PETER ORNER

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.

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