by Peter Orner
Copyright © 2006 by Peter Orner
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Hachette Book Group
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First eBook Edition: April 2006
ISBN: 978-0-316-07526-8
ALSO BY PETER ORNER
Esther Stories
FOR
Dantia Maur
Contents
Copyright Page
Part One: GOAS
1: THE TAR ROAD
2: POHAMBA
3: THE VOLUNTEER
4: CLASSROOM
5: THE C-32
6: WALLS
7: MORAL TALE
8: A SPOT NORTHWEST OF OTJIMBINGWE
9: ANTOINETTE
10: A DROWNED BOY
11: GOAS
12: STORY OF A TEACHER’S WIFE
13: UP ON THE HILL BY THE CROSS
14: CLASSROOM
15: GOAS MORNING
16: DIKELEDI
17: TYPING
18: RAIN
19: OBADIAH
20: SECOND COMING
21: BROTHERS
22: TO RETURN
23: STUDY HOUR
24: AUNTIE
25: UP ON THE HILL BY THE CROSS
26: GOAS LOVE
27: MID-MORNING BREAK
28: SIESTA
29: SHOE WAR
30: MOSES
31: BY THE PISS TREE
32: OBADIAH (3 A.M.)
33: IN THE NORTH
34: DROUGHT STORIES
35: MAVALA
36: COFFEE FIRE
37: ANTOINETTE
38: OBADIAH (SHAVING)
39: ANTOINETTE
40: GOAS
41: THEOFILUS
Part Two: FARTHER INTO THE VELD
42: NIGHT
43: POHAMBA
44: TOMO
45: LATE DUSK
46: WALLS
47: VILHO
48: THE SEVASTOPOL WALTZ
49: HYGIENE PATROL
50: NOTES ON A MOSTLY ABSENT PRIEST
51: ENGLISH NIGHT
52: HUNS AND KHAKIS
53: KARIBIB
54: BUTCHER SCHMIDSDORF
55: SISTER ZOë
56: THEOFILUS
57: ZAMBEZI NIGHTS
58: VILHO
59: GOAS
60: MORE GOAS LOVE
61: SIESTA
62: OBADIAH
63: MORNING MEETING
64: ANTOINETTE
65: GRAVES
66: APOSTLE JOHN
67: ANNUAL LIBRARY LECTURE (EXCERPTED)
68: GRAVES
69: SPIES
70: PRINSLOO
71: GOAS
72: GRAVES
73: KRIEGER
74: GRAVES
75: INTOXICATIONISTS IN A DATSUN
76: ANTOINETTE
77: MAGNUS AXAHOES
78: POHAMBA
79: A VISIT FROM COMRADE GENERAL KANGULOHI
80: GRAVES
81: OBADIAH (HATS)
82: AUNTIE
83: GRAVES
84: THE ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL
85: POHAMBA
86: A PIANO FOR GOAS
87: GRAVES
88: MAJESTY OF THE LAW
89: POHAMBA
90: THE ILLEGALS
91: SNAKE PARK
92: WALLS
93: GRAVES
94: GRAVES
95: GRAVES
96: DR. SAVIMBI
97: ANTOINETTE AND OBADIAH
98: GOAS
99: VILHO
100: GOAS CHRISTMAS
Part Three: AN ORDINARY DROUGHT
101: GRAVES
102: WALLS
103: DROUGHT STORIES
104: CLASSROOM
105: GRAVES
106: GRAVES
107: ABRAM
108: GRAVES
109: POHAMBA
110: GRAVES
111: GRAVES
112: GRAVES
113: OBADIAH (3 A.M.)
114: ANTOINETTE
115: DROUGHT STORIES
116: GRAVES
117: DROUGHT STORIES
118: WHELPS
119: GRAVES
120: POHAMBA
121: COMRADE YANAYEV
122: DROUGHT STORIES
123: GRAVES
124: THE PHARAOH’S DREAM
125: GOAS THEATER
126: UP ON THE HILL BY THE CROSS
127: MORNING MEETING
128: GOAS THEATER
129: NOTES FROM THE LAST AND FIRST REHEARSAL
130: GRAVES
131: GRAVES
132: WUNDERBUSCH
133: FARM LINE
134: GOAS MORNING
135: COFFEE FIRE
136: MORNING MEETING
137: WALLS
138: TOMO
139: WALLS
140: ACROSS THE ROAD
141: SIESTA
142: OBADIAH (3 A.M.)
