by Peter Orner
General Zacharias Kangulohi (combat alias Ho Chi Minh) was our famous alumnus. He rose from farm-boy dust to a great man in SWAPO. He’d lived in exile in London, Dar es Salaam, New York, Lusaka, Stockholm. We stood by the newly painted mural of Hendrik Witbooi with Namibian flags for his eyes and a scroll of the constitution in his hand. We waited. Each boy wore something around his neck that resembled a tie. Ribbons, scarves, cowhide, socks, braided plastic bags. One boy used a piece of biltong, which he nibbled on as morning wasted into noon. We waited. Mavala stood at attention in full camouflage, her green shirt buttoned to her neck, her pants tucked into her boots and blooming out. Her right fist clenched. Her short short hair and bullet head. Her ears stuck out from under the edge of her cap. God, I wanted to bite them. Whatever bitterness she had over the way she was decommissioned (one last paycheck and so long, comrade) was at least temporarily displaced by her sense of ceremony. She was back in the sweat of it—if not of war, something.
Our guest of honor was hours late, and the principal held us there at gunpoint with his bullhorn. He couldn’t get enough of the sound of his amplified voice. The flesh-gnawing horseflies couldn’t get enough of us. They descended en masse. Move in for the chew, boys! We didn’t want cold water anymore, or shade. We prayed only that the sun kill us faster. I’ve heard the same is true of freezing. After a certain point, it’s blissful. We stood; we waited. When the general’s motorcade did arrive, it was like an alien landing—a battalion of motorcycles, land cruisers, jeeps, a limousine, even a mobile home. We stood there as the parade rushed across the soccer field and formed a horseshoe in front of us. When the kicked-up dust settled on our slickened faces, we stood up straighter. The lines of the new anthem quivered on our lips, ready to burst:
Na-mib-ia
Our country
Na-mib-ia, motherland, we love… (Thee!)
Nothing happened. Two minutes, five minutes. We waited on the edge of shrieking at the first sight of the great man. Sirens whirled. The cops on motorcycles spoke furtively into walkie-talkies. The noise of their engines revving, idling, revving. The windows of the limousine were tinted. We thought he was in there having a late lunch. Or maybe he was in the motor home having a nap after the long trip out to Goas from the capital. Sweat was beginning to show through the back of the principal’s suit jacket. Pretty soon he would need to be wrung out. This a man who prided himself on never working hard enough to perspire. He was supposedly an old school chum of the general’s. Our knees had buckled already (but we were packed so close together, we didn’t fall), when we heard the gate clank. Our eyes moved as one, and we saw, at the cattle gate, a tiny man, his body weighed down by a jacket full of medals. He was carrying his shoes.
“I walked,” he shouted. “I walked to my beloved Goas like the farm boy I used to be!”
The principal started toward him, breasts juggling under his lapels, panting into his bullhorn. “Oh, my dear Zacharias, welcome back! Your kindness to visit us here is really beyond the call of any —”
The general didn’t take the principal’s hand. Instead, we all watched him raise a tiny foot and show the bottom of it to the principal. “Fetch me a thorn, Charles.”
Into the bullhorn, the principal continued to burble: “That you created time for these children, to help us, to inspire, to enlighten —”
“A thorn, Charles.”
“Humble place such as this our school, that you should return —”
“If you don’t put that thing down, I’ll have you shot.”
And we watched in amazement as the principal himself, not a minion, dashed off into the closeveld and stooped beneath an acacia and picked up a thorn. It was long, nail-like, and the principal carried it back to the general in the palm of his hand, gently, like a wounded bird.
“Inject it.”
“Zacharias!”
“Now!”
We watched this also. The principal stuck a thorn in Comrade General’s Kangulohi’s foot, and the general cried, “See? Still rock-hard! Myself in cushiony exile! My bemedaled chest!”
He hopped toward us on one leg, ostrich-like, the thorn still sticking out of his foot. Now came the speech. The general said he’d learned everything he ever needed to know right here at Goas, that they were the happiest days of his life, but that the Boers ended that happiness for him, for everybody. He stood on one leg and espoused.
