by Peter Orner
6
WALLS
In the beginning, none of the other teachers would much talk to me. As I had apparently come to Goas on my own volition, I was suspect. Those first weeks I spent a lot of time cowering in my room in the singles quarters, pretending to write tediously detailed lesson plans.
Mine was the room assigned to teachers who came and went. Rooms in the singles quarters were square boxes, each with one window set low in the wall. From bed, I lived eye-level with the veld. My view was of the toilet houses, and beyond them the Erongo Mountains that would always be too far to walk to.
The teacher who’d lived in my room before me had papered the walls with the German beer calendars that came free in the Windhoek Advertiser. Everywhere you looked were shirtless blonde buxoms in tight shorts. There was one girl in nothing but a red bandanna and a Stetson staring down from the ceiling above the bed, her breasts like about-to-be-dropped bombs. One day I ripped her down, and was tearing off the others when there came a knock on the wall. Then a voice, my neighbor’s, Teacher Pohamba’s: “What are you doing, Teacher?”
“I thought I’d clean up a little.”
The noise of him lifting himself out of bed. He opened his door and came over to my window and squatted down. Then he stuck his head through the torn screen. Teacher Pohamba yawned at me. It was meant, I think, to be a sympathetic, comradely yawn, but it came out too big, like a kind of maw. “Hand over the tits, Teacher.”
I gave him the scraps and he stuffed them in his shirt pocket, but he remained outside my window. Teacher Pohamba pitied me. Me standing there on the cement floor in my Walgreen’s shower shoes. “Go to sleep,” he said finally. “Don’t you know it’s siesta?”
When the first study-hour triangle rang, he came to my window again and told me to follow him. Together, we walked across the soccer field to the married teachers’ housing, to the circle of plastic chairs in front of Teacher Obadiah’s. The old man was holding court. Everybody was still drowsy from sleep and only half listening. Teacher Obadiah wasn’t as old as he liked to consider himself, but he was one of those people whose age baffles. He might have been fifty-five; he might have been seventy-five. He reveled in the crevices of his face and his white hair. That day he had a week-old Namibian on his knee and was lamenting a story about corruption in the Finance Ministry of the new government. The only thing the white government did fairly, Obadiah said, was teach the black government how to steal.
Pohamba drummed his cheeks awhile and said, “Politicians: black, white, bowlegged—what’s the difference? Let’s hear the weather.”
Obadiah flipped some pages and read. “In the north, hot. On the coast, hot. In the east, very hot. In the central interior —”
“Have mercy!”
Eventually, Obadiah turned my way and tried to bring me into the fold of the conversation. He asked me what I thought of noble Cincinnatus.
“Who?”
“You say you hail from Cincinnati?”
“Yes.”
Obadiah made a roof over his eyes with his hand and peered at me. “Well then, of course, I speak of its namesake, the great Roman general Cincinnatus. Surely, you must —”
“Sorry, I —”
“And you have come here to teach our children history?”
“Is he in the Standard Six curriculum?”
“By God, if he isn’t he should be! Gentleman farmer, reluctant warrior, honest statesman. When people needed him, he ruled. When the crisis was over, he returned to a quiet life on his farm. Not a farm like this, a proper farm. Had Cincinnatus lived here, he wouldn’t have come back. He would have done anything to avoid such a fate—even, I daresay, become a tyrant.” Obadiah put his hands on his knees and leaned forward on his plastic chair.
“Why are you here, young Cincinnatus?”
“I have no idea.”
“He tore down Nakale’s calendars,” Pohamba said.
Obadiah stood and began to pace the dust, his hands behind his back. “The beer girls? Interesting. I must admit that on occasion I peeped in there to have a look. I too once had desires. I have since forgotten what they were.” He wheeled and faced me. “Why did you do it? Were you intending to moralize?”
“I wanted to be alone,” I said.
“Ah!” Obadiah brought his hands together as if to applaud me, but stopped short and whispered, more to himself than to me, “Don’t worry. You’re alone.”
