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PETER ORNER Pohamba 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.
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.
Contributor’s
notes
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