by Peter Orner
“Cancer all over. Heal the sick, Sister.”
And Sister Zoë would gaze at him from under the habit that people said was fake, a prop, and say in her soft, beautiful English, “Teacher, I counsel repose.” Because her hands were only for the boys. And Pohamba, who when he really loved was a total coward, would go back to policing the line. Later, he’d go on about how all he wanted was to lift her habit, not take it off, only lift it.
We’d see them come up and over the ridge, moving steadily toward the cattle gate. Their walk, how one never got in front of the other. Their white gym shoes. Their habits lifting vertical in the wind like the scarves of old-time pilots. And the boys would catch a glimpse of the top of their heads and begin shouting, “Swestas!” They always parked on the road, because once Sister Ursula got the van stuck in the last dry riverbed and vowed she’d never go through that hell again. Also, didn’t it look better for the Lord’s healers to come on foot?
One day only two appeared over the rise.
The story that got back to us was that she’d gone to administer shots in the location and was raped by a bostoto. Sister Ursula sent her back to Keetmanshoop. The boys—for months and, who knows, maybe years—thought only of her hands, how they barely touched you when they touched you, sending you away. Move on, healthy boy, move on.
56
THEOFILUS
Nothing is beautiful here except the beginning and the end of the day—which is never the beginning or end of his work—so beauty happens in the middle of unfinished jobs. There are dusks when night is less about light than the mountains. When the ridges of the Erongos seem to huddle and move forward, as if they—not the sky—will bury us.
Day work means the veld. Night work means the generator. It runs from around seven-thirty to eleven. Since it is constantly breaking down, Theofilus acts in the capacity of a nurse. He sits beside the generator in the generator shack, listening to the motor, waiting for some wrong sound in all that jangle. Those hours we have electricity, he sits there until eleven. When the lights suddenly pop off early, we know his fingers are working in the dark.
When he does finally go to his bed in the mission garage, he lies there and sips warm beer, if he has any, and falls asleep with his eyes open. His blue jumper hangs on a nail by the door.
57
ZAMBEZI NIGHTS
Night swelt. The only wind is my own breathing. It’s after eleven and I’m marking compositions by candlelight. I’ve invented a candleholder. I propped a candle in a boot and tightened the laces. Boot light. The papers all begin with the line: Out in the veld I saw… Out in the veld I saw a kudu. Out in the veld I saw a broken tree. Out in the veld I saw too many dead people. Out in the veld I saw no money.
There’s a long scratch at my screen. I leap and knock over my chair.
“Who’s out there?”
“Did I scare Teacher?”
I carry my boot to the door. Her face is always different in person than when I think about it. Her face looms so large in my mind that when I see her I’m surprised how small it is. Only her eyes are huge tonight, like bobbing olives in the light of the candle. Tomo is slung on her back, his head lolling over her shoulder. At her feet is her mustard suitcase. She’s got on long pants, a rare thing.
“Scared me? You?”
“I saw you jump.”
“Normally my guests knock.”
“Ask me what I’m doing.”
“Not that I have any guests.”
She sits down on the suitcase.
“What are you doing?”
“Leaving.”
“Again?”
“For the moment, however, I’m moving over here.”
“Here?”
“Next door.”
“Next door? To Kapapu’s old room?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t want to do that.”
“Why?”
“A teacher got stabbed in there. With a bike spoke. You never heard the story? A new teacher comes and falls in love with the wife of another teacher and —”
Mavala snorts. “The stories of this place.” She stands up and seizes the handle of the case. “You aren’t very hospitable. Don’t you want to invite me in?”
I give way and Mavala’s in my squalor. My first official guest after Pohamba and Auntie. Goas is a life lived outside rooms. If our rooms aren’t sanctuaries, at least they are places to hunker in private. Mavala sets Tomo down in my laundry basket. He takes right away to my reeking socks. Then she pushes away my books and papers and clothes and takes a seat on my bed. I go back to my desk. Moths batter against the torn screen and for a while we listen to the soft thumping. Mavala begins to knead the mosquito netting and I remember it’s something my mother used to do when she came home from work exhausted, sit on her bed and knead the blanket.
I point to the candle on the desk. “What do you think of my boot?”
“Why don’t you stick it in a bottle?”
“No. See the boot is the whole point.”
“The whole point of what?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s probably a regulation against it.”
“I’m sure. And isn’t there a regulation against single women living in the quarters? Didn’t the principal do a tale on it?”
“Ask me if I’m going back there.”
“Something about temptation and how to keep it at bay. That the sobering influence of married people acts to tamp down —”
“Go ahead. Ask me.”
“Are you —”
“Die first.”
“I see.”
“I loathe this place.”
“So why’d you come back?”
She doesn’t answer, still that kneading. A moth careens into the flame. It tries to fly with a wing on fire before that’s the end of it. A sound like a wrinkle and smoke.
“Festus said you had a good posting in Grootfontein.”
