like this has ever happened to us before. Precipitation is more common. Obadiah’s place is empty at morning meeting. The principal sends a boy and the boy returns, stands, waiting to be told to speak. He’s a Standard Three, one of Obadiah’s, and his uniform’s in good order. Gray wool shorts, clean shirt buttoned to the neck. I don’t know his name. He is nervous, and his lips are trembling. He stands on one bare foot. With the other he scratches the back of his leg.

“Well?”

“Teacher says he is sick, Master Sir.”

“Sick?”

“Yes.”

“He’s in bed?”

“No, Master Sir.”

“Where is he, then?”

“On his car, Master Sir.”

“The pile of sand?”

“Yes.”

“Sick with what?”

“I don’t know, Master Sir.”

“Go find out.”

And so we wait in silence, the principal clearing and reclearing his throat. It was unthinkable to pontificate in the morning without Obadiah. The principal fancied himself not only Obadiah’s boss but also his rhetorical better. Every day he declared victory in this battle.

The boy comes back.

“Speak.”

The boy hesitates.

“Out with it!”

“Teacher says he is sick with creation, Master Sir.”

At break we went out there to check on him. Above our heads, a cloud, pallid and lazy, floated by, promising nothing. I watched it scatter and break apart above the Erongos. He was sitting at the top of the mound, on a chair he’d brought from his kitchen. Under one of the legs of the chair, as if driven through by a stake, was his play.

“How’s it, Teacher?”

“Disgusting.”

“So you’ve finished?”

He hid his face with his hands. “Finished?” he whispered. “Finished?”

“Yes, are you —”

“There is no finished. There’s only surrender.”

He took his hands away and gazed for a long time at each of us, but it looked, somehow, as if he were only remembering us. As if we were gone and he was lonely already.

Then he said, “They lie. It’s nothing at all like giving birth. Giving death? Yes. They lived in my head and they came out in the world shriveled, blue.” He thumbed himself in the chest. “I’m a murderer.”

“Who’d you kill?”

“Ignatius and the others.”

“Who?”

He shook his head. We joined him on the mound until the triangle called us back to work.

128. GOAS THEATER

The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy

of Ignatius Mumbeli or, The Suitcase

by

Mimnermus

Ignatius Mumbeli, an unknown soldier

Erastus Pohamba

Kosmos Indongo, a famous elder statesman

Obadiah Horaseb

Izelda Indongo, Indongo’s wife

Antoinette Horaseb

Paradise Gowab, a seamstress

Mavala Shikongo

Boer Policeman Number 1, bearded

Larry Kaplansk

Boer Policeman Number 2, beardless

Larry Kaplansk

Boer Policeman Number 3, bald

Larry Kaplansk

Auntie Wilhelmina

Auntie Wilhelmina

Festus Festus Galli, U.N. Secretary General

Festus Uises

Suitcase

Courtesy of Mavala Shikongo

Platoon of Blue Helmets

Boys of Standard Seven

Gunfire Sound Effects

Boys of Standard Six

Refreshment Specialist/Spiritual Advisor

Vilho Kakuritjire

Set Design

Theofilus!Nowases

Lighting

Theofilus!Nowases

Box Office

Theofilus!Nowases

Costumes

Theofilus!Nowases

First Grip

Theofilus!Nowases

Second Grip

Theofilus!Nowases

Dramaturge

Theofilus!Nowases

The Players would like to thank the following sponsors:

Desconde Motors, Schmidsdorf Meats and Poultry, and the Kingdom of Sweden

SCENE 1:The bedsheet rises on the cramped kitchen of a typical location house in the Ovambo section of Katatura location, Windhoek. A battered kitchen table, a battered cupboard, a battered kettle on the stove. If possible, a cockroach should scramble back and forth across the table during the scene. If no cockroaches are available (when are they around when you need them?), a drawing of a cockroach in motion will suffice. KOSMOS INDONGO in an elegant white suit and Panama hat. His beautiful wife, in a simple frock, tends to the kettle. Throughout the scene she gazes lovingly at her husband. There is a sharp rap on the door.

INDONGO: Entrez.

MUMBELI (offstage): Sir?

INDONGO: I said, Entrez. It’s French for entrez. Entrez!

The door opens hesitantly.