“But I’m not going to stand before you today and tell you about war,” he said. He raised his thin arms and tossed his shoes into the sand.
“No, I will not speak of the long night of exile, of what it was to not see my mother or my mother’s land for more than fourteen years. I will not discourse on such pain. Nor will I tell you of the hell of the South African prisons, or of Cassinga. Of the bombs that rained that bloody day. No, I will not stand before you and talk of the blood of your brothers and sisters, your mothers and your fathers.”
The general paused, looked out at us, and grinned. This threw us off. You did not mention the massacre at Cassinga and grin.
The principal launched into a fit of clapping and we did the same.
The general ordered a cease-fire. “No applause. No, my children, I wish to speak of today, of now. My children, you have freedom. So much freedom. Lord, you even have the freedom to hate.”
He hopped around in an angry circle to show us what hate looked like.
“Yet, I say, do not exercise this right. Hold it, even cherish it, but don’t use it. Why?” He did that circle dance again. “Because it’s too easy!” He hopped over and snatched up the principal’s bullhorn and shrieked: “What’s hard is loving! That’s why I say to you, children of Namibia, saplings of a newly watered nation, I love you. You think a big man, a comrade such as myself, doesn’t say such a thing. Well, I say it! And I will shock your little ears and say it again. Tell your mamas what Kangulohi said: I LOVE YOU!”
He hopped closer to us.
“All we must do now to build this nation, this beautiful country, is work. Work. Work and learn. Learn. Learn. Learn. Forget hate, hate, hate and love, love, love.”
We clapped more frantically. The general again waved us away. “’Tis you,” he roared. “I’m no one. ’Tis you!”
We felt light-headed, patriotic, and, yes, loved . . .
He spotted Mavala. “And who, may an old general ask, are you, comrade?”
“Shikongo, sir. Chetequera Camp, Angola. 1986 to 1989.”
“Commanding officer?”
“Elias Haulyondjaba, sir.”
“Elias. Bless his soul. I commend you for your commitment to the struggle in the past, and your commitment to the struggle in the future, Comrade Shikongo, from the bottom of my heart as well as from my sore foot.”
Laughter, applause, applause.
Obadiah stepped forward. “May our distinguished guest allow a humble teacher to quote the great murdered poet Archilochus?”
“Permission granted, Humble Teacher.”
And Obadiah took off his aviator hat and raised his mouth toward the sky and recited: “I love not a tall general, not a straddling, nor one proud of his hair nor —”
That she chose her husband’s shining moment to water the hedge of the bush in front of their house should not, in the larger scheme of Goas, have been surprising. She wasn’t a person to remain invisible any more than Obadiah was.
The nozzle of her hose rose slowly, very slowly, over the fence. One of the soldiers caught sight of it and raised his rifle.
“Wait,” Obadiah shouted. “Don’t fire! That’s my hag. Wife!” The general motioned for the man to lower his gun and looked curiously at the head that was now peering over the bushes, as if daring him to shoot her face off in the name of love.
If you imagine Goas as a village, which it wasn’t—it was a school on a farm in the otherwise empty veld—but even so, if you were to think of all of us living in a sort of idyll, the soccer field was our village square, our sacred ground.
It took him a w
hile to hop across it.
We were too far away to hear any of it, but after speaking to her through the fence for five minutes, the general knelt down and kissed the ground. Then we watched her reach and lug him up by the armpits. Antoinette was a giant compared to that little general. Then—and you may dismiss this as just another of the daily lies of Goas, but I saw it happen—she clutched his head and kissed him. Hard and long and slobbery. It was not the kiss of a hag. She talked about it for days after. How he begged her pardon for his guns and even his cursed uniform. How he said in the future, in the glorious future, we wouldn’t need armies anymore and that he was only holding on to his for a while longer because there were still people who didn’t believe in love. She said the man lied so much his lips fell off. What choice did she have but to glue them back on? I’m not a woman without compassion. Shouldn’t a doomed man, she said, have at least one good memory?
80
GRAVES
My grandfather?”
“Yes.”
“He was a pants jobber. His name was Leo.”
“A what?”
“An apprentice tailor. He also boxed hats and treffed coats. What about yours?”