7
MORAL TALE
Morning noise: The murmurs of the boys coming from church, the slap of their bare feet on the concrete porchway, the slow whish whish of the lazy classroom sweepers, boys on punishment from the day before.
Every morning meeting, before school, the principal told a moral tale. We’d stand more or less at attention, half listening, gripping our coffee, watching the unburnished gray light leak through the staff room’s single window. Not the sun; full sun wouldn’t happen for an eternity.
Often the principal’s stories came from the Bible. Other times the lessons were taken from the newspaper or from some gossip he picked up at the Hotel Rossman in Karibib. Most of the time—wherever they came from—they were somehow related to the principal’s guilt over one of his own vices. That morning he must have been suffering pangs over his embezzlement from the school till.
He wore a different tie for each day of the week. It’s how we knew what day it was. As he spoke, his Adam’s apple thrashed beneath his yellow Wednesday tie, as if, as Obadiah once said, his poor conscience was trying to escape his lying throat.
“Listen, colleagues,” he commanded. “Seriously and piously. This happened near Angra Pequena a hundred years ago, but indeed, it could have happened yesterday.” He paused and swallowed, allowed this thundering fact to settle upon us. “Let us say it did happen yesterday. Yes, yesterday. Three skeletons were found in the unforgiving sands of the Namib. God didn’t create our desert. Hark! The Namib was born of God’s forgetting. He’d always meant to come back and put something here, but alas, he didn’t. So it goes with this country. Let us return to today’s tale: Two of the skeletons were found together, the third on a dune about a kilometer away. All three were partially covered by sand and of similar age and weathering.”
He paused and eyed us all, one by one. He lingered at Pohamba, who was teetering, fighting hard to keep his eyes open and his knees from buckling.
“Erastus?” the principal said.
Pohamba had a new girl in Karibib. He hadn’t landed on his own bed in two days. He still had on his white ducks and silky disco shirt #7. The principal was the only one at Goas who called him Erastus.
“Erastus, will you summarize?”
Pohamba licked his chapped lips. “Three skeletons,” he said. “Two found together. The other not far away. It is curious. In fact, I would even say it smells.”
The principal resumed, not satisfied, but not willing to derail the tale at this point for the sake of telling Pohamba what he thought of him. “Indeed. The first two skeletons were found with their heads staved in. The head of the third was uncrushed. And in the thin whitened bones that once enjoyed the skin of a fist, the third held”—he pointed a vicious finger at Pohamba—“what?”
“His member,” Pohamba said.
Even the principal laughed, his cheeks filling up and exhaling like bellows. The problem was, we laughed longer, and whenever that happened, he changed sides. He ducked under the table and returned with his shoe and proceeded to pound, Khrushchev-like, for order.
“No, Erastus, he didn’t need that anymore. And mark me: Yours too will wither. No, I speak of something far more lasting. In the hand of the third skeleton… diamonds! After he murdered his two friends, he was going to leave the desert a king. In the wind and sand, he gripped those immaculate stones. Imagine how tight and with what hope he must have clutched them in the long Namib night!”
Now the principal guffawed, happy to pawn his shame off on someone else. “Oh, you smelled something, Erastus.” He broug
ht his fingers to his nose and gave them a smell. “Oh yes. And I do also. Satan lurks this morning. I smell corruption. I smell evil. Is not lust merely another form of avarice? God forgot the Namib, but he remembered to punish the third man, and He, in All His Glory, won’t forget grown teachers who chase young strumpets and neglect their duties to learners either. When are you going to be too old, Erastus? For the love of God, woe unto you, woe!”
The principal took a breath, crossed himself.
“And yet, I do forgive you, Erastus, I forgive you your filth, your rot, your disease.”