MUMBELI (dressed in the simple blue jumper of a railway worker): Good evening, sir. (He nods to IZELDA, who is gazing lovingly at her husband.)

INDONGO (a man of action bored by pleasantries): So, my man, you wish to join the struggle?

MUMBELI: I do, sir.

INDONGO: Very dangerous.

MUMBELI: I accept the dangers. Every night I dream —

INDONGO (whaps the cockroach): In dreams begin lies, my son.

MUMBELI: Excuse?

INDONGO: I have dreamed away decades. Not the years, but the dreams that age us. It’s odd. They seem so harmless in the morning. (IZELDAgazes lovingly at her husband.) Who are you, my son?

MUMBELI: I am Ignatius Mumbeli.

INDONGO: May your name be remembered.

MUMBELI: It is not my name that’s important. It is my country.

INDONGO (smiles): Well spoken. I too have waited long enough. Across two world wars. Two colonial powers. Two international organizations. Countless useless toothless resolutions. The rulings of the World Court. Whose court is the World Court? Are we not part of the world? I misplaced my faith. (He takes a gun from his pocket and sets it on the table.) And yet you think I am in love with the gun of this, the first act?

MUMBELI (taking up the gun): No, sir.

INDONGO: My son, I grant you this valise of high quality. Fill it with many things, including ammunition, but most of all with courage.

MUMBELI: I thank you for this case, sir. I pledge to fill it not only with the necessary items, such as socks, undershirts, sweaters, small keepsakes, but also with —

BOER POLICEMAN NUMBER 1 (shouting): Ah! Is this a meeting in violation of the Non-Assembly Act, SA 771, Section 10, as applicable to the mandated territory? Am I late? Passes, var are your passes? Vostek! Bliksem! (INDONGO and MUMBELI run around the table, followed by BOER POLICEMAN NUMBER 1, waving his sjambok. Eventually who is chasing whom becomes confused after MUMBELI seizes the sjambok and he and INDONGO chase the POLICEMAN. IZELDA holds the kettle, watches.)

Bulb dims.

SCENE 2: The living room of a typical location house in the Damara section of Katatura location. Two blue chairs.

PARADISE (sewing a scarf): So you have come, my gallant, to say farewell? (She begins to cry.)

MUMBELI (placing his suitcase center stage): Don’t weep, baby.

PARADISE: Would you I show more mirth than I am mistress of?

MUMBELI: Oh, in a better world than this. .

PARADISE: Alas. (They clasp hands.)

MUMBELI: Alas.

PARADISE: My pride in you is a mansion bitter built. My heart, however, is torn asunder. Go, my lovely! But know this: I will wait for you. (Pause. Quietly) That’s a very nice case.

MUMBELI: Always judge the man by the caliber of his luggage.

PARADISE (holds up scarf): I knit you this. Carry it well.

MUMBELI: Baby, it’s beautiful. (Pause.) But I’m not sure I’ve got room.

PARADISE: Your case is full?

MUMBELI: Yes, I have filled it with the necessary items, such as undergarments and sweaters, but also with — (The door swings open.)

BOER POLICEMAN NUMBER 2: What here? A Damara and an Ovambo cavorting? A clear violation of the Division of Races Act, SA 193, Section 18, Clause 15 (2) (C), as such is applicable to mandated territories. Passes! Var are your passes! Ah! Beautiful knitting! I never cease to be amazed by the craftiness of you native wenches. Such innate talent! May I? (MUMBELI refuses and begins to chase BOER POLICEMAN NUMBER 2, with the scarf, as if it were a sjambok. . )

Bulb dims.

SCENE 3:On the border. A barbed-wire fence strewn across the stage. On the other side of the fence, a sign: ANGOLA. MUMBELI looks at Angola, then turns around slowly — a great weight on his shoulders and a gun in his hand — to look lovingly at the audience, as at a much-loved country.