“He was Tshaanika, eighteenth Onganjera king.”
“Oh.”
Mavala stretched her arms and yawned. On the underside of her right breast, a birthmark in the shape of a bean.
81
OBADIAH (HATS)
Porkpie, boater, homburg, fore and aft, bombardier, Panama, betty tilt, Ascot, chimney pot, cockade, tiara, bucket, ten-gallon, beanie, turban, bowler, Montecristi, Stetson, Borsalino… The very notion of haberdashery is fantastical. Hail the helmet of Mambrino! It’s why their names are so picaresque. That a mere piece of felt or wool or, yes, even metal, could provide protection from God’s ultimate wrath—yet we don these illusions daily. We cover our heads. As a sign of defiance? Of faith? Of respect? Of fear? Yes. But above all, my friends, above all—hats are love. No helmet in the universe more powerful than the belief that covering one’s head will make a difference to God… Consider the case of Kaplansk’s Jews: skullcaps? A thin layer, a mere chimera, and yet don them they do. As do we all.
“Hey, Kaplansk, you heathen, where’s your yarmulke?… Kaplansk?”
“He’s asleep.”
“Again? At six o’clock in the evening?”
82
AUNTIE
Late Monday afternoon, and Obadiah and I are contemplating each other’s existences in the plastic chairs in front of his house. Soccer goes on. The thud of the ball like the irregular heartbeat of Goas. Pohamba’s curtains are pulled. Weekend sinners sleep away Monday. Beneath the acacia, Festus is barbering boys with his battery-powered razor. One desk chair beneath the tree, a plastic bag for a bib shoved up under each customer’s chin. Festus is not a subtle barber. He balds the boys, and one after another they walk away, shiny eggs.
Obadiah groans. “The mouth arriveth,” he says. Moments later we watch her approach. She gets larger and larger, and yet Auntie doesn’t move exactly; she oozes. She manifests. She heads toward us, calls out to Obadiah, “All men who have said I am beautiful have died. Except one. I see a shroud over your face, Head Teacher.”
“But, my dear,” Obadiah says, “never once have I ever said that a hirsute woman such as yourself was —”
“Happy death, Head Teacher,” she says, and without stopping veers toward the field and begins to cross through the middle of the game. She picks up speed as she gets closer to her prey, which is clearly the fuzzless tennis ball the boys have been using since the latest soccer ball got punctured. Ignore, ignore, ignore, but how can you when she’s after the ball? When she reaches it, Auntie savors the moment. Before she swipes anything, she always licks each of her fingers. She does this right now, agonizingly slowly, before swooping, reaching, snatching. She shoves the tennis ball down the front of her dress.
“Come, boys, come and get it.”
For the first time in recorded history, the boys rush toward the hostel an hour before wash call. Auntie turns her sights next on the singles quarters. Obadiah and I watch. She reaches Pohamba’s door. She knocks. He doesn’t answer. She knocks more. Then Auntie begins to pound on Pohamba’s door with both fists. Still no answer. She thrusts her wide corpus delicti against the door. Whap. Whap. We’re surprised she doesn’t break it down. Auntie insults easy. She knows he’s in there. I recall the double-ply toilet paper we brought from the dorp on Wednesday, after weeks of forgetting to buy it. (We’d been using pages from old Afrikaans paperback novels.) Pohamba keeps the stash in his wardrobe. The door cracks open. Pohamba—in his lucky lilac undershirt—exhausted, slumped, bows, greets her. We watch from across the field. Then Pohamba stands straighter and crosses his arms over his chest as if he’s barring the door. A mere boast. We know he’ll give way. That he’ll let her in, let her take what she wants. Take the Charmin, woman. But it doesn’t happen, the giving way you do for Auntie when she comes a-calling. He—we can see this plain as day—is listening to her. The time to dodge the monologue has passed, and still Pohamba stands before her. It’s an emergency—and us two cowards, we don’t twitch. There is no hue and cry from the plastic chairs. Festus’s buzzing razor clicks off, and we know he’s hypnotized as well.
