Free The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo by Peter Orner

for two weeks. Moses out there alone, a small cooking fire, only the eyes of the
     dead cow for company. But he’s eating meat; Lord, is he eating meat. A boy who got tired of mealies every day. He was a poor
     boy, an orphan. Yet a child born of this earth is entitled to some meat now and then. Is he not?
    “In those days the boys ate meat only on holidays,” Antoinette says. “Now we try to give it to them twice a week, if we have
     enough paraffin for the refrigerator.”
    Antoinette speaks of Moses in the way a lonely mother might go on about the antics of the favored bad child. If anything remotely
     like this happened on her watch now, she’d thrash him. Uncountable lashes for a boy so bold. But Moses—she’d pull him to her
     bosom. Have some tea with four sugars, my wayward boy.
    We are in the kitchen of the hostel dining hall, a wide, cavernous, many-windowed building beyond the soccer field. It reminds
     me of an air hangar or a floor of an abandoned factory. The windows are fogged from the steam rising from a vat of burbling
     pap. The boys are lined up outside the door, banging one another on the head with impatient spoons.
    She lays out clean bowls on the tables as she talks. Antoinette tells stories only during the heat of work. A Moses without
     a basket. A Moses without a people to lead. Only his own poor hunger. After the constables finally found him, they beat him
     until they got bored. What could they take from him other than his blood? Then they brought him to the farmer, who beat Moses
     until he too got bored with it, and that was the end of it. God only knows where the boy is today.
    Outside, the boys begin to clamor louder. Antoinette walks the tables slowly, ladling thick pap into bowl after bowl. Today
     is krummelpap with a side of toast with jam.
    “But forget the end,” Antoinette says. “Go back to the beginning, think of murdering a cow with a pocketknife. Cows don’t
     fight back, but this doesn’t mean they die easy. They stand and bleed. It took hours. It took the boy all night. It wasn’t
     rage. It was work.”
    She points to the door. I open it. Then she steps past me and stands before the motley line of boys and raises her oven-mitted
     hands for silence. The boys file in, trying to be slow, trying not to dash, the big ones yanking the little ones back, toward
     their waiting, steaming bowls.

31
BY THE PISS TREE
    O badiah and I doing our part, watering the desert.
    “Teacher Kaplansk?”
    “Yes?”
    “I should like to know your candid opinion of Woodrow Wilson. It’s my contention that despite his having a horse-like face,
     he had a certain fastidious decorum. And I do not doubt his sincerity. And yet, I must tell you straight out, and you must
     pardon any offense: Your man Woodrow was a cabbage. Not only was he ultimately responsible for fascism, he also left us, our
     dear insignificant country, in the lurch for seventy years. And South-West Africa shall be a sacred trust of civilization.
     Sacred trust of
whom
?”
    “He wore a top hat,” I said.
    “I wonder why. To make himself taller? Napoleon did that.”
    “I think he was tall to begin with.”
    “Hmm. Interesting. A tall man in a tall hat. May I ask you another question? Apropos perhaps of nothing?”
    “Sure.”
    “Your quite un-Wilsonian surname. What sort of name is Kaplansk? It seems highly original.”
    “It was Jewish Polish until the principal lopped off an —”
    “Polish! I should have known! How many names under the sun rhyme with Gdansk? Ah, and a Semite? But your hair —”
    “What?”
    “It’s orange.”
    “Yes.”
    He leaned toward me and examined my face. I breathed in his sweet, malty breath. “Hmm. Yes, well,
Hosanna!
My first Jew! I’ve waited a long time.”
    “You’re my first Damara.”
    “Half. My father came from Angola.”
    “First half-Angolan also.”
    “My father’s dead. Yours?”
    “No.”
    “Jewish as well?”
    “Yes.”
    “A rebbe?”
    “No.”
    “A