by Peter Orner
“Well,” Pohamba says.
“Excuse? Teacher?”
“Tell us what you saw in the office.”
“Mistress Shikongo is there, Teacher. With Master Sir.”
“And what are they doing?”
“Excuse?”
Pohamba nearly shouts: “What are they talking about, you little fool?”
“Not talking.”
“Not talking?”
“Yes, Teacher.”
“So what are they doing? Sitting and looking at each other?”
“No, Teacher. Master Sir is looking at Mistress Shikongo. Mistress Shikongo is looking nowhere.”
“What do you mean nowhere?”
“Not here.”
“What?” Pohamba raises his hand. The boy flinches, but his eyes remain steady—as if he’s trying to show us what not here looks like. He cradles the brick to his chest. We wait, listen for a moment, as if we can hear all this looking and not looking. From Obadiah’s class: “Now again, angels, try it again. Lausanne.”
“Looo Zaaaaan!”
“Brilliant! Just as the Swiss —”
“And the child?” I say. “What’s the child doing?”
“The small boy is beating his mother, Teacher.”
And then, from down the porchway, the principal doesn’t laugh at her, he erupts. The noise of him swooping, coughing, happily retching —
“Take back the key,” Pohamba says.
That night we staked ourselves out on the blue chairs in Antoinette and Obadiah’s living room and waited. The shelves of musty books made everything smell like old cheese. It was a crowded little room. The floor was scattered with open books, facedown, and various unmatched slippers. One naked bulb hung over our heads, muted by a scarf fashioned into a shade. In the corner was Antoinette’s dressmaker’s dummy. We pretended to listen to the radio while we waited for Obadiah to proclaim whatever there was to proclaim.
The chimes of Big Ben ring out. What’s some clock in London to Mavala Shikongo? The news we wanted wasn’t on the BBC. Our oracle stood on a piece of carpet sample and curled his toes. He turned up the radio so he could talk more freely. Antoinette was in the kitchen, plonking silverware, one crash after another. Whatever it took to call us lazy. “She went to see my fedder,” Obadiah said quietly, under the noise of the radio.
“Your what?”
“My distaff.”
“Huh?”
“This long disease called wife.”
“Will you simply tell us,” Pohamba moaned, as he reached out to fondle the breasts of the dummy. “One time, simply talk straight.”
The cricket news: Pakistan eight wickets over Malaysia in a test match . . .
Obadiah sighed. “This modern age. You want it all right off. Nobody has time for a preface anymore. There was a time when the beauty of a story was in the meander. Take your hand off Magdalena. All right. Your pretty soldier asked my wife to watch the boy while she teaches. She said the boy might be a bit difficult to handle. She even offered to pay —”
“And so?”
“You don’t know my wife? ‘Pay me to care for a child!’ Even before the girl came to her, she had dragged up an ancient universe from under the house. A crib, a high chair, a stuffed giraffe, a bassinet—You see, this is how women join clubs. It’s true that men often join secret societies, but the societies of women are so secret even they don’t precisely know —”
“Where’d she get it?” I said.
“The bassinet? From beneath the house. Didn’t I —”
“The kid. Where’d she get the —”
And so we began to wonder. Us in the blue chairs, Obadiah on the carpet sample, wondering, which led to conjuring, which led to certain lovely visions of coitus. Latin, Obadiah informed, from the past participle coire.
“Virgin birth,” Pohamba said. “Who could get their sausage anywhere near her but Him?”
“Wait, what’s a past participle?”
Antoinette appeared. Cotton balls in her ears to keep out the noise of us, but even so, she heard every word anybody ever said. Your own thoughts unsafe—she channeled them through her cotton balls. She didn’t say anything, only raised a fork, tiny, but in the light of that single bulb, in that cave-like room, it loomed. She’d skewer us gossips up like shish kebab.
And maybe she was more imposing now than she was in the old days, the days Obadiah often waxed over. Had she been Turkish, he’d say, my wife would have been a pasha. Her standing there in her brutally ironed gray dress, holding that fork. Why waste words when you can lash with your eyes? Cowards. Leave that girl’s life alone. Enough for her already without you sloths mongering. Father? What father? Who cares about a father? Any.
