Peter Orner: The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

Pohamba drummed his cheeks awhile and said, “Politicians: black, white, bowlegged — what’s the difference? Let’s hear the weather.”

Obadiah flipped some pages and read. “In the north, hot. On the coast, hot. In the east, very hot. In the central interior —”

“Have mercy!”

Eventually, Obadiah turned my way and tried to bring me into the fold of the conversation. He asked me what I thought of noble Cincinnatus.

“Who?”

“You say you hail from Cincinnati?”

“Yes.”

Obadiah made a roof over his eyes with his hand and peered at me. “Well then, of course, I speak of its namesake, the great Roman general Cincinnatus. Surely, you must —”

“Sorry, I —”

“And you have come here to teach our children history?”

“Is he in the Standard Six curriculum?”

“By God, if he isn’t he should be! Gentleman farmer, reluctant warrior, honest statesman. When people needed him, he ruled. When the crisis was over, he returned to a quiet life on his farm. Not a farm like this, a proper farm. Had Cincinnatus lived here, he wouldn’t have come back. He would have done anything to avoid such a fate — even, I daresay, become a tyrant.” Obadiah put his hands on his knees and leaned forward on his plastic chair.

“Why are you here, young Cincinnatus?”

“I have no idea.”

“He tore down Nakale’s calendars,” Pohamba said.

Obadiah stood and began to pace the dust, his hands behind his back. “The beer girls? Interesting. I must admit that on occasion I peeped in there to have a look. I too once had desires. I have since forgotten what they were.” He wheeled and faced me. “Why did you do it? Were you intending to moralize?”

“I wanted to be alone,” I said.

“Ah!” Obadiah brought his hands together as if to applaud me, but stopped short and whispered, more to himself than to me, “Don’t worry. You’re alone.”

Morning noise: The murmurs of the boys coming from church, the slap of their bare feet on the concrete porchway, the slow whish whish of the lazy classroom sweepers, boys on punishment from the day before.

Every morning meeting, before school, the principal told a moral tale. We’d stand more or less at attention, half listening, gripping our coffee, watching the unburnished gray light leak through the staff room’s single window. Not the sun; full sun wouldn’t happen for an eternity.

Often the principal’s stories came from the Bible. Other times the lessons were taken from the newspaper or from some gossip he picked up at the Hotel Rossman in Karibib. Most of the time — wherever they came from — they were somehow related to the principal’s guilt over one of his own vices. That morning he must have been suffering pangs over his embezzlement from the school till.

He wore a different tie for each day of the week. It’s how we knew what day it was. As he spoke, his Adam’s apple thrashed beneath his yellow Wednesday tie, as if, as Obadiah once said, his poor conscience was trying to escape his lying throat.

“Listen, colleagues,” he commanded. “Seriously and piously. This happened near Angra Pequena a hundred years ago, but indeed, it could have happened yesterday.” He paused and swallowed, allowed this thundering fact to settle upon us. “Let us say it did happen yesterday. Yes, yesterday. Three skeletons were found in the unforgiving sands of the Namib. God didn’t create our desert. Hark! The Namib was born of God’s forgetting. He’d always meant to come back and put something here, but alas, he didn’t. So it goes with this country. Let us return to today’s tale: Two of the skeletons were found together, the third on a dune about a kilometer away. All three were partially covered by sand and of similar age and weathering.”

He paused and eyed us all, one by one. He lingered at Pohamba, who was teetering, fighting hard to keep his eyes open and his knees from buckling.

“Erastus?” the principal said.

Pohamba had a new girl in Karibib. He hadn’t landed on his own bed in two days. He still had on his white ducks and silky disco shirt #7. The principal was the only one at Goas who called him Erastus.

“Erastus, will you summarize?”

Pohamba licked his chapped lips. “Three skeletons,” he said. “Two found together. The other not far away. It is curious. In fact, I would even say it smells.”

The principal resumed, not satisfied, but not willing to derail the tale at this point for the sake of telling Pohamba what he thought of him. “Indeed. The first two skeletons were found with their heads staved in. The head of the third was uncrushed. And in the thin whitened bones that once enjoyed the skin of a fist, the third held”—he pointed a vicious finger at Pohamba—“what?”

“His member,” Pohamba said.

Even the principal laughed, his cheeks filling up and exhaling like bellows. The problem was, we laughed longer, and whenever that happened, he changed sides. He ducked under the table and returned with his shoe and proceeded to pound, Khrushchev-like, for order.

“No, Erastus, he didn’t need that anymore. And mark me: Yours too will wither . No, I speak of something far more lasting. In the hand of the third skeleton… diamonds! After he murdered his two friends, he was going to leave the desert a king. In the wind and sand, he gripped those immaculate stones. Imagine how tight and with what hope he must have clutched them in the long Namib night!”

Now the principal guffawed, happy to pawn his shame off on someone else. “Oh, you smelled something, Erastus.” He brought his fingers to his nose and gave them a smell. “Oh yes. And I do also. Satan lurks this morning. I smell corruption. I smell evil. Is not lust merely another form of avarice? God forgot the Namib, but he remembered to punish the third man, and He, in All His Glory, won’t forget grown teachers who chase young strumpets and neglect their duties to learners either. When are you going to be too old, Erastus? For the love of God, woe unto you, woe!”

The principal took a breath, crossed himself.

“And yet, I do forgive you, Erastus, I forgive you your filth, your rot, your disease.”

That afternoon, we climbed up the hill and sat beneath the cross. I watched the Erongos retreat beyond the blurry sheen of afternoon heat. The sky was like watered-down milk. The goats wandered languidly along the paths in the veld. And we talked and we talked. Pohamba said he had a brother Josiah who worked for CDM in the south and got caught stealing diamonds he’d shoved up his ass. Obadiah said, You’ve got more brothers than the principal has sins to atone.

“Truth,” Pohamba said. “They caught him on X-ray. He’s still in prison at Oranjemund. That was four and half years ago.”

“How’d they get them out of there?” I asked.

“Laxatives.”

This all got Obadiah started in on the diamond fields and how Adolph Lüderitz bought a tenth of the world’s wealth for three hundred breechloaders and a wagonload of cheese. And of course Vilho — who everybody said still had faith in God (that’s how people described him, Vilho who still has faith in God ) — couldn’t help himself from adding that Lüderitz drowned in the Orange River after his boat tipped over. “He never got rich,” Vilho said. “The man didn’t live to sell a single stone.”

“And his descendants?” Obadiah shouted. “And his descendants’ descendants’ descendants?”

But Pohamba didn’t want to talk about history or the wicked getting their just deserts or God’s sense of justice. He wanted to talk about his brother Josiah, who was still in prison at Oranjemund for shoving diamonds up his ass. “One carat,” he said, and turned around, bent over, and talked to us, his big melon head between his thighs. “Or two?”