Scribbling The Cat: Travel With an African Soldier

by Alexandra Fuller

  "Do you regret it?"

  K looked at me for a long time, considering the question. "Not like you’d expect," he said at last. "My whole life would have been different if it hadn’t been for the war so . . . In some ways, the war years were the best of my life. Those boys that I fought with—there were four of us in a troop, that’s it . . . man, I knew them better than I knew myself. You walk into the shateen with three strangers and a month later you walk out with ous that you’ve had to trust with your life and who have trusted you with their lives and you know them so well. You’ve seen them shit themselves with fright, you’ve cried with them, you’ve laughed a lot. . . ." K looked out at the river and went quiet. Then he said, "Always, forever after"—K crossed his fingers and held up his hand to show me—"you will not forget them. Even the Yanks from Vietnam and those crazy buggers from Northern Ireland, and the Frogs and the Kiwis. . . . We were all in it together, it didn’t matter where you came from. And I learned a lot from those ous. By the end of the war, I could say 'fuck you,' 'fuck me,' and 'fuck off in four different languages." K laughed and then he said, "Unless you’ve licked the arse end of the world with a man, you can’t know what it’s like to have that kind of relationship with someone. It’s closer than family. And that’s why it hurt. . . ." K looked away and shook his head; when he spoke again, his voice was strangled with tears: "The guy lying in the wank-sack next to you might have been a jerk in the real world, but out there in the shateen. . . . We all knew that none of us were angels, but we covered for each other. We were so close with each other that . . . it was like we spoke a different language—our own language."

  K sighed and his shoulders sagged. "There was this one ou—my best friend, you could say he was my Stone China. He was the guy that was always right there, by my side for five years. After the war he was nailed by some gondies in Jo’burg. They jumped him at a red light and they blallered his skop and stole his car. He was completely spazzed out for months but when he got out of hospital I told him he must come and live with us, with me and my wife. So he came and lived with us because he wasn’t square—he couldn’t look after himself, he couldn’t really talk, his brain was like sadza. But, of course, I took care of him under my own roof. I told my wife, 'Treat him as if he were your own brother.'" K paused. "And then I come to find the bloody cripple’s screwing my wife." K made a choking noise that might have been a laugh. "Ja, that’s how he thanked me for taking care of him for three years. That’s how he treated his best friend."

  The hippos surfaced and shouted their objection into the lowering sun.

  "So that was the marriage over, more or less. It had been on the rocks for a while, but that was the final straw. Me, I decided, 'Screw this.'

  "I told the ex: 'You take everything, my girl. The house, the garden, the car, the business. Me, I am heading into the bush.'

  "I got sod all except a boat. So that year, at the end of the rains, I hopped in the boat and I started at the top of the gorge and I floated down these rivers every chance I got for two years. And one day, I was coming along here"—K pointed upstream—"and I look up on the shore, and there’s a lekker crop of turbo cabbage." K put an imaginary joint to his lips and sucked in a deep lungful of air. "I pulled my boat over and I go looking to see whose weed it is. But there’s no one here. Not a soul. It’s just shateen for miles and bloody miles. The dagga was wild, self-cultivated. But man! I dried some and smoked it and the stuff almost blew my wig off. Anyway, the cabbage wasn’t the point. It was this land.

  "I spent two nights here that first time, just sleeping on the ground, under the stars. Right here under this tree, I cleared the damn jesse scrub and buffalo bean and slept right here. All night, I kept asking the Almighty, 'Is this what You want for me?' And all day I walked, deeper and deeper into the shateen and I just kept seeing that it was more and more beautiful and more and more wild.

  "Then the next month I found the chief having a few drinks with Alex and Marie down at Chongwe and he agreed to have discussions with me and after a few months he granted me the land. Have you met him? Old Chief Chabija."

  I nodded. The chief was well respected from Sole to Kariwa, ruthlessly stubborn and notoriously fair. (He rejected land claims by anyone who arrived at his boma carrying bribes, but nevertheless expected gifts from his visitors commensurate with their means. The difference between a bribe and a gift seemed to depend on the chief’s assessment of the gift-giver.) Anyone requesting land from the chief—my parents included—could expect both arbitrary and thorough inspections, as well as a rigorous trial period during which the chief ensured the land was being developed as promised and that jobs were going to his people, and not to workers from other provinces.

