Peter Orner - The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

Mavala proclaimed the creation of a Goas music department. She had some boys on punishment clear out the storage room. The piano was the lead story in the first edition of The Goas Harbinger .

Obadiah wrote:

What is significant, friends, brethren, Goasonians, about music and our impending new piano is that it is the physical embodiment of God’s infinite varieties. Eighty keys! Give me eighty keys and I give you the miracle of creation itself. On behalf of Goas, I wish to extend our heartfelt gratitude to Kaplansk’s long-suffering mother, Saint-in-waiting Sylvia Kaplansk, for this remarkable bestowal upon our humble institute of learning. .

Festus, Pohamba, and I rode out in the priest’s lorry, Theofilus driving, to fetch it. And, returning, we were like triumphant combatants. Pohamba stood on the crate and gyrated, drunkenly fingering “Tea for Two” on Festus’s head. So many boys wanted to help lift the box that two Standard Fours got trampled. Even the priest and the principal stood side by side at a small ceremony in the piano’s honor, the crate at their powerful feet. The two of them stood there with their pregnant-looking stomachs and refused to look at each other. Church versus state in the battle of the chubbies. The principal announced music, the great equalizer, the future of African democracy. The priest offered that music was the most direct path to salvation of our corrupted souls. Mavala wept with joy for music. Tomo waddled over and took a chomp of the crate.

So. All night. All night we tried. Maybe because at heart we were optimists, even Pohamba. Maybe at our cores we adhered to Vilho’s benevolent view of mankind. All night we hammered. We sawed. We nailed. We glued. We prayed. We schemed. We didn’t leave the new music room until eight o’clock the next morning, when we held a press conference in the courtyard to announce that the random shit in the box could no more be made into a piano than the feathers of a slaughtered dinner rooster could be pushed back together to make a live bird. Mavala wept again, this time with rage.

“Who are you people to send that across the ocean?”

I found myself defending Bebe Pomerantz and the good people of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was possible, wasn’t it, that the stuff in the box — some wood planks, a multitude of keys, some wires, brass pedals — could have had a prior career as an actual piano?

“Rough passage?” I suggested.

That night we went out to Goas Stonehenge — an assortment of large granite boulders lacking in mystery — and roasted a goat on the remains of that piano. Festus slit its throat, I held it down with my knees as if it were Bebe Pomerantz and reveled in its childlike screams. And we drank to that piano’s second and final destruction. Mavala stood up in her heels on one of the boulders and, with a fist of meat in one hand, said, “Tonight, I curse Cincinnati, curse it beyond —”

“It’s already cursed,” I said.

And Mavala, drunk and furious, ignoring me and the rest of us, twisting and wiggling in the windblown smoke, in the hectic light of the fire. I wanted to stand up there and let her rail in my ear, but I stayed in the shadows in my Ohio shame and composed:

Dear Kaplansk’s Long-Suffering Mother,

I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry for so many things, and so please understand that I am even more sorry than usual to say that I will never, as long as live, and may this apply also to my corpse, set one cold toenail again in Cincinnati, Ohio. Rest assured, I’m in good hands. Her name is Mavala Shikongo. You always said you were the first person to admire spunk. I think of your passion for Geraldine Ferraro. I’d like you to meet my destiny, my destination, my disintegration. A former guerrilla fighter. She can take apart an AK-47 in seventeen seconds. Now she teaches kindergarten. Please tell Bebe thanks so much for the piano.

All my love,

Kaplansk

Other days it was less that the sun rose than that the veld seemed to pull itself up out of the darkness on its own volition. I woke up drowsy to the horizon’s slow bleed. In my left hand was a high heel. Everybody else had somehow managed to get back to their beds. Only Obadiah and I were still out there. The piano was no longer, except some keys hadn’t burned. They were scarred and blackened but intact, as if mocking our attempts to incinerate them.

I shook Obadiah awake and we started back. I carried Mavala’s shoe stuffed in my pants. A rare dawn wind lifted the veld, and we moved slowly against the gusting sand, our bodies weighing nothing.

She’s gnawing a pear, and pauses in chewing to accuse me of not having any money. Since Americans are supposed to have money, I must have thought coming here was an easy way to make a fortune — typical colonialist model, I’m out here only to loot.

“What’s here to loot?”

“That’s what I can’t understand.”

“Anyway, I’ve got money.”

“How much?”

“A little.”

“Where is it?”

“Stocks.”

“Stocks! Capitalist carnivore, It’s in stocks … You could, though, have a bigger enogo. Isn’t that what they say in America, that the blacks have these monster penises? Do people believe such things?”

“My grandfather was a pants jobber. I’m the proletariat.”

“So you have no comment on this penis issue?”

Words dissolving, muffled so as not to wake Tomo — rolling across the tablecloth we hid in the rocks. It was an old checkered one. Antoinette had given it to us so that Pohamba and I would eat less like jackals. Every time we went out there, we had to shake the sand out of it. Gradually we began to smuggle other stuff and hide it behind the graves. A pillow, a mattress cover, an umbrella (which we used to protect us from the sun, but that made us too hot), a can of Doom for the ants, library books. Afternoons of flung clothes. You couldn’t call it an escape, because we didn’t go far and we didn’t go long. Mavala unbuttons slow. One button at a time, and then she stands and yanks off her dress. And I have to think it again, remember it again. Unbuttoning slow, pushing plastic through penny slits. Not looking at me, looking at the veld. Then she stands and yanks her dress over her head. She yawns. No claims about the sex we had, only the sex we didn’t have. The sex we imagined was superior. The sex we had was hurried, diminished by the heat, sand-irritated. She rips open a condom with her teeth. And then only us and the sand crickets we try not to roll over and kill.

“Davey?”

“Yeah?”

“Davey Concepcion?”

“Yeah.”

“Touch me.”

“Where?”

“Here.”

“Here?”

“And a little lower.”

“And here. Wait, Davey, slow, Davey, too fast, Davey —”

The court decrees that the porter who ate his bread by the smoke of the roast has duly and civilly paid the cook by the jingle of his money… Case dismissed.

RABELAIS

Progress, Obadiah would often espouse, is having an efficient legal system based solely on principles of fairness and blind justice. One day he received a certified letter from the law firm of Tuhadeleni, Enkono, Sheehama & Partners, Windhoek.

Dear Sir,

We beg forthwith to inform you that herein described vehicle, Datsun 180 B, 1979, VIN # 3972268377AC12, currently in your possession and under your control, is the subject of an ex parte application filed at the magistrate’s court, Windhoek, under a rule nisi attaching said vehicle. Cur avd vult. (Dated May 31, 1991.) Duly filed by S. Vivier on behalf of legal practitioners, Tuhadeleni, Enkono, Sheehama & Partners, Windhoek. Note that said action being duly filed resulting therein from an outstanding balance under a repair lien in the sum of rand 32,185.11. (Dated April 11, 1977.) Please see standard established under Rule 59 (a) in support thereof, providing that attachment be made on a vehicle alienated without balance duly forthwithed in full. Please also see Amalgamated Engineering v. Minister of Labor (1949) (3) SA (A) 337 at 661, as the person claiming to be lien holder will have direct and substantive interest in the subject of said lien. Further see In re: Tokien Butchery (1974) (4) SA (T) 893.