With Mavala Shikongo gone, our lusts still maintained a constant: Dikeledi. Pohamba once worked up the equation: p = d = 2 r = Dikeledi. Impossible that she was Festus’s wife, and yet she wore it proudly. She dominated Festus in ways we didn’t even try to fantasize about. It was rumored that when she wanted him—as in when she wanted him wanted him—she rang a little bell, a little tinkle tinkle only he could hear. These were the sorts of disgusting particulars we had to endure. Festus and Dikeledi were the farm’s abhorrent newlyweds. It was said she washed her teeth in fresh goat’s milk every morning. We all wished she’d sleepwalk over to the singles quarters, because that was the only way she’d come near us. She must have cleaned their little purple house all day. Somehow she successfully banished every grain of sand, every crunchable beetle underfoot. I used to watch her looking out the window. She didn’t seem to have any interest in watching our soccer field antics up close, but she always watched from the window. And so we made a point of putting on shows out there for her. That time Pohamba challenged every boy in Standard Five to wrestle him all at once. My job was to make certain no older boys snuck into the match, so I’d lined them up and crosschecked them against the Standard Five register. I set them up in three clusters, ripping off a dumb line from my junior high gym teacher: All right, halfwits, listen up. I want half of youse over here, half of youse over here—and half of youse over here. Pohamba with all those boys hanging from his neck, and the rest of us jeering him to scrum the Standard Sixes too. I look toward Festus’s purple house and there’s Dikeledi in the window.
Her head was shaped like an egg we all wanted to cradle. Sometimes she’d send a boy with marinated chicken and rice and syrupy peach halves to the singles quarters. Other times, potatoes and creamed corn from a can. But this was only charity. Her love for Festus unnerved us. Her face hid nothing. It was there in those teeth, in her nose, in the delicate porches of her ears. She looked at him a hundred different ways, but the one I remember most was curiosity, as if one of the reasons she loved him was that she was unsure of what he’d do next. No one at Goas was more predictable than Festus. He was the farm’s most unsecret agent. He was so reliably duplicitous, he circled back around to trustworthy. Festus was a man who cahootsed with both sides of the Goas power balance. When the principal wanted something, Festus hopped to it, believing one day he’d become assistant principal, should the principal ever deign to appoint one. Same went for the priest, though the reward might have been more intangible. (Then again, maybe not. It was said that the Father was a hoarder of both money and frozen steaks.) Above all, what Festus cherished were his hushed conferences in either the rectory or the principal’s office, his proximity to power.
But the question was: Why couldn’t he just be content to make love to Dikeledi? What makes an already rich man need more? Everybody was waiting for her to get pregnant, as this would, we thought, take the sting out of her being so close and yet always behind that window. Obadiah wrote it in a poem. May we rejoice in the sadness /of your milkplump breasts.