MUMBELI: My story? You should like to know my story? Now you ask? I have none. I was killed on the border, by a fence. Once, I had one. I was called Ignatius Mumbeli. I had a mother also. You too? Funny how we all — Mine was a charwoman for a white family in the dorp. I remember waiting on the stoep while she folded sheets. Sheets were washed on Wednesdays. They were aired out all other days. She mopped the floor before dinner and after dinner. On her hands and knees, she mopped the floor. Before dinner and after dinner. She shined their shoes. She raised four of them and five of us. Once, one of them died. I remember. His name was Jan. She came home and wept over him. Now, may I ask, whose mother will weep over me? I had a girl. If I had more time, I would tell you about my beautiful. Her name was Paradise. Her parents, you see, were optimists —

AUNTIE (having climbed in through a stage-left window): Come to my boozalum, angel.

MUMBELI: Are you a ghost, Mother?

AUNTIE: No ghost, boy, I’m your fantasy.

OBADIAH: [Cut! Cut! Cut! Get her out of here!]

BOER POLICEMAN NUMBER 3 (gun drawn, plastic bag wrapped tight on his head to simulate baldness): Aha! Terrorist! Dummkopf! Var do you think you’re going? Who gave you a pass to leave the mandated territory, eh? Eh? (BOER POLICEMAN NUMBER 3 and MUMBELI [and AUNTIE] fight. BOER POLICEMAN NUMBER 3 shoots MUMBELI. MUMBELI shoots BOER POLICEMAN NUMBER 3. MUMBELI dies. BOER POLICEMAN NUMBER 3 dies.)

AUNTIE (noticing the suitcase): Hmmmm. (Snatches it, creeps off.)

FESTUS FESTUS GALLI (trailed by a platoon of blue helmets, stops at the bodies): Ah, tut tut tut. Clean this mess up, boys. Oh, this quarry cries havoc. (Consults script.) Or is it this havoc cries quarry?

Bulb out.

129. NOTES FROM THE LAST AND FIRST REHEARSAL

Hostel dining hall. Night.

MAVALA: I don’t mind being a seamstress, but I’m definitely too tall to play a Damara.

POHAMBA: Herr Director, do you not think there ought to be a kiss in Scene 2? When both of them say, “Alas.” Right there would be an excellent moment —

KAPLANSK: Do I really have to say “native wenches”? I’ll say anything in any language I don’t understand, but I draw the line at saying native wenches.

POHAMBA: That doesn’t mean you don’t think it.

KAPLANSK: Think what? What are you insinuating?

POHAMBA: Insinuating your arse.

ANTOINETTE (Scowls. Leaves.)

FESTUS: Maybe that’s a long speech for Mumbeli at the end?

OBADIAH (wit’s end, end of the rope, last hurrah, goodbye to all that, things don’t fall apart, they implode): Even Festus is a critic. All we ever do is make speeches. Don’t you even understand that? You think anybody talks to each other? Ever? Talks to each other?

130. GRAVES

I have something to tell you.”

“Is it shocking?”

“Von Swine is aware.”

“Of what?”

“This.”

“That’s not shocking.”

“Listen. Last night after rehearsal, he didn’t pant, he knocked. So I was curious. He’d never knocked before. I got up and opened it. He only smiled. Then he turned around and walked away. It was the first time I ever closed the door on him.”

“So the kid told. Or maybe it was Festus. Anyway, he’s the last to —”

“Who told Festus?”

“Nobody. I’m just saying we’re not a well-kept — do you think he’ll tell the priest?”

“Why not? Father, there’s fornication going on in the veld and it isn’t only the goats.”

“The goats are gone.”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t say anything?”

“No, only that smile.”

“Smiled like how?”

“Like he was taking joy in it.”

“In what?”

“In my success. In proving, once again — so I called him back.”

“What?”

“I invited him in.”

“What?”

“Yes. And he comes back. He sighs, rubs his fat face. ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he says. ‘I thought perhaps you couldn’t either.’ It was all very formal and dignified. Then he starts sliding off his belt. When he’s down to his shorts, I start shouting for my sister. Oh, did I shout. You didn’t hear me down there?”

“No.”

“Tuyeni! And the man is so confused. Tomo starts bawling. And Tuyeni, heavy sleeper always, but this time she comes running.”

Mavala rolls over, runs her finger from the ditch in the hinge of my arm to my wrist.

“Wait.”

“There isn’t much time.”

“Just tell it.”

“Well, she came into my room, and what do you think?”

“He’s in your room, with his pants down, in the middle of the night? I think she freaked.”

