Peter Orner - The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

And so the prodigal daughter went back to her class, as if she’d always been a fallen woman and not the up-and-comer in a new nation. Even true heroes became no one at Goas. That’s what you get for walking around wearing your head so high. Now we don’t consider ourselves so far beneath you. A similar thing happened with Pohamba. Once, he made good on his daily threat to leave and was gone five days. His previous record was three and a half. When he slouched back up the road in the same disco shirt he’d left wearing, no one reminded him of his vow that he’d come back to this farm only as a corpse, and even then his ghost would flee.

Now we don’t have to be so discreet when we again pilgrim by her classroom on our way to and from the toilet houses. Ignominy has given us license to spy more openly. She’s taller than she was when she was a myth, and not every move she makes is so utterly graceful. She stomps around her class with a book open in her hand. Her short-short hair and her eyes that gaze restlessly up at the ceiling in the middle of a sentence. She does not baby her sub b’s as Vilho did. She reads fast and doesn’t pause to explain what the words mean. And when she teaches the alphabet, we note with interest that she does not sing it. But the small boys seem to love her more for not talking down to them, for treating them like her little soldiers of the dangling feet.

Another of the principal’s tortures, a bit of daily imprisonment in the name of holy education. If they refuse book learning, then we must foist it upon their shoulders so that they may carry it like honorable oxen.

And it’s an hour and a half, not an hour.

Pohamba and I are on duty. We sit bunkered down in the staff room while mayhem reigns in the unsupervised classrooms. From the Standard Fives, the sound of broken glass. In the courtyard, a couple of Standard Sevens are fencing with our teacher brooms. We hear nothing, see nothing. We’re eating yesterday’s cold fish and chips and playing War. Fast rounds, plapping down the cards as quick as we can. It’s the Cincinnati Kid versus the Man. Three out of five for who gets to leave early. In between chips, Pohamba chews on a chicory root, which is supposed to improve his virility. It isn’t making him very good at War.

“That was my take,” I say.

“I had a jacko,” Pohamba says.

“Three’s wild.”

“Seven.”

“It was seven last time.”

“Where’s the vinegar? How can the Man eat fish and chips without vinegar? It was seven.”

“Three.”

“Take it. It’s your conscience.”

Next round he loses again. I get up to leave.

“Wait,” he says. “Did she speak to you?”

“No.”

“Look at you?”

“No.”

“Play for Thursday.”

“Your credit’s no good.”

He snaps off a little chicory. “What if I give you some of this here root, Kid?” Whence from beneath the outside ledge of the staff-room window, a TransNamib hat rises. And a godhead thunders:

Hear this, idle suitors! While you sit there playing games! Know this: During the great Herero rebellion, during a break in that slaughter, two German officers once played cards — cards! — on the naked buttocks of a captured Herero princess. Imagine it. Think of a card slapping on flesh and its reverberations. Titillated? Go ahead, be titillated!

Forgive us. We got titillated. Because he invited us, cajoled us, and the hour and a half wasn’t getting any shorter. And so — mid-War, the cards in our sweaty hands — we indulged. We thought of her young body arching off a table, and cards —

Then the hat in the window rumbled again.

Thrilled? All right, then. You had it your way. Now see it another. Think of how still that girl must have held. How long the game lasted. What the smoke was like in the tent. Was ash flicked on skin? Was it better than what else she knew could happen? Or did that happen too? Of course it did. Her relatives who live among us are all the evidence we need. Yes, it certainly got worse some nights. And you may in the filth of your imaginations take it that far. But I ask that you consider only the rudimentary evil of the game itself. Now add a voice —Gruss Gott! — And laughter and the reek of the cigars. .

There were afternoons when any sort of idle entertainment spurred his umbrage. Such diversions, Obadiah said, contributed to the disintegration of civilization. Thus, he ambushed us with history, rose up from the window, and bombasted.

“Revolted?” he said.

We nodded.

“It won’t do. Revulsion only makes a man turn away. I demand you look at her again, see her again —”

“Demand?” Pohamba said. “We’re only trying to get through the day here.”

Obadiah raised the brim of his hat and peered at Pohamba. Of all things, this he understood, but when he was sober, he pretended he didn’t. Drunk, he carried his own aches. Sober, he lugged the burdens of the world. Today on his back were the miseries of a long-dead Herero princess. He left us, slowly, hunched over. I slid the fish and chips to Pohamba; he slid them back to me. A six of diamonds and a body seized beyond fear into stillness. Fingers clenching the edge of the table.

If you bothered to wash up at Goas, acceptance, or at the very least toleration, was pretty much guaranteed. Auntie Wilhelmina was an exception, as ignored as she was ubiquitous. She was the minor character who always insisted she star.

A Wednesday? A Saturday midnight? Auntie was all day all days. The most prominent thing of many prominent things was the noise of her. Her fat twangling, her fulumping down the ridge toward the singles quarters. The jangle of her hundreds of stolen bronze bracelets. The barking of her retinue of sycophantic dogs. The heaving of her breasts. She was a big heaver of her breasts; Auntie heaved at the slightest provocation. Her turtled skin. Parts of it were long past withered; other parts were new, infantile, as if she had the power of selective regeneration. You see, once you start to describe her, there is no end of her. A wildebeestian woman, the only answer is to look away, but it’s impossible. Her eyes — no, stay clear of her eyes. Her cheeks sag off her face like grocery bags overstuffed with fruit. Her teeth, cruel, sharp, heinously white — on the days she wore them in. Without them, her mouth looked full of bloody thumbs. There was a fresh wart on her chin, not like a dead thing, but a happy thing, very much alive. She groomed her beard a lot like Obadiah’s, a bit pointy off the chin. Beyond ugly, Auntie Wilhelmina, beyond ghastly, and this was the fundamental problem. The woman was a fascination. The boys said that if you stared at Auntie Wilhelmina long enough from a certain angle, you’d never stop wanting her. Ever.

She lived at Old Goas, in a ruined pondookie up and over the ridge, only half of which was roofed. Vilho, who was here that far back as a learner, remembered that one day she materialized. That one day Auntie Wilhelmina was simply in the veld, rooted, like something that had always been right where it was. You just hadn’t seen her. Like a hill beyond another hill. Or as if, Vilho put it, Goas had come to her, not the opposite. Obadiah refused to indulge in anything so metaphysical about Auntie. He only said: That old bitch talks too much.

Auntie Monologued

She had an extremely hoarse voice, like an old dog’s after it’s spent the day barking and can hardly do it anymore — but bark onward it must. In that terrible voice, she would go on about her royal lineage and her family’s personal relationship to Jesus. She said she could trace her family back to Kambonde on her father’s side and Impinge on her mother’s. She said her paternal grandmother’s eldest brother was Mpingana, who was assassinated by Nehale. And she said Mpingana’s son, Kwedhi, her great-uncle, was the one who, after banishment, started to associate with the Germans. She said the Germans might have had their faults, but we must always bless them for bringing the word of God to this heathen place. Eventually Kwedhi was baptized and declared himself king — hence, as she, Auntie, was the great man’s niece, everyone owed her fealty for freeing them from the bondage of paganism. In Auntie’s universe, four hundred years of colonialism and apartheid never happened. And she carried her namesake, the last Kaiser — Wilhelm II! — proudly.