by Peter Orner
Pohamba sucks his teeth, looks at me. I’m slumped against the door. We sit there awhile. I reread the same sentence: I wanted to buy three passable horses for my britzka. I wanted to buy three passable horses for my britzka. I wanted to buy three
“You don’t want to go to the dorp?” he says finally. “If we start now we could have a good night.”
“No thanks.”
“What are you reading?”
“Still this Turgenev book.”
“Russian?”
“Yeah.”
“Communist?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe socialist.”
“Rich?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
“All socialists are rich. That’s why they’re socialist.”
“He supported the serfs.”
“You don’t like my story? You have better stories to listen to now?”
“I like your story fine.”
Pohamba steps over to me and raises a flip-flopped foot to my face. He holds it there, quivering. I drop the book in the sand.
“Why don’t you do it? Smash my head?”
He waggles his foot in my face. “He supported the serfs,” Pohamba says. “Good for him.”
90
THE ILLEGALS
They emerged one morning out of the veld during those days of ruthless heat. It was a Friday and we were in morning meeting. That morning’s tale concerned, if I remember, the importance of proper dental hygiene in an emerging democracy. The principal was reading to us from a Namibian article about the alarmingly high incidence of tooth decay in Ombalantu. “Citizens must floss. A nation must maintain its oral health. I prefer waxed. Watch me now.”
We hardly had our eyes open. Caffeine never did much for us on Fridays. Then there was a knock on the door, which was strange, because the boys knew better than to disturb this ritual. The principal was working on a trouble spot in the back of his mouth. He pointed to Mavala: “Open it.” He loved to give her orders in public. And Mavala, more out of curiosity than the command, did it. When she saw them, she dropped to her knees, still holding her cup of coffee. After, she said she didn’t know why, only that there was something so heavy about them. They weren’t bedraggled. The most alarming thing was how scrubbed clean they looked. But they ignored Mavala’s outstretched arms. They seemed to understand immediately that the one in the tie flossing his teeth was boss. Of the two boys, one was tall and gangly, with extremely thin arms and long hands. The other was squat, with roving eyes that seemed to troll over us, summing us up. We were pampered. We knew nothing of suffering. All we cared about in the world was our coffee and egg-and-tomato sandwiches at mid-morning break. You never see yourself as plainly as through the eyes of children who aren’t children anymore.
The girl never looked up. She only gazed at her feet, which were sun-cracked and blistered, but somehow too clean. Her not looking up didn’t seem to be out of fear exactly. She appeared past any notion of being scared of anything. She wore a light blue dress with delicately embroidered frills around the edges. Mavala said it looked like a communion dress she once wore. The tall one was probably her brother. They had similar eyes, smallish, worried. He stood next to her, the edge of his bare feet touching hers. The squat one spoke to the principal.
“We greet Teacher.”
“Greetings, child. Where are you coming from?”
“North, Teacher.”
“How far north?”
The boy hesitated. “The border.”
“The other side of it?”
“Yes.”
“Running?”
“Yes.”
“From what?”
The boy hesitated again. “The fighting, Teacher.”
“Savimbi?”
The boy knew better than to take sides, even in another country, even as far south as Goas. “Only from the fighting, Teacher.”
“Parents?”
“None.”
“How did you come here? Who brought you?”
“We walked, Teacher.”
“Walked! From Angola!”
“Yes.”
“Impossible!” the principal cried. “It’s eight hundred kilometers!”
The squat boy’s expression didn’t change. He seemed to be sizing the principal up, seeing he wasn’t a fool, only bombastic.
Quietly he repeated it: “We walked, Teacher.”
The principal looked down at their feet, the first time he had. “You’re hungry?”
“No, Teacher.”
“You need a place to sleep?”
“No.”
“What do you want, then?”
This time the boy didn’t hesitate. “School.”
“What?”
“We want to go to school, Teacher.”
The simple truth of it. Not food, not a place to sleep, only school. The principal shrugged, pleased they’d come to him instead of the priest. Had it been Father who sheltered these lambs, the principal would have been on the farm line to the police barracks in Karibib and those three might have been deported within a day, shipped back to more civil war, to Dr. Savimbi, in the back of a cattle lorry.
“There is room, children,” he said, “in our inn.”
For a week or so, they sat quietly in our classrooms. When there weren’t enough chairs, they sat on the floor. We gave them pencils and paper, but they rarely wrote anything down. They rotated from class to class like benevolent versions of the dreaded school inspectors who descended on Goas once a term with their checklists, rating us on the old Bantu education scale from Goed to Swak. They often started their days in Mavala’s class of sub b’s and ended them in Pohamba’s Standard Sevens, each day an entire trajectory of whatever we had (or didn’t have) to offer, which was probably more school than they’d had in mind. They didn’t talk to the boys or even among themselves. Even the squat one, after his initial boldness, settled down to the life of just another silent learner. Once, Mavala tried to talk to him, to ask him what happened to them. She said she might understand, but he only turned away without a word.
