For two years Alan Barstow taught English as a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia, but he learned much more than he taught. Six months after Tomas completed his homestead, Alan met a woman whom he would later marry. They’ve been together for seven years, and she supported him while he earned an MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Wyoming. Alan’s work has appeared in The Sun, American Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, and 10,000 Tons of Black Ink. Marriage in a Time of AIDS Alan Barstow        Tomas could stare his students into silence. While I had to plead, Okay, let’s get started, please sit down, please be quiet, all Tomas had to do was fold his arms, sweep his eyes across the class, and wait. At Hallelujah Combined School in Namibia, Tomas started his teaching career three years earlier, and I had started mine as a Peace Corps volunteer just six months ago. But now Tomas stood before me silent and unsure. He looked over each shoulder, then settled his eyes on my feet. The morning break had begun, and we stood in the staff room away from the windows that opened onto dozens of blue-uniformed students swapping stories and snacks.        “The short one,” he breathed, using his girlfriend’s code name, a Namibian take, I guessed, on hip hop’s shorty. “She’s pregnant.”        Soon after Tomas moved to Aakwetu village to teach, he and the short one began dating in secret. If their paths crossed at the cuca shops, the corrugated metal-roofed shebeens that made up Aakwetu’s center, or at the public water tap beyond the school’s gate, they passed each other without even a wave or greeting. I saw her for the first time only a month earlier. In line to buy fried bread, a local delicacy called oshikuki, Tomas took my hand and gestured with his chin to a young woman sitting on a blanket, doling out the oily bread wrapped in scraps of newspaper. A mound of silver coins grew beside her.        “Her aunt has gone to town,” Tomas said, “so the short one is working her business.”        She, in her early twenties, and Tomas, twenty-five years old, had similar features: both were short and stocky, had round faces with prominent cheekbones, and kept their hair shaved to the scalp. While she wore sandals, cut-off khaki shorts, and an old T-shirt with pockmarked fabric, Tomas wore a neon yellow Arsenal jersey, dark jeans, and leather shoes. Without acknowledging her presence, nor she his, Tomas bought our snacks from another woman.        But in the last month everything changed. On the sand court behind the grade eight block, they played volleyball, together. Tomas talked to the short one, in public. At the water tap Tomas was seen hoisting her five-gallon jerry can onto his shoulder and carrying it in the direction of her father’s homestead. And last week he even led her to me and said, “Alan, you know Maria.”        “Pleasure,” she said. Big, round eyes, the irises as dark as the pupils, focused on my feet. Unsure of her English, she covered her mouth with a thick hand. She’d failed the nationally administered grade ten exam years earlier, a test that only 50 percent of tenth graders typically passed, so she wasn’t eligible to enroll in the eleventh grade. Her schooling over, she worked in her father’s fields, pounded grain into flour, cooked the local staple oshimbombo, millet porridge, and brewed traditional beer at her father’s cuca shop.        “Of course I know Maria,” I said. In the traditional way, our left hands held our right forearms as we shook. She bounced at her knees; I nodded. She wore a meme dress, an unflattering, one-piece, billowing frock that old women wore.        And now, as Tomas still focused his eyes on my feet, everything—his nervousness, her meme dress, their public encounters—made sense: they were pregnant.        Tomas said, “I’ll go at the weekend, ” meaning that on Saturday he’d travel to his father’s homestead, a hundred-mile, four-hour journey by foot and taxi. “I’ll tell my father we want to marry.”        “That’s fantastic news,” I blurted. I was twenty-four years old, and marriage to me was an abstract inevitability. I’d never had a serious girlfriend, but I had no doubt that I—that everyone—would one day marry and slip seamlessly into adulthood. I reached out to embrace Tomas, but he shrugged and stepped away.        “It is fantastic,” he said, but his tone was flat, as if he spoke of the heat or a staff meeting. He turned to the window, and I, confused, stood beside him. Through the burglar bars we watched students amble towards their classes, girls holding their girlfriends’ hands, as was customary, and boys holding their friends’ hands.                                                     * * *        Come Monday, all Tomas offered of his discussion with his father was, “It’s done. The wedding will be in December.” On the verge of marriage and fatherhood, he didn’t look at all happy or excited. Love and relationships, it seemed, were as inscrutable as AIDS, which in 2003 was said to plague one out of every five Namibians.        Yet I believed that love was the only reason they wanted to marry.        In Aakwetu, because weddings were expensive affairs, marriage was uncommon. The groom’s family had to pay for an extravagant engagement party, a formal wedding ceremony, and lavish feasts to which the entire village was invited. Traditionally marriage meant the bride left her family to join her husband’s, so the groom compensated his in-laws with a lobola, a bride price, paid in cattle, grain, and tools.        