by Peter Orner
At last, the pastor began. Obadiah translated bits of the Afrikaans. “He says Ganaseb has only changed homes. From his modest house in Karibib to the Kingdom of Heaven. Yet he remains in our hearts.”
A woman in the pew in front of us hunched over and sobbed wildly. Obadiah made a fucking motion with his hips. “One of Ganaseb’s girlfriends,” he whispered. “He was into more than her heart.” He reached into his inside coat pocket for his flask. Antoinette’s crabbed hand whapped across me and seized Obadiah’s wrist like a talon. It remained there—welded to him—for the entire service.
Prayers, hymns, speeches, testimonials, weeping, more testimonials. When Ganaseb was justly honored, we shuffled slowly out into the sun and followed the casket. The dead man was sticking out of the trunk of his Volvo. The road to the cemetery was strewn with withered lettuce.
After the burial, we went to the Dolphin. Pohamba bought beers for the men and Cokes for the women (out of deference to Antoinette) and hard-boiled eggs for everybody. The women sat at a separate table (Tomo under it). The three of them, all beautiful in their way, sat there like a kind of cabal, a war council. Antoinette lording, trying not to judge everyone around her too harshly, trying to be a good Christian and love, love… Dikeledi so silent, taking everything in. She rarely came to town. I never knew she wore glasses. Mavala pops a whole egg in her mouth.
“It’s funny,” Vilho said. “A man dies and we all eat eggs.”
Pohamba took the salt and shook it over Vilho’s head. Then he got down to business. “With Ganaseb gone,” he said, “won’t Karibib hire a new teacher?”
“Faulty analysis, Teacher,” Festus said. “They’ll double up one classroom. And Kapapu will be the new assistant. Either Kapapu or Tjaherami.”
“How many learners can fit in one room?”
“As many as they want.”
“What about Hangula for assistant?”
“He’s Ovambo. Hereros control the district. Also, they say Hangula voted DTA.”
Mavala reached across the table and covered Antoinette’s hand with her own. Then she looked my way, found me watching her, and mouthed, Where’s O.?
I shrugged. Don’t know.
“Wait—Kapapu’s not Herero. Isn’t he Damara?”
“Yes, but his wife’s Herero.”
“Ah. And Ngavirue?”
“Ngavirue’s Herero, but nobody likes Ngavirue.”
Outside, Father began to honk for us. Impatient little priestly beeps.
When we’d all gathered back in the bakkie, it became clear we were still missing one of us. Antoinette groaned. This foray into decadence was enough for her without further humiliation. Festus and Pohamba checked the other bottle stores. Vilho checked the reeking public toilet. Then Antoinette sat bolt upright against the spare tire, her dress gathered up in her arms, and pointed to the cemetery with a long, unequivocal finger.
Together, Mavala and I ran down the rutted road. It was good to run with her. I wanted us to keep going. Near Ganaseb’s grave, I spotted a single battered loafer. He wasn’t far from his stray shoe, passed out, his face in the gnarled dirt. Mavala shook him. No movement. She shook him again. A limp hand waved her away.
“Don’t disturb the dead.”
“It’s time.”
“Time? Time for what?”
“Let’s go.” Mavala said. “The priest is snorting.”
He sat up and brushed a dusty sleeve on his forehead. His eyes were past bloodshot now. They were a kind of viscous brown, murked by tears and sweat. For a moment he sat there and stared at the fresh mound.
“I did it,” he said.
“Did what?” Mavala asked.
“Pissed on him.”
“Why?”
“A long piss. I’d show you, but it’s gone, evaporated. That too dries up.” He laughed, asthmatic, parched. “Didn’t I love him? Didn’t I?”
We pulled him up by the armpits. He felt light, too light for a man so tall. He looked around at the cemetery, at the rows of cardboard markers, plastic sunflowers, and sleeping dogs. We walked slowly back. It was late afternoon. Jazz was already playing in the living room of one of the houses closest to the cemetery road. Dust clouds from the taxis that roamed the location wafted above us. An old woman passed by wheezing loudly, holding a loaf of bread to her chest. When we reached the bottle store, the priest was revving the engine. Festus hooted at Obadiah’s dusty suit as the three of us piled into the back with the others.