Out at the graves she said, “He only talks when he needs to. I forgot the virtue of that.”
“You don’t tell anything.”
She shrugged. It was a lying-down shrug, and the sand made a dull rasp.
“I’ve nothing to tell.”
“I don’t believe you.”
We never learned their names, or anything about what they’d been through. Of course, we had Obadiah’s radio and week-old newspapers. We had an idea. We could have imagined things if we were up to it. Soldiers tossing babies in the air and shooting them in front of their mothers. But who can truly see this?
They never lingered. The three of them arrived at school in the morning after the second triangle and left promptly after last class. At break, they went out into the veld by themselves.
In class, silent or not, the girl was the only lesson. You could smell the boys sweating over her. Her eyes had a kind of sad vagueness as she looked straight ahead at the board. She seemed unaware of the boys’ agitation. The only time she showed any real expression was when she looked at her brother. Sometimes, in class, she touched the side of his face, and the boys swooned. The squat one could obviously take care of himself. But of her timid brother—always next to her, his feet touching hers—she seemed to wonder, What will become of you?
When they were gone from us, a boy discovered they’d been living out by the road. Theofilus must have known this. We figured he also gave them food, and they may well have accepted it from someone as unobtrusive as Theofilus. He never mentioned it either way. But when they were among us, nobody, not even the most lawless of the Standard Sevens, followed them back to where they slept. The only way I can explain this is to suggest that for some reason all of Goas recognized—without it being decreed from on high—that a part of the veld out toward the road was, for a time, theirs, in a place where they were like stowaways.
They left us as abruptly as
they’d come. Nobody chased them.
91
SNAKE PARK
We rented a bakkie from Felix Desconde. According to Pohamba, Desconde was the richest man in Karibib, and he had a fleet of Toyotas he rented out at usurious prices. Desconde owned the grocery, the hardware, and the marble works on the edge of town. He was also a man of the people, and wanted to live among them, so he built the only two-story house in the location, a mock castle with a four-car garage, a razor-wire security fence, and eight roaming dogs.
All of us were going. Just as we were pulling away from Goas, Auntie ran—the first time anybody had seen this happen—and lunged at us. Her breasts caught on the open back gate of the bakkie, and we had no choice but to haul her up. As we rattled down the Goas road toward the C-32, we saw Miss Tuyeni out walking in the veld. She was becoming more ignored than Auntie. Alone, she looked more like Mavala than when they were near each other. They had the same shoulders. Vilho suggested we invite her along, but Pohamba didn’t hear him over the noise of the radio. As we passed her, Miss Tuyeni didn’t look at us. She stooped, took off a shoe, and jiggled a rock out of it.
The Erongo Snake Park was down the C-32 toward Otjimbingwe and run by an ancient Polish couple. Who knows how they got marooned at a tourist attraction on a road where not a single tourist ever strayed, but they’d been there since long before independence. A decrepit Mercedes was parked in front of a small flat house with the windows boarded up. The Poles were incredibly tiny, sun-shrunk people. The Mercedes was apparently their ticket office, as well as, perhaps, their house. They were both sitting in it when we pulled up. The snake park consisted of seven or eight glass boxes. The glass hadn’t been cleaned in years. It was hard to see the snakes. Inside the boxes were rocks and sand that looked very much like the rocks and sand outside the boxes. In one of them we could see, past the green slime of the glass, the outlines of two Neilson vipers looped together in a pretzeled twist.
“Do you think they are more bored with the box or with each other?” someone said.
“Each other.”
“The box.”
“Each other.”
We moved on to the next box, a lone giant python thick and sedentary as a car tire.
I remember very little else except for the heat and the overall wobbly drunkenness of the day and how the sun glinted against the glass of the boxes.
On the way back, Mavala put on Obadiah’s touring hat, an argyle pot lid-looking thing he said was most appropriate for motoring in Scotland. It blew off and sailed like a frisbee into the veld, but Pohamba wouldn’t stop for it. This was his trip. He’d rented the truck. He’d organized us. Now we were all exhausted and wilted and letting him down because we weren’t whooping it up anymore, and so he wasn’t stopping for any fucking Scottish hats.
92
WALLS
Hey, Truelove, how’s she tasting?”
“I’m not answering that.”
“Come now, is she satisfying your meatful needs?”
“Kill yourself.”
“Suicide? What about my learners?”
“I’ll cover your classes.”
“What about the Pope?”
“He won’t care, one less pagan.”
“You think I’ve never been in true love, Truelove?”
It’s not a question, it’s a proclamation. I let it hang in the dark. Let him nail it to his forehead. Night is a hole I fall into, with papery walls and his voice is like a camera eye with a loudspeaker, as if I’m in some low-tech 1984. I wait for him to say something else. Maybe he’s gone to sleep. All bedsprings silent. No noise of his breathing. Nothing.
93
GRAVES
Us lying on Grieta backward. Mavala’s head is hanging off the front of the grave. There’s a scratch on her left cheek from a thorn. She’s eating cheese. She holds it out to me.
