Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (21 page)

“Well, how many cars come on this road every day?”

The policeman wobbled his head, considering. “Maybe one hundred. Or two.”

“How many of those are speeding?”

“If they are foreign,” said the policeman slyly, “then it is one hundred. Or two.”

“Nice little business,” commented K.

The policemen laughed appreciatively. “Come back to where I am sitting with my friend. Let us talk.”

“Pay anything,” I implored as K got out of the car, “and let’s find a place for me to stop.”

By now a curious cluster of children had congregated noiselessly around the car. They had approached me crouched, like soldiers, bellying their way over the ground toward the road and making silent “feed me” gestures with cupped hands. I couldn’t understand their reticence, until they caught the eye of one of the policemen, who threw himself after them with handfuls of rocks, shrieking at the top of his voice. The children exploded back to the hut from which they had snuck, backs arched in a futile attempt to avoid the barrage of rocks that hailed down on their little bodies.

I turned to the policeman with the beginnings of a protest on my lips, but he cut me off, saying, “Those childs. You know! If you are not looking, even if you
are
looking—they steal even the shirt you are wearing on your body.”

K returned to the car and announced that the fine was astonishingly steep and payable only in American dollars, which seemed suspect and I said as much. K said, “I can haggle if you want. But we’ll be here for hours.”

“Forget it,” I said. “Let’s just pay and get to the nearest tree.”

We’re Not Really Lost

Double-story hut—Mozambique

WE TOOK A LEFT turn before Tete, on the road that declared itself (on a grand, green sign) to be leading to towns that we never reached, or if we did, they didn’t exist when we got there. We were heading for the area around Wasa Basa Lake. K had a friend in Harare who knew someone by the name of Connor who had a fishing camp on the lake and who had said that he would be willing to let us camp on his premises. When K was a soldier here, the lake had not existed. At that time, the place that the lake now covers was the lower end of the Pepani River. It had been a land of many kopjes, dry and densely covered with mopane woodland. The acid soil gave the air a slightly saline scent.

I can’t remember at what point the straight, new aid-donor tar road we were on disintegrated into a dirt track and when, in turn, that dirt track dissolved into something that looked like a footpath. But we were on increasingly rougher tracks, the kind that showed where cattle and goats had been herded but had no tire prints on them. Once or twice, K pulled a tatty piece of paper out of his breast pocket and said, “Would you have said that was a village, or just a cluster of huts?” or “Did that look like a left branch in the road to you?”

I sighed. “This doesn’t look like a road to me at all, left branch or not.”

“Well, if that
was
a left branch in the road, there’s supposed to be a double-story hut somewhere here,” said K, peering out into the failing light. He tapped the piece of paper. “That’s what it says here in these directions.”

“I’ve never heard of a double-story hut. That’s absurd.”

“I promise,” said K, waving the piece of disintegrating paper at me. “Read my notes.”

I felt bruised by the road, battered by the pickup, assaulted by the border post, and incredibly grimy. “Maybe we should just camp right here,” I suggested, “before it’s too dark to set up our mosquito nets.”

“No, no. We must be nearly there,” K said.

Evening fell as we drove, and the relative cool of night released into the air the smells of the bush. K shuddered. “Boy, that smell.” He turned to me. “That’s the smell of being on patrol. Smell that?”

Mostly, I could smell us: two sweaty travelers who have spent too long together in the humid steam of February at low elevations and on bad roads. So I hung my head out the window and took in a lungful of outside air and was rewarded with the fragrant scent of mopane scrub and the chalky smell of dust (the powdery white soil that mopane trees favor).

I said, “It smells like the lowveldt to me.”

“Man, and the gun oil and the sweat and the kak.
”
K shook his head. “I’m telling you, you’ve never smelled people until you’ve been in the shateen with them for three weeks. We used to hum. Mm-mm. I’m sure the only thing that stopped the gooks from smelling us is that they smelled just as bad themselves.”

We drove in silence for a while and then K said, “We were just like the gondies
,
the way we hid out in the bush and never slept in the same place twice and never ate where we slept. We used to stop, just as it was getting dark, and we made our supper over those little gas stoves that just got the food puke-warm and made everything taste like lighter fluid. We couldn’t cook with a fire—the smell of wood smoke carries too far.”

“But you smoked cigarettes.”

K shrugged. “Ja, we would have died without our cigarettes. We had to have something. But we smoked carefully, hey. Everyone lit up at one time, to limit the amount of time the smoke was in the air. It dissipates quite quickly out here, hey? And it was those old toasted cigarettes—they don’t have such a strong smell as those things you buy today that are all chemicals and full of shit.”

“Did you ever get attacked at night?”

“Oh ja. Some ous used to sleep in full gear because of that, but not me. Those fart sacks were clammy enough as it was.”

We drove along in silence for another half an hour or so. By now, there was no light at all. The brilliant sunset that had speared, in slices of orange and bleeding red, through the mopane trees had turned sullen. There was, as yet, no moon. The mopanes flashed past us, tall as soldiers, briefly illuminated and then shrinking quickly back into the homogeneous oblivion of the world beyond our headlights that sliced through the black world in front of us in two plunging beams. K and I were on a lonely, mad mission. The two of us lurching on an unlikely journey up a lonely road in the dark, thick beginning of a Mozambique night. As our pickup churned over rocks and through thick sand, the engine drowned out the night cries of the cicadas, the crickets, and the nightjars. Behind us, a plume of dust burned pink in our rear lights.

Before complete darkness had fallen, we had caught sun-slurred glimpses of the lake but now it seemed to me that we had veered in a direction likely to take us farther from the lake.

“Do you think we’re going in the right general direction?” I tried timidly.