  K said, "Half his relatives work here now, so I’m long Chinas with the chief."

  The sun caught the tip of the escarpment and flooded the lower western sky with a golden thread. A young man clad in a camouflage-patterned tank top and green trousers came to the gate and beat the gong.

  K put his hand out to stay the dogs. "Come!" he told the man.

  The young man came down to the veranda. "I am Innocent," he announced.

  "Bo," I said, shaking his hand.

  Innocent took the tea tray to the kitchen and began to retrieve clothes from the washing line. I glanced at my watch and said that I thought it was time I started to head home.

  K stood up. "But there’s something I want to show you first."

  "Perhaps another time," I suggested. "I have a long walk back to the road."

  "No, no. You don’t need to leave right now. You’re in no hurry. I’ll drive you home. I’ll drive quickly," said K. "Did you have enough tea? Enough to eat?"

  "Plenty, thank you."

  "Come now," ordered K. He led me away from the veranda and garden, through the farmyard, and cut sharply toward the bend in the river, on a path cleared through the bush. Vervet monkeys clattered overhead and openbill storks stood sentry in the top reaches of a winter thorn tree. Suddenly, the bush opened up into an expanse of rain-misted lawn. A half-built redbrick house in the middle of a freshly planted lawn stood watch over the river, facing the square head of a mountain on the far bank.

  "That," said K, pointing across the river, "is Peace Mountain."

  I had seen the mountain before from the tarmac road. It is a distinctive wedge-shaped rise of land with a wide band of cliffs at its neck. "I didn’t know it had a name," I said.

  "It didn’t," said K. "I named it." His voice thickened. "I climbed it last year. I got caught on a cliff. I just had to hang there and wait for the Almighty to tell me what to do. If it hadn’t been for Him . . . It took me until well after dark to get down, just praying to Him to guide me as I went." K demon-strated a massive bowl of a hand. "You have to remember that He holds each and every one of us right there, right in the palm of His hand."

  "Luckily," I said.

  K frowned. "Come," he said, leading me up to the house. It stood stubbornly in the middle of the lawn, the reverse of a ruin (something being built up against the press of the Sole Valley sun, instead of the more usual experience of something crumbling and melting back into the ground).

  "And this," said K as he stepped into the roofless house, "is where we’ll live one day. I’ll finish building it soon. I have to get the farm going a bit more first, though. But what do you think?"

  I wondered who "we" was, but I didn’t ask. Instead I said, "It’s lovely."

  "Look," said K, "it’s all set up for books. Shelves here, and here. Maybe you could put ornaments on this shelf. This is the kitchen. See? A view of the mountain out the window." He turned to me and I can describe the look on his face only as transported. "I don’t think," he said, "that God is going to have me make this journey alone. He will send me a woman when the time is right."

  A blue-headed lizard scampered up the wall where the larder shelves would be one day and one of the dogs darted after it, barely catching the end of its tail, which sloughed off and wiggled hysteri
cally on the cement-dusted floor.

  "She’ll have to be a very special woman," said K, softly and looking at me.

  "Yes," I said.

  And then, maybe it was a trick of the rain-softened light, but I saw K’s face fold with such exquisite torment that my heart turned over for him.

  He said, "There’s been so much destruction. But I’ve learned so much now. I’ve really learned about love." K’s lips grew fleshy. "I would nurture a woman. She would be the head of the family now. I wouldn’t have to dominate her. I would put everyone else first. I would come last in the family. This is the order: first God, then my wife, then my children, the dogs, the servants. . . . I would be last. I just want to share this"—he gestured to the house, the garden, the slow-churning river—"with someone."

