Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (11 page)

K let this sink in for a moment and then he gave such a guffawing laugh that he sprayed tea over the table and then I started to laugh too. I slammed the lid of my computer shut, losing all unsaved work in one careless gesture, and said, “Oh God, how arrogant. You’re right. Crazy to even try.”

“No,” said K earnestly, “you’re not crazy to try. Sorry for laughing.” He made an attempt at a straight face. “Sorry,” he apologized, laughing again and covering his mouth with his hand. Then we were both laughing more than the comment had any right to.

“How’s the farm?” I asked, when I had recovered my breath.

“Going strong.”

I smiled at K. He smiled back. We drank tea. The heat sighed up from the earth and curled around my neck. I waved my cigarette smoke toward some flies that had settled on the edge of the milk jug. “It’s warm, isn’t it?”

K nodded. “I’m glad I’m not a gorilla.” He showed me his hairless arms and legs. “When I played underwater hockey for Zimbabwe the ous used to tease me that I shaved.”

“Under what?”

“Underwater hockey. I was on the national team for Zim.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s hockey you play under water,” said K. “On the bottom of the pool. You have little sticks and a puck. In Europe they play it in big pools with glass sides.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. I was also on the Zim spearfishing team. We went to Turkey for a tournament.” K laughed. “You should have seen! All the other teams had boats and radar and wet suits and there were us Zimbos with our flippers and snorkels and we had to smear ourselves with Vaseline so we didn’t freeze. So we go paddling off the beach—and all the other teams are way out there, in the middle of the sea, diving off their fancy rigs—and start hunting for fish and I am swimming along and a bloody turd goes bobbing past me. But there was a huge fish chasing the turd, so I nailed that.

“Then I noticed there was a pipe this big”—K made a huge circle with his arms—“and there was not just one turd, but hobo of shit pumping into the sea and there were maninge fish, and big ones too, right there. So I called the boys over and we took turns hopping into the sewer and pulling out these monsters, man. We were doing quite well by the end of the first day except then, the next day, we got a little sick of swimming in kak, so we swam out to sea to look for fish and we had a little incident with the Turkish navy.”

“With the what?”

“Apparently we swam into no-go waters and the next thing you know there’s a torpedo boat gunning straight for us and this idiot in a white Elvis sailor suit throwing a thrombie in gibberish. I couldn’t understand a word he said, so then he pointed a gun at me, just to make himself clear.”

“What did you do?”

“I told him to fuck off and stop pointing his gun at me.”

“And did he?”

“No. And there was bugger all I could do about it.” K shook his head. “I guess you could say I lost that round. I had to bareka, or he was going to chaya me.” He sighed. “Man, I hate to lose.” Then he took a deep breath and leaned forward. “I get that from my mother,” he told me. “She was a cheeky one that. Incredibly determined. Half Greek and half South African—we used to say she was the Greek salad. You know, she was also an incredible athlete, my mom. Very competitive. She played hockey for South Africa.”

“Under water?” I asked.

“No, field,” said K. “When she was in her early twenties—right in the middle of her career as an athlete—she got polio. That was it, she was finished. She was a complete cripple. The doctors said she’d never walk again, but she was a stubborn woman. She could do anything she set her mind to. The doctor said she’d never have kids. She had three of us. Okay, she couldn’t have us naturally. But still she had us. She could get pregnant normally, but then she had to have cesareans to get us out. In Rhodesia in the fifties, that was a mission, I’m telling you. But that’s the kind of woman she was. She had absolutely no muscles left in her stomach. You must see photos of her—I’ll show you a photo of her sometime—she was completely collapsed on the side.” K held his hands out to the side as if cradling an enormous bulge of unrestrained stomach. “Her stomach went all the way out here and she was all tipping over sideways, but it never stopped her.”

K lifted up his left leg with both his hands and let it drop. “That’s how she used to drive. She used to have to pick up her leg and drop it on the clutch or the accelerator or the brake. She only had two speeds in the car, flat out, or stopped dead.” K laughed. “People used to see her coming and they’d dive off the road.” He shook his head.
“
Gondies flying into the ditches left and right. Everyone used to bail out when they saw the Old Lady coming their way. Oh man, I’m telling you”—K looked at me slyly to see if I was listening and smiled—“that’s when we were living on the farm in Kaleni, here in Zambia. Northern Rhodesia in those days. I was at boarding school in Matabuka. Shit, I hated it. I was only happy when I came home and I used to take my gun and a bit of biltong and bread and head out into the shateen all day. That, I loved. I’ve always loved the bush.

