The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo

by Peter Orner

Genres: Cultural Heritage; Literary Fiction; Multicultural & Interracial Romance

Synopsis

Set in Namibia just after independence in the early 1990s, Peter Orner's first novel is a chronicle of the long days, short loves, and cold nights at Goas, an all-boys Catholic primary school so deep in the veld that "even the baboons feel sorry for us." Though physically isolated in semi-desert beneath a relentless sun, the people of Goas create an alternate, more fertile universe through the stories they tell each other. The book's central character is Mavala Shikongo, a combat veteran who fought in Namibia's long war for independence against South Africa. She has recently returned to the school -- with a child, but no husband. Mavala is modern, restless, and driven, in sharp contrast to conservative Goas. All the male teachers (including a bumbling but observant volunteer from Cincinnati) try not to fall in love with her. Everyone fails -- immediately and miserably. This extraordinary first novel explores the history of a place through the stories of its people. But above all it's about the fleetingness of love and the endurance of fellowship.

Release date: May 1, 2009

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 338

Sample

He was a big man and he prayed out loud in a small bed. Through the wall, his face in the mattress, and still we heard him.


Out of the deep I call

To Thee, O Lord, to Thee

Before Thy throne of grace I fall.

Be you merciful to me… Damn you, to me…

During the day he denounced God as residual colonialist propaganda. “Listen, if He was opium, I’d stuff him in a pipe and
smoke Him.” Pohamba. Resident Catholic school blasphemer, atheist, revolutionary, provocateur, math teacher. Even he turned
to a higher power when the long veld night closed us in. Who else could deliver him from such a place? A farm in the desert?
And what kind of god would put a farm in the desert? Pohamba was a man out of options. All traditional and earthly means had
failed. He’d sent countless letters to the Ministry of Education begging for a post in a town, any backwater dorp would do.
Dear Comrade, I’ll even accept a position south of Windhoek in order to do my share for this budding democracy.

Every one of them went unanswered. He often conjured those letters, talked about them as if they were castaways washed up
on some bureaucrat’s desk. And when he got going, a little Zorba in his veins, he’d describe the bureaucrat, Deputy Minister
So-and-So. Meneer Deputy Minister Son of Somebody Important in the Movement! Some bastard who spent the war years in Europe
while the rest of us sat here ja baasing P. W. Botha. He’d give his bureaucrat a smooth, freshly shaved face and a fat-cat corner office in the Sanlam Building. A
wristwatch big as a Volkswagen. And a secretary, of course, in a chafing skirt. White. Make her a white secretary. And he’d
imagine his letters, his babies, sitting stacked neat, unread, ignored. “Like to burn that office,” he’d say. “Watch Meneer
Deputy Minister Son of Somebody Important melt. Secretary too. Both of them black as char in the morning.”


Nights were different. And some nights it wasn’t Jesus he’d beg to but his mother. These were the longest. It wasn’t that
he kept me up when he talked to his mother. It was that I couldn’t hear him. Even with our walls made of envelope, I had to
press a coffee cup to the wall to listen. Mama oh Mama . . .

She was buried, he once said, behind a garage on a farm north of Otavi.

The hours drag on. Then the inevitable. Through the wall Pohamba moans low. The bedsprings noisy for a while before the death
silence of small relief.


But there were, weren’t there, also afternoons when you could have almost called him happy? Pohamba on a rock outside our
rooms, cooking bloodwurst, thick German plumpers he bought from the butcher Schmidsdorf in Karibib. Pohamba whistling. His
tape player spewing that horrid Afrikaner disco folk. Tinny synthesized drumbeats accompanied by sexy panting.


Saturday languoring. Wind, sand, boredom, sweat, visions of sausages. Eating our only glory then. The rest of us loll in the
sweaty shade while Pohamba forks bloodwurst. We lick our fingers, slowly. Pohamba moving in time. A big man but graceful.
His feet plap the dust. The rocks beneath our heads get hotter. Sleep refuses. Pohamba bobs. He skids. He twirls, juts, swags.
He wiggles a booty at us. In the pan, in the holy grease, our beloveds fatten and splurt.


A brother from the diocese drove me out there from Windhoek. His name was Brother Hermanahildis. He was a silent man with a
bald, sunburned head. The single thing he said to me in four hours was “I am not a Boer, I am pure Dutch. I was born in The
Hague.” He drove like a lunatic. I watched the veld wing by, and the towns that were so far between. Brakwater, Okahandja,
Wilhelmstal. Brother Hermanahildis seemed to be suffering from an excruciating toothache. At times he took both hands off
the wheel and pulled on his face. I was relieved when we reached Karibib and he turned onto a gravel road heading south. Eventually,
he let me off at a wind-battered tin sign—FARM GOAS—and told me to follow the road, that the mission was just beyond the second ridge. When you get there, Brother Hermanahildis
said, go and see the Father directly.


Ta-ta.

With a suitcase in each hand, one backpack on my back, another on my stomach, I followed the road, a rock-strewn double-track
across the veld. There were a number of ridges. I looked for one that might be considered a second one. The short rocky hills
made it impossible to see what was ahead on the road, although in the distance I could see a cluster of smallish mountains
rising. A few crooked, bony trees here and there. Strawlike grass grew like stubble up out of the gravel. Somehow I thought
a purer desert might have been more comforting. Where were the perfect rippled dunes? Where was the startling arid beauty?
These plants looked like they’d rather be dead. I listened to the crunch of my own feet as I shuffled up and over ridges.
There was no second ridge. There would never be a second ridge.


