Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (16 page)

Soldiers line up for food

BY THE TIME WE LEFT the farm, the sun had taken its place in the sky, spreading across the divide of east and west, elbowing out sky and color and perspective, and sending a flattening assault of rays to the earth. The greater part of Africa—the vast, uncurling spill of cities and roads, and jungles and savannahs—lay behind us. We were heading steadily toward the Indian Ocean, toward the thick slice of land that curled around Zimbabwe’s eastern shoulder, nudged Zambia, and almost swallowed Malawi off the map altogether. Scattershot in our path were soldiers from K’s war. Hundreds of them probably, most of them silent about the years that were stolen from them and the years that they had stolen from others.

It’s not hard to find an old soldier in Africa. In fact, there are probably parts of Africa where almost anyone over the age of ten is an old soldier and has held an AK-47 in his hands and let its fire chatter into human flesh. (Christmas-cracker guns is how they seem, cheap and deadly and associated with mass production in China.) And then there are parts of Africa where ammunition and guns aren’t available and citizens—children among them—take up arms against one another with whatever instruments they can find: machetes, hoes, knives, their bare hands.

What is harder to find are old soldiers who will
talk
about their war with strangers. And why should they talk? Those of us who have escaped the horror of being turned—by whatever euphemisms there are for the calculated process of dehumanization—from people into machines that issue, and might reasonably expect to receive, a sentence of death are ill equipped to judge (let alone understand) anyone who has been a soldier. Our minds are still innocent of the stain of sanctioned murder.

I can recognize a certain breed of ex-soldier, not only for what they look like, but also for how their lives have unraveled. There are the tattoos, the shaggy beards (something about all the years of military seems to instill the need for copious, perhaps disguising, facial hair), the cigarettes, the drinking, the bluster. If you sleep in the same house or camp with them, you will hear their spooks. They shout their ghosts away all night.

There are the multi-marriages (of the six soldiers I met and talked to in any kind of depth while traveling with K, three were divorced, one had been widowed when her husband committed suicide, one had never married but tore haphazardly through his relationships with women). There is the history of violence: the brawls, the destroyed bars, the nights in jail. And then, when everything else has peeled away from them, there is God.

The first ex-soldier whom I met on my journey with K had been a soldier for almost all his life. Riley had started out as border patrol for the Rhodesian army in 1962, and had stayed on to fight until shortly before that country’s independence. When he ran out of war in Rhodesia, Riley headed for South Africa. Riley’s wife is also an ex-soldier. She joined up in the 1970s and met Riley in training camp soon after. Her first husband (who had been a soldier too) had shot himself.

In 1992, when South Africa was clearly on its way to democratic rule and wars in Africa had changed their tone (they had turned in on themselves—tribal, hand-to-hand, and indistinct and no longer the black-and-white wars of the liberation days), Riley and his wife came to Zambia looking for work. For a while, they camped on K’s farm and acted as his farm managers.

One night, when K was away, armed thieves came to the farm. Riley was shot in the hand before he could return fire. He showed me his hand. “Almost thirty years as a soldier and I don’t get hit,” he told me, “and then I get nailed in Sole by a gondie with a sawn-off shotgun!” When Riley laughed, as he did then, it was an alarming event. His laugh caught, like a two-stroke engine on an old motorbike, and turned into its own choking throb until the man had turned a pale, airless green. He broke the filter off a Madison—Zimbabwe’s strongest cigarette—and lit it, which took some doing because his hand shook so violently that the match almost flitted itself out.

“That was enough for me,” said Riley’s wife, shuddering. “Being out there in the bush with those . . . bloody bandits. I mean it’s not like it used to be, you know. It was safer during the bloody war than it is now.

“I told Riley, ‘No, man. I’m not staying here to get chayaed by some gondie with half a gun. Not after everything . . .’

“I don’t know how K stays down there alone like he does.”

Then we all had to be quiet while Riley was shaken by another fit of coughing. He took a deep drag off the shortened cigarette, and that subdued his cough for a moment.

I said, “Did you ever catch the guy that shot you?”

Riley’s eyes slid across to K and there was a significant silence.

