Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (13 page)

“Three people are three people.”

“Then, let me see . . .” K stared at his hands for a moment. “A dozen, I reckon.”

The heat outside sung its stinging tune. There were shouts from the men on the cliff. Rocks tumbled down onto the road and exploded in dust and shards of splintered granite. The trader women argued and shouted and chased children and flies from the food. The men who weren’t fighting or rolling rocks off the cliff sat in whatever shade they could find and drank beer.

K stretched and said lazily, “My last week in the army, I was in an accident. I was in a truck that rolled. I was sitting in the back and I tried to jump clear but the damn thing came down on me. I did this”—K showed me his knee, which was snaked with a thick, brown scar. “It was a blerry mess. The army docs fixed it and sent me home on sick leave and I got so pie-eyed my first night home that I drove my own car off an embankment. They reckon it was thirty meters high, more. I should have been dead probably, but I just got my crutches out of the wreck and walked back to the bar and the bartender told me, ‘You’ve had enough,’ so I turned the place upside down. I told him, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are? No one tells me when I’ve had enough.’ I locked him in the storeroom and I started to drink the bar dry except the cops came and dragged me off to jail. It took six of them.” K sighed unhappily. “That’s where I was when I got my papers getting me out of the army. I was in chook with the biggest babalas of my life.”

I closed my eyes. K started to tell me a story about a time, shortly after that, when he destroyed three taxi drivers and a cab in Bulawayo: “I was still on crutches too. Man! I remember ripping a door off the taxi and then my mind went. . . . You know, one moment I was aware of fighting . . . These ous had a crowbar, and they broke open the top of my head. Then my mind went blank. I wasn’t unconscious, I just don’t remember . . . I mean, my mind was blank from rage, not from getting knocked out. When I was aware of what was going on again, the taxi drivers had fucked off. But the taxi! The thing looked like it had been rolled. The roof was squashed in, the steering wheel twisted, the rims buckled, and I had the rearview mirror in my hand.

“I had to go to court three weeks later—assault and grievous blerry harm—and the taxi drivers were still a mess. One of them was in a wheelchair, one had to come to court on a stretcher, the other guy . . . fuck, I’d ripped his scalp off. It was frightening. I got fined two thousand bucks for that and a ten years’ suspended sentence.

“The judge said, ‘Animals like you should not be allowed to walk freely on the streets.’ ”

K’s voice hummed on and on.

I slept.

When I woke up an hour later we hadn’t moved, but K, who had been wearing a khaki-colored bush shirt and a pair of olive green corduroys from the early eighties, slightly flared at the ankle and beginning to strangle a little at the thigh, had stripped off and now had a towel wrapped around his waist. There had been a decided change in the mood of the previously cheerful travelers. At least one man, near the accident, had been punched and the men who were filling the ditch with rocks had gone on strike and had said that they refused to throw down another boulder unless we all agreed to pay them a few thousand kwacha for their efforts. With all the cars squashed up behind us and the disabled lorry in front of us, there was no immediate hope of our heading back to Lusaka or forward to K’s farm.

I bought two ears of burned maize and a beer off one of the market women and found a place on the side of the road next to some truck driver. It was, I realized, the best place from which to observe the primping prostitutes who had recently toiled up from Sole, dressed to kill. Late afternoon sun throbbed onto the road. There was a smell of hot tarmac and fresh sweat and steady wood smoke and old burning rubber. Children curled up and slept on the bare ground, damp and oblivious and happily released, for the moment, from the tedium of waiting.

IT WAS EVENING by the time we reached the farm, too dark to walk to the river or see the bananas. The sudden evening had already stolen light off the river and a gibbous moon crept up behind the acacia trees to the east. K lit a lantern and showed me the way to the shower—a small ablution block set downwind from the bedroom and kitchen. “Here,” he said, “I’ll get you a cold beer. Anything else?”

“No. Thanks.”

The hot water for the shower was heated by an old-style Rhodesian boiler (a drum of water set over a fire in a structure like a pizza oven). The room, freshly tiled, was meticulously clean and furnished with clean towels. As I was showering, K shouted, “I left a beer on the step for you.”