“No. She looked at me like she used to look at me when we were sisters. Like she loved me, but there was also nothing to be done with me. Then she took him by the hand and led him away like he was a child. It was very beautiful. And man and wife left the slut with her crying kid.”

131. GRAVES

The light slants, the sun nonexistent behind a wall of sky. The graves rise like hulks. The wind is so constant you don’t know you’re hearing it until it falls. She drapes her arm across my neck.

“Hold me.”

“All right.”

Then: “Will you go?”

“Now? We’ve got twenty minutes at least. Why?”

“Don’t ask. Will you? Here, take your sock.”

132. WUNDERBUSCH

“Myrothamnas flabellifolia: A small, woody, aromatically fragrant shrub. It endures droughts by putting itself into a state of dormancy wherein its leaves shrivel, turn brown as the chlorophyll becomes inactive, and eventually become so dry that they can be crumpled into dust between one’s fingers. At the same time, its branches bend upward into a vertically bunched position. Yet at first rain the plant suddenly becomes ‘alive’ once more. The branches descend into more normal positions, the leaves become soft and pliable, and the chlorophyll becomes green and active. This transformation takes only an hour at most, and can be brought about artificially by spraying the plants with water or by immersing them in a tub of water for only a few minutes. Because of this ability to return to life after apparent death, the species is called the ‘resurrection plant’ (in German, Wunderbusch). The natives use the plants for the brewing of a pleasantly scented tea, hence there is a name for the species in each of the native tongues. For instance, in Herero it is Ongandulwaze and in Nama it is !godogib.”

133. FARM LINE

Just after the second triangle, the farm line will ring. It will sound, as it always does, like a chain being dragged across asphalt. The principal will pick it up from his office. Miss Tuyeni will pick it up from the kitchen of their house. The priest from his office. Krieger from his house. There will be a chorus of Hellos and Who is calling? Who is calling? Asking for whom? The headmaster, please. Speaking! It will be Prinsloo, and he will tell the principal (and everyone else listening) that he saw the girl teacher, the one with the bitty skirts, walking down the C-32 at what odd in the morning. The sky still bloody. Strange for a Wednesday. Is today another one of these new holidays? I thought we just had one. A suitcase too. She didn’t put her hand out, so I didn’t stop. I thought you might like to know.

134. GOAS MORNING

Not yet dawn, that strange light before the light, and Antoinette’s in the dining-hall kitchen slicing morning bread for the boys, thick slices of brown bread with an ungenerous slap of butter that the boys will try to make go further by spreading it around with their tongues. They eat their morning bread slowly. Mavala knocks on the glass window of the door. Antoinette looks up, not surprised, because to her there is no such thing as a surprise. She opens the door and Mavala carries Tomo inside. He’s sleeping in his car seat. She sets him down in the corner of the kitchen where the gray hasn’t reached. She leaves his stuffed horse, a few of his cars. A plastic bag full of clothes and diapers. He’ll be saying more words soon. After that will come sentences. So beautiful when he’s helpless with sleep, she’d like to sink down with him in the corner. Her body arcing toward him. She drags her fingers down his face. Then she stands and whispers things to Antoinette that Antoinette listens to — but as always with the two of them, their understanding goes beyond words, and now, past the promises Mavala’s making, promises she insists on repeating.

Antoinette scrapes out the last of the butter from the tub, and nods. “I’ll heat some milk,” she says.

135. COFFEE FIRE

She can act, that one.”

“Quite an exit.”

“Oh, she’ll be back.”

“Of course, she’ll be back.”

“Where’d she go?”

“Windhoek. Where else is there to go?”

“No! Jo’burg. City of Gold! That’s where the real money is. She’ll be a real actress in Jo’burg. Forget Windhoek.”

“She’ll be back, I say.”

“It’s true, that girl can act.”

“I thought she wanted to be an accountant.”

“Still, it exhausts.”

“What?”

“Leaving. Any leaving.”

“Coming back’s tiring also.”

“That’s true. But the boy.”

“Yes, the boy.”

136. MORNING MEETING

In morning meeting, the principal doesn’t mention her. Moral tales come and go, and he doesn’t once look at her empty space. She normally stands between Obadiah and Vilho. They leave a gap for her, whether as a reminder or a tribute, I don’t know. The principal doesn’t seem interested in taking anything out on me. One, because he knows I’d never say a word, and two, because if it is a game, which it is to him, then we’ve both lost.