That afternoon, we climbed up the hill and sat beneath the cross. I watched the Erongos retreat beyond the blurry sheen of afternoon heat. The sky was like watered-down milk. The goats wandered languidly along the paths in the veld. And we talked and we talked. Pohamba said he had a brother Josiah who worked for CDM in the south and got caught stealing diamonds he’d shoved up his ass. Obadiah said, You’ve got more brothers than the principal has sins to atone.
“Truth,” Pohamba said. “They caught him on X-ray. He’s still in prison at Oranjemund. That was four and half years ago.”
“How’d they get them out of there?” I asked.
“Laxatives.”
This all got Obadiah started in on the diamond fields and how Adolph Lüderitz bought a tenth of the world’s wealth for three hundred breechloaders and a wagonload of cheese. And of course Vilho—who everybody said still had faith in God (that’s how people described him, Vilho who still has faith in God)—couldn’t help himself from adding that Lüderitz drowned in the Orange River after his boat tipped over. “He never got rich,” Vilho said. “The man didn’t live to sell a single stone.”
“And his descendants?” Obadiah shouted. “And his descendants’ descendants’ descendants?”
But Pohamba didn’t want to talk about history or the wicked getting their just deserts or God’s sense of justice. He wanted to talk about his brother Josiah, who was still in prison at Oranjemund for shoving diamonds up his ass. “One carat,” he said, and turned around, bent over, and talked to us, his big melon head between his thighs. “Or two?”
Vilho rubbed his hands together. He wanted to pray for the deliverance of Pohamba’s soul, but wouldn’t dare do it in front of him.
8
A SPOT NORTHWEST OF OTJIMBINGWE
You claim that you are sorry that I do not accept German protection. You seem to think that I am guilty even of this . . . This is my answer: I have never in my life seen the German emperor and am sure he has never seen me.
HENDRIK WITBOOI, 1885
In the event you should intend to fight me further, I have to ask your Highness to provide me with two more boxes of Henri Martini cartridges so that I can respond to your attack. So far we have not really fought each other… A great and honest and civilized nation such as yours should not stop ammunition for its enemy. In the event that I should have enough ammunition, you are welcome to conquer me.
HENDRIK WITBOOI, 1893
The story goes that it was the most savage raid on colonial forces in the whole bloody history of German South-West Africa. Hendrik Witbooi and his men—answering a call from God—made a surprise attack on the German base at Otjimbingwe. Five thousand imperial troops led by Herman Goering, hapless father of the more successful future reich marshal, were stationed in the barracks, fast asleep on a sweltering summer evening. The raid was so successful that Goering himself was forced to flee and, in what must have been a particular humiliation, reduced to begging the protection of the British garrison at Walfish Bay. Not surprisingly, the Germans did not allow the attack to go unanswered and stormed back three months later, following the arrival of fresh recruits from the Fatherland. Witbooi retreated to the uninhabitable sand wastes and clay buttes northwest of Otjimbingwe.
One Monday morning Obadiah, carrying a long stick, marched his class, thirty-eight Standard Threes in those powder-blue button-downs, holding hands, two by two, away from school, up the dry riverbed. After trudging through the sand for what felt to the boys like twelve days, Obadiah abruptly stopped. He jammed his stick into the sand.
“Cherubim! Who can tell me what makes this place significant?”
None of the boys said a word. They tried not to even breathe. At that time of day, late morning in March, everything looked bleached. The sand, trees, bushes, even the cows, were all the color of plaster. Above, the sky allowed for no variation in the glare. All around the boys was semidesert sameness, and they were hungry, so so hungry. Teacher had made them skip morning break for this expedition. Pocked across the dry riverbed were hoof- and footprints accumulated since the last time it rained. Plus all the goat shit in neat little piles, like tiny pyramids. What here could be worth all that walking?