We set up in the kitchen, me on a wooden crate wrapped in a chitenge and K at the counter chopping vegetables for a casserole. Sheba and Mischief slept at my feet. Dispatch shadowed K, sitting behind his master’s legs and keeping one slit eye on me all the time. I put a tape recorder on the table.

“What’s that?”

“Ignore it,” I said.

Then neither of us said anything for a long time. The dogs dozed and scratched on the floor, the cicadas buzzed from the winter thorn trees, the odd mosquito droned. From up at the workshop, the generator hummed and sawed, the lights dimming and soaring in response. I sipped my beer and looked out at the star-spotted sky. K crushed garlic.

At last K said, “Okay, what do you want to know?”

I tried to think of something that would be easy for K to talk about, something uncontroversial. “What about school?” I asked. “Why don’t you tell me about school?”

“Okay,” said K. “From scratch?”

“Sure.”

“I went to kindergarten in Zambia, in Matabuka,” said K, “but I told you about that already, didn’t I?”

I nodded.

“Well, then when I was eight, my fossils sent me to Zim—Rhodesia in those days—Mweni Junior in Bulawayo.” K rummaged through a cardboard box that was on the steps outside the kitchen. “Don’t ask me why they did it,” he said, coming back with three tomatoes. “Because the school was full of Jews, and from day one they beat the crap out of me, those little bastards. They picked on the kids who weren’t Jewish,” K. said. “And that was me and about five other kids.”

“Oh?”

K put down the knife with which he had been cubing sweet potatoes and glanced at the tape recorder. “I’m not against Jews, you know. I didn’t have a quarrel with them—
they
picked on me. What was I supposed to do? Stand there and take it?”

I said nothing.

So K insisted, “What would you have done?”

“I don’t know.”

“Those little Jews
taught
me to hate Jews. I didn’t hate Jews before I got there. I didn’t even know what a Jew was.”

“Do you still hate Jews now?”

“No, man, I don’t hate anyone. I love all people the same. I don’t care if you’re a Yank, a Pom, a Chink, a fucking purple alien, a goffle.” K wagged the pointy edge of the knife at me, then suddenly threw back his head and laughed. When he looked at me again, I saw that there were tears on his cheeks. “Oh ja!” he said. “A hobo of people have accused me of being a goffle. Ha!” K laughed, “Ha! Because in the sun I go almost black, hey? Have you seen? So people used to call me Goffle in the war. That was one of my nicknames.” He slid potatoes and carrots into a pot and then he sighed and shook his head. His lips puckered and folded down at the edges.

I asked, “So why do you think your parents sent you to a Jewish school?”

K took such a long time to answer that I almost repeated the question. Then he said abruptly, almost angrily, “I don’t know. I don’t think they knew it was mostly Jews. You know? They hardly came to the school. They just put me on the train in Vic Falls and, ‘Bye, chap, see you in three months,’ and off I went.”

“Did you ask your folks to take you out?”

“Ja
,
every time I went home. But my old lady wouldn’t listen. Anyway, I begged her—on my hands and knees—not to send me to Mweni Senior because that’s where all the big brothers of all the little Jews were, and I knew they would make mincemeat out of me. So she sent me to Wilson High in Que Que.” K chopped at a heap of onions angrily and tears flooded down his checks. “And the bullying didn’t end there. You know? Anyone who went to a boys’ boarding school in those days will tell you, if they’re being honest, it was savage. If you couldn’t stick up for yourself, you’d end up being rammed by every prick in the school.”

There was a long pause while K sniffed, and wiped his face with the back of his hand. Then he said, “When I was fourteen, I was held down by two guys from my class while this older boy raped me.”

Another long pause. Dispatch sat down abruptly and whined.