85
POHAMBA
Same place as always. In front of our doors. Mosquito carcass- bloody morning. Pohamba sitting on a rock and brushing his teeth, talks like he’s been smoking dagga, but we’re at least a month out of dagga. He spits out the side of his mouth, doesn’t look at me.
“Sooooooooo.”
“What?”
“Been good, ja bassie?”
“What?”
“Good afternoons, ja? Siesta. No sleepy-peepy time for bassie.”
“Why are you talking like that?”
“Veld? Thorny but good, ja? No need sleep. Oh, bassie got juicy thing, happy!”
He brushes his teeth some more, sticks his tongue out, wiggles it, brushes it.
“What do you want me to say?”
“Say?”
And then him looking at me as if he’s only seeing me now for the first time. He points his toothbrush at me. “Don’t say anything.” Then in a low, officious growl: “Sir, I’m afraid that’s highly classified, confidential information.” He sticks his brush back in his mouth.
A hen struts by and Pohamba stands, toothbrush-mouthed, tries to wallop it, misses. His flip-flop airborne into the acacia. The hen flutters, then begins to mosey around again like nobody just tried to murder her. Pohamba goes inside his room to rinse his mouth.
86
A PIANO FOR GOAS
Let us now blame Kaplansk’s mother, Sylvia. At the League of Women Voters of Greater Cincinnati, Avendale Chapter, she mentioned it offhandedly to Ruthie Goldblatt, who mentioned it to Kitty Levine, who mentioned it to Bebe Pomerantz. Which was all it took. Sylvia’s son is teaching at an adorable little school somewhere in deepest Africa. I forget where. New Bubia? Anyway, they’re in direful need of donations. Simply in direful need. What sort of donations? Oh, any donation! A donation is a donation is a donation! And besides, Bebe, Kitty says, Sylvia says these children have nothing, nothing. Well, I do seem to remember an old piano in my basement, Bebe Pomerantz says. I think it was Miles’s mother’s sister’s. Died young, poor thing. They say she won contests.
Tremendous idea! Send Chopin! Send Debussy!
Four weeks later a wooden box weighing upward of two tons landed at the postkantoor in Karibib with the fanfare of a meteor. It had been delivered from Walvis Bay in its own lorry, and the postmaster called the principal personally to announce the arrival of a “mighty crate.”
Mavala proclaimed the creation of a Goas music department. She had some boys on punishment clear out the storage room. The piano was the lead story in the first edition of The Goas Harbinger.
Obadiah wrote:
What is significant, friends, brethren, Goasonians, about music and our impending new piano is that it is the physical embodiment of God’s infinite varieties. Eighty keys! Give me eighty keys and I give you the miracle of creation itself. On behalf of Goas, I wish to extend our heartfelt gratitude to Kaplansk’s long-suffering mother, Saint-in-waiting Sylvia Kaplansk, for this remarkable bestowal upon our humble institute of learning . . .
Festus, Pohamba, and I rode out in the priest’s lorry, Theofilus driving, to fetch it. And, returning, we were like triumphant combatants. Pohamba stood on the crate and gyrated, drunkenly fingering “Tea for Two” on Festus’s head. So many boys wanted to help lift the box that two Standard Fours got trampled. Even the priest and the principal stood side by side at a small ceremony in the piano’s honor, the crate at their powerful feet. The two of them stood there with their pregnant-looking stomachs and re
fused to look at each other. Church versus state in the battle of the chubbies. The principal announced music, the great equalizer, the future of African democracy. The priest offered that music was the most direct path to salvation of our corrupted souls. Mavala wept with joy for music. Tomo waddled over and took a chomp of the crate.
So. All night. All night we tried. Maybe because at heart we were optimists, even Pohamba. Maybe at our cores we adhered to Vilho’s benevolent view of mankind. All night we hammered. We sawed. We nailed. We glued. We prayed. We schemed. We didn’t leave the new music room until eight o’clock the next morning, when we held a press conference in the courtyard to announce that the random shit in the box could no more be made into a piano than the feathers of a slaughtered dinner rooster could be pushed back together to make a live bird. Mavala wept again, this time with rage.