21
BROTHERS
Late. Pohamba pounds the wall. “My dreams are too loud,” he says. “Aren’t yours?”
“No.”
“It’s her. She’s walking on my head with those heels.”
“Go to sleep.”
“She’s put me, you know, in a manly state.”
“I don’t want to hear about it.”
“And you’re not hungry?”
We had chunk meat for dinner, which I now can’t remember eating. “What have you got?”
“Canned snoek.”
“Use the Primus?”
“No. Outside.”
In front of our rooms he builds a small fire by the garbage pit. I hold my flashlight while he pours oil into one of Antoinette’s big black pots. He slaps the fish out of the tin. “One-sixty k from the ocean,” he says. “You wouldn’t know it from the fish we eat.”
I listen to the crackle of the oil. Above, a crowded bowl of stars and a dented orange moon so low in the sky, it looks like it’s squatting in the veld.
“Another thing.”
“What?”
“Lowest population density of any country in the world, and I live in a two-and-a-half-by-four-meter room. Explain the incongruity.”
“I can’t.”
“Have I told you about my brother Moola, the scientific socialist?” he asks.
“Is he the one who lost his hand at the canning factory?”
The wind is so dead at this hour, I can hear him swallow. He doesn’t laugh. “That was Simeon.”
“Oh.”
“My father’s sister’s child. To myself, this is a brother. I called him Moola. His mother called him Bonifacius. We went to junior primary together at Otavi. Then to Dobra for high school. The boy liked to dance, I tell you. Run also. Up in the mountains above school. Had he lived he would have become as fast as Frankie Fredricks. Running in the Olympics. Money, cars, women. He also read more than any of us. Fuck this school, he said. He said the rest of us—no matter how poor our fathers—were peons of the whites. Sellouts. He said he was willing to die so we could rule ourselves and work together, because, he said, you, my friends are the proletariat… It was going to be beautiful. We were going to build community halls, post offices. He always talked like that, us holding hands and building post offices together.”
The oil in the pot splutters and Pohamba pokes at the fire with the edge of his boot.
“We formed an underground organization—Moola called it the League of the Just. We would meet in the veld, and Moola would teach us, lecture us. So when the time came, I left school and followed Moola north and joined the struggle. Understand, we hardly had boots. They had planes and tanks. But wasn’t our cause righteous, eh? ”
He pauses, cracks his knuckles, all of them.
“Myself and Brother Moola. We were part of a platoon that worked reconnaissance. In country. We’d spend our days sleeping in the bush. Nights, we’d sabotage. We were saboteurs. Ha! Our job was to create fear. Not to win, only to keep the whites afraid. We’d get them while they slept. We’d steal their women, their children. We were spooky terrorists. We were the gorilla in guerrilla, get it? Oh, were we good! And Moola was our fearless leader. Then—it happens. We’re all sleeping in the bush, mid
dle of the day, up near their air base at Ruacana, and—suddenly—a helicopter lands on us like a weaver coming home to roost. Two Boers hanging off that metal bird with howitzers. Out of seven comrades, four dead, rest of us wounded. Myself in the left leg.”
He swallows loud, and rolls up his left pants leg.
It’s small for shrapnel, it seems to me. Still, I gasp. Holy shit.
He’s quiet for a while, satisfied. Lets the thud-like truth of the wound settle.
“Only one of us, you see, wasn’t there. One of us, you see, had, fortuitously, crept away before the ambush. Have a good sleep, my comrades. Oh, he used to cheer the good fight with his right hand raised! Mandela! Nujoma! Toivo ja Toivo! We tracked him the next day.” Pohamba burps, looks at me over the pot. “Watch the ones who talk too much.”
“Why’d he do it?”
Now he laughs, waves his spoon around. “Why does anybody do anything? Money or women. In this case it was money.” He sings, “Money makes the world go round the world go round the world… We found five hundred rand in his boots. A few thousand more in his underwear. My dear brother sold us. He was trying to get out. Maybe he wanted to preach the revolution in Paris or somewhere. Fuck some French girls for Trotsky. I don’t blame him. Do you think I blame him?”
He reaches into the pot and feels the fish with his fingers.
“The fish is done.”