She sighs, bounces a finger against her lower lip. “There was no Grootfontein.” She looks at Tomo, who is now on his stomach in the basket, his arms spread out like a tired swimmer, a pair of my underwear on his head. “Tomo was Grootfontein. He was waiting, at a friend’s. I never thought I’d come back. Then I thought with him so young, it might be easier here for a while. At least there’s a job, and I thought my sister —”
There’s a slowness in the shadow her elbow makes as she rubs the back of her head. The shadow creeps and retreats in the spastic flame. We watch each other. A mosquito weens in my ear, now soft, now blaring.
“Your sister?”
“Yes. I thought —” She leans back on my bed. “I don’t know what I thought.” Neither of us says anything else for a long time. Mavala stares at the ceiling.
A pound on the wall wrecks it, the silence of the night and of Mavala in my room, on my bed. Then more pounds. Three longs followed by two shorts followed by two more shorts and another long. “Has anyone been alone on this farm?” Mavala says. “For five minutes? Alone?”
“Not that’s been documented.”
“What’s he doing?”
“It’s Morse code. You were in a war.”
“We used satellite phones.”
I put my head to the wall and take in the pounds. Now it sounds like he’s using his feet.
“What’s he saying?”
“He says there’s a sale at the Pep Boys in Usakos. Thirty-five percent off on all beachwear and towels.”
She looks down at the bed. Her fingers are still crushing the netting. “Beachwear?”
A moment later, Pohamba’s colossal head rises from below the window. He puckers the screen like a fish. I run to lock the door, but I’m too late and he explodes into the room in nothing but flip-flops and briefs, leaps up on my bed. “Deliverance!” he shouts. “Mercy, mercy me! Comrade Shikongo joins the bachelors!”
“Shhhhhh, the kid,” she says. “You’ll wake the kid.” And Mavala wraps her arms around Pohamba’s bare legs and I watch the tw
o of them leaping and laughing in the now frantic light. I remember this, how I sat there at my desk and watched them.
“Teacher!” Pohamba yells. “Boot’s on fire!”
We mobilize our nightclub, which Pohamba calls Zambezi Nights, after his favorite bottle store in Otavi. I pound the other wall and wake up Vilho, who begs to be allowed to sleep, but later materializes with a half bottle of Fanta. Pohamba goes to fetch Obadiah and Festus. Festus bolts right over. It will take Obadiah a little longer because, as everybody knows, Antoinette sleeps with one Cyclopean eye open. Later, he toddles over with a fresh pint of Cardinal Richelieu. “Brandy in the age-old French tradition,” he says. “For the European in all of us.” Pohamba fixes the tape player with a pen, and we, again, listen to Whitney Houston—before the tape player breaks (again). Pohamba rolls the last of his dagga. I boil spaghetti. Festus and Vilho dance to the memory of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (who loves me).” Mavala and I sit a little out of the circle, away from the fire, beneath the acacia. She takes a slug of the Richelieu and passes it on. Pohamba says Vilho dances like a Boer having a shit. “Move those hips, dear brother!”
“Oh, I gotta feel some heat with somebody,” Festus sings. “Yeah I really gotta…”
“It’s wanna,” Pohamba says. “Wanna feel the heat.”
Speaking of heat, we’ve none left. I’m still amazed by how it disappears in the night, even in summer, torn out of the sand by the dark.
“Is this the piss tree?” Mavala says.
“No, the piss tree’s behind Antoinette’s.”
She sniffs. “Are you certain?”
Mavala droops against me, then wakes, rights herself. Festus and Vilho collapse in a heap. Tomorrow morning looms. Festus gets up and dusts himself off, joins his plump hands in prayer. “Well, I’m off to bed, brothers and sisters. There’s Mass in the morning.”
“The priest is here?” Pohamba says.
“Back this afternoon from Swakop.”
“Bugger the pontiff,” Pohamba says.
“Please,” Obadiah says.
“I’m not Catholic,” Pohamba says. “I’m a Marxist revolutionary, and during the war I —”
“Taught fractions,” Festus says.
Pohamba stands. Sometimes when he’s drunk, he looks for reasons to pummel Festus. And Festus stands there blinking, waiting, trying to decide if he should run. Instead, Pohamba begins to sway—not to our dear Whitney, to something else. He dances by himself for a while, then slowly turns and looks at Mavala and begins to ramble, not angry, quiet, under his breath. “My mother was Catholic, bless her soul. But my own father fought barefoot at Omgulumbashe, and during the struggle I too —”
“I believe you,” Mavala says. “I believe you.”
Obadiah was holding up the bottle, toasting the ungreen earth and all of us impoverished beneath its moon, when the principal stalked into our circle from behind the toilet houses. Even then he wore a tie, yellow and blue stripes for Thursday, rammed up tight under his chin. He stood by what was left of the fire and looked us over. His glasses caught the last spark of flame in the coals. Obadiah crawled over to him on his knees and offered him the final swig of the Richelieu. Then he passed out at his feet. The principal seized the bottle by the neck and tipped it back. Then he nudged Obadiah with the toe of his shoe. “This is the Head Teacher with whom I am to build a new nation out of the ashes of war? Ha! Even Goas will fall into the sea.”