143: ANTOINETTE
144: PRINSLOO’S WIFE
145: MAGNUS AXAHOES
146: DROUGHT STORIES
147: SINGLES QUARTERS
148: THE B-1 SOUTH
Part Four: ANTOINETTE
149: GOAS
150: CINCINNATI PUBLIC
151: MAVALA
152: ON THE MOLE AT SWAKOPMUND
153: GRAVES
154: HOSTEL (NIGHT)
NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
We cannot speak with one voice, as we are scattered.
—HOSEA KUTAKO (1870-1970)
Part One
GOAS
1
THE TAR ROAD
Boys stand with road-sore feet holding cardboard suitcases. They stand clustered, but not in a group. They’re not together. They don’t talk into the wind; they only wait on the brake lights that so rarely happen. Still, every new car or bakkie or combi or lorry is a new hope, rising and dying like a beating heart glowing and then spending itself on the pavement, only to live again when the next one comes. Out there in their best clothes, trying to get to the school deep in the veld. At certain moments in the early afternoon the tar road looks like it’s burning. A boy kneels and sniffs. There’s always one who thinks he can tell how much longer it will be by smelling the road.
“Stupid,” another says.
“Not stupid, science. It’s about air currents near the pavement’s surface. They change when —”
“Ai, go on.”
“Where? Go on where?”
They’re hungry, but you don’t want to pull out food, because no one would want to be caught chewing if the miracle of car does stop. Imagine a comfortable ride in a bucket seat with the radio playing. They keep their bread in their pockets. Boys have it worst. They are chosen last, after old mammies, mothers with babies, old men. Most of the time their only option is a lorry. Lorries don’t stop, they only slow down, just long enough for the boys to toss their bundles and leap, before the driver shifts gears and accelerates again. Klim op! Then they huddle against each other in the wind and wait for it to be over, as the lorry gains speed and begins to cross bridge after bridge over the dry rivers.
2
POHAMBA
He was a big man and he prayed out loud in a small bed. Through the wall, his face in the mattress, and still we heard him.
&nb
sp; Out of the deep I call
To Thee, O Lord, to Thee
Before Thy throne of grace I fall.
Be you merciful to me… Damn you, to me…
During the day he denounced God as residual colonialist propaganda. “Listen, if He was opium, I’d stuff him in a pipe and smoke Him.” Pohamba. Resident Catholic school blasphemer, atheist, revolutionary, provocateur, math teacher. Even he turned to a higher power when the long veld night closed us in. Who else could deliver him from such a place? A farm in the desert? And what kind of god would put a farm in the desert? Pohamba was a man out of options. All traditional and earthly means had failed. He’d sent countless letters to the Ministry of Education begging for a post in a town, any backwater dorp would do. Dear Comrade, I’ll even accept a position south of Windhoek in order to do my share for this budding democracy.
Every one of them went unanswered. He often conjured those letters, talked about them as if they were castaways washed up on some bureaucrat’s desk. And when he got going, a little Zorba in his veins, he’d describe the bureaucrat, Deputy Minister So-and-So. Meneer Deputy Minister Son of Somebody Important in the Movement! Some bastard who spent the war years in Europe while the rest of us sat here ja baasing P. W. Botha. He’d give his bureaucrat a smooth, freshly shaved face and a fat-cat corner office in the Sanlam Building. A wristwatch big as a Volkswagen. And a secretary, of course, in a chafing skirt. White. Make her a white secretary. And he’d imagine his letters, his babies, sitting stacked neat, unread, ignored. “Like to burn that office,” he’d say. “Watch Meneer Deputy Minister Son of Somebody Important melt. Secretary too. Both of them black as char in the morning.”