“What did you do to him?”
“Oh, the natural thing.” Pohamba takes his spoon and glops some fish on my plate.
“What’s that?”
“Eat your fish. Don’t you want some chutney?”
I point the light in his face.
“What’s the natural thing?”
He yawns. “We tied him to the back of a lorry and drove. Drove till the veld shaved the skin off his body. You could hear him moaning on the Champs-Elysées. Then we cut him loose and let the birds eat out his eyes.”
Pohamba takes the pot off the fire and sets it on a rock. I hand him back my plate. I want to believe him. I want to believe him in the way you want to believe the one story people tell (he told so many, but he really told only one) to be the truth. He’s stacking himself up against the soldier.
“She’s not that hot,” I say.
“No, only that arse.”
He hands me back my plate heaped with blackened snoek. I shove the fish in my mouth with my hands. When I’m through with my second plate, I watch him eat. Pohamba’s a dainty eater. He changes the subject, tells me how he’d like to open a shop at Goas and sell cooldrink and candy to the boys. Easy money, he says. A monopoly. Some cooldrink, some chocolate. Simba raisins and peanuts. “Wouldn’t you like to open a shop?” he says.
22
TO RETURN
We pretended not to notice. Bastard children were normal for country people, farm people. Or men. (Pohamba claimed legions.) Not for a woman teacher. Not for a woman teacher at a Catholic school. And certainly not for a woman teacher at a Catholic school where her brother-in-law is principal. To parade around as if it was nothing (as Miss Tuyeni put it to Antoinette, overheard by Obadiah, who reported to us) was more than an embarrassment; it was a disgrace. The girl goes off to fight a war and now look at her, toting a child without a husband. Which is what men want. Any man. To plant seeds without staying around to water the garden. The price respectable women charge is marriage. There is no other fee.
But not only Miss Tuyeni clucked. It was all of us. Nobody greeted Mavala Shikongo when she returned. And everyone, myself included, wore an air of Nope, we’re not surprised. We expect nothing less than humiliation here.
In morning meeting, the principal acted as if she’d never left. Vilho had been covering her classroom, running back and forth across the courtyard. All day, every day, for nearly a month, he had done his best to control two rooms of squalling boys, his own Standard Fours and her sub b’s. Supposedly, the principal had put a call into the ministry for a replacement teacher, but no one had turned up, and now no one needed to.
And so the prodigal daughter went back to her class, as if she’d always been a fallen woman and not the up-and-comer in a new nation. Even true heroes became no one at Goas. That’s what you get for walking around wearing your head so high. Now we don’t consider ourselves so far beneath you. A similar thing happened with Pohamba. Once, he made good on his daily threat to leave and was gone five days. His previous record was three and a half. When he slouched back up the road in the same disco shirt he’d left wearing, no one reminded him of his vow that he’d come back to this farm only as a corpse, and even then his ghost would flee.
Now we don’t have to be so discreet when we again pilgrim by her classroom on our way to and from the toilet houses. Ignominy has given us license to spy more openly. She’s taller than she was when she was a myth, and not every move she makes is so utterly graceful. She stomps around her class with a book open in her hand. Her short-short hair and her eyes that gaze restlessly up at the ceiling in the middle of a sentence. She does not baby her sub b’s as Vilho did. She reads fast and doesn’t pause to explain what the words mean. And when she teaches the alphabet, we note with interest that she does not sing it. But the small boys seem to love her more for not talking down to them, for treating them like her little soldiers of the dangling feet.
23
STUDY HOUR
Another of the principal’s tortures, a bit of daily imprisonment in the name of holy education. If they refuse book learning, then we must foist it upon their shoulders so that they may carry it like honorable oxen.
And it’s an hour and a half, not an hour.
Pohamba and I are on duty. We sit bunkered down in the staff room while mayhem reigns in the unsupervised classrooms. From the Standard Fives, the sound of broken glass. In the courtyard, a couple of Standard Sevens are fencing with our teacher brooms. We hear nothing, see nothing. We’re eating yesterday’s cold fish and chips and playing War. Fast rounds, plapping down the cards as quick as we can. It’s the Cincinnati Kid versus the Man. Three out of five for who gets to leave early. In between chips, Pohamba chews on a chicory root, which is supposed to improve his virility. It isn’t making him very good at War.
