Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (14 page)

Bobo on K’s farm with Dispatch

IN A NARROW SWATHE around the circumference of K’s farm, the land had been scoured of all undergrowth and freshly mown, so that it resembled cultivated, protected parkland. The sun was just beginning to rise as we set out and the night’s light rain had washed the air fresh and had released into it the scent of wild plants and the round, tinny smell of freshly hatched termites. An emerald spotted dove lamented, “My mother is dead. My father is dead. My sister is dead. And my heart goes dum-dum-dum-dum.” The dogs forayed into the bush, occasionally yelping back to us their discoveries.

Then Dispatch came crashing back to K with something large and white in his mouth and dropped it at our feet.

“Oh look, a bone,” I said. “Maybe a cow?”

K stood looking down at it for a long time, turning it over and over with his toe. Then he bent down and picked it up, weighing the thing in his hand. He ran his nose up the length of it, his eyes closed. Then he made a sound like a laugh, except it was too choking and bitter to be any sign of amusement, and he said, “Okay, I heard you.”

“What?”

“I’m talking to the Almighty,” K told me. There were tears in his eyes.

“Oh.”

K said, “Go on, keep walking. Go back to the house. I’ll catch up with you later.” He held the bone in both hands now, his arms outstretched, as if he were offering it to the paper bark trees.

I turned back to the trail and kept going at a hurried walk. K did not follow me and when I looked back to see where he was, I saw that he had fallen to his knees in the cropped grass and his hands were held skyward, the bone aloft. Dispatch was by his side, anxious and trembling. Sheba was irreverently scratching fleas from her ear. I found my way back to the house alone.

K FOUND ME in the kitchen preparing a fresh pot of tea. “You okay?” he asked.

“Fine.”

K shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I made up my mind,” said K, “last night. I wasn’t going to talk to you anymore. I was going to tell you this morning, ‘If you want to go to Mozambique, then go. Take the pickup, take a map. You can go and see for yourself. Me, there’s nothing for me there.’ But then . . . that bone this morning. The Almighty is talking to me.” K sniffed and sighed. “I should tell you something.”

I said, “Why don’t we go and sit in the garden, then?” suddenly not wanting to be in the cramped confines of the kitchen with him.

K followed me. I poured myself tea and watched the river until K began to speak.

“About a week ago,” said K softly and with great hesitation, “I had a dream that . . . I was digging up a grave. There were two bodies in the grave—two gondies, one man and one woman. And I was trying to get”—K’s voice caught and it was a moment before he could continue—“the woman out of the grave. She was wrapped up in a chitenge, you know, like you were wearing last night, except she was wrapped from head to toe, like a mummy, so I couldn’t see her face—except her arm was exposed, and there was no skin on her arm. Her bone was poking out and she had a big bone, like a cow’s bone, like that bone we just saw . . . and I knew I had to cut through that bone to get her free. To get her out of the grave, I mean.

“So I was hacking at the bone with a panga and hacking and hacking, but I didn’t have the strength to cut her free. I was too weak.” K’s voice tripped and when I looked over I saw that he was crying. “I was too weak,” he repeated. Then K put his face in his hands and breathed deeply.

“What about the man in the grave?” I asked after a minute or so had passed.

K looked up and shook his head. “No, he was okay. It was okay for him to be there. Not the woman though, but I couldn’t”—K gave a great yawn of anguish—“I couldn’t . . . free her. And then I woke up. I got out of bed and I fell on my knees.”

I pictured K on the rough cement floor next to his bed in the little cell of a room, with the chirring insistence of Africa calling to him from outside. I pictured the great loneliness that stretched between him and the watchman who crouched by the gong at the top gate all night, and I pictured the watching islander tending his night’s fire.

“I asked the Almighty, ‘Father, what does this mean?’ ” K shuddered at the memory of it; tears rolled down his cheeks and collected above his lips. “And He told me,” said K, “that I have to go back there and let her go.”

“Let who go? Where?”

K shook his head and wiped his eyes with the back of his hands, but the tears sprung through his fingers and seeped down his neck. I looked away. At last K said, “I have so much inside me that I feel . . . If I could only get it out of me, then . . .” He wiped his eyes again, scraping his hand down from eyes to mouth. “Could you . . . ? I mean . . . if maybe . . . ?”

He looked at me with a mixture of anguish and hope and with such desperation that I folded my hands in my lap and looked at my feet.

K said, “That’s okay. There isn’t anything . . .”