“But school was another story.” K shook his head. “The house-mistress gave me stripes my first day of school for insolence—I was five years old. You should have seen”—K held up a thick thumb—“welts this thick on my arse
.
The Old Lady was cross about that.” K paused. “She went into the mistress’s office on Monday morning and she told her, ‘Beat the little bastard as much as you want. But I see welts on his rear again and you will regret the day you laid a finger on him.’ ”

And then K got quiet and when he spoke again, his voice had lost its joking tone. “You know we went through three of the Old Lady’s wheelchairs. I used to tie them to the back of the tractor and take my sisters for rides over the tobacco fields. It was bloody funny until the wheels came off and then Mom would be furious and she’d say, ‘Wait till your father comes home,’ and then I’d shit myself, because Dad had a sjambok and Mom didn’t mind if
he
left welts on our backsides.”

K continued, “Anyway, after we’d scribbled all the wheelchairs, Mom decided it was too expensive to keep buying the things for us to tear apart. So she taught herself to walk using crutches. She could get around okay, but if she fell down, she was finished. She had to lie there until someone came to help her. But she was also an incredibly proud woman—incredibly proud. If she fell down in the garden and the Old Man was out in the fields and my sisters and I were at school, she’d crawl, hand over hand, all day to get to the veranda rather than allow a gondie to lay a finger on her. That’s how proud she was. But you know,” said K, pressing his thumbs into the palms of his hands, “she had these huge knots in her tendons from holding on to the crutches. Her hands were like claws. So when I was fourteen—I was at high school in Que Que by then, in Rhodesia—the Old Lady went to have her tendons operated on in Bulawayo.” K sighed. “She was forty-four years old and she died on the operating table.”

“Oh God.” I put my teacup down with a crash. “How awful.”

K said, “The headmaster called me out of class. He said, ‘Your mother’s dead. You can take the weekend off.’ So that was a Friday. I went on the train to Bulawayo for the funeral. I met the Old Man there, and my sisters. On Monday I was back at school.”

“That’s it?” I said.

“Ja,” said K.

“You must have been devastated.”

K shrugged. “Ja, ja
.
Of course. It was a mission. But it was worse for Dad. He was a shell after Mom died. That’s when he left Zambia and moved to Rhodesia.”

“You only had the weekend to get over your mom’s death.”

K nodded.

“Did you cry?”

“Not really,” said K. “But all my hair fell out. Even on my head. I was so bloody cold that winter, I wore underrods on my head and the master gave me the cane because he thought I was trying to be clever. I wasn’t. I showed him—‘Sir, I’m bald. My bloody head’s freezing’—but he still gave me stripes. Although it’s grown back on my head now”—K rubbed his hand over his hair—“but nowhere else.”

“How did your sisters cope?”

“Okay, I think.”

“Do you see much of them?”

“On and off.”

We drank tea in silence together for a while. The sun had fallen behind the escarpment and evening was starting to creep its way up from the river. “What are you doing tomorrow?” asked K suddenly.

I looked at the pile of notes, the computer, the spilling ashtray, and the pyramid of old teacups on the veranda. “I should really try to do something about this,” I said.

“Take a break,” he said. “Come out fishing with me.”

“I can’t stand fishing.”

“Then you sit in the boat and I fish.”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling guilty already and looking at my computer again.

“Look, maybe a day away from it and you’ll come up with something to write.”

I hesitated.

“Come on. It’s too hot to work anyway.”

“Okay.”

“We’ll take your old man’s rig.”

So, the next day, just after breakfast, K arrived with fishing rods, a hat, a cooler, and a basket of food (fruit from his farm mostly, with some vegetarian samosas from the truck stop at the bottom of the escarpment). He smeared sunscreen on my nose, put a hat on my head, and hurried me down to the canal that cuts up from the Pepani River into the fish farm.