“That was my take,” I say.
“I had a jacko,” Pohamba says.
“Three’s wild.”
“Seven.”
“It was seven last time.”
“Where’s the vinegar? How can the Man eat fish and chips without vinegar? It was seven.”
“Three.”
“Take it. It’s your conscience.”
Next round he loses again. I get up to leave.
“Wait,” he says. “Did she speak to you?”
“No.”
“Look at you?”
“No.”
“Play for Thursday.”
“Your credit’s no good.”
He snaps off a little chicory. “What if I give you some of this here root, Kid?” Whence from beneath the outside ledge of the staff-room window, a TransNamib hat rises. And a godhead thunders:
Hear this, idle suitors! While you sit there playing games! Know this: During the great Herero rebellion, during a break in that slaughter, two German officers once played cards—cards!—on the naked buttocks of a captured Herero princess. Imagine it. Think of a card slapping on flesh and its reverberations. Titillated? Go ahead, be titillated!
Forgive us. We got titillated. Because he invited us, cajoled us, and the hour and a half wasn’t getting any shorter. And so—mid-War, the cards in our sweaty hands—we indulged. We thought of her young body arching off a table, and cards —
Then the hat in the window rumbled again.
Thrilled? All right, then. You had it your way. Now see it another. Think of how still that girl must have held. How long the game lasted. What the smoke was like in the tent. Was ash flicked on skin? Was it better than what else she knew could happen? Or did that happen too? Of course it did. Her relatives who live among us are all the evidence
we need. Yes, it certainly got worse some nights. And you may in the filth of your imaginations take it that far. But I ask that you consider only the rudimentary evil of the game itself. Now add a voice—Gruss Gott!—And laughter and the reek of the cigars . . .
There were afternoons when any sort of idle entertainment spurred his umbrage. Such diversions, Obadiah said, contributed to the disintegration of civilization. Thus, he ambushed us with history, rose up from the window, and bombasted.
“Revolted?” he said.
We nodded.
“It won’t do. Revulsion only makes a man turn away. I demand you look at her again, see her again —”
“Demand?” Pohamba said. “We’re only trying to get through the day here.”
Obadiah raised the brim of his hat and peered at Pohamba. Of all things, this he understood, but when he was sober, he pretended he didn’t. Drunk, he carried his own aches. Sober, he lugged the burdens of the world. Today on his back were the miseries of a long-dead Herero princess. He left us, slowly, hunched over. I slid the fish and chips to Pohamba; he slid them back to me. A six of diamonds and a body seized beyond fear into stillness. Fingers clenching the edge of the table.
24
AUNTIE
If you bothered to wash up at Goas, acceptance, or at the very least toleration, was pretty much guaranteed. Auntie Wilhelmina was an exception, as ignored as she was ubiquitous. She was the minor character who always insisted she star.
A Wednesday? A Saturday midnight? Auntie was all day all days. The most prominent thing of many prominent things was the noise of her. Her fat twangling, her fulumping down the ridge toward the singles quarters. The jangle of her hundreds of stolen bronze bracelets. The barking of her retinue of sycophantic dogs. The heaving of her breasts. She was a big heaver of her breasts; Auntie heaved at the slightest provocation. Her turtled skin. Parts of it were long past withered; other parts were new, infantile, as if she had the power of selective regeneration. You see, once you start to describe her, there is no end of her. A wildebeestian woman, the only answer is to look away, but it’s impossible. Her eyes—no, stay clear of her eyes. Her cheeks sag off her face like grocery bags overstuffed with fruit. Her teeth, cruel, sharp, heinously white—on the days she wore them in. Without them, her mouth looked full of bloody thumbs. There was a fresh wart on her chin, not like a dead thing, but a happy thing, very much alive. She groomed her beard a lot like Obadiah’s, a bit pointy off the chin. Beyond ugly, Auntie Wilhelmina, beyond ghastly, and this was the fundamental problem. The woman was a fascination. The boys said that if you stared at Auntie Wilhelmina long enough from a certain angle, you’d never stop wanting her. Ever.