“Who are you people to send that across the ocean?”
I found myself defending Bebe Pomerantz and the good people of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was possible, wasn’t it, that the stuff in the box—some wood planks, a multitude of keys, some wires, brass pedals—could have had a prior career as an actual piano?
“Rough passage?” I suggested.
That night we went out to Goas Stonehenge—an assortment of large granite boulders lacking in mystery—and roasted a goat on the remains of that piano. Festus slit its throat, I held it down with my knees as if it were Bebe Pomerantz and reveled in its childlike screams. And we drank to that piano’s second and final destruction. Mavala stood up in her heels on one of the boulders and, with a fist of meat in one hand, said, “Tonight, I curse Cincinnati, curse it beyond —”
“It’s already cursed,” I said.
And Mavala, drunk and furious, ignoring me and the rest of us, twisting and wiggling in the windblown smoke, in the hectic light of the fire. I wanted to stand up there and let her rail in my ear, but I stayed in the shadows in my Ohio shame and composed:
Dear Kaplansk’s Long-Suffering Mother,
I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry for so many things, and so please understand that I am even more sorry than usual to say that I will never, as long as live, and may this apply also to my corpse, set one cold toenail again in Cincinnati, Ohio. Rest assured, I’m in good hands. Her name is Mavala Shikongo. You always said you were the first person to admire spunk. I think of your passion for Geraldine Ferraro. I’d like you to meet my destiny, my destination, my disintegration. A former guerrilla fighter. She can take apart an AK-47 in seventeen seconds. Now she teaches kindergarten. Please tell Bebe thanks so much for the piano.
All my love,
Kaplansk
Other days it was less that the sun rose than that the veld seemed to pull itself up out of the darkness on its own volition. I woke up drowsy to the horizon’s slow bleed. In my left hand was a high heel. Everybody else had somehow managed to get back to their beds. Only Obadiah and I were still out there. The piano was no longer, except some keys hadn’t burned. They were scarred and blackened but intact, as if mocking our attempts to incinerate them.
I shook Obadiah awake and we started back. I carried Mavala’s shoe stuffed in my pants. A rare dawn wind lifted the veld, and we moved slowly against the gusting sand, our bodies weighing nothing.
87
GRAVES
She’s gnawing a pear, and pauses in chewing to accuse me of not having any money. Since Americans are supposed to have money, I must have thought coming here was an easy way to make a fortune—typical colonialist model, I’m out here only to loot.
“What’s here to loot?”
“That’s what I can’t understand.”
“Anyway, I’ve got money.”
“How much?”
“A little.”
“Where is it?”
“Stocks.”
“Stocks! Capitalist carnivore, It’s in stocks… You could, though, have a bigger enogo. Isn’t that what they say in America, that the blacks have these monster penises? Do people believe such things?”
“My grandfather was a pants jobber. I’m the proletariat.”
“So you have no comment on this penis issue?”
Words dissolving, muffled so as not to wake Tomo—rolling across the tablecloth we hid in the rocks. It was an old checkered one. Antoinette had given it to us so that Pohamba and I would eat less like jackals. Every time we went out there, we had to shake the sand out of it. Gradually we began to smuggle other stuff and hide it behind the graves. A pillow, a mattress cover, an umbrella (which we used to protect us from the sun, but that made us too hot), a can of Doom for the ants, library books. Afternoons of flung clothes. You couldn’t call it an escape, because we didn’t go far and we didn’t go long. Mavala unbuttons slow. One button at a time, and then she stands and yanks off her dress. And I have to think it again, remember it again. Unbuttoning slow, pushing plastic through penny slits. Not looking at me, looking at the veld. Then she stands and yanks her dress over her head. She yawns. No claims about the sex we had, only the sex we didn’t have. The sex we imagined was superior. The sex we had was hurried, diminished by the heat, sand-irritated. She rips open a condom with her teeth. And then only us and the sand crickets we try not to roll over and kill.
“Davey?”
“Yeah?”
“Davey Concepcion?”
“Yeah.”
“Touch me.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“Here?”
“And a little lower.”