“Fortitude,” Obadiah said. “An important word, leprechauns. It means having the courage to fight when your body says, Asseblief makker. No more, I beseech You. Hendrik Witbooi had it. Write it in your notebooks when you return to class. Use it in a sentence. For instance, ‘Witbooi had fortitude, indeed.’ Look at this staff, my children, alone, here in the sand, silent as a pillar. Even fortitude needs to rest sometimes. The great Hendrik Witbooi, after fleeing the garrison at Otjimbingwe, rode northwest toward Goas—yes, even Goas has a place in history—and he stopped at this precise spot.”
The boys looked languidly at the stick leaning crookedly out of the sand.
“This spot! Even fortitude must stop and take a breath of pure desert air, this air of freedom. Listen, boys. You hear them? The Schutztruppe in menacing pursuit. Think on it, little men of Goas. Of being chased, of riding for your lives. But think also of all those killed in their beds. Yes, criminals, colonizers, but also men with beating hearts. Death to them, absolutely. But with their heads on their pillows? Was it not something Witbooi might have learned from the Germans themselves? Take a pause. A great man rested here. Was it a victory?”
Obadiah seized the stick, hoisted it to his shoulder, and scanned the line of boys.
“Hendrik Witbooi was the greatest shot with a gun since Jonker Afrikaner’s father.” Obadiah lowered his rifle. “He was also a Christian down to his eighty-year-old feet. I repeat, think on it. A heroic act of independence? Certainly. But the beginning of a time of slaughter as well. I bring you here to Witbooi’s place of rest to remember the price of one man’s greatness.”
With this, Obadiah thrust the stick back into the sand and began to walk slowly away, back toward the school. Over his shoulder he called, “I provide no answers.”
They stood and watched him. They’d heard about this from the boys in the grades above, about drunk Master Obadiah’s stick in the veld, but now that they were out there alone, they did what other boys before them had also done. They stared at it. Now more awake, they stared at that stick. All thirty-eight boys, silently, still gripping hands. One boy considered knocking it down. Another thought of taking it and using it to smack Reginald Eiseb, his enemy. Another, of riding on it, as he’d seen a white witch do in a picture book. But one boy, Jacobus Tivute, listened for the pant of a hunted man and actually started to hear it. The noise was coming from the boy whose hand he held, an asthmatic, but it didn’t matter. Jacobus was hearing that awful gasping. The Germans will hunt Witbooi to the end of the earth. Then they’ll shoot him seventeen times at Vaalgras. He’d heard that story from his father. Looking around at the cragged trees, the tangled patches of sharp bushes, the wide, waterless river snaking away ahead, Jacobus thought, Bravery is more hell than cowardice. He hoped to grow taller and never have either, and he swore to himself he’d remember this. Then Jacobus said a short prayer asking God, politely, to have mercy and let him leave this desert place one day so he could go live in a town. After that he turned from the stick and, with his wheezing partner in tow, followed his teacher.
9
ANTOINETTE
Sometimes, as now, on the edge of morning, she hears the stifled cries of the Hebrew women giving birth in secret. Pharaoh’s
men are tossing boys into the Nile. Antoinette wakes and stands in the dark and prays for them, and for her own lost, her first, a daughter, taken away before she had a name. Aren’t daughters supposed to be allowed to live?
She bows her head to pray, but she will never kneel. Not in church, not anywhere. Since she was a child, she’s known this. To ask something of God is not a humble act. It’s a demand. Why try to disguise it by doing it on your knees?
Eyes closed, she listens for the birth cries of all the lost children. With her rheumatic fingers, she makes her hands into a basket; but she will never kneel. She waits for the noise of the cries to fade, the voice of her own blood and the blood of so many others.
They never named her. You don’t name a child until you hear it scream, and this one was born silent. The death certificate, the only relic holy enough to store in her Bible, is written in highfalutin Afrikaans. Herewith on said day the following unnamed personage… They paid ten rands for it. Ten rands for a fact anybody could tell just by listening to her not scream. Still, there are days when she takes it out and rereads. The paper is worn away from rubbing. At the folds are dirty creases; the certificate is breaking apart. She thinks how it must have lasted longer than her daughter’s bones.
