PETER ORNER

The House of Commons

The boys had been invited to compete in a track meet in Omaruru. We were the coaches. It was Obadiah, Festus, Theofilus, Vilho, and me. Pohamba had slept in. He refused to wake up. We tried the pot-gong treatment, but that morning he was gone, a smile on his face. Maybe he was fouling wives in his dreams. Theofilus drove everybody in the priest’s lorry. All of us and the boys, in the back, getting jolted like cattle.
 
I remember, near Kalkveld, we passed the remains of an abandoned petrol station where there was an old man standing on the cracked concrete beneath a Shell logo on a pole. The two decrepit pumps were like tall headstones. The old man stood so still that, to me, he looked like a third one.

Vilho was the only coach who stayed to coach. This was all right because except for Pohamba none of us knew a thing about track. Our coaching mostly consisted of shouting: RUN FASTER! PLEASE RUN FASTER!

After the first couple of events, we walked up the hill to have a drink at The House of Commons. The House of Commons has no chairs. The regulars drag plastic ones from home and sit outside and talk about women and the price of goats. Since we were from out of town, we leaned against the wall of the bar. Down in the valley our boys were running their hearts out on the new sports field. The local beautifuls were still in their beds. It was three o’clock on a Wednesday. 

Behind the bar in the windowless House of Commons (a shipping container with a door), in the blue vaporish light of the paraffin lantern, stood the proprietor Silent Doke. He was a trollish man whose head was the only thing visible above the bar. He was reputed not to have spoken a word in many years. It was said a certain disappointment had turned him mute. The unknown source of his disappointment was the subject of much meaningless conversation, a kind of right of passage at the House of Commons.

“Politics,” Obadiah says. “Or love?”

I vote for love. Festus votes for the weather. Theofilus doesn’t vote for anything.
“The weather!” Obadiah says. “Who dies for the weather? Oh Romeo, it’s cloudy! Have you not a drop of poetry in you? Not a drop?”

“Cloudy?” Festus says and slumps his rotundity to the shadowless ground. I do too. There’s a shard from a broken Tafel bottle in my ass and I pluck it out. We sleep in the urine-smelling dust. Goats, according to a man who seems to know what he’s talking about, are, on account of the drought, down to forty-five Rand for a robust female.

Later, Vilho comes and wakes us up, announcing that Magnus Axahoes dropped the baton in the relay, but that Rubrecht Kanhala won both the 550 and the 880. Oh, Kanhala, Kanhala, Kanhala. May we ride your glory back to Goas and tell about it as if we’d seen it. That bizarre way you had of running with your eyes not looking straight ahead, but up, as if where you were headed had not a single thing to do with anything.

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