Peter Orner - The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

Now they say she’s back down south for good.

Sister Zoë worked at the clinic at Usakos, and she used to come every first and third Saturday with Sister Ursula and Sister Mary, out to the farm for sick call. The boys would line up in front of the hostel dining hall and go in one by one to be examined. There wasn’t a boy at Goas who wasn’t deathly ill those particular first and third Saturdays. If only to get touched by Zoë’s hands and sent away, condemned healthy. Sister Ursula was German, gaunt and old, with cracked hands. She’s been a nurse so long among blacks, people said, the woman thinks she’s a doctor. Sister Ursula would usually stand off to one side and wait, haughty, for hard cases. She carried antibiotics in a padlocked handbag. Sister Mary was the one the boys went to when they were actually sick, so sick that even the touch of Zoë meant nothing. Sister Mary was a large, shaky-breasted woman with a pocked face. She was from Malemba up on the Caprivi, a place, she’d said, that was so thick in the bush that once you left, you could never find home again. She laughed at the boys who were sick, called them God’s paupers. Come, little pauper, come; we shall take your temperature and then see what we find in Sister Ursula’s magic handbag. Sister Mary always gave out free Q-tips and plastic rosaries in multiple colors. But mostly those Saturdays were about Zoë and her hands on your body. Pohamba would stand and supervise the mob, and every once in a while walk to the front and push his way inside the dining hall and announce to Sister Zoë that he had cancer.

“Cancer all over. Heal the sick, Sister.”

And Sister Zoë would gaze at him from under the habit that people said was fake, a prop, and say in her soft, beautiful English, “Teacher, I counsel repose.” Because her hands were only for the boys. And Pohamba, who when he really loved was a total coward, would go back to policing the line. Later, he’d go on about how all he wanted was to lift her habit, not take it off, only lift it.

We’d see them come up and over the ridge, moving steadily toward the cattle gate. Their walk, how one never got in front of the other. Their white gym shoes. Their habits lifting vertical in the wind like the scarves of old-time pilots. And the boys would catch a glimpse of the top of their heads and begin shouting, “Swestas!” They always parked on the road, because once Sister Ursula got the van stuck in the last dry riverbed and vowed she’d never go through that hell again. Also, didn’t it look better for the Lord’s healers to come on foot?

One day only two appeared over the rise.

The story that got back to us was that she’d gone to administer shots in the location and was raped by a bostoto. Sister Ursula sent her back to Keetmanshoop. The boys — for months and, who knows, maybe years — thought only of her hands, how they barely touched you when they touched you, sending you away. Move on, healthy boy, move on.

Nothing is beautiful here except the beginning and the end of the day — which is never the beginning or end of his work — so beauty happens in the middle of unfinished jobs. There are dusks when night is less about light than the mountains. When the ridges of the Erongos seem to huddle and move forward, as if they — not the sky — will bury us.

Day work means the veld. Night work means the generator. It runs from around seven-thirty to eleven. Since it is constantly breaking down, Theofilus acts in the capacity of a nurse. He sits beside the generator in the generator shack, listening to the motor, waiting for some wrong sound in all that jangle. Those hours we have electricity, he sits there until eleven. When the lights suddenly pop off early, we know his fingers are working in the dark.

When he does finally go to his bed in the mission garage, he lies there and sips warm beer, if he has any, and falls asleep with his eyes open. His blue jumper hangs on a nail by the door.

Night swelt. The only wind is my own breathing. It’s after eleven and I’m marking compositions by candlelight. I’ve invented a candleholder. I propped a candle in a boot and tightened the laces. Boot light. The papers all begin with the line: Out in the veld I saw… Out in the veld I saw a kudu. Out in the veld I saw a broken tree. Out in the veld I saw too many dead people. Out in the veld I saw no money.

There’s a long scratch at my screen. I leap and knock over my chair.

“Who’s out there?”

“Did I scare Teacher?”

I carry my boot to the door. Her face is always different in person than when I think about it. Her face looms so large in my mind that when I see her I’m surprised how small it is. Only her eyes are huge tonight, like bobbing olives in the light of the candle. Tomo is slung on her back, his head lolling over her shoulder. At her feet is her mustard suitcase. She’s got on long pants, a rare thing.

“Scared me? You?”

“I saw you jump.”

“Normally my guests knock.”

“Ask me what I’m doing.”

“Not that I have any guests.”

She sits down on the suitcase.

“What are you doing?”

“Leaving.”

“Again?”

“For the moment, however, I’m moving over here.”

“Here?”

“Next door.”

“Next door? To Kapapu’s old room?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t want to do that.”

“Why?”

“A teacher got stabbed in there. With a bike spoke. You never heard the story? A new teacher comes and falls in love with the wife of another teacher and —”

Mavala snorts. “The stories of this place.” She stands up and seizes the handle of the case. “You aren’t very hospitable. Don’t you want to invite me in?”

I give way and Mavala’s in my squalor. My first official guest after Pohamba and Auntie. Goas is a life lived outside rooms. If our rooms aren’t sanctuaries, at least they are places to hunker in private. Mavala sets Tomo down in my laundry basket. He takes right away to my reeking socks. Then she pushes away my books and papers and clothes and takes a seat on my bed. I go back to my desk. Moths batter against the torn screen and for a while we listen to the soft thumping. Mavala begins to knead the mosquito netting and I remember it’s something my mother used to do when she came home from work exhausted, sit on her bed and knead the blanket.

I point to the candle on the desk. “What do you think of my boot?”

“Why don’t you stick it in a bottle?”

“No. See the boot is the whole point.”

“The whole point of what?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s probably a regulation against it.”

“I’m sure. And isn’t there a regulation against single women living in the quarters? Didn’t the principal do a tale on it?”

“Ask me if I’m going back there.”

“Something about temptation and how to keep it at bay. That the sobering influence of married people acts to tamp down —”

“Go ahead. Ask me.”

“Are you —”

“Die first.”

“I see.”

“I loathe this place.”

“So why’d you come back?”

She doesn’t answer, still that kneading. A moth careens into the flame. It tries to fly with a wing on fire before that’s the end of it. A sound like a wrinkle and smoke.

“Festus said you had a good posting in Grootfontein.”

She sighs, bounces a finger against her lower lip. “There was no Grootfontein.” She looks at Tomo, who is now on his stomach in the basket, his arms spread out like a tired swimmer, a pair of my underwear on his head. “Tomo was Grootfontein. He was waiting, at a friend’s. I never thought I’d come back. Then I thought with him so young, it might be easier here for a while. At least there’s a job, and I thought my sister —”