Finally, after she’s been gone eight school days — apparently some official level of delinquency — he distributes mimeograph copies of a typed letter. We stand there and sniff it. There’s no moral tale this day. He’s all bluster and business. He reads the letter to us.

Dear Deputy Minister Tjoruzumo:

I regret to inform you, Sir, of a vacancy effective immediately at the Don Bosco Primary School (Goas Farm RC), District Erongo.

Grade: Sub B

Reason for Vacancy: Teacher Mavala Shikongo abandoned her post May 5 of the current calendar year, without notice and without explanation. In addition, she left her son, Tomo (surname unknown), 2, at the mercy of the charity of the state.

Request: Please send a replacement teacher as soon as convenient.

If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me at the below address.

Obediently yours,

Charles Komesho, Principal

Goas Primary School, RC

Private Bag 79

Karibib

Tuyeni stared straight ahead as he read it. Not a word. Although we believed she was the power behind him, she never tipped her hand either way. She was almost godlike in that way. And so, finally, difficult to hate. To hate Tuyeni took more imagination than any of us had. Maybe she got what she wanted. Maybe there can never be enough disgrace. The woman was impenetrable, hollow-eyed. Mavala’s leaving left her no more numb than she’d always seemed. Morning meeting, staring at nothing.

“My wife is not the charity of the state,” Obadiah says.

The principal swallows. Then he gently rubs his hands together, as if preparing to eat. “Her food is. Her house is. And now that I consider it, Head Teacher, her man is also.”

“The boy’s name is Shikongo, Master Sir.”

“You’re informing me, Head Teacher, of the name of my own bastard nephew?”

137. WALLS

He liked to think his love for her was a thing he kept pure. I was the degrader in this respect. He was proud of what he considered his refusal, how he didn’t give chase. How he loved her from a distance. He was the untainted one.

Wall thumped by foot.

“Are you awake?”

“No.”

“You should have left her alone.”

“I should have left her alone? You’re lecturing me on women? I can’t even think of a good analogy. I should have left her alone. I’m asleep. We all should have left her alone. Everybody should have left her alone.”

“There’s no we in this instance.”

“All right. I. I.”

“What is she running from? That fat harmless?”

“I don’t know.”

“You never asked her?”

“Asked her what? I didn’t know she was leaving.”

“You think you’re harmless?”

“I’m asleep.”

“When are you leaving?”

“I don’t know.”

“Back to O-hi-o. Must be good. Blink your eyes and fly away. Whee!”

“You want to come to Ohio?”

“I want to go to Dallas.”

“There’s only one choice. Ohio.”

“What did she want?”

“She said she didn’t know.”

“She didn’t know?”

“That’s what she said.”

“Not you?”

“No.”

“And why don’t you chase her?”

“Chase her where?”

This seems to satisfy him. He farts as if to signal an end, a long, sad sigh of a fart, and I roll over to try to sleep. Moments later, he bops the wall again.

“What did you do out there in the veld?”

“Talked.”

“That kind of talk’s where she found Tomo. You’re not harmless, comrade. None of us is.”

138. TOMO

I found myself needing to be around him. I’d sit in Antoinette’s garden and watch him destroy things. Wasn’t he beautiful in that way?

One night during Sunday dinner at Antoinette’s, over chicken, rice, and radishes from the garden, the subject of his presence in their house as opposed to the principal’s was finally breeched. Antoinette and Obadiah usually waited until Sunday dinner to argue, and sometimes they invited spectators.

“Whatever else Tuyeni may be,” Obadiah said, “the woman is the boy’s aunt.”

“Aunt,” Antoinette piffed. “Aunt!”

“Under the law, she’s next of kin. Lord knows, those two might accuse us of kidnapping.”

“Kidnapping? They live up the road.”

“The law says —”

“The law! Whose law? I will not give them the satisfaction of granting me permission.”

“The fact of the matter is that we’re not relatives. Now, in the old days, yes, this sort of thing happened all the time, but today we have…” He ran down of his own accord. We ate on in silence, to the noise of crunching radishes. I wondered: How can it be so loud in your own ears and the room so quiet?