Without moving his head in her direction, he said, “A word, privately, Miss Shikongo?”
This was followed by a brief and strangely quiet exchange between the two of them in Kapapu’s old room. Pohamba held an enamel mug to the door but couldn’t catch a thing. That door, behind which so much else had happened. Then the principal charged out and headed straight across the soccer field toward his office without a word. We watched him unlock it and go inside. He sat there in the dark.
Mavala refused our help, either with her suitcase or the kid, who was in full fury at being woken up and taken from my sweat-reeking clothes. We watched her pull the case through the sand, up the road to the principal’s house, as Tomo flailed at her back.
58
VILHO
Vilho shivering ecstatically in the cold church before the light. His knees on the concrete.
I only want to be alone, and still there’s desire? I don’t want Your blood, only Your touch. Sleep is only a brief reprieve. You watch. I wake slow. I come here and I bring You my tiredness, my empty hands, my inabilities, my bitterness, my unsatisfaction, my disgust, my cold knees. The fierceness of silence in the cold. The way each movement echoes here. You above on the wall. Plaster, broken-off leg. But it’s You, isn’t it?
59
GOAS
An abandoned swing set. A single seat dangling from the crossbar. It was behind the hostel, where the reek of raw sewage made it a no-man’s-land. The smallest and poorest boys would go back there to shit. They couldn’t afford the toll the older boys made them pay to use the toilets. Some boy must have braved the stench to float for a while. You’d hear it. The screech was loud, and you could tell how fast he was flinging himself by the intervals when the swing reached as high as it could and the screws and the rust of the chain contracted. We’d hear it during class and wonder which truant was back there. And we could, if we bothered to, remember what it was like, that jolt, that drop.
60
MORE GOAS LOVE
Festus points to one of Auntie Wilhelmina’s whelps that’s trying to mount another of Auntie’s whelps and says, “That dog’s penis is too big.” Festus says things like this, things you might think but never say. Mid-morning break and us watching it. The dogs in the puddle beneath the standpipe, failing at it. The one dog, the mangle-eyed one, trying, trying again. His terrible red penis. It wasn’t that she was averse.
The dog, front paws paddling the air again, hind legs surging forward, a feeble dance. He’s on again. Whoops. No go.
Why remember this? Why relate it? Things that are not worth telling force themselves out in the open anyway. Like that sad dog’s unrequited erection. Animals fail to fuck and we get a half hour’s free entertainment. Antoinette damns us all to yet another level of hell. We liked to think Festus wasn’t as complicated as we were. He had too great a love of obvious observation. Things you were looking right at. But he was right, wasn’t he? That dog’s penis was too big.
“I didn’t think it was possible,” Mavala says.
“Oh, it’s possible,” Pohamba says. “Either that or her Switzerland’s too small.”
The triangle jangled and we all went back to class, left those dogs to themselves. Except Festus, who stayed to watch.
Later, after school, he told us that she finally gave up on him and bit Mr. Big Cock in the neck. And that’s when I tried, Vilho-like, to yank a moral out of it. I said, There’s something sad about those two unashamed dogs. The public nature of such doomed love. Their complete lack of grace. Those dogs are us, our own pathetic natures, our own fundamental inability to connect . . .
Festus taught science. He said it wasn’t sad.
“What, then?”
“A matter of proportionality. It will never fit. I waited. I watched.”
“And if they love? Isn’t it sad that —”
Festus stared at me for a moment. “It doesn’t fit,” he said. “That’s all.” Then he scratched his belly and walked off toward his house, toward Dikeledi, and we watched him, squat and round, walking away. Festus was said to be trying to emulate the principal’s stomach. In this he was succeeding. And we thought of how unfair it all was, of a house free of sadness, of a floor free of sand, of soft underwear (Antoinette, who did our laundry, was morally opposed to fabric softener), of those waiting Dikeledian arms . . .
I turned slowly to Pohamba. This our revenge? That Festus and Dikeledi can’t consummate? That no sexual congress convened in the purple house we’re all so jealous of?
Even we don’t wish this on Festus. W
e tried to think only happy thoughts. Nothing too big, nothing too small. Finally, Pohamba couldn’t help himself.
“Oh, that poor poor poor girl.”
“Don’t you go save her.”
“Do you think I am that low?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “Never to friends.” He brightened. “Wait—Festus isn’t a friend.”
“Close.”
“Close isn’t a friend, friend.” And he bopped off toward the quarters and his waiting bed.
61
SIESTA
I always said, Sure, it’s hot here, but you don’t get the humidity like we do back home in O-hi-o. You see, back home in Hamilton County, we get what we call a wet heat, and no matter how bad it gets around here, there’s no humidity, and so it’s really not so… I stop saying all that.
