The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo Read Online Free Page A

shoes.”
    “Ah yes, and rich men’s sons are tender-footed.”
    “That’s true.”
    “Tender-footed, but he knew how to swim.”
    “True. He had lessons at the swimming pool for whites in Windhoek.”
    “So what happened? If he knew how to swim, why’d he drown?”
    “Sadness.”
    “I see, yes.”
    “And then he sank.”
    “There was enough water to drown?”
    “A rare year.”
    “And they didn’t find him until the cows began acting strange.”
    “They wouldn’t drink any of that water.”
    “Then they trampled the fence.”
    “Yes, and then a shepherd—not Theofilus, this was even before Theofilus—pulled himself up and looked over the edge.”
    “That boy’s head was floating like a cabbage.”
    Our feet were cold, our hands; we crowded to the fire and hunched toward it with our empty coffee cups. We watched each other’s
     breath more than we listened to any words. Those mornings, it was less that the sun would rise than that the darkness would
     simply pale. And it always, always came back to his loneliness, how he was the single Tswana on a farm of Hereros, Damaras,
     Namas, Coloureds, Ovambos. There were even two Bushmen at Goas then, two Bushmen who could at least talk to each other. We
     forgot about the stampeding cows, something nobody ever believed anyway. Cows at Goas never did anything that dramatic.
    Our voices in the changing light:
    “Forsook, the boy was.”
    “Aren’t we all?”
    “Our Lord, the same.”
    “And he didn’t call for help. He knew nobody would come. The one certain thing about calling for help.”
    “And the cows?”
    It was a rare woman’s voice that answered, a voice we didn’t recognize.
    “The cows watched.”
    Nobody said anything after that. There was the slow rise of the smoke. Then it wandered away, toward the boulders beyond the
     toilet houses.

11
GOAS
    S easons at Goas, as much as you can call cold, hot, and more hot seasons, catapult into each other. Days too. Winter mornings
     bleed to summer afternoons. And memory is as much a heap of disorder as it is a liar.
    The spiraled ash of a spent mosquito coil. A book with a broken spine lying facedown. A row of tiny socks drying on the edge
     of a bucket.

12
STORY OF A TEACHER’S WIFE
    T uesday and the beautiful and sleek and unsmiling and too good for us Mavala Shikongo is gone. The only single woman teacher
     to bless an all-boys boarding school so far in the veld even the baboons feel sorry for us. They come and shit by our doors.
     Yes, Mavala Shikongo has escaped Goas after a scant three weeks. Three weeks; the universe had only just begun to be merciful.
     The word is, she’s found a better posting at a junior primary in Grootfontien. But twenty-one days was enough for us all,
     single or divorced, or wanting to be divorced, decrepit or spry, morally repugnant or generally decent—every last one of us—to
     fall, to stagger, to cave into love with Mavala Shikongo.
    She had arrived not long after I had. No longer was I the new teacher. Anyway, my novelty was short-lived. I wore pants. The
     brief moment she graced the farm, Mavala Shikongo lived a quarter mile up the road, cloistered, in a room that had once been
     the principal’s attached garage. She was Miss Tuyeni’s, the principal’s wife’s, sister.
    She ignored us. Three weeks we were invisible. Long school-day afternoons she never once stopped by Auntie Wilhelmina’s fence
     to monger the latest lies, only went back to her room at the back of the principal’s house, to her books. Festus reported,
     having spied the mail, that she was studying for a university course in England by correspondence. She’s not satisfied, it
     was said. She doesn’t even want to be a teacher, it was said. She wants to be an accountant. This was swooned over. She’s
     going somewhere in this world, Mavala Shikongo is. She’s not going to lie down with the cows at Goas. Women rise higher now.
     The war did it. Because—not only skirts, not only