139. WALLS

Well, son.”

“What?”

“I fucked her too.”

“Go to hell.”

“One night the man went a-knocking.”

“Don’t you get tired?”

“Of what, son?

“Lying like an asshole.”

“Asshole or arsehole. Which is the correct pronunciation?”

“I’m through.”

“It’s a geographic variation,” Vilho interjects. “The British say it one way, the Americans —”

“Through?”

“Listening to you.”

“In any case, I believe ‘anus’ would be most correct.”

“It was hot. Very hot. I couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t sleep. The woman said she wanted a real man, not a —”

“Not a what?”

“Notta notta notta. Sleep, son, sleep —”

140. ACROSS THE ROAD

We’re walking the open veld on the other side of the C-32, south of Prinsloo’s. A man named Schwicker used to farm here. A sun-faded, bullet-holed sign FARM SALE 18,000 HECTARES leans out of the ditch by the side of the road like an arm reaching up out of the grave. Obadiah said we needed new ground to cover, that we hadn’t yet seen everything. The veld is just as flat out this way.

“What people don’t know,” Obadiah says, “but the cows do, is that so long as there’s grass, something like grass, it’s all right. This parch has more nutrients than the green stuff. But water — without water —”

“She’s not coming back,” I say.

“Funny. I’ve always thought of water as woman. You too?”

Then he stops and I stop. He places a mournful hand on my shoulder and says solemnly, “Jimmy Carter.”

“What about him?”

“Blame him.”

“For what?”

“Optimism.”

“Can we just walk? Not say anything, just walk?”

He sniffs. He takes off his glasses, pinches his nose, puts his glasses back on, gazes east, west.

“You see, Carter was the only one of your presidents who had a nimble enough mind to see we weren’t Communists in the truest sense. There were some real ones. Joe Slovo, perhaps. Chris Hani. But for the most part, it was always a question of playing Commie because at that time it didn’t quite matter.”

“Please —”

“Because the fight was the only thing. And that takes money. Independence would come and it would all be solved. With Jimmy Carter, through the black man at the United Nations, Andrew Young — there was hope. But hope. One pays dear for it. Next came your movie star. The war went on another decade. Then, when the fighting was finally over, Sam Nujoma said, ‘Commie? Who me?’ Because by then the money was coming from somewhere else. See? Easy?”

“But —”

“Of course there were people who believed in it! Your Mavala being one — and it was, wasn’t it, a beautiful thing? Houses, jobs. Food enough for all? How does one argue with this? Where’s the dear man now?”

“Who?”

“Andrew Young!”

“I don’t know.”

“Faded away did he?”

“How should I know?”

“A man like Andrew Young and you don’t know?”

I stop. He walks on ahead. An old man banging away and banging away and banging away. When I leave this place, this old man will still be banging away. I turn around and walk faster, head for the road. He starts hollering.

“You think there’s honor in inconsolable? Over a girl in a skirt? You think that’s devastation?”

I’m on the road. The gravel stretches across the veld like a long tongue. I shout back, “I didn’t say. I only —”

He stands on a koppie, a lonely tree of a man against the sky. “And Andrew Young? You think it’s a joke. How many people would be alive today if anybody listened to him? Families intact? Glorious futures? And that blameless girl would have stayed home in her village with her mother.”

141. SIESTA

Siesta and my eyes feel like they’ve been torn open. I knock on the wall. I knock on it again, again. “Wake the fuck up.”

“May I help you?”

“Fok jou mama se poes.”

“Hey! That’s not bad. But with poes, you want to drag it out, like this: Poooooes.”

“She had a birthmark.”

“Where?”

“Fuck off.”

“Have you so little faith?”

“She once said, Don’t be jealous.”

“Of who?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Now, that is romantic. He’s probably dead. Aren’t all the heroes dead?” He calls to Vilho. “Pious one!”

“Yes?”

“We’ve found our martyr.”

“Who?”

“Tomo’s daddy.”

“What about his mother?” I ask.

“It’s too early to tell.”

“Bless them both,” Vilho says.

“And Kaplansk?” Pohamba says.

“Why not?”

