On the wind of talk, word carried—from Usakos to Omaruru to Karibib, and then even out to Goas—that’s no real nun. It had, people said, something to do with her mouth, or more specifically, the way she bit her lip with one jagged, vampirish incisor. People said this wasn’t the way you walked around penitent. Not a bride of Christ, this one. Her catechism is nothing but lies. It was about desire, how it eats away at you when it’s stifled, and just because you hide in the sisterhood doesn’t mean you don’t sweat the sheets. Sister Zoë, her serious, tired face, her generous hands. She was from the south, a Nama from Keetmanshoop. She ran from her mother. She ran from Keetmanshoop. Anybody would run from Keetmanshoop, where the sun does nothing all day but lash your neck and look for plants to kill. At least up here we’ve got three scrawny trees a kilometer.
Now they say she’s back down south for good.
Sister Zoë worked at the clinic at Usakos, and she used to come every first and third Saturday with Sister Ursula and Sister Mary, out to the farm for sick call. The boys would line up in front of the hostel dining hall and go in one by one to be examined. There wasn’t a boy at Goas who wasn’t deathly ill those particular first and third Saturdays. If only to get touched by Zoë’s hands and sent away, condemned healthy. Sister Ursula was German, gaunt and old, with cracked hands. She’s been a nurse so long among blacks, people said, the woman thinks she’s a doctor. Sister Ursula would usually stand off to one side and wait, haughty, for hard cases. She carried antibiotics in a padlocked handbag. Sister Mary was the one the boys went to when they were actually sick, so sick that even the touch of Zoë meant nothing. Sister Mary was a large, shaky-breasted woman with a pocked face. She was from Malemba up on the Caprivi, a place, she’d said, that was so thick in the bush that once you left, you could never find home again. She laughed at the boys who were sick, called them God’s paupers. Come, little pauper, come; we shall take your temperature and then see what we find in Sister Ursula’s magic handbag. Sister Mary always gave out free Q-tips and plastic rosaries in multiple colors. But mostly those Saturdays were about Zoë and her hands on your body. Pohamba would stand and supervise the mob, and every once in a while walk to the front and push his way inside the dining hall and announce to Sister Zoë that he had cancer.
“Cancer all over. Heal the sick, Sister.”
And Sister Zoë would gaze at him from under the habit that people said was fake, a prop, and say in her soft, beautiful English, “Teacher, I counsel repose.” Because her hands were only for the boys. And Pohamba, who when he really loved was a total coward, would go back to policing the line. Later, he’d go on about how all he wanted was to lift her habit, not take it off, only lift it.
We’d see them come up and over the ridge, moving steadily toward the cattle gate. Their walk, how one never got in front of the other. Their white gym shoes. Their habits lifting vertical in the wind like the scarves of old-time pilots. And the boys would catch a glimpse of the top of their heads and begin shouting, “Swestas!” They always parked on the road, because once Sister Ursula got the van stuck in the last dry riverbed and vowed she’d never go through that hell again. Also, didn’t it look better for the Lord’s healers to come on foot?
One day only two appeared over the rise.
The story that got back to us was that she’d gone to administer shots in the location and was raped by a bostoto. Sister Ursula sent her back to Keetmanshoop. The boys—for months and, who knows, maybe years—thought only of her hands, how they barely touched you when they touched you, sending you away. Move on, healthy boy, move on.