PETER ORNER

The Tar Road

Boys stand with road-sore feet holding cardboard suitcases. They stand clustered, but not in a group. They’re not together. They don’t talk into the wind; they only wait on the brake lights that so rarely happen. Still, every new car or bakkie or combi or lorry is a new hope, rising and dying like a beating heart glowing and then spending itself on the pavement, only to live again when the next one comes. Out there in their best clothes, trying to get to the school deep in the veld. At certain moments in the early afternoon the tar road looks like it’s burning. A boy kneels and sniffs. There’s always one who thinks he can tell how much longer it will be by smelling the road.

“Stupid,” another says.

“Not stupid, science. It’s about air currents near the pavement’s surface. They change when—”

“Ai, go on.”

“Where? Go on where?”

They’re hungry, but you don’t want to pull out food, because no one would want to be caught chewing if the miracle of car does stop. Imagine a comfortable ride in a bucket seat with the radio playing. They keep their bread in their pockets. Boys have it worst. They are chosen last, after old mammies, mothers with babies, old men. Most of the time their only option is a lorry. Lorries don’t stop, they only slow down, just long enough for the boys to toss their bundles and leap, before the driver shifts gears and accelerates again. Klim op! Then they huddle against each other in the wind and wait for it to be over, as the lorry gains speed and begins to cross bridge after bridge over the dry rivers.

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.

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.

3. The Volunteer
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.

Walls

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.” 

Obadiah

Days pile high. We loaf long against the doors of our rooms. Obadiah’s on his back under the Mapone, his upper body in the shade, his lower in the full sun. He reads out loud from a week old Namibian that he is holding over his head like a tarp:

February 12. Kuisebmond Location, Walfish Bay: An as yet unidentified twelve year-old boy was found in the cemetery adjoining the playground of the Kgobetsi primary school at Kuisebmond West Location yesterday evening. Police estimate the time of death to have been between twenty-one hundred and twenty-three hundred hours Tuesday Night. The boy was found disemboweled.

Then, speaking not to us, not to anyone listening anyway, he says, “A reporter wrote that. Byline: Oswald Kambabi. The boy was found—First Oswald scribbled the word down on a pad at a police briefing. Then, later, back at the office, he typed out his copy.”

A lone finger rises and begins to peck the air.

T-H-E-B-O-Y-W-A-S-F-O-U-N-D-D-I-S-E-M-B-O-W-E-L-E-D.

“Oswald, did your hand tremble to type those letters? Or is such sentiment entirely vanished from the earth? Have we lost even the right, to be surprised, much less indignant? Antoinette prays to God. I pray to God. But there are new Gods now. Oswald Kambabi who types such things without trembling.”

And Obadiah begins to rock slowly from side to side under the Mapone. He lets go of the paper and drifts slowly down and covers his face. Chanting: The boy was found, the boy was found, the boy was found . . .

“Twelve years old,” Obadiah says. “Only the shit beetles who crawled all over what was left of him weren’t indifferent to that boy.”

Obadiah

There was no Tower of Babel. It was only fear. The Damara—and hence all people on earth—were born out of a crack in a rock at Kanubes, near Okahandja. There was harmony among all peoples. We all spoke the same language and lived in peace and concord. Then a rumor reached us that death was stalking the land, and all the families fled in different directions into the mountains. Some fled to the Erongos, some to the Waterberg, and some to the Auas Mountains, southeast. Others went still further. That’s more or less how this scattering happened.

Obadiah

An old trick. It worked many times on the west coast. Portuguese sailors invented it. You send a female slave inland. Then leave her. Give her time to make contact with tribes in the area. Then you come back later and hunt her. In this way you can establish trade, make war, further enslave, all depending on your fancy.

In 1484, Bartholomew Diaz sails down the barren southwestern coast of an unknown land. He calls the slaves up from the hold and chooses a nubile young thing. If any slave will attract a crowd in this forsaken place—this tasty specimen will. He orders his men to row her ashore. His men do it. At the spot where they leave her they erect a marble cross. Since the creation of the world 6684 years have passed and since the birth of Christ 1484 years and so the illustrious Don Johannes has ordered this pillar erected here by Giacomo, his knight. Then the men row back to the ship. Diaz sails further north toward the Cape of Good Hope. Two months later he sails north again and sends his men into the beach where beneath the cross they find only the whiteness of bones picked clean by the gulls.

In his ledger that evening, Diaz writes the coordinates, followed by, “No Contact, hostile or otherwise.”

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.

Obadiah

Why are people are always bursting into tears in Russian novels? What could be more inaccurate? In Dostoevsky it’s every other page—bursts into tears, bursts into tears,  but even Tolstoy himself is sometimes a fool for making it so easy. Anna bursted into tears. Bursted?

Now galoshes—yes. There is much truth in goulashes, if not here, certainly in St. Petersburg, while tears—my beloved Lev—you must know this, it is not too late even for you to know this—are the blood of the soul and they take hours days months years to form and only then do they wander slowly down a face that at first thinks it must be rain.