Peter Orner - The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

He was just lying there, his hands folded across his chest, his feet hanging off the bed, admiring it.

“Nice,” I said. “Who made it?”

“Eiseb’s brother.”

We both looked at the sign for a while. Then I went back to my own bed and thought about spies, about seeming to be one person and being another. Or were you both? Neither? At Goas, Pohamba was so completely Pohamba . What he wanted, what we all wanted, at times, was to be not only somewhere else but someone else. A friend, what was the challenge in that?

I mostly remember him in motion. Even when he was still, much about him was in motion. His eyes, his mouth, his jiggling knees. But the times I need to return to now are the rare moments he’s at peace. Him on that saggy mattress that’s too big for him. His head on his extorted pillows. His wardrobe door is open and his shirts hang neatly in plastic. His walls are bone-colored. Plaster crumbles in spots. On the same wall as the sign there’s a long, jagged crack that runs from the ceiling to the floor. (Sometimes we pour hot water in our cracks to kill the ants.) He’s there, reading his sign. A secret history of Pohamba? What of the horror of not having one, of being the person people think you are?

Sampie Prinsloo sells us vegetables. A jovial old-time Boer farmer who dresses the part. Veldskoens and no socks, khaki shorts, skinny legs holding up a belly like a small hillock. A cucumber dangling lazy out of his mouth like a cigar. No hat, just an exuberant bush of dusty hair. He’s also the Republic of Namibia’s most vocal local cheerleader. (“I’m a tough old bastard,” he’d say. “If I can survive forty years in this forsaken place, I can live through President Nujoma.”) Prinsloo was the first white in Karibib to line up for a new driver’s license. His bakkie is festooned with patriotic bumper stickers.

GLORY TO OUR PLAN HEROES.

TO EVERY BIRTH ITS BLOOD.

ONE NATION, ONE NAMIBIA, SOUND YOUR HOOTER.

Once or twice a month, he and his wife pull up to the cattle gate and Prinsloo jams that hooter. Then he gets out and waits. His wife stays in the car. Apparently she doesn’t share his enthusiasm for getting to know the neighbors now that things have changed so much. The boys come running out of the hostel or off the soccer field, springing over to him, and Prinsloo shouts, “Go back and get your money, boys!”

And the boys say, “We’re poor, meneer, very poor boys. We have nothing, meneer, nothing.”

“You think this fruit of the earth is free? You think I’m Communistic?”

And the boys in chorus say: “Not Communistic. Meneer is very generous.”

Prinsloo sighs and cackles and takes his cucumber out of his mouth and spits and shows his golden teeth and then yanks out a box of small carrots and starts tossing them in the air. The boys leap for the carrots. High in the air for those runt carrots. Not because they’re hungry, but because they’re free and this is a game they still enjoy.

Dankie my baas! Dankie my baas!

Eventually, we the teachers walk down the road. We take our time. We are dignified teachers and we will not jump for carrots. No Boer’s monkeys are the teachers. Antoinette carries down her knives. (Prinsloo is also the local knife sharpener.) And we look over the merchandise like discriminating shoppers. Prinsloo watches me put back a pumpkin. What? The United States doesn’t appreciate my vegetables? How about a nice squash for the U S of A? How about green peppers, Brussels sprouts, oranges, corn, spinach, kumquats, lemons, pawpaws, okra, pears, pomegranates, eggplant (aubergine, Obadiah corrects)? Because there is nothing Prinsloo can’t grow. The man grows cotton on the edge of the Namib. We pay our money to his wife, who watches us with small, suspicious eyes behind the dirty windshield. Then we head toward our rooms, our arms now piled high with the bounty of a suddenly miraculously generous earth. It helps that Prinsloo has the only irrigable standing water of any farm along the C-32. Still, he pretends it has less to do with his groundwater levels than his magic hands. Prinsloo’s hands, gnarled, fattish, beet-red.

Quiet out here during most of the bad years leading to independence. The eighties were years of calm, when Goas settled into its mission of churning out farm boys with sufficient arithmetic, Afrikaans, and Fear of the Lord. The shooting at the Old Location in this country, Soweto, Sharpeville, Steven Biko in South Africa — all that happened on some other planet. Yet it is true that one boy did burn down a classroom here in 1985, an event that now stands as Goas’s proudest antiapartheid moment. At the time it was considered pure terrorism. The boy, Lucas Nambela, was sent down south to the juvenile prison in Mariental. That it was our current principal who whipped Lucas Nambela is an unspoken truth and one of the contradictions by which Goas runs. The principal does not discuss the particulars of back then. The revised truth is that everyone who was here believed in the cause of righteousness, all are survivors of apartheid’s unmitigated evil and oppression. Lucas Nambela was a freedom fighter. The classroom he burned down was the school science lab. Four years later, on the eve of independence, the diocese in Windhoek sent Goas new equipment. Men came out with state-of-the-art everything: lab tables, sinks with running water, microscopes. There are beakers and flasks. Safety goggles. Hazardous chemicals. Bunsen burners! To this day no boy has touched any of it. The principal keeps the place locked up like a gleaming shrine. The Lucas Nambela Memorial Classroom. Even Festus, who’s the science teacher, can’t use it.

The principal Scotch-taped his edict to the door:

The equipment inside this room is very expensive. It took many years after the patriotic incident of 1985 for this equipment to arrive. There is too much risk involved in the use of this equipment at the present time. An inventory is being conducted. Following this inventory, the lab will be opened in limited circumstances. The public shall be apprised of any progress in this matter.

Meanwhile, we all peek in and look at the shiny hardware. Our own museum of the future, right there, two classes down from the principal’s office. A form of worship to look at all that new stuff through the glass.

Across the courtyard, Festus teaches photosynthesis. Sometimes he points to the shackled class and says, “Behind that door, all that I’m telling you may be proved before your eyes.” A sort of heaven waiting. There were times we wondered if it wasn’t for the best. Bunsen burners get clogged. Beakers shatter. Crucibles rust. Theories go to hell. Let all remarkable things remain in the realm of perfection, of order. .

There are no nights to remember, because we never had any. Out there by the graves after lunch. Only those stark early afternoons when the day died a little and everybody else wilted on their beds. Could we have snuck some nights? Probably, but first of all there was Tomo, and second, there was something about the lunacy of anybody being out in the veld during siesta. Weekdays only. (Weekends were too risky; Saturday and Sunday were like all-day random siestas, and you never knew who’d wander out in the veld.) We bucked the schedule of life at Goas, and this was somehow a small thrill, the best we could muster. We’d come from different directions and be shocked to see each other.

What a surprise —

Couldn’t sleep. The heat.

And how is Grieta today?

Still dead, I’m afraid.