by Peter Orner
Antoinette scrapes out the last of the butter from the tub, and nods. “I’ll heat some milk,” she says.
135
COFFEE FIRE
She can act, that one.”
“Quite an exit.”
“Oh, she’ll be back.”
“Of course, she’ll be back.”
“Where’d she go?”
“Windhoek. Where else is there to go?”
“No! Jo’burg. City of Gold! That’s where the real money is. She’ll be a real actress in Jo’burg. Forget Windhoek.”
“She’ll be back, I say.”
“It’s true, that girl can act.”
“I thought she wanted to be an accountant.”
“Still, it exhausts.”
“What?”
“Leaving. Any leaving.”
“Coming back’s tiring also.”
“That’s true. But the boy.”
“Yes, the boy.”
136
MORNING MEETING
In morning meeting, the principal doesn’t mention her. Moral tales come and go, and he doesn’t once look at her empty space. She normally stands between Obadiah and Vilho. They leave a gap for her, whether as a reminder or a tribute, I don’t know. The principal doesn’t seem interested in taking anything out on me. One, because he knows I’d never say a word, and two, because if it is a game, which it is to him, then we’ve both lost.
Finally, after she’s been gone eight school days—apparently some official level of delinquency—he distributes mimeograph copies of a typed letter. We stand there and sniff it. There’s no moral tale this day. He’s all bluster and business. He reads the letter to us.
Dear Deputy Minister Tjoruzumo:
I regret to inform you, Sir, of a vacancy effective immediately at the Don Bosco Primary School (Goas Farm RC), District Erongo.
Grade: Sub B
Reason for Vacancy: Teacher Mavala Shikongo abandoned her post May 5 of the current calendar year, without notice and without explanation. In addition, she left her son, Tomo (surname unknown), 2, at the mercy of the charity of the state.
Request: Please send a replacement teacher as soon as convenient.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me at the below address.
Obediently yours,
Charles Komesho, Principal
Goas Primary School, RC
Private Bag 79
Karibib
Tuyeni stared straight ahead as he read it. Not a word. Although we believed she was the power behind him, she never tipped her hand either way. She was almost godlike in that way. And so, finally, difficult to hate. To hate Tuyeni took more imagination than any of us had. Maybe she got what she wanted. Maybe there can never be enough disgrace. The woman was impenetrable, hollow-eyed. Mavala’s leaving left her no more numb than she’d always seemed. Morning meeting, staring at nothing.
“My wife is not the charity of the state,” Obadiah says.
The principal swallows. Then he gently rubs his hands together, as if preparing to eat. “Her food is. Her house is. And now that I consider it, Head Teacher, her man is also.”
“The boy’s name is Shikongo, Master Sir.”
“You’re informing me, Head Teacher, of the name of my own bastard nephew?”
137
WALLS
He liked to think his love for her was a thing he kept pure. I was the degrader in this respect. He was proud of what he considered his refusal, how he didn’t give chase. How he loved her from a distance. He was the untainted one.
Wall thumped by foot.
“Are you awake?”
“No.”
“You should have left her alone.”
“I should have left her alone? You’re lecturing me on women? I can’t even think of a good analogy. I should have left her alone. I’m asleep. We all should have left her alone. Everybody should have left her alone.”
“There’s no we in this instance.”
“All right. I. I.”
“What is she running from? That fat harmless?”
“I don’t know.”
“You never asked her?”
“Asked her what? I didn’t know she was leaving.”
“You think you’re harmless?”
“I’m asleep.”
“When are you leaving?”
“I don’t know.”
“Back to O-hi-o. Must be good. Blink your eyes and fly away. Whee!”
“You want to come to Ohio?”
“I want to go to Dallas.”
“There’s only one choice. Ohio.”
“What did she want?”
“She said she didn’t know.”
“She didn’t know?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Not you?”
“No.”
“And why don’t you chase her?”
“Chase her where?”
This seems to satisfy him. He farts as if to signal an end, a long, sad sigh of a fart, and I roll over to try to sleep. Moments later, he bops the wall again.
“What did you do out there in the veld?”
“Talked.”
“That kind of talk’s where she found Tomo. You’re not harmless, comrade. None of us is.”
138
TOMO
I found myself needing to be around him. I’d sit in Antoinette’s garden and watch him destroy things. Wasn’t he beautiful in that way?
One night during Sunday dinner at Antoinette’s, over chicken, rice, and radishes from the garden, the subject of his presence in their house as opposed to the principal’s was finally breeched. Antoinette and Obadiah usually waited until Sunday dinner to argue, and sometimes they invited spectators.
“Whatever else Tuyeni may be,” Obadiah said, “the woman is the boy’s aunt.”
“Aunt,” Antoinette piffed. “Aunt!”
“Under the law, she’s next of kin. Lord knows, those two might accuse us of kidnapping.”
