The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo Read Online Free Page B

textbooks—Mavala Shikongo’s a genuine hero of the struggle herself. An ex-PLAN
     fighter. Not even twenty-five and this girl’s shot her share of Boers. Those blinkless eyes, it isn’t hard to imagine them
     staring down a barrel. How many times those days did we moon by her classroom windows? On our way to the toilets, just to
     catch a glimpse. Three weeks we circled, coward vultures from a distance. And now look: Mavala Shikongo’s battered mustard
     suitcase is riding away in the back of the priest’s bakkie. How are we going to get up in the morning without the sight of
     her charging across the sand in her saucy black heels, those inspiring city shoes? Only Mavala Shikongo could lure us away
     from our dirty dreams on the coldest mornings. Days when our fingers cracked like the branches in the coffee fire and our
     scrotums didn’t loosen until after third period break. How to warm a desert winter now?
    We’re all deep in mourning in the singles quarters and nobody feels like walking out to the road to wait for a hike into Karibib.
     Obadiah wanders over to my room and offers me a freshly peeled carrot. He invites me for an afternoon drink in his Datsun.
     I follow him out to the car. Obadiah’s Datsun is mired in the sand behind his house, near Antoinette’s chicken coops and laundry
     lines. An old Windhoek taxi, it will never, come the Second Coming or even the Third, drive anywhere again. Still, Obadiah
     has prophecies. Prophecies of the engine one day combusting, the carburetor carborating, the upholstery growing fur again.
     In the meantime, we talk in it. I take a nip of Zorba and say, Farewell, Mavala, if only we could have opened that mustard
     suitcase, taken one final whiff of you.
    Obadiah adjusts the rearview. He’s wearing his TransNamib hat, the hat his cousin Elias gave him when he retired from the
     railroad. Its peak grazes the top of the crumbling roof of the car, which, every time he moves his head, snows chunks of old
     yellow foam.
    With his left hand at the top of the steering wheel, he gets right into it. It’s another story, he says. A good many years
     ago, he says, another new teacher arrived at Goas. He hadn’t been here long. Three weeks, perhaps. But three weeks is always
     enough for a man to fall in love with another man’s wife. The Roman Empire? It took Nero one drunken night and a box of matches
     to burn the place down. The Hundred Years’ War? An exaggeration. Advertising for Joan of Arc. God’s Flood? You think he needed
     forty days and forty nights to drown every man and beast and creeping thing? He—how do you put it?—overdid it. He was irritated.
     Wouldn’t you be? Five chapters in and already you’ve got to start again.
    Obadiah moves the steering wheel only slightly, as if we’re moseying along a mostly straight road. Outside, around the car,
     the scrabbling chickens peck the dust.
    So, Obadiah says, three weeks and the new teacher is insanely, lunatically, in love with another teacher’s wife. The teacher
     with the wife taught Standard Four math and the new teacher taught Standard Five Afrikaans. One day the husband noticed that
     the new teacher’s class was cacophonous, more cacophonous than usual. He went and stuck his head in the window of his new
     colleague’s classroom.
Where’s Teacher?
he asked. Thirty, forty voices answered,
We know not, Teacher
. But the teacher with the wife could see something in the eyes of those boys. They were mocking him. This happened in the
     seventies. Boys were less innocent then. The war made them more worldly. These boys didn’t want to study fractions, they wanted
     to kill whites. They used to climb up the hill by the cross and shout:
Boers back to Kakamas!
And what is it about war and lust? So yes, they mocked that teacher. Although their lips were tight, he could see the laughter
     in their eyes.
While the cat’s away, the mice will play!
The teacher then walked slowly toward the singles quarters. He