PETER ORNER

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.” 

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