“Of course we are.”

“It’s just,” I went on weakly, “we don’t seem to be getting there.”

“It’s a big country,” said K.

“Yes, but we don’t need to make it bigger than it already is by driving over every square inch of it.” I looked out the window and said, in a carefully casual voice, “We could always stop and ask someone.”

K glared at me. “I know this place like the back of my hand,” he said. “I’ve walked all over this land. Shit, I’ve crawled over half of it on my belly.”

We dodged off the track we were on and started to crash our way down something that resembled a goat trail and continued along in this fashion (weaving our way, more or less arbitrarily, it seemed to me, from one narrow path to the next as trees allowed) for another half an hour or so, passing through several villages and, once or twice, narrowly missing an off-guard pedestrian or laboring cyclist.

“Look at all the villagers,” I said at last, “who are just waiting for an opportunity to tell us where we are.”

So that, at last, K stopped and asked someone, in Shona, where Mr. Connor’s camp was, and we set off in a fresh direction with fresh and (as it turns out) misplaced enthusiasm. We drove for over an hour, occasionally feeling and smelling (rather than seeing) that we were closer to the lake (it gusted a brief, damp coolness at us, soaked with a scent of mud and fish).

Then K finally stopped and switched off the engine. Into the ticking silence that followed the relentless hum and whine of the car engine he said, “I have no fucking idea where we are.”

WE NEVER DID find our way. It was Connor who eventually found us. We had parked near a double-story hut that had loomed out of the darkness and shone yellow and black, shaggyhaired and strangely reminiscent of something I would associate with China more than Africa.

“Looks like a double-story hut to me,” said K, directing the headlamps on the hut and unfolding his piece of paper with the directions on it. “So we should turn left here. Except there’s no left turn.”

Suddenly, out of the monotonous darkness car lights bore down on us (we were, unusually, on something closer to a road than to a goat track) and a land cruiser slammed to a stop next to us.

“Connor,” said a man, climbing out of the land cruiser and extending his hand.

“Oh, what a coincidence! We were just looking for you,” I said, employing great restraint not to fling myself upon the man in relief.

“I got a message that there were two wazungu out here. Get lost, did you?”

“No, no. I know this place inside and out,” K said. “We’re not lost, we were just—”

“Lost,” I said loudly.

K tapped his paper. “My directions said to turn off at the double-story hut.”

Connor turned and looked at the hut. “Oh, those are all over the place,” he said, waving expansively into the nameless, deep bush.

“It looks almost Chinese,” I said. “Like a mini thatched pagoda.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” said Connor, “these gondies were sent to China so that the Chinks could teach them how to be gooks. First against the Porks and then against each other.”

“Ah.”

“All these black limbs,” said Connor, making a broad sweeping motion, “from Angola to Moz and Tanzania—they were all trained by the Russkies and the Chinks. Then the wall came down and suddenly no one gave a crap whose side the gondies were on. You could almost feel sorry for the poor bastards. All those years getting help from the Commies or the Yanks and then the Cold War is over and all of a sudden they’re on their lonesomes.”

I lit a cigarette and offered one to Connor. “No, no,” he said, “I quit. Although I don’t know why I bothered. It’s not like I’m going to live any longer just because I don’t smoke.”

I said, “We’ve been driving around the lake for hours.”

“An
hour,” corrected K.

Connor laughed. “Ja well,” he said cheerfully, “good thing I found you before you went off on any of the side roads here. Mbambaira everywhere.”

“Mbambaira?” I said.

“Ja, you know. Potatoes. That’s what they call them, potatoes—mbambaira in Shona. It’s a joke. It means ‘land mines.’ Place is riddled with them.”

I glared at K.

CONNOR IS GARRULOUS in four languages (he speaks Portuguese, Shona, English, and Makua-Lomwe with ease) with the result that his accent has morphed from a white Zimbabwean accent (known as a Rhodie accent) into something resembling a scramble of black Mozambican and southern European. An energetic, cheerful man in his late thirties, with an insistently bright and pragmatic outlook on life, he seems uniquely suited to an existence on the banks of Wasa Basa. An ability to find a solution to the most crushing problems and an illogically optimistic outlook on the worst of circumstances are two of his most impressive survival skills. Five years before, after his farm in Zimbabwe was taken over, at the implicit encouragement of Zimbabwe’s president, by a gang of squatters calling themselves “war veterans” (supposedly of the Rhodesian War), Connor moved here to manage a kapenta-fishing operation.

His house is a tall, dank shed that seems to trap the heat of the day and turn it, by night, into foul-smelling steam. His dining room and kitchen are open-air structures—during the day they are poorly shaded from the stark glare of sun that reflects off the lake; at night they offer no defense against the onslaught of insects that crackle in on brittle wings and sink in mounds of tiny bodies under the lights. The garden is a long lawn set about with trees and flower beds, a bright oasis of cheer against the altogether gloomy buildings.

Connor welcomed us warmly to his home, but regretted he could not feed us. “My maid has knocked off for the night,” he said. “But if you want to cook some fish and sadza, I can unlock the pantry for you. I am afraid there aren’t shops around here, so we don’t have anything out of a tin or a packet.”

“It’s all right,” I said, “we brought food.”

I opened a packet of biscuits and some cheese, rescued from the festering tin trunk, and set up a picnic while K unpacked the pickup. I was enjoying the first sip of a cold beer when K emerged from the dark. He looked distraught. “They stole my water bottle and my knife.”

“Who?” I asked.

“At the border, it must have been.” K glared at me. “You were supposed to be keeping an eye on the back of the pickup.”

“I was. I did.”

“You were looking at the fertilizer thieves.”