“Kidnapping? They live up the road.”
“The law says —”
“The law! Whose law? I will not give them the satisfaction of granting me permission.”
“The fact of the matter is that we’re not relatives. Now, in the old days, yes, this sort of thing happened all the time, but today we have…” He ran down of his own accord. We ate on in silence, to the noise of crunching radishes. I wondered: How can it be so loud in your own ears and the room so quiet?
139
WALLS
Well, son.”
“What?”
“I fucked her too.”
“Go to hell.”
“One night the man went a-knocking.”
“Don’t you get tired?”
“Of what, son?
“Lying like an asshole.”
“Asshole or arsehole. Which is the correct pronunciation?”
“I’m through.”
“It’s a geographic variation,” Vilho interjects. “The British say it one way, the Americans —”
“Through?”
“Listening to you.”
“In any case, I believe ‘anus’ would be most correct.”
“It was hot. Very hot. I couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t sleep. The woman said she wanted a real man, not a —”
“Not a what?”
“Notta notta notta. Sleep, son, sleep —”
140
ACROSS THE ROAD
We’re walking the open veld on the other side of the C-32, south of Prinsloo’s. A man named Schwicker used to farm here. A sun-faded, bullet-holed sign FARM SALE 18,000 HECTARES leans out of the ditch by the side of the road like an arm reaching up out of the grave. Obadiah said we needed new ground to cover, that we hadn’t yet seen everything. The veld is just as flat out this way.
“What people don’t know,” Obadiah says, “but the cows do, is that so long as there’s grass, something like grass, it’s all right. This parch has more nutrients than the green stuff. But wa
ter—without water —”
“She’s not coming back,” I say.
“Funny. I’ve always thought of water as woman. You too?”
Then he stops and I stop. He places a mournful hand on my shoulder and says solemnly, “Jimmy Carter.”
“What about him?”
“Blame him.”
“For what?”
“Optimism.”
“Can we just walk? Not say anything, just walk?”
He sniffs. He takes off his glasses, pinches his nose, puts his glasses back on, gazes east, west.
“You see, Carter was the only one of your presidents who had a nimble enough mind to see we weren’t Communists in the truest sense. There were some real ones. Joe Slovo, perhaps. Chris Hani. But for the most part, it was always a question of playing Commie because at that time it didn’t quite matter.”
“Please —”
“Because the fight was the only thing. And that takes money. Independence would come and it would all be solved. With Jimmy Carter, through the black man at the United Nations, Andrew Young—there was hope. But hope. One pays dear for it. Next came your movie star. The war went on another decade. Then, when the fighting was finally over, Sam Nujoma said, ‘Commie? Who me?’ Because by then the money was coming from somewhere else. See? Easy?”
“But —”
“Of course there were people who believed in it! Your Mavala being one—and it was, wasn’t it, a beautiful thing? Houses, jobs. Food enough for all? How does one argue with this? Where’s the dear man now?”
“Who?”
“Andrew Young!”
“I don’t know.”
“Faded away did he?”
“How should I know?”
“A man like Andrew Young and you don’t know?”
I stop. He walks on ahead. An old man banging away and banging away and banging away. When I leave this place, this old man will still be banging away. I turn around and walk faster, head for the road. He starts hollering.
“You think there’s honor in inconsolable? Over a girl in a skirt? You think that’s devastation?”
I’m on the road. The gravel stretches across the veld like a long tongue. I shout back, “I didn’t say. I only —”
He stands on a koppie, a lonely tree of a man against the sky. “And Andrew Young? You think it’s a joke. How many people would be alive today if anybody listened to him? Families intact? Glorious futures? And that blameless girl would have stayed home in her village with her mother.”
141
SIESTA
Siesta and my eyes feel like they’ve been torn open. I knock on the wall. I knock on it again, again. “Wake the fuck up.”
“May I help you?”
“Fok jou mama se poes.”
“Hey! That’s not bad. But with poes, you want to drag it out, like this: Poooooes.”
“She had a birthmark.”
“Where?”
“Fuck off.”
“Have you so little faith?”
“She once said, Don’t be jealous.”
“Of who?”
“She didn’t say.”
“Now, that is romantic. He’s probably dead. Aren’t all the heroes dead?” He calls to Vilho. “Pious one!”
“Yes?”
“We’ve found our martyr.”
“Who?”
“Tomo’s daddy.”
“What about his mother?” I ask.
“It’s too early to tell.”
“Bless them both,” Vilho says.
“And Kaplansk?” Pohamba says.
“Why not?”
142
OBADIAH (3 A.M.)
In 1897, rinderpest wiped out three quarters of the cattle in the country. The disease was followed by drought. Next came, for the human beings, hunger. Those who had been baptized gave up on God, but those who hadn’t besieged the mission stations on their knees. Give us food. Give us Christianity. In such a year, when even the missions had so little, belief was easier to dollop than porridge. And so the missionaries said, Here’s Christ.