  I looked away from the house and saw that three fishermen had paddled their canoes around the bend in the river. The evening had brought a kind of careless, extravagant beauty to the world. The sky was rinsed various shades of blue and pink and was scattered with ripped, high clouds. The sun, catching itself in the trees on the far bank, bled red and gold across the water. Peace Mountain and the distant escarpment were softened in a dying light. From the village opposite K’s farm, blue clouds of smoke from cooking fires tugged into the evening sky. It was the time of day when the confusion of color, the churn of cooler air supplanting the heat of the day, the miracle of the journeying river—everything about being alive—seemed more improbable and fleeting and precious than usual.

  The Left Behind

  Sole Valley village

  THE ROAD FROM the boundary of K’s farm to the tarmac had not been improved by the day’s rain. The bridge over the gorge had been repaired, but there were several other sections of the road that had given way and were torn in sharp, washed-away gullies. K drove fast and determinedly and although the car sometimes slipped and spun, we managed somehow to stay on track and forge the streams that tumbled brown and frothy in their new, temporary capacity as rivers.

  As we dipped into warm pockets of air that had sunken into dambos and vleis, the air expanded with the comforting smell of the potato bush and there was a ricochet of insects shrilling. We flashed past huts that, in the dim light, had lost their shabby air of poverty and had taken on instead the aura of cozy domesticity. Indistinct shapes huddled over cooking fires, the occasional snatches of life (a child crying, a man shouting, a woman’s high voice calling out) tumbled through the air at us.

  "I like you," said K suddenly.

  I startled and hesitated before I said, "I like you too."

  "I don’t like most people," K said. "Most wazungu."

  "No."

  "I find I don’t trust people. It’s hard to trust someone who hasn’t looked up the wrong end of a barrel. You know?"

  "I don’t make a habit of looking up guns’ snouts," I admitted.

  K persisted. "Ja, how do you know what someone is made of until you’ve broken cover with them at exactly the same time?"

  "But I haven’t broken cover with you," I pointed out.

  "No, but you’re a woman," said K, as if that exempted me.

  "Yes," I agreed, knowing it didn’t.

  K drove in silence for a bit longer. The road ahead—its surface magnified in the headlights—told a vivid story of everything that had walked or run or driven over it since the rain had stopped. Bicycle tracks snaked; goat hooves poked sharp dents; flat feet padded; cows left deep grooves; donkeys were daintier and tripping.

  "Man," said K, "every time I drive through here I think of Mozambique. This patch of bush just here is exactly like Mozambique. See how it is—this flat sandy mopane with the scrub on the side and these piles from old anthills? It’s just like in Moz."Then he shuddered and added, "I’m going to give myself spooks, talking about the war all day."

  "Don’t you usually talk about it?"

  K said, "I don’t usually talk about anything. I don’t have anyone to talk to except the gondies. . . . And you know how it is to talk to these guys? I love these munts, I really do, but . . . I don’t really talk to them. I mean, we talk about the farm and the river and the weather and money—we’re always talking about their blerry money problems—and about their indabas in the village. . . . They tell me all their hunna-hunna about who’s bonking whose wife and who is beating up who and they want me to fine the offenders and tell them who is right and who is wrong, but I can’t tell them about the ex or about myself or about, you know . . . about my life. About the war. If I told Michael what I told you today he’d shit himself. Don’t you think? He’d shit himself."

  "Probably not," I said.

  K was quiet for a few minutes and then said, "Ja, well, in any case, it’s true that I’d rather sit and talk to a fisherman on the Chabija all day about tiger fish and bream and his bloody millet crop than try and spend one afternoon chatting to a honky about his shallow crap. No . . . maybe it’s just that this hondo stuff shouldn’t be spoken at all. Not to a gondie or to you or to anyone."

  And then the pickup gave a jolting buck and we were hiccuped out onto the tarmac. A black, curling ribbon of shiny highway, connecting the fragments of Zambia that fall on this side of the escarpment to the city of Lusaka. As we turned up the dirt road toward my parents’ camp, the headlamps swung briefly against Sole’s candlelit brothels and caught the stunned eyes of drunks on the verandas of the throbbing taverns.

  "You must stay for a drink when we get to the camp," I told K.

  "No, I should get home," said K. "I have a busy day tomorrow. Anyway, I don’t drink anymore."