There’s an unusual stillness in Pohamba, a tranquilizing of his spirit. His body, in the door frame, now limp. He’s enchanted. It’s here I make an obvious link, but still one I’ve never made before—between stealing and monologing. When she monologued us, she robbed us of our life’s time, and maybe this is why she never quite aged like a normal person. Our time fattened her. We watch Pohamba grin. He backs into his room. This is a different sort of giving way. He does it willfully, joyfully, meltingly. Goodbye, friend, so long. It’s been good to —
At the same time, I can’t help but wonder, as Obadiah gags, what if it works? What if she could filch them? Our tormented desires. Our desires tormented. The door closes behind Auntie’s enormous ass, like the gate of a bakkie on a load of mealie sacks. A few moments later a hand—not Pohamba’s, a thick, soft, braceleted hand—appears out Pohamba’s window. The hand holds a tennis ball. Then the hand’s fingers spread open—all five fingers wide, ecstatic—and the ball, like a tiny skull, drops into the dust.
83
GRAVES
She hounded me about my cold feet, my literally cold feet, and she thought it hilarious that the desert didn’t make any difference, that I could be sweating all over and my feet were still like ice water, and she asked once if I wanted her to blow on them, and I said, No, please, just stay away from them, don’t call attention to them. And she asked how such a thing could happen. I said, I’m from North America, basically I’m an Eskimo. That, and the fact that my feet sweat and then they cool off too quickly. She didn’t accept this explanation.
“Are they ugly? Ugly albino rabbits? Why are white people so afraid of their feet? Please, just a look —”
“Never.”
In socks, nothing but socks, half off, bunched.
84
THE ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL
News off the farm line that Obadiah’s old friend Ganaseb has died in town. I’ve been summoned by a boy to the Datsun. Normally Obadiah savors, today he palms the bottom of the bottle and drinks as if he’s trying to shove it down his throat. “Naturally,” he says, taking a break, “you will attend the funeral.”
“But I never knew Ganaseb.”
“Not important. The man was a teacher here. You and he are of the same family now, whether you choose to accept this onus or not, our families being nothing if not onuses. Follow me? By the way, have you written your father to forgive him his trespasses?”
“When’s the funeral?”
“You see, Ganaseb was blessed. That was the difference. He escaped and enjoyed Goas only in his memory, the only true way to live here. You should have heard Ganaseb talk. The long veld nights, the clean air, the russet sunsets.”
“I’ve got to go
open the library.”
“You’re the librarian?”
“Sub-deputy chief.”
“Who’s chief?”
“You.”
“In that case, I declare a day of mourning. All public institutions must be closed out of respect.”
“I’ve got reading group.”
“What are you reading?”
“Mowgli.” I start to climb up and over the door.
“That tripe? Wait,” he says. “Ganaseb was a big man, an important man, an assistant principal. Not once since he left did he return to visit us. I always met him in town.” He seizes my arm. “And do you want to know the vicious truth of it?”
“What?”
“The man had a Volvo.”
The priest drove us into Karibib in the back of the bakkie. The women wore black dresses they looked too comfortable in, as if death were a uniform waiting in the closet. Antoinette gripped Tomo by the neck, like a puppet under arrest. Mavala held the tarts Antoinette had baked for Ganaseb’s widow. Pohamba tried to sneak his hand under the foil and grab some crust off a tart. Mavala tucked the tarts under her dress, which didn’t stop Pohamba’s mission. As we pulled away, some boys chased us, shouting, “Teachers, buy us Lion Chips!” Antoinette commanded they desist with a flick of her wrist, and the boys fell away one by one, laughing and throwing their arms around one another.
Ganaseb had got so free of Goas, he deserted the Catholic Church. The Lutheran parish in the location was packed. People swelled out the doors. Old women wailed on the steps outside. Boys dangled from the windows. The air was thick with competing perfumes. Obadiah led our entourage down the aisle, saying, “Pardon us, old friends, pardon us.” We made it to the third pew and squeezed in. I tried not to look at Mavala, who was wedged between Vilho and Dikeledi. She tried not to look at me. At that time everything about us—to us—was thrilling. I loved being close enough to touch her and to pretend I didn’t want to. I tried to differentiate the smell of her sweat from everybody else’s.