“No, thanks.”
“You don’t like Cheddar?”
“I do. I ate.”
“What did you eat?”
“Tuna and cabbage soup.”
“Who made the soup?”
“Dikeledi sent it over.”
“Dikeledi, Dikeledi, Dikeledi. You men like them silent. Why am I so hungry all the time? These condoms. If I’m pregnant, I don’t want a kid that looks like old butter.”
“I look like old butter?”
She kisses my chin.
“Sorry, but in certain light, yes.”
“I don’t need to listen to this shit. I could be in a real bed. Alone. Unharassed.”
“Why did you come here?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“What?”
“To come and save all the dark babies.”
“Come here, Teacher.”
“You come here, Teacher.”
“Tell me more about Snowy Pinkus.”
“Rainy.”
“Snowy’s a bitch.”
Our legs are twined up. She’s still holding the hunk of cheese.
94
GRAVES
I want to spit on her,” she says.
“On who?”
“Grieta.”
“Why?”
“You’re asking me why?”
“I’m asking you why.”
“Listen. I heard this story about them once. A train of ox wagons are crossing the Kalahari from the Free State. The great trek to unknown parts. It’s their second day without water. They’re wandering trackless. A baby dies. There’s no time to stop, and so the father of the baby tosses it out in the veld—not because he’s cruel, but because he wants to save his other children and there’s no time. But the mother won’t have this. She leaps out for her dead child. So they stop, outspan long enough to dig a small hole and say Our Father. But before they can move on, another child dies, and so they do it again. Our Father. This land beat the Boers into natives, didn’t it?”
“Sounds like it.”
“But when they saw us, they didn’t see themselves.”
“So spit, or not?”
“I say spit.”
“What about us?”
“Us what?”
“Us this. Here. This isn’t desecration?”
“This is nothing, darling.”
And she rolled away from me into the grooves of hot sand, her body wearing it.
95
GRAVES
Look at me. Tell me what you see.”
“Can you flare your nostrils like that on demand? I’ve always —”
“You mean you can’t ? It’s easy, just —”
“I’m trying, I’m trying.”
“Shhh. Be quiet and look at me.”
Her nails dig into my arm, painted pink death—“Look.”
Instead I go closer to her and she blurs, closer until our faces crash.
And Mavala stands and marches away: marching, swinging her arms, her knees like levers, heading farther into the veld, shedding everything, blouse, necklace, strap-tangled bra, skirt—all in puddled clumps off the goat path, into the trackless veld, heading for the C-32, across a river of sand, not stopping, me chasing and picking up clothes, her not looking back, shouting, “Leper! Make way! Leper!”
96
DR. SAVIMBI
Namibia never made the BBC. What would they have said? Nothing much raged again today across newly independent… So we had to be content with Angola or South Africa news, both of which were consistently bloody enough to make the radio.
One night, I dreamed I heard on the BBC that Jonas Savimbi was assassinated, blown up by a hand grenade. The next morning, I trumpeted it around school: “Savimbi’s dead!”
“How do you know?”
“I heard it last night on the BBC.”
Hallelujah, the BBC. The BBC! Could the sun rise without the BBC? The earth rotate? The tides roll in? The tides recede?
Mavala shouted from her classroom: “Finally, that Bantustan got what he deserved!”
“The war will be over up there,
” Pohamba said.
“And now our illegal nomads will go home,” Vilho said.
That night we gathered at Antoinette and Obadiah’s and waited. Obadiah was soaking his feet in water and salt. He said his feet had the hardness. Beep, beep, beep. BBC News. Thirteen hours Greenwich mean time. The main points read by Wynford Vaughn-Thomas: In the Slovenian capital, Ljubljana, federal troops clashed with demonstrators demanding an independent Slovenian state for a second straight day… In Angola, UNITA rebel leader Dr. Jonas Savimbi has again failed to honor the cease-fire, and his men are reportedly on the march toward Huambo. The Zairian president, Mr. Mobutu Sese Seko, has renewed his role as mediator in the conflict … A reprieve for Galileo. The Vatican announced today that Galileo Galilei has been formally absolved of charges of heresy and that the earth is in fact round.
Obadiah clicked it off.
“Fine work, Kaplansk,” Pohamba said.
“You’re going to blame me for dreaming?”
“I’ve been punished my whole life for it,” Pohamba said.
“Let’s have a drink,” Obadiah said and poured a little zorba for each of us. “Now I have a question for us to ponder. What in God’s name is that Mephistopheles a doctor of?”
We pondered.
Gastrology?
Demonology?
Scientology?
“Aaaaaaaaha!” Obadiah raised his feet and showed them to us. Then he put them back and stood up and began to march in place, splashing water all over. “All that marching. Imagine what such raping and pillaging can do to a man’s arches. The man’s a podiatrist! ‘Halt, men, show the good doctor your soles. Not your souls, fools! I have no use for your souls!’”