At last K said, “Riley is a highly trained soldier.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, ‘Rest in peace, gondie
,
’ ” said K.

“And the police?”

“Were very grateful,” said K. “They wrote that the gondie died of natural causes.”

Which sent Riley into another spasm of laughter-turned-coughing. Then he leaned over and said to me, “What you need to understand, Bobo, is that this isn’t how it used to be. There aren’t rules of engagement anymore. The way it used to be, the enemy was there”—Riley moved a box of Madison cigarettes across the table to represent the enemy—“and he was in his uniform. You were over here”—Riley placed a fork opposite the cigarettes—“and you were in your uniform. Then you opened fire and whoever got scribbled lost and whoever didn’t get scribbled won.”

He smashed his fist down on the fork, which sailed in a high, graceful cartwheel off the end of the table, and then he sat back and pulled his lips down. “Now it’s just dog-eat-dog. Gondie-scribble-gondie
.
No one gives a shit. It’s not about color. People think it’s about color. It’s not about color. If it was about color, it would be easy to understand.”

“No,” agreed Riley’s wife, wagging her finger at me, “not about color.”

Riley said, “You want to know what it’s about? It’s about pure animal survival. And these lazy bastards want something for nothing. Why go out and get a job when you can wave a shotgun in someone’s face and get money for nothing?”

“Life’s expendable,” said K. “It doesn’t matter to these guys if they get plugged because they’re going to starve to death anyway. It’s what . . . ? What do you say when there are no rules of engagement anymore?”

“Anarchy,” replied Riley. “Pure and simple anarchy.”

“Ja,” said Riley’s wife, regret underpinning her voice, “the war was the easy part. Not this . . .” and she gestured toward the veranda of the hotel on which we were having lunch (the empty tables, the cluster of noisily drunk clients at the bar, the pale glare of rain-washed sun).

“And now?” I asked. “What do you do now?”

“Now we’re fishing up here,” said Riley breathlessly, waving at the expanse of Lake Kariwa. “Civvy street,” he said, as if the word could be picked off his tongue with the debris of loose tobacco that had scattered there from the end of his butchered cigarette.

I asked if he regretted the war and Riley blinked at me, as if I had said something blasphemous. “Regret?” he asked rhetorically. “No. No. Those were the best years of my life. Maybe I could have skipped South Africa. That was bullshit. They treated us like shit. But Rhodesia”—Riley cocked his head in the way that people do when the ability to define a fine wine has eluded them—“Rhodesia . . . That was
living.
”

“You don’t think it . . .” I searched for a word that could put what I was trying to say delicately. “. . . it affected you? All those years of fighting?”

“War doesn’t have to mess you up”—Riley eyed me suspiciously—“if that’s what you’re trying to say. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

It was, but I shook my head.

Riley bit the head off another Madison and I thought of the Zimbabwean advertisement,
Man, make yours Madison.
“It didn’t mess me up. I’ve been a soldier most of my life and it didn’t mess me up.” He coughed his metallic-coffin laugh again. “We had information on where the gooks were. We were dropped out of airplanes, did the job, and then they pulled us out. When it got stressful . . . well, yes: it got stressful when there were three or four contacts a day. That’s how it was. Dropped you in, take you back to base to reissue and give you a brief, and then you’re back in the plane. It was okay. It was a job. It was just a job. Better than sitting behind a desk. Now
that
would have messed me up. Sitting behind a fucking desk with a tie around my neck”—Riley grasped his neck with his powerful hands and throttled himself—
“that
would have killed me.”

IT WAS ONLY AFTER we had crossed the border from Zambia into Zimbabwe that K remembered that he still had his revolver with him. “Shit,” he laughed, rooting around in his briefcase and emerging with the weapon, “the Almighty was looking after us, my girl. If those customs guys had found this thing”—he waved the revolver around carelessly and the car swerved, narrowly avoiding a stub-tailed chicken that had chosen that moment to scuttle across the road—“we’d both be melting to death in a gondie jail by now.”

“How about we don’t try and cross into Mozambique with it?” I suggested.

“I’ll leave it with a friend,” said K. “You talk to Dingus while I drop the gun.”