A bird flashed in the bush in front of the veranda—a bright burst of red, yellow, and blue—and scolded, “prrrp,” followed by a sharp wing clap.

K was startled. “Oh look,” he said, forcing a steady voice through his tears, “it’s the Angola pitta. I have a pair nesting here.” He smiled and cleared his throat. “They’re quite rare, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

“Ja.” He stood up. “Come, bring your tea, there’s something I want to show you.”

K led me into his bedroom. He searched under his bed and reappeared with a dented black tin trunk—the kind we used to take to boarding school as kids—with his name stenciled on the lid in white paint. K heaved the trunk onto his bed and opened it. It was full to bursting with papers, documents, and photographs.

“This is it,” he said. “You want to know about me? Well, here it is. My whole life. Or what was left of it after the ex took everything.” He picked up a couple of photographs that had been lying on the top of everything else. “Here,” he said, handing me the photograph, “that was the ex.”

A tiny, very pale redheaded woman with stunningly blue eyes stared out of the shiny paper. She was beautiful in a ghostly, luminous way, like the pale flame that comes from lighting dry mopane.

Then K shook himself and grew businesslike. “Okay, let’s see,” he said, turning his attention back to the trunk. “Oh look,” he said, handing me a black-and-white photograph. “My fossils on their wedding day.”

I took the picture and held it up to the light at the window. It showed a man and a woman of average height and indeterminate age (thirties or forties, their stern pose and their conventional 1940s clothes made it hard to tell) on the steps of a church. K’s father—of whom K appeared to be a giant version—looked like a man of passion trapped into a suit of careful clothes and tight leather shoes. He had a dark complexion, full lips, and black eyes that looked deep into the camera. He was handsome in a way that suggested he might, in another life, have been romantic and jaunty: a B-grade actor, a lounge singer, or an artist in a Mediterranean tourist town, instead of a tobacco farmer on a dry scrape of land in Northern Rhodesia.

K’s mother was laughing, not at the camera, but at someone over the photographer’s shoulder. She was being held up by K’s father, who had his arm firmly around her ribs as if catching her fall. She was mildly pretty, in a comfortable, unobtrusive way, but there was no bone structure for her face to hold on to and hers were the kind of looks that would dissolve with child-bearing and middle age. Her stomach bulged—because of her polio, K had told me—weakly.

“You look like your dad,” I observed.

“Turkish,” said K quickly.

“Turkish?”

“Originally his people came from the border of Turkey and Bulgaria.”

“Ah.”

“Me, I’m related to Genghis Khan,” said K.

“I see.”

“My dad was born in India,” said K. “His great-grandfather went out there as an engineer.”

“Oh,” I said, “so he was part Indian?”

K looked shocked. “No,” he said. “No wagon burners in the bloodline. They got their wives from Europe.”

“Like racehorses,” I said.

“Look.” K handed me his father’s papers, from which I could read that the man was born in Calcutta in 1915. In 1938, he enlisted with the Indian army. He fought in Egypt from September 1940 until June 1942, when he was taken prisoner at the fall of Tobruk and held as a prisoner of war in an Italian prison camp from June 1942 until May 1945. At the end of the war he was demobbed from the Indian army and went to South Africa.

His “Final Assessment of Conduct and Character on Leaving the Colours” read like a school report, rather than the assessment of a grown man: “Exemplary,” someone has penned in neat ink next to the printed category “Military Conduct” and below that, “This man was a prisoner of war for over three years. A reliable, intelligent, hardworking man. Always cheerful. Fit for a responsible job. He should do well.”

K held the papers on his lap. “I didn’t know any of this until after the old boy died. He never talked about India, or the war, or the prisoner camp. To tell you the truth, he didn’t talk about anything. I mean he literally did not open his mouth. He was a good father, though. Don’t get me wrong. He put a roof over our heads, he fed us three square meals a day, he sent us to school, and he beat us regularly for the shit we did. You can’t ask for more than that.”

K showed me photos of himself as a kid—there weren’t many and they were mostly blurry, as if taken in an impatient hurry. Then there were suddenly pictures of K in army uniform. In less than a dozen photos, the child had become a soldier. In one photo, K was building a long drop in the bush with his fellow troopies, laughing in triumph at the jute-covered hole in the ground. K, in full camouflage with his arm slung over his grandmother’s shoulders. Another picture showed him at night, in full uniform, with belt and shiny boots, beret and dark glasses. From the date on the back of the picture I calculated that K could not have been much older than nineteen at the time the photograph was taken, but he looked terrifyingly unboyish.