  "I think I knew that."

  "Who told you?"

  "It was an international news flash when you stopped."

  K laughed. "Ja, it should have been. I used to drink. Mai we, I used to drink!"

  Suddenly, a man riding a bike with a woman balanced across his handlebars came reeling out of the village, wobbled in front of the pickup for a few swollen seconds, and then veered out of the way. K spun the steering wheel and the pickup juddered off the road, where it cruised along at a terrifying angle before regaining four wheels.

  K carried on talking as if nothing had happened. "All of us guys, you’ll find we drink in binges. Three weeks sober and then a week of being absolutely blallered. Maybe a bottle of vodka and a dozen beers in a night. It’s what we learned in the war."

  I glanced behind us and the man and the woman were toiling on through the mud, quite matter-of-factly, their faces reflected red in the tail lights of the pickup.

  "You’re in the shateen for three weeks straight," K was saying, "and then you’re back in camp for a week and you spend the first three days trying to forget the last three weeks and the next three days trying not to think about the next three weeks and one night with an almighty hangover and then you’re back in the shateen." K shook his head. "Voddies and Coke was my drink," he said. "But my hangovers! And my demons! One night about two years after the war I was in a hotel room with the ex, and you know those ceiling fans with a toggle on the end of a string to switch the thing on and off, ja? Well, in my sleep, I guess, I could hear the fan—thuka, thuka, thuka—and the toggle—tinka, tinka, tinka—and in my alcoholic state I thought it was a helicopter coming to chaya me. Man, I woke up and I was screaming and leaping around the bed and donnering that fan with a pillow and there were feathers flying everywhere and the ex was screaming at me. But I honestly thought I was under attack, which was bull if you think about it because in real life, it was us with the choppers and the gooks getting stonked with those K-cars."

  K drove in silence for a moment. Then he said, "Thank God—I thank the Almighty—that I stopped the old elbow-lifting exercises because those other boys . . . binge? Ja, that’s how they still operate. They work like dogs for three weeks and then they soup it up for a solid week. That’s how we got through the war. That’s how we learned to get through real life."

  K paused and then he said, "I can’t blame them though. You know, if I didn’t believe in the H
eavenly Father, I think I might have scribbled myself by now, either by accident or on purpose. Because what’s the point of life? Do you know what the point of life is?"

  "No," I said, "I haven’t figured it out yet."

  "I’ll tell you," said K. "Unless you have been saved by Jesus, life is just the few seconds you have before death. That’s it. Over and out. . . Without Jesus as your savior, that’s all life is. . . . And doing everything you can to forget that you’re going to snuff it shortly is your single mission in life." K turned to me in the darkness. "Do you know how I know this?"

  "No," I said.

  K was speaking with a preaching voice, a voice that was supposed to reach into the dark, cool corners of a church. "We were all lost after the war," he told me. "I reckon those of us who stopped dopping and sucking cabbage, we started to feel . . . shit! I mean, we actually started to think about what had happened to us because—you know—we had sobered up. How come we aren’t dead? Where are we? Why are we here? What are we doing? We went from this incredible structure, this incredible focus and sense of purpose . . . You were either in, or out. Alive or dead. And then it was over and . . . All of a sardine, we had to figure it out by ourselves and what we found is that nothing seemed to matter about the outside world. It was all pointless. How much can it matter what kind of car you drive? How can it matter what you eat, I mean as long as you have enough to eat? How much can it matter what you wear? When you get down to it, what can matter more than being alive? But then what? You’re alive and then . . . what?"

  All around us the rinsed air and sky and world seemed endlessly black, as if you could plunge into it in any direction and fall forever. A nightjar exploded up from in front of the headlights and seemed to hang there for an age before dipping into the night. By now, we had turned off the mud-rutted road that leads from Sole to Chongwe and onto the high gravel spine of driveway that leads through the mopane pan to Mum and Dad’s camp. Only a few days ago an army of bullfrogs had frolicked and seethed here. Now the shallow lake rippled out on either side of the track, vast and anonymous and almost silent.