Nights were different. And some nights it wasn’t Jesus he’d beg to but his mother. These were the longest. It wasn’t that he kept me up when he talked to his mother. It was that I couldn’t hear him. Even with our walls made of envelope, I had to press a coffee cup to the wall to listen. Mama oh Mama . . .
She was buried, he once said, behind a garage on a farm north of Otavi.
The hours drag on. Then the inevitable. Through the wall Pohamba moans low. The bedsprings noisy for a while before the death silence of small relief.
But there were, weren’t there, also afternoons when you could have almost called him happy? Pohamba on a rock outside our rooms, cooking bloodwurst, thick German plumpers he bought from the butcher Schmidsdorf in Karibib. Pohamba whistling. His tape player spewing that horrid Afrikaner disco folk. Tinny synthesized drumbeats accompanied by sexy panting.
Saturday languoring. Wind, sand, boredom, sweat, visions of sausages. Eating our only glory then. The rest of us loll in the sweaty shade while Pohamba forks bloodwurst. We lick our fingers, slowly. Pohamba moving in time. A big man but graceful. His feet plap the dust. The rocks beneath our heads get hotter. Sleep refuses. Pohamba bobs. He skids. He twirls, juts, swags. He wiggles a booty at us. In the pan, in the holy grease, our beloveds fatten and splurt.
3
THE VOLUNTEER
A brother from the diocese drove me out there from Windhoek. His name was Brother Hermanahildis. He was a silent man with a bald, sunburned head. The single thing he said to me in four hours was “I am not a Boer, I am pure Dutch. I was born in The Hague.” He drove like a lunatic. I watched the veld wing by, and the towns that were so far between. Brakwater, Okahandja, Wilhelmstal. Brother Hermanahildis seemed to be suffering from an excruciating toothache. At times he took both hands off the wheel and pulled on his face. I was relieved when we reached Karibib and he turned onto a gravel road heading south. Eventually, he let me off at a wind-battered tin sign—FARM GOAS—and told me to follow the road, that the mission was just beyond the second ridge. When you get there, Brother Hermanahildis said, go and see the Father directly.
Ta-ta.
With a suitcase in each hand, one backpack on my back, another on my stomach, I followed the road, a rock-strewn double-track across the veld. There were a number of ridges. I looked for one that might be considered a second one. The short rocky hills made it impossible to see what was ahead on the road, although in the distance I could see a cluster of smallish mountains rising. A few crooked, bony trees here and there. Strawlike grass grew like stubble up out of the gravel. Somehow I thought a purer desert might have been more comforting. Where were the perfect rippled dunes? Where was the startling arid beauty? These plants looked like they’d rather be dead. I listened to the crunch of my own feet as I shuffled up and over ridges. There was no second ridge. There would never be a second ridge.
*
An hour or so later, sweat-soaked, miserable, I stood, weighted and wobbly, and looked down on a place where the land swooped into a kind of valley, a flat stretch of sand and gravel. There was a group of low-slung buildings painted a loud, happy yellow. There was a hill with a tall white cross on top. Hallelujah! As best I could I bumbled down the road until I reached a cattle gate made from bedsprings lashed to a post. The gate was latched closed by a complicated twist of wire. As I struggled with the wire, a rotund man in a khaki suit moved slowly but inevitably down the road toward me, as if being towed by his own stomach. When he reached the other side of the gate he stopped. He faced me for a moment before he spoke much louder than he needed to. “Howdy.”
“Howdy,” I said.
“I see you are having some trouble with our gate.”
“A little.”
“In fact, you are unable to open it?”
“No, actually I can’t.”
“Of course not. You’re the volunteer?”
“Yes.”
“Volunteer of what?”
“Pardon?”
He wore large glasses. Behind them his eyes were tiny, distant, and his head seemed far too small for his body. Behind him, up the road, a group of boys in powder-blue shirts had gathered to watch us. Under a lone and scraggled tree, a bored cow gazed at me in that eerie, death-announcing way cows have of looking right through you.
“And your name might be?”
“Larry Kaplanski.”
He pumped my hand from the other side of the cattle gate.
“Pleasure, Mr. Kaplansk. So very good of you —”
“Kaplanski.”
His big head winced. He swatted a fly off his ear.
