Peter Orner - The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

The dog, front paws paddling the air again, hind legs surging forward, a feeble dance. He’s on again. Whoops. No go.

Why remember this? Why relate it? Things that are not worth telling force themselves out in the open anyway. Like that sad dog’s unrequited erection. Animals fail to fuck and we get a half hour’s free entertainment. Antoinette damns us all to yet another level of hell. We liked to think Festus wasn’t as complicated as we were. He had too great a love of obvious observation. Things you were looking right at. But he was right, wasn’t he? That dog’s penis was too big.

“I didn’t think it was possible,” Mavala says.

“Oh, it’s possible,” Pohamba says. “Either that or her Switzerland’s too small.”

The triangle jangled and we all went back to class, left those dogs to themselves. Except Festus, who stayed to watch.

Later, after school, he told us that she finally gave up on him and bit Mr. Big Cock in the neck. And that’s when I tried, Vilho-like, to yank a moral out of it. I said, There’s something sad about those two unashamed dogs. The public nature of such doomed love. Their complete lack of grace. Those dogs are us, our own pathetic natures, our own fundamental inability to connect. .

Festus taught science. He said it wasn’t sad.

“What, then?”

“A matter of proportionality. It will never fit. I waited. I watched.”

“And if they love? Isn’t it sad that —”

Festus stared at me for a moment. “It doesn’t fit,” he said. “That’s all.” Then he scratched his belly and walked off toward his house, toward Dikeledi, and we watched him, squat and round, walking away. Festus was said to be trying to emulate the principal’s stomach. In this he was succeeding. And we thought of how unfair it all was, of a house free of sadness, of a floor free of sand, of soft underwear (Antoinette, who did our laundry, was morally opposed to fabric softener), of those waiting Dikeledian arms. .

I turned slowly to Pohamba. This our revenge? That Festus and Dikeledi can’t consummate? That no sexual congress convened in the purple house we’re all so jealous of?

Even we don’t wish this on Festus. We tried to think only happy thoughts. Nothing too big, nothing too small. Finally, Pohamba couldn’t help himself.

“Oh, that poor poor poor girl.”

“Don’t you go save her.”

“Do you think I am that low?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. “Never to friends.” He brightened. “Wait — Festus isn’t a friend.”

“Close.”

“Close isn’t a friend, friend.” And he bopped off toward the quarters and his waiting bed.

Ialways said, Sure, it’s hot here, but you don’t get the humidity like we do back home in O-hi-o. You see, back home in Hamilton County, we get what we call a wet heat, and no matter how bad it gets around here, there’s no humidity, and so it’s really not so… I stop saying all that.

Bloat of eyeballs. I have returned to a liquid state. I am a broiled pig melted down to sap. No cold water anywhere on the farm. We’d sent a boy around to beg for some, but neither the priest nor the principal would answer their doors. Water from the tap was at least eighty degrees. We had no choice but to remain in the sweaty, greasy shade of our rooms until the principal headed for Karibib and one of us could hitch a ride and bring back some Fanta. I lie on my bed and pant. I try to read Turgenev. Until his dying day, Chertopkhanov remained convinced that the blame for Masha’s treachery lay with a certain neighbor, a retired captain of Lancers by the name of Yaff, who, in Pantelei’s words, got his way just by perpetually twisting his whiskers, thickly oiling his hair and sniffing significantly… I toss Yaff on the floor and lust the walls, try to put together the pieces from the remains of my German calendar girls. Mother of God, to have them back intact. Unhelpful body parts bob across my salt fat eyes: How do you letch an elbow? I can’t sleep, won’t sleep, will never sleep. Too hot even for self-delight, the only exercise any of us ever got during siesta. And then in the swamp of this lost time, a faraway click. A sound like a door opening. I try to sit up and I think I see a blurry vision of Mavala moving toward my bed. She stands and looks down at me. Her eyes are still, but her lips are moving without words. Through the sog, I think I hear her breathing, but it too sounds as if it’s so far away. She kneels and rests her head on my stomach, where it rises and falls with my panting. That’s all. She says nothing.

At three-thirty, I woke up alone to Pohamba gargling.

We of course don’t have anything approximating your autumn here, but I have often imagined it. Beautiful, but also violent, no? Those leaves, not yet deadened, ripped off the only mother they’ve ever known, their hold on a branch. Here the sun beats and beats, and the plants, perhaps, come to expect it. Every day the homicidal sun. Your autumn, I’ve read about it, seems much like a sudden, wrenching death. Or do I misunderstand it from the leaf’s point of view?

Murmur not among yourselves.

JOHN 6:43

This morning the principal is lustful by way of Isaiah. Thus: so are we. Yea, we are greedy dogs who can never have enough. Thou shalt not. Thou shalt not what? Thou shalt not everything, because, yes, sinners, it’s everywhere. Lust grows out from under the rock like wattle bush. Lust needs no water for a thousand days.

And Mavala, next to Vilho, who’s next to me, reaches her foot over and nips the back of my shin with the tip of her heel. Then she says something into her coffee that I can’t make out. This is how we sometimes communicated, all of us, during the moral tale — through our slurps. And the principal is so loud we can sometimes talk under him. I drink and keep my nose deep in there, lean closer to Vilho, who pretends not to notice. I point my cup her way.

“What?”

“Bored.”

And myself, still early-early-morning dopish, gurgle back: “What?”

“Bored. I’m very bored.”

“Hast thou enough meatflesh, you insatiable whoremongers?” the principal booms.

And the fog begins to lift, and in a greedy yes covetous yes carnal whisper I nearly shriek into my coffee: Okay, so . .

She waits a moment. The principal is working himself up into a hyperventilating frenzy, dramatically flipping pages. “Siesta,” she breathes.

“He goeth after her straightaway as an ox goeth to the slaugh —”

“Where?”

Mavala aims the bottom of her cup at me, her eyes giant over the rim, steady, blinkless. “The graves,” she says. “The Voortrekkers.”

“Or as a fool to the correction of the stocks!”

She keeps them in an empty tin next to the Rooibos tea in the kitchen sideboard. Her vice. Her weakness. Her raisins. What is it about them that makes her crave their shriveled little bodies with such abandon? What makes her lust so overpowering there are times when she slinks into her own house in the smack middle of a working day to stuff a pluck of them in her mouth? Ugly emaciated things, like the shriveled tops of fingers left too long in the wash water. She hardly chews one before it’s gone and all she’s left with is an insatiable need for another. Savage gluttony. The original fruit comes wrapped in a package from the Pick ’n Pay. The devil is crafty. There is a psychologist in the office block next to the Mobil station, and there was even a time when she almost knocked on the door. I have only a small question, Doctor, concerning a small fruit. Otherwise I am healthy in the head. All I want is to control the passion. To bring it to heel. To leave a boiling cauldron of mealies, my post, my responsibility, to feed my face? Like an old hoer stealing across the sand to a tin in the sideboard. Hand pushing the door. The glant of sun on the sideboard. Fingers seize the tin. Leave your nose among them. How at first they don’t smell and then they do. A snort of sugared earth up the nostrils. Oh, filth. Ravish them. A vision of herself scurrying across the sand, the midday sun. Soon the boys will be lining up at the dining-hall door for lunch, spoons in hands. Temptation, fulfillment, emptiness. How can it be that the only cure for sin is more sin?