Peter Orner - The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

We must raise the political and social

status of teachers. They should command

the respect not only of their students, but

also of the whole community.

DENG XIAOPING

After classes, after lunch. A consecrated time of languishment. A flopped, dead-eyed hour. Our beds damp oases, narrow paradises of our own orificial excretions. And here we wallow in moist, sweat-clammy bliss, until the study-hour triangle rings us back to bondage.

One siesta — hark — treason! A boy (ruffian! villain! bandit!) whistles — loudly — as he wanders by Obadiah’s open bedroom window. The insomniac inside just so happens to be asleep this day. (Taped to Obadiah’s screen, facing out for the world to be inspired by, is a photo of Mandela after his release: that peppered hair, that raised fist, that loving-even-my-jailers smile.) But Obadiah, now that he is awake, is no gentle spirit of the nation today. He’s belligerent. Nonetheless, to temper his fury, he uses the language of diplomacy. Hence, the following resolution is translated from the French:

Be it known that Head Teacher Obadiah Horaseb of the Goas Primary School RC calls upon all boys of Goas to heed the following… That Head Teacher recognizes the need for spontaneous joy in young plebeians who do not yet comprehend that life on earth amounts to nothing but sorrow, regret, failure, and, ultimately, humiliation. Furthermore, that Head Teacher reaffirms such young plebeians’ inherent, nay, inalienable right to express such bonhomie in certain proscribed instances, such as the Lord granting me a decent night sleep. However, be it known that Head Teacher henceforth forbids the expression of any such jollity — particularly by way of infernal whistling — at any time during siesta, which, be it also known, is the only remaining solace for those who do understand that life on earth amounts to nothing but sorrow, regret, failure, etc., etc. The Head Teacher decrees that punishment for whistling — which may, in the instant case, be defined, to wit, as: to emit or utter from the mouth or beak a shrill sound or series of sounds — shall be the SEVERANCE of said offender’s lips from said offender’s mouth, through the deployment of Theofilus’s unsharpened sickle.

Mindful of this day of non-repose,

Head Teacher Horaseb

Adieu.

Miss Tuyeni had much of her sister’s beauty, but wore it all wrong. She had the same long legs, the same jutting chin and huge blinkless eyes. But Tuyeni scowled constantly, so, unlike her sister’s, there was no mystery on her face. The world never ceased to find ways to disappoint Miss Tuyeni. We noticed her much more after Mavala came back. Before that, she had seemed to be merely a better-looking appendage of the principal. She was childless. As far as anybody knew, she’d never been pregnant. This led to all kinds of talk, most involving the besmirchment of the principal’s manhood. But it wasn’t true that she was a complete nonentity. She wielded a quiet sort of power in her own right, and you could sometimes feel it during staff meetings. When she didn’t like something he’d said, she had a way of letting him know. All of sudden he would veer away from a topic, and we knew it had something to do with her. But we never cracked their intimate marital code. Mostly she kept to herself. She never was treated quite like a traitor. After all, she had to live with him, and people couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for her for that. The only person she ever talked to was Antoinette, as if Miss Tuyeni, for her part, acknowledged the one true authority on the farm.

Still, as I say, the fact of Mavala made Miss Tuyeni more present, because how could we not compare them? And maybe she realized this and tried to compensate. Even though Mavala had dishonored her family in the eyes of the Lord, Miss Tuyeni started wearing high heels to school. She had no mastery of this delicate art. The truth: We all took sadistic joy in watching Miss Tuyeni totter across the sand toward morning meeting. The treacherous crossing, books in arm, one unnimble step after another. Sometimes she would tip over and the principal would send a boy to help her up.

Then Mavala would come charging down the road, always on the edge of being late. We speculated that the reason Mavala was so good in heels, her gravity-defying sense of balance, had something to do with — combat. Everything that was wonderful about Mavala Shikongo had to do with combat. You see how she twisted us?

The boy who the priest caught jerking off to the statue of the Virgin in the church grotto. The boy who burned down the science class. The boy who tried to poison the farm’s water supply with diesel. The boy who stole Festus’s classroom door. The boy who… The boy who… None was mightier than Moses, the Standard Seven who slaughtered a neighboring farmer’s cow with a pocketknife and lived off it in the veld for two weeks. Moses out there alone, a small cooking fire, only the eyes of the dead cow for company. But he’s eating meat; Lord, is he eating meat. A boy who got tired of mealies every day. He was a poor boy, an orphan. Yet a child born of this earth is entitled to some meat now and then. Is he not?

“In those days the boys ate meat only on holidays,” Antoinette says. “Now we try to give it to them twice a week, if we have enough paraffin for the refrigerator.”

Antoinette speaks of Moses in the way a lonely mother might go on about the antics of the favored bad child. If anything remotely like this happened on her watch now, she’d thrash him. Uncountable lashes for a boy so bold. But Moses — she’d pull him to her bosom. Have some tea with four sugars, my wayward boy.

We are in the kitchen of the hostel dining hall, a wide, cavernous, many-windowed building beyond the soccer field. It reminds me of an air hangar or a floor of an abandoned factory. The windows are fogged from the steam rising from a vat of burbling pap. The boys are lined up outside the door, banging one another on the head with impatient spoons.

She lays out clean bowls on the tables as she talks. Antoinette tells stories only during the heat of work. A Moses without a basket. A Moses without a people to lead. Only his own poor hunger. After the constables finally found him, they beat him until they got bored. What could they take from him other than his blood? Then they brought him to the farmer, who beat Moses until he too got bored with it, and that was the end of it. God only knows where the boy is today.

Outside, the boys begin to clamor louder. Antoinette walks the tables slowly, ladling thick pap into bowl after bowl. Today is krummelpap with a side of toast with jam.

“But forget the end,” Antoinette says. “Go back to the beginning, think of murdering a cow with a pocketknife. Cows don’t fight back, but this doesn’t mean they die easy. They stand and bleed. It took hours. It took the boy all night. It wasn’t rage. It was work.”

She points to the door. I open it. Then she steps past me and stands before the motley line of boys and raises her oven-mitted hands for silence. The boys file in, trying to be slow, trying not to dash, the big ones yanking the little ones back, toward their waiting, steaming bowls.

Obadiah and I doing our part, watering the desert.

“Teacher Kaplansk?”

“Yes?”

“I should like to know your candid opinion of Woodrow Wilson. It’s my contention that despite his having a horse-like face, he had a certain fastidious decorum. And I do not doubt his sincerity. And yet, I must tell you straight out, and you must pardon any offense: Your man Woodrow was a cabbage. Not only was he ultimately responsible for fascism, he also left us, our dear insignificant country, in the lurch for seventy years. And South-West Africa shall be a sacred trust of civilization. Sacred trust of whom ?”