Peter Orner - The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

There’s a slowness in the shadow her elbow makes as she rubs the back of her head. The shadow creeps and retreats in the spastic flame. We watch each other. A mosquito weens in my ear, now soft, now blaring.

“Your sister?”

“Yes. I thought —” She leans back on my bed. “I don’t know what I thought.” Neither of us says anything else for a long time. Mavala stares at the ceiling.

A pound on the wall wrecks it, the silence of the night and of Mavala in my room, on my bed. Then more pounds. Three longs followed by two shorts followed by two more shorts and another long. “Has anyone been alone on this farm?” Mavala says. “For five minutes? Alone?”

“Not that’s been documented.”

“What’s he doing?”

“It’s Morse code. You were in a war.”

“We used satellite phones.”

I put my head to the wall and take in the pounds. Now it sounds like he’s using his feet.

“What’s he saying?”

“He says there’s a sale at the Pep Boys in Usakos. Thirty-five percent off on all beachwear and towels.”

She looks down at the bed. Her fingers are still crushing the netting. “Beachwear?”

A moment later, Pohamba’s colossal head rises from below the window. He puckers the screen like a fish. I run to lock the door, but I’m too late and he explodes into the room in nothing but flip-flops and briefs, leaps up on my bed. “Deliverance!” he shouts. “Mercy, mercy me! Comrade Shikongo joins the bachelors!”

“Shhhhhh, the kid,” she says. “You’ll wake the kid.” And Mavala wraps her arms around Pohamba’s bare legs and I watch the two of them leaping and laughing in the now frantic light. I remember this, how I sat there at my desk and watched them.

“Teacher!” Pohamba yells. “Boot’s on fire!”

We mobilize our nightclub, which Pohamba calls Zambezi Nights, after his favorite bottle store in Otavi. I pound the other wall and wake up Vilho, who begs to be allowed to sleep, but later materializes with a half bottle of Fanta. Pohamba goes to fetch Obadiah and Festus. Festus bolts right over. It will take Obadiah a little longer because, as everybody knows, Antoinette sleeps with one Cyclopean eye open. Later, he toddles over with a fresh pint of Cardinal Richelieu. “Brandy in the age-old French tradition,” he says. “For the European in all of us.” Pohamba fixes the tape player with a pen, and we, again, listen to Whitney Houston — before the tape player breaks (again). Pohamba rolls the last of his dagga. I boil spaghetti. Festus and Vilho dance to the memory of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (who loves me).” Mavala and I sit a little out of the circle, away from the fire, beneath the acacia. She takes a slug of the Richelieu and passes it on. Pohamba says Vilho dances like a Boer having a shit. “Move those hips, dear brother!”

“Oh, I gotta feel some heat with somebody,” Festus sings. “Yeah I really gotta…”

“It’s wanna,” Pohamba says. “Wanna feel the heat.”

Speaking of heat, we’ve none left. I’m still amazed by how it disappears in the night, even in summer, torn out of the sand by the dark.

“Is this the piss tree?” Mavala says.

“No, the piss tree’s behind Antoinette’s.”

She sniffs. “Are you certain?”

Mavala droops against me, then wakes, rights herself. Festus and Vilho collapse in a heap. Tomorrow morning looms. Festus gets up and dusts himself off, joins his plump hands in prayer. “Well, I’m off to bed, brothers and sisters. There’s Mass in the morning.”

“The priest is here?” Pohamba says.

“Back this afternoon from Swakop.”

“Bugger the pontiff,” Pohamba says.

“Please,” Obadiah says.

“I’m not Catholic,” Pohamba says. “I’m a Marxist revolutionary, and during the war I —”

“Taught fractions,” Festus says.

Pohamba stands. Sometimes when he’s drunk, he looks for reasons to pummel Festus. And Festus stands there blinking, waiting, trying to decide if he should run. Instead, Pohamba begins to sway — not to our dear Whitney, to something else. He dances by himself for a while, then slowly turns and looks at Mavala and begins to ramble, not angry, quiet, under his breath. “My mother was Catholic, bless her soul. But my own father fought barefoot at Omgulumbashe, and during the struggle I too —”

“I believe you,” Mavala says. “I believe you.”

Obadiah was holding up the bottle, toasting the ungreen earth and all of us impoverished beneath its moon, when the principal stalked into our circle from behind the toilet houses. Even then he wore a tie, yellow and blue stripes for Thursday, rammed up tight under his chin. He stood by what was left of the fire and looked us over. His glasses caught the last spark of flame in the coals. Obadiah crawled over to him on his knees and offered him the final swig of the Richelieu. Then he passed out at his feet. The principal seized the bottle by the neck and tipped it back. Then he nudged Obadiah with the toe of his shoe. “This is the Head Teacher with whom I am to build a new nation out of the ashes of war? Ha! Even Goas will fall into the sea.”

Without moving his head in her direction, he said, “A word, privately, Miss Shikongo?”

This was followed by a brief and strangely quiet exchange between the two of them in Kapapu’s old room. Pohamba held an enamel mug to the door but couldn’t catch a thing. That door, behind which so much else had happened. Then the principal charged out and headed straight across the soccer field toward his office without a word. We watched him unlock it and go inside. He sat there in the dark.

Mavala refused our help, either with her suitcase or the kid, who was in full fury at being woken up and taken from my sweat-reeking clothes. We watched her pull the case through the sand, up the road to the principal’s house, as Tomo flailed at her back.

Vilho shivering ecstatically in the cold church before the light. His knees on the concrete.

I only want to be alone, and still there’s desire? I don’t want Your blood, only Your touch. Sleep is only a brief reprieve. You watch. I wake slow. I come here and I bring You my tiredness, my empty hands, my inabilities, my bitterness, my unsatisfaction, my disgust, my cold knees. The fierceness of silence in the cold. The way each movement echoes here. You above on the wall. Plaster, broken-off leg. But it’s You, isn’t it?

An abandoned swing set. A single seat dangling from the crossbar. It was behind the hostel, where the reek of raw sewage made it a no-man’s-land. The smallest and poorest boys would go back there to shit. They couldn’t afford the toll the older boys made them pay to use the toilets. Some boy must have braved the stench to float for a while. You’d hear it. The screech was loud, and you could tell how fast he was flinging himself by the intervals when the swing reached as high as it could and the screws and the rust of the chain contracted. We’d hear it during class and wonder which truant was back there. And we could, if we bothered to, remember what it was like, that jolt, that drop.

Festus points to one of Auntie Wilhelmina’s whelps that’s trying to mount another of Auntie’s whelps and says, “That dog’s penis is too big.” Festus says things like this, things you might think but never say. Mid-morning break and us watching it. The dogs in the puddle beneath the standpipe, failing at it. The one dog, the mangle-eyed one, trying, trying again. His terrible red penis. It wasn’t that she was averse.