Dad’s boat is an old and ordinary banana boat, a bit leaky from the time a hippo bit it when Dickie, my brother-in-law, was out fishing over new year’s, but it works, more or less, and has the charmed river smells of mud, weed, fish, and sunscreen. The boat was loosely tied was in the middle of a canal. K scooped me into his arms and waded thigh-deep into the water and I closed my eyes and envisioned crocodiles, and then he deposited me on the cooler and pushed the boat out into the weak current.

Where the canal met the Pepani, the current grabbed the nose of the boat and we were flung out into the wide expanse of river. I kept a wary eye on the hippos, which K appeared to be ignoring, and we motored downstream into the bright glare of water that swirled ahead. K fished and I read, cringing from the sun under a wide hat and a towel. If I shut my eyes I felt suspended in a hot bubble of peace; the water licking the edge of the boat, the creak of the hull, the sounds of K fishing, the occasional eerie cry from the fish eagles.

We ate lunch pulled up on an island with our toes dug in the sandy beach, keeping half an eye on the boat, which was bellied up on a stretch of sand just downstream from us. I smoked a cigarette, waving it around my head to get rid of the flies, and K stripped down to his underpants and waded into the river.

“How do I start the boat when you get eaten by a croc?” I asked. The engine of Dad’s boat, in common with almost everything mechanical on the fish farm, had quirks of temperament that required an intimate knowledge of the psychology of machines to operate.

K laughed (a smack of reflected sun caught his throat and face in profile and turned him black, like a cardboard cutout).

I said, “I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I do this all the time,” he said.

“Why don’t you save it for rescue missions?”

“Nah, I’ll be okay. I’m too tough for a flattie anyway.”

“I’ll just write that on your tombstone, shall I?”

K waited until he was chest-deep in the water and then went under. I waited several seconds and then I got to my feet, feeling stupid with a rising panic. This is exactly how people are said to be taken. In half a minute or so, K will resurface, he will shout once for help, a crocodile’s tail will arc out of the water sending silver droplets of water and red droplets of blood into the air, and that will be all I will ever hear from K again. I will yell, throw rocks, and call on God. But I will stop short of running into the river. Nevertheless, I will tell everyone at his funeral that I did my best to save him. Everyone will know that I am lying.

And then he came up for air close to the boat, squirting a mouthful of Pepani water into the sky above his face, like a living fountain. He waded to shore and shook himself dry and came and sat next to me. “Ja, ja
.
Refreshing, hey.”

“I was having croc visions.”

K laughed. “When my time’s up, it’s up. I reckon my fate is all written in God’s Big Book and there’s not a whole lot I can do to change the time and place and nature of my death.” K bit the lid off a beer for me. “Here,” he said, “keep your hair on and drink this. I’m going fishing.”

I lay back on the warm sand and put my hat over my eyes. I could hear K’s fishing line; a high whine as it buzzed over the water, a pause, and then—
plop
. I dozed off and when I woke up I found that K had made an umbrella for me out of a towel and four sticks. “The shade from the tree shifted,” he explained, “I didn’t want you getting sunburned.”

“Thanks.”

“I’ll get the boat,” said K, handing me the fishing rod and wading off into the river. I stared at him sleepily as he plowed through the water and returned towing the boat behind him. With his dark skin and tight metallic gray hair, he looked colossal and African, like Mwetsi, the first man in Shona mythology, who started life under the waters and ended murdered by his own sons when he grew ill from the poison of a snake bite.

K lifted me into the boat and said, “Should we drift for a while?”

“Why not?” I put my feet up on the cooler and lit a cigarette.

The boat nosed silently into the current and we were tugged downstream. The sun was poised to sink behind the hills in Zimbabwe. A hatch of mosquitoes drifted out of the water and floated off in a tender swell of air, cool and slow, casually drifting to shore. A noisy clutch of ibises burst off an island. “Ha-de-da! Ha-de-da!” they mocked. Weaver bird nests hung over the water and their occupants swooped out of them and into riverside foliage. The world was held in a confusion of color; the sun, diffused through heat and haze, seemed to lick everything golden red and orange while darker blue shadows crouched under the fig trees and riverbanks.

“I asked God if you were the one,” said K suddenly.