Peter Orner - The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

“And you’re an old souse,” Mavala said.

“Try,” Obadiah said. “Try and dance.”

And they did try, the two of them, in the road, in the sand. Mavala pulled off her heels. Even without them she was as tall as he was. Still, they were an awkward pair. When he went forward, she went forward, and their heads knocked together. Finally, he dropped his hands and peered at her curiously, as if he were trying to read something in bad light. “There’s something else,” he said. Up the road, the boys were coming back from the dining hall, gripping half-eaten carrots.

“What?” Mavala said.

Obadiah moved toward her, and reached out to her without touching; his hands only hovered over her shoulders. “My father never drank a drop. But — and I have never in my life forgotten this cruelty — that day as my father waxed triumphant in the road about the Sevastopol Waltz, my mother said, softly, because she knew she need not shout it, ‘Better a man drink.’”

Obadiah stood in the road and looked at his feet. Mavala raised her hand and swatted, almost gently, the beak of his TransNamib hat.

The triangle rang, and we stood up and brushed off our pants and gathered our stray pens. There was a knob on Festus’s forehead from his knee. As we started back to our classrooms, Obadiah called out, “May I add an addendum?”

Nobody turned around.

“My mother had, it’s true, exquisitely long legs. Are there not days when a son may imagine how they might have looked?”

One woman delouser. Pest Control Queen. Antoinette stalking the rows of beds in the boys’ hostel. The only instruments necessary are her hands, long-fingered, clawlike pinchers. No meek shampoos. She needs to feel the crush of death in the skin. One by one she tweaks the lice and squeezes. Hygiene as spectacle and Antoinette the unhooded executioner. Boys at attention! Your bodies are living, breathing, sweating violations! Their bunks are so close together she has to walk sideways. Boys, boys, boys. So many heads to inquisition. Boys, year after year, boys. Scalps! Underarms! Pubic nesting grounds! Lift your arms, Matundu. Pants down, Shepa. Your head, Titus, bow it! And then one day a boy simply says, No. My head is my head. Unhooded halts. Examines recalcitrant. Eyes his eyes, her pupils colossal. Antoinette is less alarmed than fascinated. Being stood up to is always something she’s wondered about. A tyrant without opposition gets very bored. Napoleon was said to have dreamed sweetly of defeat. And didn’t Stalin await the poison, half loving the notion of martyrdom? Antoinette halts, looks the boy up and down. He’s sitting on his bunk. His feet don’t reach the floor. She doesn’t know him. He’s not a thief, a vandal, or an arsonist. The good ones blur together. Why is it we remember only the hoodlums? His defiance isn’t even very spirited, and yet it’s unequivocal. His little legs in shorts. The dirty bottoms of his little feet. His clean powder-blue shirt. (Clearly he follows some regulations.) His slightly ovaled head and bags beneath his eyes. Does this boy ever sleep? He stares: Do what you want to me, old bitch, but my head is my head.

“Surname?”

“Axahoes, Mistress.”

“Common name?”

“Magnus.”

“Standard what?”

“Six, Mistress.”

“So small a Standard Six?”

He doesn’t answer this, looks at his feet as if they explain so small a Standard Six.

“From which place?”

“Andawib West.”

“Farm?”

“Of Meneer Pieterson. Kalkveld district.”

“Parents?”

“Father.”

“Mother?”

He sits silent. One leg twitches.

“Stand up.”

He gets up off the bed. The other boys stand mute, but their eyes are swarming.

“Bow your head.”

“No, Mistress.”

“Why not? You suspect vermin? An infestation? You’re afraid?”

His eyes want nothing, not even for this to end. Such a rare thing. You can’t drain the want out of your eyes no matter how hard you try. Even the dead want everything back, which is why the undertaker either closes their eyes or blocks them with a penny. But this boy. Not even sorrow, as if he knows that above all sorrow is only pride. Train your eye to watch a single mosquito. You can never concentrate enough. Since she was a child, she’s tried to follow the course of just one. It’s impossible. You can only hope to get lucky when it flings back into your vision. But this boy’s eyes, because they see nothing else, could probably do it. She thinks: Your mother, child. The world is full of dead mothers, to the hilt with dead mothers. Jesus in his meekness, and you claim the right to be haughty? Your affliction’s greater? Still, she pities him, she loves him. This is not a standoff. This is a breath before a rout. She raises her hand and breaks him on the hostel floor like a donkey.

Storyless lump. To Goas his sole importance was that he had transport. A car, two bakkies, a lorry, a tractor. Our Father of Goas captained a fleet. It was like being on a desert island with half a dozen rescue boats. Except there was a catch. Only Theofilus was permitted to drive any of them, and he could use them solely for official church business, which did not include the business of teachers.

For a mostly doughy man, the Father had very square shoulders. In his robes he looked like a box dressed in a tablecloth. No one knew him well enough to hate him. He’d been at Goas only a few years. He spoke in an oddly high-pitched voice, and, it was said, there was something in it that harked backward. Whether fair or unfair, people sometimes said it was because Father was “coloured,” and so a half-step closer to being white under the old — just recently old — laws. Myself he ignored. He once asked me what my faith was, and when I told him, he said, “So Windhoek sent us a pagan?” Then he shrilled something that might have been a laugh and marched off.

He kept a German shepherd in a pen — sequestered from Auntie Wilhelmina’s whelps. He loved the dog and would feed it fresh kudu bones. One day this pampered dog escaped and stepped on a puff adder in the veld. It dragged itself back home and stood howling in front of the rectory for its master. We all stood around and watched its neck balloon. Then the dog begin to convulse and choke. Eventually, Father came out and brained it with a hammer.

The priest had two rules, as opposed to the principal’s countless ones. No drinking and no fornicating among unmarrieds. The first one wasn’t enforced (the priest was known to indulge in vermouth). The second didn’t need to be.

Why the principal, by far the loudest Catholic on the farm, and Father despised each other was a mystery. It probably had something to do with the nationalization of schools, which happened after independence. This made for a sense of confusion as to who truly ruled Goas. The principal ran the school, but the school was on Church property. The teachers of Goas saw it this way: The principal owns our asses; the priest, whatever’s left of our souls.

There was a strange story about the two of them. An inexplicable story, with no beginning and no end and no point whatsoever.

One morning the priest found the principal asleep on the rectory roof.

What was he doing up there? Spying?

Nobody knows.

Why’d he fall asleep? Was he drunk?

Wouldn’t you get drunk if you had to spend the night on a roof?

Yes. What was he doing on the roof in the first place?

I said, Nobody knows. .

Even more than her lipstick and her baby-blue eye shadow and her skimpy skirts, it was Mavala’s enthusiastic organ playing that drove the priest out of his gullet. Wednesday night was officially English night in church. Any ordinary Sunday or daily morning Mass — if he happened to be at Goas, often he wasn’t, the Erongo region being short on priests — the Father spoke a kind of apocalyptic-sounding Afrikaans. Nothing but hell awaits you boys who flout your immorality under God’s all-seeing eyes… Wednesday nights, though, he left off the pulpit fist-banging. It was said that he resented the edict handed down by the bishop in Windhoek, out of deference to the new constitution, that English be spoken in church at least once a week. It seemed that Father wanted to show everyone that Afrikaans was still the language of a thunderous God. So, on English night, he tweeted his homily. And the boys took his cue. They knew it was safe to fall asleep in church on Wednesday. The older boys brought pillows and sprawled out on the back benches. In the front pews the sub b’s fell asleep, collapsed onto one another’s shoulders, their little heads lolling, their tiny kneecaps digging into the wooden slats as they endured painful but merciful sleep.