“That was it,” said K, turning around and thrusting his knife into an eggplant. “I am not saying that being raped damaged me for life or anything, and it didn’t make me hate homos. I have nothing against moffs as long as they leave me alone. I don’t think that guy was a moff in any case; I think he was just a bully. But that was it for me. I had had enough. So I was in the shower one day and the guy—the arsehole that raped me—came in and I stepped out of the shower and I punched him. One time. Flat. That’s when I realized I knew how to hit. Not even to talk. One punch right there”—K pointed to the tip of his chin with the knife—“and then in the goolies on the way down, and then a kick to the head when they’re on the floor. That’s all it takes. That’s when I started to get a reputation as someone who could fight. People three and four years older than me picked fights with me because of that reputation. Half the fights I got into weren’t even my fault.”

K cut some bread and fed slices of it to the dogs.

“After that . . . I don’t know, there probably wasn’t a week when I didn’t get into a fight with some damn idiot. All the little squirts wanting to see if they could get the better of me and all the big monsters trying to see if they could squash me. I learned the hard way—smack them hard first. Soon as you see them coming. One, two, three. Then it’s over. Pointless dragging the thing out. You know, all these ous dancing about, flapping their fists all over the show? What’s the point?”

“Did you ever box?”

“Ja. But I was shit at it. I wanted to kill my opponent the first time he punched me and there’s all these rules about you can’t nail an ou in the goolies or paste them in the head and anyway, who wants to fight for sport? I spent enough time fighting for real, I didn’t need to do it in my spare time too.”

“Did you ever lose a fight?” I asked.

K held the bread knife in the palm of his hand, as if weighing it. “Not once I figured it out,” he said at last. “No, not that I can remember.”

THAT NIGHT, K slept on the veranda and I took his bed in the single room overlooking the river. He had set up the small fan (battery-run) exactly so that it would blow onto my face. Before I could climb into bed, K sprayed the room with a powerful insecticide. “You won’t need a mosquito net,” he informed me.

My eyes started smarting and my throat burned.

“It works, that stuff.”

“Yes,” I wheezed.

“Sleep well, then.”

“Good night.”

Then the generator was switched off and the night expanded with insect life, the muted sound of drums from the village across the Chabija, the calling of nightjars and a solitary scops owl, “Prrrp! Prrrp!” I sat up on the bed and stared through the grille of the window at the river. A solitary islander had set up house on the patch of island in front of K’s house. He was crouched over a fire that he had built to keep the hippos off his maize. I pulled my legs up, put my chin on my knees, and watched the barely moving shape of the man as he nudged his fire to keep it alive. Rain gusted lightly off the escarpment, breathed over the river, and misted the gauze on my window. The islander lowered some sort of shelter over himself and the fire—a large sheet of plastic, I thought—and the flames lit the edge of his face orange. When the hippos rose near the tip of the island three or four times and shouted at him, the islander banged on a large tin disk.

I lay down, but could not sleep. Sometime after midnight I heard fishermen in their dugout slapping the water with their paddles to chase fish into their nets. I went to the window and saw the long, low shapes of two canoes slipping through the velvety black water. The fishermen were both standing and, in unison, their paddles came down and the cracking sound that followed was not unlike gunshot. The islander called something to the fishermen, who shouted back. Shortly after that, the watchman stirred. I heard him up at the gate coughing thickly and then relieving himself noisily on the broad-leaved canna lilies. K got up, his bare feet scuffling on the bare veranda floor. He was talking steadily under his breath to the dogs. Finally, just before dawn, feeling stiff with sleeplessness, I got up to put the kettle on. K was already showered and dressed. He was sipping on a cup of hot water and honey.

“Sleep okay?” he asked.

I nodded. “Very comfortable, thank you.”

I made tea and took the tray down to the river to watch the dawn. The islander had let his fire die to a smoky column and had curled up next to it to sleep. K’s three dogs stationed themselves on the edge of the lawn and whinged. The watchman sounded the gong, a persistent clanging on a plow disk, to warn the laborers that they had half an hour before the day’s work started. In a short time, a column of Africans filed up from the staff houses and into their places at the workshop, on the bananas, and at the nursery.

“I am going for a walk,” K shouted to me from the kitchen. “Want to come?”

Cow Bones I