Most couples chose to raise their children out of wedlock. In fact, half of Hallelujah’s teachers had fathered or mothered children with people whom they had no intention of marrying. Children were a sign of adulthood, a measure of masculinity, femininity. Childless men were rumored to be impotent; women who weren’t mothers were said to be sterile or have diseases.        It would’ve been common for Maria to raise the child on her father’s homestead. Tomas would’ve sent money for doctor’s visits, clothes, and school fees. The child would’ve spent weekends and holidays with Tomas. If, in the future, they still wanted to marry, Tomas and Maria would’ve had the opportunity to save money so the wedding expenses would’ve been better absorbed. If not for love, then why else would they marry so soon?        As the wedding approached, Tomas lost weight, his face became gaunt, and he no longer played soccer or volleyball after school. Students and colleagues avoided him. His free time consisted of transporting cattle from his father’s farm deep in the bush, amassing food and refreshments for hundreds of relatives, and borrowing more and more money from his family. He and Maria needed a home, so Tomas bought an undeveloped section of the mopane forest. After long days of teaching during the hottest times of the year, when simply talking, eating, or sleeping was difficult, Tomas cleared his new land of brush and trees. Out of blocks he mixed himself from sand and cement, he built an okambashu, a hovel with a concrete floor, single window, and corrugated metal roof. No more than one-hundred square feet, his home was just big enough for a pallet, trunk, table, and chair.        In December, summer and the rains burst upon northern Namibia. Night awoke with the chirp and whir of insects, with choruses of frogs like mallets on a wooden xylophone. Once dry pans swelled with rainwater, and cattle and goats grew fat on wild grass. As families plowed and planted, Tomas’s relatives crowded into his father’s homestead. When I arrived, a hundred people had bivouacked around the cinderblock buildings and grass-roofed huts. From the homestead fence fluttered a white sheet tied to a pole—the symbol of efundula, a wedding.        Tomas met me at the homestead gate. Around us goat meat braiied on half-a-dozen cook fires, and Tomas’s relatives laughed and drank bottled beer or a sour traditional beer called omalovu gwiilya. Caught up in their emotion, I slapped Tomas on the back and said, “Are you ready to be an omusamane, a husband?”        “I haven’t slept in three days,” he said. He raised an index finger to massage his temple. His eyes were sunken and his shoulders slumped. Sweat marks traced down his filthy ankles. He stank—the ripe onion smell of sweat; the grainy smells of wood smoke, grilled meat.        He said his days and nights had been a blur of traditions and celebrations: drinking and dancing, speeches from aunts and uncles, ritual cleansings with traditional oil. And each night, while his family slept, he and a handful of siblings struck out into the village. They woke up neighboring homesteads with dance and song until the families allowed Tomas to catch one of their chickens and hobble its feet with string, to add to the wedding feast.        Tomas listlessly introduced me to his family. We found his father with blood up to his elbows, eviscerating a slaughtered cow. He was a short, stout, kind-faced man—unmistakably Tomas’s father. He hacked off a foreleg and handed it to me.        “A good cut,” Tomas said without smiling.        All night the family drank and ate and danced. It was the eve of his wedding, and Tomas was surrounded by family and friends, but he sat alone, morose and glum. Something more than exhaustion fueled his dark mood, I knew, but the family’s energy infected me, and all night I partied with them, celebrating Tomas even though he abstained. At some point I fell asleep with my shoes on, the tent flap unzipped, oblivious to the mosquitoes that feasted on me.        I woke at sunrise to a 750-mL bottle of beer and a plate of beef cubes in a light gravy. Three sips and I was drunk again. While the family bathed and dressed, Tomas, already wearing a pressed tuxedo and shoes polished to obsidian, sat in a plastic chair. His shaven, moisturized face looked as fragile as glass.        “Want some meat?” I called.        “I’m sick,” he whispered. “High blood pressure.” His blazer hung open, the tuxedo shirt unbuttoned, and he held his right hand pressed against the flesh of his chest. Midmorning everyone climbed into a caravan of bakkies until the pickups were so overloaded the wheel wells sat an inch above the tires. Men wore suits and cowboy hats, and women wore multi-colored frocks with matching head wraps and carried short staffs with horsetails mounted on the ends. The caravan crept onto the two-lane, undivided B1 tar road. Children blew plastic whistles, men sang hymns, women ululated and waved the horsetail staffs—everyone cried, “Iiyaloo, Tomasa! Efundula, efundula, efundula! Congratulations, Tomas! A wedding, a wedding, a wedding!” Despite the songs and ululation, Tomas dozed, his head lolling back and forth.   To read the rest of this story, purchase the issue.