Peter Orner - The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

“Murdering fop of a Kaiser,” Obadiah said. “And there is nothing, zero, in the historical or anthropological record to support a lick of her stories. That obese woman bastardizes history! Christianization was a gradual process. It occurred over decades, centuries. No one man determined anything. Her Kwedhi was no Constantine, and for that matter, neither was Constantine. Faith is not something commanded by a despot. The woman’s a fake and a liar.”

“A fake what?”

Obadiah didn’t answer. He was going to condemn her for making up stories? For exploitation of history to suit her own ends? For lying for the sake of the good of the story? This sin?

Auntie Filched

Initially the priest had hired Auntie Wilhelmina as an undercook in the hostel kitchen. Then one day she walked off with two forty-kilo bags of carrots. Dragged them behind her in broad daylight, her philosophy being that stealing in public is no sin. Robbing His children under His watchful eye is no transgression. If it was, she said, wouldn’t there be thunder and lightning? How do you argue with this? The priest fired her, but he didn’t have either the heart or the stomach to banish her off the farm for good. So he let her live up there in her half-roofless house with the dogs she stole as whelps from farmers up and down the C-32. A good, quasi-socialist thing about Auntie Wilhelmina was that she stole only expensive things from the government (rands from the tuition scholarship fund) and the Church (a year’s supply of communion wafers and a golden chalice). From us, she took double-A batteries, lightbulbs, mosquito coils, your last nub of toothpaste. Her dogs were especially fond of gnawing rolls of toilet paper. She’d knock on your door and there she’d be, every glorious boozy inch of her. “I bestow my blessment upon this dwelling.” And you’d be faced with a choice that wasn’t really a choice. Let her in and let her take whatever the hell she wanted. Or listen to her.

“Come on in, Auntie. I was actually just on my way to choir practice. Make yourself at home.”

“Sing well, White Child, raise high your voice.”

Auntie Promised She’d Die

Like all descendants of Kavango royalty, Auntie said, she could not allow herself to die a natural death. As with Jesus, as with the lineage of Kwedhi. When her time came, she said, the oldest male was supposed to strangle her to death. She often hinted that such time was nigh, but Obadiah, overanxious, would ask, “Is it not yet time to perish, O Queenly Queen of Queenishness?”

And she’d say, “Patience, little brother, patience. Soon, soon, the royal murder.”

And Obadiah would stroke his old callused hands as if to sharpen them.

Mavala Shikongo walking along the road to the principal’s house. Us watching from the top of the hill, the gust in our faces. Obadiah says, There are sixteen kinds of wind, but only one that lifts a skirt like that.

He stands and whaps the cross with his hat.

And still the bedraggled pigeons fuck. Everywhere they do it. No place is sacred, or depending on how you looked at it, all places sacred. Every mapone, every acacia. Toilet pit, dam, trough. They fuck on the road to Krieger’s farm. We blame it on the late freak rain, the theory being that somehow it had lodged into their chickpea brains that the world was all greenfull and pleasure from now on. Couldn’t they see the land was already parched again? Obadiah caught nine of them orgying in the backseat of his Datsun and attacked them with a broom, which seemed only to increase the rapture all around. The noise of their foul love deafening but indescribable, and yet I hear them still in my sleep. That gurgly, broody, out-of-breath whorling. Ecstatic death throes that went on deathlessly across dusk, night, dawn, coffee — feather-flapping fuckery. They do not do normal pigeon activities. They do not roost. They do not sun themselves. They do not harass your feet while you are eating an egg sandwich. They fuck. After that they fuck. Pigeon-mating season was supposed to last two weeks in the drier season — dry, drier, drought — and so was considered by the regional government to be only a minor plague on the list. As it has now gone on a month, we would welcome any other wrath, because those birds are such an affront to the general celibacy of Goas. Toads, serpents, locusts, boils, blains — at least they wouldn’t mock us. Leprosy? Give us the spots. Of course, Vilho counsels love, his finger holding his place in Matthew 13:37. He calls them doves, not pigeons. “He that soweth the good seed,” he says. “What would Jesus say?”

Pohamba blows him a kiss. “Jesus would stomp these flying rats with a fat hairy sandaled foot.”

*

A moment of reprieve. Mercy of a soft thud. One drops dead in the soccer field right in the middle of it. Just rolls off and that’s it, motionless feathers. We go out there and hold an impromptu funeral. We ring around him, we figure it’s a him. “Same thing happened to Nelson Rockefeller,” I say. “Died on top of his secretary.” People ignore this, like a lot of things I tend to say.

Beerless, we raise plastic cups of lukewarm water and toast this pigeon’s flight to hell. Sheeny blue-green body, deviled orange eyes. All around, his countryman haven’t noticed, haven’t flagged. A fundamental truth we didn’t want to be reminded of: You die, everybody else goes on fucking. That’s when Vilho, smelling our vulnerability, flaps back to the Old Testament, starts in about the murder of the Kenite, Sisera, by Jael, the wife of Heber. How Jael, clever wench, lured the sex-starved Sisera into her tent with the promise of her favors, her charms. How she gave Sisera butter. Then, as soon as Sisera got comfortable, she smote him on the head with a nail. “ At her feet, he bowed, he fell, he lay down . A Kenite,” Vilho says. “God reviled him, but still his death is grace. Who among us will not die on a bed of sin?”

We look at Vilho. We look at the deceased. As if one or the other could provide an answer, but to what? Even Pohamba is silent. Butter — absolutely — but to be smote on the head? Theofilus brings back a shovel from the mission garage, and we, bereft, bury our old tormenter amid the racket of the continuing deliciousness of his fellow foul fowls.

She never laughed. Even during break, when Obadiah would retell that morning’s moral tale, doing his best imitation of the principal’s self-flagellation (which was, by his kind of osmosis, our flagellation):

Oh, savage gluttony! Ye who fare sumptuously while others go without. Do ye not ache for your lack of guilt? Consider for once the Ethiopians, the Irish, the Chinese. Have you no pity? No, it is only, More meat, more crackers, more cheese. Ye who would not offer a finger dipped in water to a thirsty —

Mavala sitting in the sand, leaning against a barrel, unpeeling a hard-boiled egg. Not hearing a thing. Us all trying not to watch her bite the top off that egg. Obadiah said it was the struggle. All those years of believing the end of the war would usher in Paradise. He said Mavala Shikongo was even more beautiful for believing in all that. Now she carries an attendance register and wipes snot from under sub b noses? She’s old, Obadiah said. No matter what her legs look like. It’s all that believing. A woman with a Kalashnikov isn’t anything new. My Lord, think of the Amazons of Dahomey. But believing — it’s like seeing a bronze-winged courser this far west of Gobabis.