“And your qualifications, Mr. Kaplansk?”
“Qualifications?”
He took off his glasses and examined me. Without them his eyes got even smaller, receded into his head as if an invisible thumb had pushed them in like buttons.
“I see. And what have you brought for us?”
I stared at him. Even with all the shit I’d lugged —
“To be expected!” he boomed. “You came under the presumption that you yourself will be of use to us? Oh, erroneous! Oh, so erroneous!”
“But —”
“Be this as it may, Mr. Kaplansk. Of course it would have been far more advantageous to our development, yes, to our development, had you placed cash in an envelope and, well, to be frank, mailed it! Goas, Private Bag 79, Karibib, Namibia, 9000! Alas! You didn’t!” He turned and raised a thick, baggy hand and swept it across everything in sight, the blue-shirted boys, the cow, the infinite veld—all of it dry, everything everywhere dry.
“Brother Hermanahildas told me to see the Father.”
“Brother who?”
“From The Hague, Brother Hermana —”
“Listen.” He grasped the gate with both hands as if he were preparing to vault it. Then he leaned toward me and whispered, “Have you not heard? No man can serve two masters, Mr. Kaplansk.” He backed away, appraised me again, gnawing the inside of his cheek. “Do you understand the parameters as they’ve been succinctly explained this day of our Lord, March the sixth, nineteen hundred and ninety-one?”
I nodded frantically.
“Very well! As long as you’re here, you’ll teach Standard Six. English and History.” He about-faced, whistled once, as if he were followed by a platoon (and it was true, always the pri
ncipal commanded an invisible army), and marched up the road toward the cluster of school buildings. Some boys came down and helped me with the gate. The cow, without taking its eyes off me, took a long, long piss.
4
CLASSROOM
They stand up when I walk into the room. Every morning, first period, they leap out of their chairs. Goed morro, Teacher. And every morning, my fraudulence more transparent, I plead, Sit down. I beg you guys.
So cold in the shadows and so unbearably hot in the sun, and no in between. I watch the day rise, then blare, then finally leak away through the cracked and broken glass. The boys sit in a swath of dusty light with their foreheads sweating but their feet still cold. The boys who wore their shoes were quietest. The ones who went without, who conserved their shoes for church or soccer, would rub their dry, chapped feet together, and you’d hear it all through class like a chorus of saws.
Rubrecht, Nestor, Jeremiah, Gideon, Sackeus, Albertus, Demus, Mumbwanje, Kalumbo, Magnus, Fanuel (coughing, always coughing, always apologizing for it), Stevo, Nghidipo, Ichobod… Later in the term, Fanuel will spend two weeks at the clinic at Usakos. Bloody lung, Sister Ursula will call it. After Usakos, Fanuel will be transferred to Windhoek General Hospital, and from there we will lose track of him.
But right now another boy, one of the smallest Standard Sixes, Magnus Axahoes (his feet don’t yet touch the floor), raises his hand and stands and whispers, “May I, the toilet, Teacher?”
“You may.”
Magnus walks out of the classroom, then runs across the courtyard, his feet kicking up sand that seems to rise but not fall into the now stark light.
5
THE C-32
I remember the slow roll of a road that seems flat. How it suddenly dips into dry sloots I’d forgotten were there, and that swooning that happens in my stomach. I also think of the old woman who sold rocks at a small wooden table. Who did she sell them to? She sat at a place where the veld seemed to repeat itself, where there was no sense of the land passing, or even of time. Nothing in either direction but fence-line and veld, and then there she is by the side of the road, at the top of a rise. You don’t see her until you are upon her. She’s there, waiting. Everything about her has shriveled in the sun but her hands. They seem to have grown bigger than her face, and she sits there, lording over the common rocks she calls gems. That’s what her sign says: GEMS 4 SALE. She doesn’t shout, wave, or cajole. She lets the truth of the sign speak for itself. Those enormous gnarled hands hovering over the table as if she’s trying to levitate it. And then she’s gone—or we’re gone. We never stopped, not one time, all the times we went back and forth along that road. We never even slowed down. Turn your head and she’s a shroud of dust.