*

An hour or so later, sweat-soaked, miserable, I stood, weighted and wobbly, and looked down on a place where the land swooped
into a kind of valley, a flat stretch of sand and gravel. There was a group of low-slung buildings painted a loud, happy yellow.
There was a hill with a tall white cross on top. Hallelujah! As best I could I bumbled down the road until I reached a cattle gate made from bedsprings lashed to a post. The gate was
latched closed by a complicated twist of wire. As I struggled with the wire, a rotund man in a khaki suit moved slowly but
inevitably down the road toward me, as if being towed by his own stomach. When he reached the other side of the gate he stopped.
He faced me for a moment before he spoke much louder than he needed to. “Howdy.”


“Howdy,” I said.

“I see you are having some trouble with our gate.”

“A little.”

“In fact, you are unable to open it?”

“No, actually I can’t.”

“Of course not. You’re the volunteer?”

“Yes.”

“Volunteer of what?”

“Pardon?”

He wore large glasses. Behind them his eyes were tiny, distant, and his head seemed far too small for his body. Behind him,
up the road, a group of boys in powder-blue shirts had gathered to watch us. Under a lone and scraggled tree, a bored cow
gazed at me in that eerie, death-announcing way cows have of looking right through you.


“And your name might be?”

“Larry Kaplanski.”

He pumped my hand from the other side of the cattle gate.

“Pleasure, Mr. Kaplansk. So very good of you —”

“Kaplanski.”

His big head winced. He swatted a fly off his ear.

“And your qualifications, Mr. Kaplansk?”

“Qualifications?”

He took off his glasses and examined me. Without them his eyes got even smaller, receded into his head as if an invisible
thumb had pushed them in like buttons.


“I see. And what have you brought for us?”

I stared at him. Even with all the shit I’d lugged —

“To be expected!” he boomed. “You came under the presumption that you yourself will be of use to us? Oh, erroneous! Oh, so
erroneous!”


“But —”

“Be this as it may, Mr. Kaplansk. Of course it would have been far more advantageous to our development, yes, to our development, had you placed cash in an envelope and, well, to be frank, mailed it! Goas, Private Bag 79, Karibib, Namibia, 9000! Alas!
You didn’t!” He turned and raised a thick, baggy hand and swept it across everything in sight, the blue-shirted boys, the
cow, the infinite veld—all of it dry, everything everywhere dry.


“Brother Hermanahildas told me to see the Father.”

“Brother who?”

“From The Hague, Brother Hermana —”

“Listen.” He grasped the gate with both hands as if he were preparing to vault it. Then he leaned toward me and whispered,
“Have you not heard? No man can serve two masters, Mr. Kaplansk.” He backed away, appraised me again, gnawing the inside of
his cheek. “Do you understand the parameters as they’ve been succinctly explained this day of our Lord, March the sixth, nineteen
hundred and ninety-one?”


I nodded frantically.

“Very well! As long as you’re here, you’ll teach Standard Six. English and History.” He about-faced, whistled once, as if
he were followed by a platoon (and it was true, always the principal commanded an invisible army), and marched up the road
toward the cluster of school buildings. Some boys came down and helped me with the gate. The cow, without taking its eyes
off me, took a long, long piss.


In the beginning, none of the other teachers would much talk to me. As I had apparently come to Goas on my own volition, I
was suspect. Those first weeks I spent a lot of time cowering in my room in the singles quarters, pretending to write tediously
detailed lesson plans.


Mine was the room assigned to teachers who came and went. Rooms in the singles quarters were square boxes, each with one window
set low in the wall. From bed, I lived eye-level with the veld. My view was of the toilet houses, and beyond them the Erongo
Mountains that would always be too far to walk to.


The teacher who’d lived in my room before me had papered the walls with the German beer calendars that came free in the Windhoek Advertiser. Everywhere you looked were shirtless blonde buxoms in tight shorts. There was one girl in nothing but a red bandanna and
a Stetson staring down from the ceiling above the bed, her breasts like about-to-be-dropped bombs. One day I ripped her down,
and was tearing off the others when there came a knock on the wall. Then a voice, my neighbor’s, Teacher Pohamba’s: “What
are you doing, Teacher?”


“I thought I’d clean up a little.”

The noise of him lifting himself out of bed. He opened his door and came over to my window and squatted down. Then he stuck
his head through the torn screen. Teacher Pohamba yawned at me. It was meant, I think, to be a sympathetic, comradely yawn,
but it came out too big, like a kind of maw. “Hand over the tits, Teacher.”


I gave him the scraps and he stuffed them in his shirt pocket, but he remained outside my window. Teacher Pohamba pitied me.
Me standing there on the cement floor in my Walgreen’s shower shoes. “Go to sleep,” he said finally. “Don’t you know it’s
siesta?”


When the first study-hour triangle rang, he came to my window again and told me to follow him. Together, we walked across
the soccer field to the married teachers’ housing, to the circle of plastic chairs in front of Teacher Obadiah’s. The old
man was holding court. Everybody was still drowsy from sleep and only half listening. Teacher Obadiah wasn’t as old as he
liked to consider himself, but he was one of those people whose age baffles. He might have been fifty-five; he might have
been seventy-five. He reveled in the crevices of his face and his white hair. That day he had a week-old Namibian on his knee and was lamenting a story about corruption in the Finance Ministry of the new government. The only thing the
white government did fairly, Obadiah said, was teach the black government how to steal.


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 . . .