Peter Orner - The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

Those days were hardest on his Standard Sevens. The more fatigued he was, the more he expected of them, up there in front of his class roaring: “Differentiate the following: Y equals 1 plus X divided by the square root of 1 minus X to the second power.”

“But, Teacher —”

A bleary, too-caffeinated man pacing the rows with a ruler in one hand and his big deadly wooden protractor in the other. “Do you want to end up at Goas like me? Don’t you boys see I only want the best for you? No fingers. Calculate!”

What kind of person hates a baby? That’s no baby. He only looks like a baby. Mavala called him her monstrous, her squirmy, her rodentia, her bedlam. He had squat little legs like a miniature Greco-Roman wrestler. We called him Little Festus. He was not yet two but was seen by reliable witnesses lifting a wheelbarrow over his head. He loved a toilet house, especially when you were in it. (As good a time as any to mention that the only toilet house that locked from the inside was the principal’s private one. It would have been considered tantamount to a coup d’état if anyone else shat in it.) Tomo’s ferrety, chicken-greasy fingers in your pockets. He ate everything. He noticed everything, understood everything. I remember his eyes staring at me through the slats of a chair, just his eyes, holding me, knowing me, hating me back. We were jealous of him. Of what his eyes had the privilege of seeing in person. An outside shower, the spigot in the back of the principal’s house. Tomo sits in the muddied sand while she… she… she. .

I’d try to hold him tender — my false hands — and his body would seize. And that thing. All babies do this, but Tomo did it with particular vengeance. That thing they do. You’d be playing with him, or think you were playing with him, having a good time making gurgling noises and chasing him around, and then he’d fall over and he’d raise his head and think about it a moment, make the calculation. Decide whether it was in his best interest to cry bloody murder. In my case he always wailed like the tornado drill at Wainscott Elementary on North Clifton in Cincinnati. The way he could turn it on, turn it off. Blast. Modulate. Blast.

Upside-down in his car seat, his feet where his head should be (one bootie on, the other long gone), that big head dangling down. How those eyes never seemed to bother with seeing anything superfluous. Like your lying-ass smile. He sneered right through you. He couldn’t talk yet, and maybe this was the true source of his power. Words would only get in the way of his seeing the essentials. Who would hate a baby?

We said Mavala Shikongo never laughed. It wasn’t true. It was that only he could make her do it. I mean laugh. Laugh like a banshee, as if she had the whooping cough, uncontrollable seal barks you could hear all the way from the principal’s house. Small, easy things like brushing his hair with a toothbrush, like stuffing a little mashed potato up his nose, would get her going with her croaking.

Goats skitter in from the veld through the late dusk, the blue light like falling smoke. Pohamba’s asleep, his early evening nap. I take a tub of Rama out of the food cupboard and scoop the margarine out and toss it onto the garbage pile beyond our fire pit. One of Antoinette’s roosters, the one with the spiky tuft of green hair, immediately converges, stunned — never has such a mother lode been delivered with such nonchalance. I leave him to his wonder. I walk up the road toward the principal’s house. She’s sitting on a bench outside her door, stirring pap over an open fire. Tomo sits up from rolling in the dirt at her feet and glowers at me. I hold up my empty tub.

“Anybody home? We’re out of margarine in the quarters, wondering if —”

Mavala jabs her thumb toward the window. Beyond the curtain I can see the fuzz of the television. The principal can’t get any reception from Windhoek, but he and Miss Tuyeni like to sit there and pretend they’re watching the shows they read about in the paper.

“My sister and her husband are being entertained,” Mavala says. “Would you like to sit and wait, Teacher?”

Her feet are bare. It’s either bare feet or heels. Immense attention is paid to Mavala’s footwear in the quarters.

“I asked if you’d like to sit, Teacher.”

“Sure.” I sit down next to her on the bench. She leans over the pot and stirs some more, then sets the spoon on the bench between us. She crosses her legs one way, then the other. Then leaves them uncrossed.

“You know, I wouldn’t be so fat if I was home working in the mealie fields. In the north, you strap a baby on your back and go to work in the fields.”

We’d been noticing this, that she’d sometimes say things that made you think she’d been having a conversation with herself and your presence was only incidental.

“Who said you’re fat?”

“I heard English whites don’t like fat women. The Boers like them fat.”

“I’m not English.”

“I’m bored,” she says. “Aren’t you bored?”

I watch her scratch her left ankle with her right toes. I stoop and pick up Tomo. I want, for a moment, to be closer to her feet. I start to bounce Tomo on my knees, but he goes for my eyes and I drop him. He snatches up my margarine tub and tosses it in the fire. She doesn’t seem to notice any of this. She looks at me, her eyes too big. Pohamba said no woman should open her eyes that wide, that a woman who advertised like that was either lying or crazy. I stare back at her with what I’m thinking looks like sensuous, but also intellectual, meaning.

She looks back at the pot.

“Why don’t you cook inside in the kitchen?”

“It seems my sister thinks my morals contaminate the food.”

“She said that?”

“She said I’m a slut.”

“Sluts don’t use kitchens?”

“Apparently not.”

I lean toward her sideways, with my eye on the small scoop in her neck, thinking this is the right angle for something, but she’s already off the bench, moving fast into the darkened veld, up and down a small koppie and out of sight.

She shouts to me, “Feed him for me, will you, please? Wait for it to cool.”

I spoon the pap into his bowl and set it on the bench. I watch the steam rise for a while. Then I call the monster and the monster comes. He plumps himself down against my leg and waits for his bowl.

Down the road, Antoinette hollers wash. “You boys, I want you washed, scrubbed, and pious. Ten minutes!” And the boys shout it back in all their languages. A babel of voices hollering wash.

In the house, there’s the subtle flick of the constantly changing white light. Miss Tuyeni laughs at something she thinks she sees. I watch Tomo eat.

Aboy in the hostel has night terrors. We are all accustomed to it now. We wait for him. It’s as if he does our screaming for us.

He’s screaming right now.

Pohamba bangs the wall. “Can’t sleep?”

“No.”

“Which boy do you think it is?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s he afraid of?”

“Look, let’s try and —”

“Mobutu can’t sleep either.”

“What?”

“Mobutu Sese Seko and his leopardskin hat. What keeps him awake? What’s he fear?”

“It’s two in the morning.”

“He fears Patrice Lumumba. Want one? A bedtime story?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Come now. We’ve nowhere to go but sleep. Answer. Why does Mobutu fear Patrice Lumumba?”

“I have no clue.”

“Good. You shouldn’t. Because Lumumba’s gone. They chopped him up in pieces and threw him in a barrel of acid.”