That was the other peculiarity of the soldiers I met. None of them went by their given names. K is known variously as the Phantom Sergeant (he refused to stand for troop photographs during the war, and in commando pictures he shows as a white gap in the front row) or Savage or Goffle. The man whom I was about to meet was known, not as Peter, but Dingus after his habit of asking for “that dingus” or “this dingus,” or for referring to a woman as “quite a dingus.” Dingus is Afrikaans for “thing.”

Dingus turned out to be an incredibly soft-spoken man. He almost whispered in answer to my questions. His wife was a vivacious, blonde Englishwoman. Both smoked cigarettes as an apparent substitute for breathing. Dingus’s wife brought out a pot of tea and we sat around a rickety veranda table; its Formica top had curled up at the lip, showing rotting plywood underneath. Dingus and his wife, in common with many Zimbabweans, were leaving Zimbabwe.

“Nothing left here now,” said Dingus, shrugging. “Look, we can stay and starve and wait for the end, or we can leave while we still can.”

Packing cases and boxes waited in stacked, sagging towers.

“Where are you going?”

“North,” said Dingus. He lit a cigarette with the end of one he was just finishing. “I got a job as a boat mechanic on Lake Tanganyika.”

“God help us,” said his wife with feeling.

Dingus, like K, had found God. I asked him what prompted his conversion and he told me that after the war he had been such a violent man—so angry all the time—that he had gone through two marriages (he said this the way a rally driver might talk about needing to change shredded tires in the middle of a grueling race). “During the war it didn’t matter. The aggression was—well, you needed it. It was a way to survive. It was afterward. . . . When my second wife left me, that was when I woke up.” He, like K, had joined the army straight out of school. “I could hardly read,” he said, “but I knew how to shoot. I could fight.”

Looking at him, it was hard to believe that he was any kind of young man, or soldier. His eyes washed pale and blue into the back of a yielding face. His lips were indecisive and sad, looped down at the edges. He carried a soft paunch over which was stretched a holey, pale blue vest. He looked like a man who had surrendered. And, like so many Africans, he’d had his gut of tragedy. Four years before his daughter died of malaria. He talked softly—almost mouthing the words—about her death, his voice barely rising above the tenure of breath. There were no other children. His wife looked stunned and stiff while he talked and her eyes filled with tears.

Then he talked about the war, his regret that he had any part in what he now saw as mindless killing. And he talked about what was happening in Zimbabwe now—the way that land redistribution, from landed whites to landless blacks, had turned into a full-scale war of looting, thievery, and political oppression.

“It’s just wrong,” Dingus told me in a disappearing voice, “criminal. That man”—he meant Mugabe—“should be stopped before he destroys this entire country.”

Only when Dingus talked about God did his voice sound as if it were on firm footing, gripping on something actual and strong and real. But he whispered about his life before God and the death of his daughter, as if, by whispering, he could undo his own history.

When K returned from stashing the gun and we took our leave in the late afternoon, Dingus leaned over the edge of his veranda to see us off. The rusted rails of the veranda looked too fragile against the press of his belly and the ache of his past. He waved good-bye, saying to K, “Don’t let the ghosts in Moz bite you, Goffle!” and at that moment, the sun glittered off our windscreen and blotted his face into an obliterating white and he flinched back, his hand to his cheek.

When I looked over at K, he had tears in his eyes.

As we drove away, K said, “Dingus and I are closer than this”—K crossed his fingers. “Look at our lives? The army, then broken marriages, then . . . The drinking, the violence, all that is there too. Then, you know, we both realized at some point that the way we were going was killing us, killing the people around us. We were destroying so much. You know after I lost Luke, that’s when I woke up and started to listen to the Almighty. Dingus had to lose a wife before he woke up.” K shook his head. “He’s a lovely man, that. A lovely, lovely man. I’ll miss him when he heads up north. He’s the only man . . . he’s probably the only person in the world who knows why I am the way I am. He’s maybe the only human being who knows everything I’ve done—every good thing, every shit thing. And he still loves me.” K sniffed. “Now that’s really something, hey?”

Demons and Godsends