142. OBADIAH (3 A.M.)

In 1897, rinderpest wiped out three quarters of the cattle in the country. The disease was followed by drought. Next came, for the human beings, hunger. Those who had been baptized gave up on God, but those who hadn’t besieged the mission stations on their knees. Give us food. Give us Christianity. In such a year, when even the missions had so little, belief was easier to dollop than porridge. And so the missionaries said, Here’s Christ.

In the morning, they counted saved souls in corpses.

Absolve me, Love. Do you think I enjoy repeating such things, even to myself? But can a man unread himself blind? Can he close these books and live? Don’t answer this. I know you hear me. Don’t answer.

143. ANTOINETTE

Less each word than the cumulative weight of them. At the sink holding the one true book in her hand. With her other hand, she digs crud out of the drain. The boy is out back, stalking a hungry whelp. Unnoticing now. Tonight he will remember and wail. He’ll reject my arms.

It is not that I don’t understand. If she had a Jerusalem, it was somewhere far from here, and she had to go alone. What cost to me to raise another? But forgive a woman a thought: Would she have left behind a daughter?

144. PRINSLOO’S WIFE

They shot Sampie Prinsloo. The papers said they raped his wife, but let her live. The Afrikaans paper, The Republikein, screamed that it was an epidemic, that this was what democracy was going to look like. Yet the truth was that, as Pohamba said, farmers had always been murdered. You lit your own death in the veld every time you turned on a lamp at night. The price of land bought so cheaply, so to speak. Dogs and the electric fences could do only so much. Farmers at the Rossman Hotel in Karibib would often laugh about their dates with destiny.

We wondered where we’d get our vegetables.

A week or so after it happened, Prinsloo’s bakkie pulled up to the cattle gate. We were all in class. There was no horn, but no motorized vehicle could get within a half kilometer of Goas without making news. When we saw whose bakkie it was, nobody knew exactly what to do. The boys didn’t run for it. They walked slowly, curious. So clever, those whites. A man dies and still his ghost has transport.

It was his wife. No one had known her. She was only that woman who never got out of the bakkie, who watched us from behind the glass. But now she had no choice. She got out of the bakkie and put the free box of withered carrots on the ground and motioned for the boys to take what they wanted. She wasn’t going to toss them in the air. We looked over what she’d brought. Not much. A few peppers, an undersized pumpkin. Those bostostos must have had their fill of produce as well. She spoke a halting English. We didn’t offer condolences. Standing up, she was taller than we expected, and her face was blanched too white, as if even the Erongo sun had given up trying to redden it. She didn’t look stunned by grief. What would it have looked like if she had been? We watched her, lingered over her slim pickings. We gave her more than any of it was worth.

Then she stooped and picked up the free box, tossed it in the back, and nodded to us. She was about to drive away when Antoinette, who’d bought the single sad pumpkin and was now cradling it in her left arm like another child (Tomo was in her right), went up to the driver’s side window and knocked on it. Prinsloo’s wife didn’t roll the window down. She was a Boer farmer’s wife and wasn’t used to taking orders from any native grootma. Antoinette in her plastic Pep Boy Shop sandals, her starchy clean dress, her head wrapped in a scarf, pumpkin in one arm, child in the other. And her face like a fist she’d smash the window with. She demanded so much from people. Buck up. Be better, be stronger. Rise above.

Had she still been on the farm then, Mavala might have said that nothing happened. That Prinsloo’s wife was broken when she pulled up in the bakkie and broken when she drove away. That all she was doing was selling the last of her vegetables. Nothing happened when those two women looked at each other. Nothing.

But she wasn’t there. She’d left us by then. So I’m going to see it, remember it, differently.

Antoinette knocked on the window and eyed that woman, and it wasn’t strength she gave, but something smaller. Maybe it was only recognition. What happened to you, what happened to you.

145. MAGNUS AXAHOES

His desk is empty now. The only one besides Mavala who leaves and stays gone. I don’t report him missing. Nobody notices other than the boys and me, because I am his teacher. Antoinette has her hands full these days with Tomo and with end-of-the-term cleaning. She hasn’t done a roll call in weeks. One day Magnus’s father comes up to the school asking for him.

No phone to call, so I came here to see him myself. You see, his mother passed this year and I worry over the boy.