“What’s this?” I asked, showing him the photograph.

“Oh, that was at my sister’s wedding. I had to wear dark glasses because a bazooka blew up in my face in Moz, and my eyes were . . . shit, that hurts! To have a gun blow up in your face? Ooha blicksem! My eyes were swollen out to here”—K held curled hands out in front of his face—“and crawling with flies. I’d only been out of barracks a month or six weeks.”

“Did they let you out until you were better?”

K looked surprised. “I couldn’t see properly,” he said, “but I could still see. No, they sent me back in. Two days off for the wedding, that was it. Then straight back into the shateen.”

Then K showed me a picture of his father as an old man. It showed a fragile-looking man, bent in the spine and staring at the camera from beneath suspicious, nervous brows.

“That was Dad when he was an old toppie. He was never the same after Mom died. He left the farm in Zambia, moved to Rhodesia, and lived in a little flat in Bulawayo. He was a mess, you know. A complete shell. He was older than her—I think fifteen years or so. I don’t think he ever expected to outlive her, and he couldn’t cope with being alone. One weekend when I was on R and R from the army he phoned me up and asked me if I’d help him move in with this woman—this nice old lady he had met at church. So I spent the whole weekend moving my old man’s shit into this woman’s flat.

“Three months later he phones me up and says, ‘Son, help me move out of here.’

“I said, ‘Dad, what’s wrong? Don’t you like her?’

“ ‘No, it’s not that. But she doesn’t like to have sex.’

“Sheesh! Sixty years old and he’s still worried about not getting his oats, hey. That’s about as close as he ever got to telling me anything about anything.” K stared out at the river, then said, “So he was a horny old bugger. I know that much. But nothing else. I don’t know what else he had bottled up inside him. Maybe nothing. Maybe all kinds of bullshit. Who knows? He didn’t laugh, he didn’t talk, he didn’t hardly drink, he never looked at another woman while he was with Mom. He smoked four cigarettes a day. Every day was the same for him. He worked his tail off, he never made money. But when he died, he didn’t owe anyone anything and he had a roof over his head, and he had his pride. That’s not a bad achievement, hey? I mean just to come onto the earth and leave it, having done the best you could with what you had.”

“How did he die?”

“He keeled over of heart failure, six months before Luke . . . before my son . . . died. He was sitting in the backseat of my sister’s car. She was taking him on holiday to Durban-by-the-Sea. He hadn’t been on holiday for . . . shit . . . all his life.

“Then they get to the border and she says, ‘Okay, Dad. We need to get out and do customs and immigration,’ and the old man doesn’t budge. So she says, ‘Hey, Dad, we’re here,’ and she gives his shoulder a shake, you know, and he still doesn’t budge. So that’s when she twigs that he’s snuffed it.

“So she phones me in a murra of a panic. ‘Dad’s died. What do I do?’

“I tell her, ‘Keep your hair on, sis, just bring him back to Bullies.’

“So she drives him all the way back to Bulawayo and I meet her there and by now he’s been dead hours and hours. I had to break both his arms to get him in a coffin. My sister was having a hernia, but what could I do?

“I told her, ‘He’s dead, man. He can’t feel it.’ I told him, ‘Sorry, Dad,’ but he would have understood. He would have done the same thing if he was in my position. He was practical that way, you know. A very practical man.”

K handed me another photograph. “And that was Luke.”

This picture showed a dark-skinned child with white, peg-shaped baby teeth and blond, almost white, hair. His eyes are nearly closed with laughing and his head is thrown back. His bare stomach is muscular and his stocky legs look powerful already. He is dressed in shorts; no shirt, no shoes, no hat.

“My son,” K continued. He swallowed. “Five years old.”

I looked at K.

K said, “We were at a braai—me and the ex and Luke and”—K breathed out—“the little chap came and found me at lunch and he told me, ‘Dad, I have a headache.’ ” K’s voice faltered. “My boy didn’t whinge for nothing—he wasn’t that type of kid, you know. He was a tough little guy. And independent. One minute he’d be in the garden playing and the next minute gone. I’d go looking for him and there he was running down the road, barefoot, no shirt, off to go and visit his mates. . . . He had so many friends. He didn’t care—young, old, honky, gondie. Everyone in the whole town loved that child. So, anyway, I put him on a towel in the shade and I gave him some cold water. By three that afternoon he was in a coma.” K took a shuddering breath. “Dead in a week. Meningitis.”