In the morning, they counted saved souls in corpses.
Absolve me, Love. Do you think I enjoy repeating such things, even to myself? But can a man unread himself blind? Can he close these books and live? Don’t answer this. I know you hear me. Don’t answer.
143
ANTOINETTE
Less each word than the cumulative weight of them. At the sink holding the one true book in her hand. With her other hand, she digs crud out of the drain. The boy is out back, stalking a hungry whelp. Unnoticing now. Tonight he will remember and wail. He’ll reject my arms.
It is not that I don’t understand. If she had a Jerusalem, it was somewhere far from here, and she had to go alone. What cost to me to raise another? But forgive a woman a thought: Would she have left behind a daughter?
144
PRINSLOO’S WIFE
They shot Sampie Prinsloo. The papers said they raped his wife, but let her live. The Afrikaans paper, The Republikein, screamed that it was an epidemic, that this was what democracy was going to look like. Yet the truth was that, as Pohamba said, farmers had always been murdered. You lit your own death in the veld every time you turned on a lamp at night. The price of land bought so cheaply, so to speak. Dogs and the electric fences could do only so much. Farmers at the Rossman Hotel in Karibib would often laugh about their dates with destiny.
We wondered where we’d get our vegetables.
A week or so after it happened, Prinsloo’s bakkie pulled up to the cattle gate. We were all in class. There was no horn, but no motorized vehicle could get within a half kilometer of Goas without making news. When we saw whose bakkie it was, nobody knew exactly what to do. The boys didn’t run for it. They walked slowly, curious. So clever, those whites. A man dies and still his ghost has transport.
It was his wife. No one had known her. She was only that woman who never got out of the bakkie, who watched us from behind the glass. But now she had no choice. She got out of the bakkie and put the free box of withered carrots on the ground and motioned for the boys to take what they wanted. She wasn’t going to toss them in the air. We looked over what she’d brought. Not much. A few peppers, an undersized pumpkin. Those bostostos must have had their fill of produce as well. She spoke a halting English. We didn’t offer condolences. Standing up, she was taller than we expected, and her face was blanched too white, as if even the Erongo sun had given up trying to redden it. She didn’t look stunned by grief. What would it have looked like if she had been? We watched her, lingered over her slim pickings. We gave her more than any of it was worth.
Then she stooped and picked up the free box, tossed it in the back, and nodded to us. She was about to drive away when Antoinette, who’d bought the single sad pumpkin and was now cradling it in her left arm like another child (Tomo was in her right), went up to the driver’s side window and knocked on it. Prinsloo’s wife didn’t roll the window down. She was a Boer farmer’s wife and wasn’t used to taking orders from any native grootma. Antoinette in her plastic Pep Boy Shop sandals, her starchy clean dress, her head wrapped in a scarf, pumpkin in one arm, child in the other. And her face like a fist she’d smash the window with. She demanded so much from people. Buck up. Be better, be stronger. Rise above.
Had she still been on the farm then, Mavala might have said that nothing happened. That Prinsloo’s wife was broken when she pulled up in the bakkie and broken when she drove away. That all she was doing was selling the last of her vegetables. Nothing happened when those two women looked at each other. Nothing.
But she wasn’t there. She’d left us by then. So I’m going to see it, remember it, differently.
Antoinette knocked on the window and eyed that woman, and it wasn’t strength she gave, but something smaller. Maybe it was only recognition. What happened to you, what happened to you.
145
MAGNUS AXAHOES
His desk is empty now. The only one besides Mavala who leav
es and stays gone. I don’t report him missing. Nobody notices other than the boys and me, because I am his teacher. Antoinette has her hands full these days with Tomo and with end-of-the-term cleaning. She hasn’t done a roll call in weeks. One day Magnus’s father comes up to the school asking for him.
No phone to call, so I came here to see him myself. You see, his mother passed this year and I worry over the boy.
The principal doesn’t stand up. Magnus Axahoes’s father standing there in his blue jumper isn’t anybody he has to get up out of his chair for. “These farm boys run away all the time,” the principal says. “What can I do? Alert the constable every time?”
146
DROUGHT STORIES
The oldest and weakest cattle began dying in the middle of June. Our only rain had been that single storm. Dikeledi in the rain, and now nothing. Everybody said it was never a surprise. How could it be a surprise? Still, it was odd how you went along, the days opening, the days closing, and then one afternoon it was as if the grass got a crack more brittle and you knew. You knew the worst wasn’t coming tomorrow, it was here. Everybody knows when a drought ends, but when does it begin? The cows went from quietly starving to actually dying, and Theofilus had to go to Karibib for fodder to keep them alive another day. He couldn’t water them fast enough.