The principal doesn’t stand up. Magnus Axahoes’s father standing there in his blue jumper isn’t anybody he has to get up out of his chair for. “These farm boys run away all the time,” the principal says. “What can I do? Alert the constable every time?”

146. DROUGHT STORIES

The oldest and weakest cattle began dying in the middle of June. Our only rain had been that single storm. Dikeledi in the rain, and now nothing. Everybody said it was never a surprise. How could it be a surprise? Still, it was odd how you went along, the days opening, the days closing, and then one afternoon it was as if the grass got a crack more brittle and you knew. You knew the worst wasn’t coming tomorrow, it was here. Everybody knows when a drought ends, but when does it begin? The cows went from quietly starving to actually dying, and Theofilus had to go to Karibib for fodder to keep them alive another day. He couldn’t water them fast enough.

We voyeurs wanted to watch their suffering up close. Their bulging eyes, their slowly whirling pupils. I had always thought cows have sad eyes. The one thing I know now is that this is conceit. That their eyes hold some sort of sorrow seems beside the point. They died with them open.

Out of mercy, Theofilus shoots a few of them that are no longer able to stand. Their meat’s all gone, but still he wants to save them the indignity of having their carcasses picked clean by the already circling, murderously patient vultures. How do they smell death before it even happens? We go out there with some boys and watch. Small bonfires light the veld. Petrol and smoke line our nostrils. The cows burn down to bone.

147. SINGLES QUARTERS

Morning meeting in eight minutes. Vilho gongs a pot to make certain, because aren’t there too many days now we sleep through the third triangle? Pohamba’s waking coughs, his cursing the universe that made Vilho’s mother, the foundry that made the pot, the God who gave us dreams and then wrenched them away from us for fucking morning meeting. Rarer times, I beat the first triangle. On my knees, in the chill, watching out my torn screen the blue as it rises above the shoulders of the mountains.

148. THE B-1 SOUTH

She was pretty, a little nasty-mouthed, but pretty. Tall, with a bullet-looking head. Standing west of Karibib with a suitcase. She didn’t wing her arm out when I drove by. Waiting on something better. They’re always waiting on something better while I work. But I stopped anyway, and she walked up, and I leaned over and opened the door. She didn’t say anything and didn’t get in. I didn’t say anything either. What would I? I leaned over to close the door. You’re getting in, you’re not getting in. What difference does it make to me? She put her hand on the door, and my eyes said to her, In or out? Her hand on the door like I’m the one in the road begging a lift. Where are you going? she said. I pointed up the road. How far? she said. I have to answer questions? Upington, I said. Tonight. Her hand was still on the edge of the door. All right, she said. She hoisted her suitcase and expected me to take it. I let the thing stand there in the air above the seat. She put it down on the seat and climbed up. I jerked my thumb. There’s room for it in the back, and she, with her knees on the seat, lifted it and put it back there. Then she sat with her hands folded like a nun. She wasn’t a nun. She looked straight ahead out the windscreen. I don’t play the radio. I like to think when I drive. Thirty, forty kilometers, she didn’t say a word. Up and over the hills and straight up to the checkpoint before Windhoek. At the checkpoint she didn’t take out her card and they didn’t ask her to. That’s how it is now. Six times in a route now I show my card. The other day they fined me two hundred rand for my tires. Cop measured my treads with a ruler and said I was in violation. Straight past Windhoek on the underway, and she’s so still it doesn’t look like she’s breathing. Maybe she thought if she breathed she’d be giving me something. I got used to it. I feel her there and don’t feel her, and listen for her breathing and don’t hear it. I do the three hundred k’s to Mariental, where I stop for petrol. When I get back in the cab, there’s thirty rand on my seat. I look at it awhile and then get in and sit on it. She doesn’t say anything, but I see her breathe. Outside Horncranz, I ask her if she has a name, and without taking her eyes off the glass or moving her nasty little mouth, she says she does. Outside Gibeon, I said, Do you ever tell people what it is? and then she did tilt her head and she did look straight at me. And all right, I want to touch her, not grab her, just touch her. And I look at her and she knows it. Stop, she says. Here? A flat stretch of tarmac south of Keetmans, at least two hundred more k to the border. Nothing, no dorp for sixty, seventy k in either direction. An hour to dark. You want to get out here?

Here.