“And here. Wait, Davey, slow, Davey, too fast, Davey —”
88
MAJESTY OF THE LAW
The court decrees that the porter who ate his bread by the smoke of the roast has duly and civilly paid the cook by the jingle of his money… Case dismissed.
RABELAIS
Progress, Obadiah would often espouse, is having an efficient legal system based solely on principles of fairness and blind justice. One day he received a certified letter from the law firm of Tuhadeleni, Enkono, Sheehama & Partners, Windhoek.
Dear Sir,
We beg forthwith to inform you that herein described vehicle, Datsun 180 B, 1979, VIN # 3972268377AC12, currently in your possession and under your control, is the subject of an ex parte application filed at the magistrate’s court, Windhoek, under a rule nisi attaching said vehicle. Cur avd vult. (Dated May 31, 1991.) Duly filed by S. Vivier on behalf of legal practitioners, Tuhadeleni, Enkono, Sheehama & Partners, Windhoek. Note that said action being duly filed resulting therein from an outstanding balance under a repair lien in the sum of rand 32,185.11. (Dated April 11, 1977.) Please see standard established under Rule 59 (a) in support thereof, providing that attachment be made on a vehicle alienated without balance duly forthwithed in full. Please also see Amalgamated Engineering v. Minister of Labor (1949) (3) SA (A) 337 at 661, as the person claiming to be lien holder will have direct and substantive interest in the subject of said lien. Further see In re: Tokien Butchery (1974) (4) SA (T) 893.
We sat in the Datsun and read it, reread it.
“I think they want money,” I said.
Obadiah took his glasses off. He blew on one lens, stuck it half in his mouth and huffed, wiped it off. Did the same with the other one. Then he called a boy over—a Standard Five on punishment named Nashikoto. He’d been hosing out the chicken coop and, alternately, trying to drown the chickens.
“Go get some help.”
A few minutes later, Nashikoto came back with more boys. We got out of the car and Obadiah stood on the hood in his bathrobe and read the letter, the entire letter.
When it was over, he said:
Bless this nation, its magistrates, its Minister of Justice, its constitution. But above all, a prayer for the Messers Tuhadeleni, Enkono, Sheehama & Partners and the poetry they send to Obadiah Horaseb via certified mail. Amen.
He stepped off the rostrum of the hood of the Datsun, his Datsun, and stared at it awhile. “Now bury it,” he said.
It took the rest of the a
fternoon, but even then the pile still looked like an oafish mound in the shape of a Datsun. Observe the majesty of the law’s corpus, Obadiah says, arms outstretched, his palms up like the balanced scales of justice.
89
POHAMBA
Months since Dikeledi’s rain. The few clumps of green that hung on into summer are now a memory. The only thing that grows in the veld are those bizarre spiderwebs that seem to have no hold anywhere. They seem to float. They greet us in the morning, wet with slight dew, across our faces. Other than this, the days are long and dry. The cows have gotten thin again. And everybody says it’s too hot even for this season.
Pohamba paces back and forth, from the fire pit to his door, from the acacia to his door, his hands behind his back. He looks me over. I’m sitting against a tire trying to read. He paces more. Undrunk Saturday and no transport to Karibib, his boredom rising to anger. Fucking Boers, he says. Fucking, focking Boers. That it’s the Boers’ fault that we have no transport to town is of course true if you follow the chain of causation to the beginning, starting with colonialism moving through apartheid all the way to what this school is doing way the hell out here to begin with, but today, forgive me, I’m only trying to read a little. I toss my teabag to the chickens.
“Listen,” he says. “This happened to a friend of my Uncle Johannes. Late at night, there’s a pound on the door. Like a hammer to your skull in your dreams. This friend of my Uncle Johannes gets up and answers the door. Military police on a late-night visit. ‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ ‘Kaffir, we have intelligence that your son’s SWAPO. Now we’re going to punish the womb that birthed a terrorist.’ And so they drag the old guy out of his house, this friend of my Uncle Johannes. They tie him to a goat who’s tethered to a tree. They go back inside. His wife of forty-eight years. Why don’t you go and write this down, Kaplansk? Why don’t you go and get a pen and write it? They stuff a doek in her mouth. Her husband’s in the yard married to a nanny goat.”
