Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (23 page)

K put his head in his hands. He said, “Ja. I’ve seen some shit in that war. I’ve seen some shit. But that was . . .” K was quiet for a long time and then he put back his head and howled, high and long and with so much pain that the hair on my arms stood up. “It was like that. All fucking night.”

We Just Don’t Know Where We Are

My bed—Mozambique

LATER THAT MORNING, over a breakfast of eggs and fruit, I asked Connor what other commercial fishing ventures were on the lake. “A whole lot of Zimbabweans came here when Mozambique opened up after the war. But they thought they could fish without a permit and the authorities deported a bunch of them. At one time, hell, there must have been twenty or thirty operations up and down this lake. Now there are a dozen of us, eighteen families at the most. If you include the mad bastards on the islands.”

“Who are the mad bastards?”

“Oh, we have a couple of crazy bachelors that live out there,” said Connor, waving out into the vague direction of the hazy, sun-glazed lake. “One guy, the munts call him Mapenga. That’s what a crazy bastard he is. He used to live a couple of hours away from here by boat, but he’s moved to an island a little closer to shore.”

The maid came through from the kitchen with a fresh pot of boiling water for tea.

Connor pushed himself away from the table and sighed. “Mapenga’s been married three times. I don’t know why the first and third marriages didn’t work, but the second wife—he shot at her when they’d been married a week, so that was the end of that.”

I poured myself more tea and stared out at the lake.

Connor said, “Quite a ladies’ man too. There isn’t a woman within a few million miles that doesn’t fall for that man and I don’t know why because he looks like he’s been dragged through the shateen backward—”

Suddenly K put down his fork. “What’s Mapenga’s real name?”

Connor frowned. “Piet Verwoed.”

K said, “Shit! I know him! I’ve known that mad bastard for twenty—no, longer . . . thirty years. Everyone called him Oscar because he behaved like a dog and that was the family dog’s name. I think he bit people’s ankles when he was a kid.” K turned to me. “He used to walk into a bar and point to a woman—didn’t matter if she had her arm around an ou—and he’d say, ‘She’s mine,’ and I guarantee he’d walk out with the chick one hundred percent of the time. One hundred percent poke rate.” K shook his head. “I’d never do that. I was too shy.”

“You were too busy putting people on the floor,” I said.

K turned his lips down at me.

Connor frowned. “Do you want to see him? I’d get my foreman to take you to his island in my boat, but he caught a lift with one of the other crazy bachelors to Tete to do some shopping yesterday.” Then Connor added, “But I can call Mapenga on the radio if you like. If he’s on mainland maybe he’ll come around and have a cup of tea.”

Mapenga was raised on the radio.

“Are you on mainland? Over,” asked Connor.

“Affirmative. Over.”

“There’s a mate of yours here from Zambia. Over.”

“I don’t know any fucking Zambians. Over.”

Connor laughed helplessly and fingered the handset, embarrassed. “Ja, well, that’s Mapenga for you,” he said apologetically.

K said, “Give me that radio.” He took the handset. “Oscar?”

Silence hissed back.

“Oscar? It’s Savage here.”

“Who?”

“Savage.”

There was another long silence and then the reply came, “Hang five, man. I’m coming there right now. Don’t fucking move. Over and out.”

“Every now and again,” said Connor while we waited, “Mapenga decides he needs silence in his life. So he stops talking for four days, or a week. He doesn’t talk to the guys that work for him or any of us. He won’t answer his radio. The last time it happened he didn’t answer his radio for so long we thought his lion had eaten him. So someone went over to the island to see if he was okay and he was fine. He was just walking around in silence, all by himself. He wouldn’t say hello or anything. So the guy that had gone over to check on him came back and reported that Mapenga was just being his usual penga self. Then all of a sudden Mapenga decides he’s talking again and he decides he wants company and he’ll come over to the mainland and want to have a big party, and everyone else has had enough of him and doesn’t want to talk to
him
anymore.” Connor shook his head. “He’s a lekker guy, but he’s mad as hell.”

Mapenga looked exactly how you’d expect a man to look who spends his life alone on an island in the middle of a lake in Mozambique with a lion. He had a week or ten days’ worth of beard on his face, a torn shirt, scratches up and down his arms and legs, and a deep, raw tan, blending to deep red in his neck. He had vivid blue eyes, deeply creased on the edges with laughter (but the eyes themselves had a worried, restless, haunted look), and a sunburned nose. His smile was sudden and beautiful and careless and came easily. His energy was quick and electric, as if you might be shocked by physical contact with him. He was about five foot ten, powerfully built, and wiry with shoulders that looked coiled and ready for a fight.

K and Mapenga hugged, thumping each other violently on the back. It looked like the meeting of two gladiators. “Fucking bastard!” yelled Mapenga.

“You mad asshole!”

“This bastard,” yelled Mapenga, clasping K around the neck in the crook of his elbow, “he tried to kill fucking Father Christmas one year! This one is the maddest bastard I know.”

“He deserved it,” said K. “The guy had no manners.”

“You can’t scribble Father Christmas,” said Mapenga, “just because he doesn’t have manners.”

“His kid called my wife a bitch,” explained K, “so I punched him.”

“And stuffed his beard down his throat,” laughed Mapenga.

K said, “I don’t fight anymore.”

“Bullshit.”

“I promise you. I swear it’s the truth. I haven’t hit someone for a year. Longer maybe.”

“Really?” Mapenga stared at K, his mouth open. “Then what the fuck do you do with yourself all day now?”

K laughed.

“Who’s this?” said Mapenga turning to me.

I was introduced.

“Do you like to fish?”

“Not really,” I admitted.

“Good, you can come and stay on my island then,” said Mapenga to K. “She can cook and we’ll go fishing. Shit, that will be lekker
.
You’ll come?”

K nodded.

And Mapenga laughed with delight, a surprising noise, like a chicken getting chased around a farmyard.

We packed up a duffel of clothes and some food and Mapenga drove us around the lake to where his boat was tied up. We climbed into the boat and chugged off across the lake to Mapenga’s island. The lake is incongruous because it is new (not yet thirty years old) and so it looks as if it is still trying to be land. The tops of kopjes surge from the water, as if gasping for air, and the fingering limbs of dead trees poke eerily up from the watery depths. Storms are known to produce violently bad-tempered waves on this lake, which is also famous for its aggressive crocodiles. The combination has proved to be the end of plenty of fishermen.

“Last year,” Mapenga told us, slowing the boat down to a crawl and shouting to be heard above the engine and the wind and the water, “there were some South Africans fishing on the lake and they went out even though there was a storm brewing and, sure enough, their boat got swamped.” Mapenga indicated a place farther into the lake. “They were right out there, in the middle. So two of them swam for a tree, but the third guy didn’t make it and he drowned. By the time we found the two ous
,
like baboons clinging to the tree, the drowned guy was gone. And the guys in the tree said they didn’t know where he had gone. I said to them, ‘Get in the boat. But I’m just telling you miserable fuckers right now that this is the first and last time you will ever ride in my boat and I should probably leave you in that fucking tree until the vultures come because you deserve to die a shit death.’ ”

Mapenga turned to K. “What kind of prick lets their mate drown and then, on top of that, loses the fucking body?”

K shook his head.

“Anyway, the drowned bloke, ja? Well, his widow sends a message. She says she needs his body for burial. So I go to Tete—I fucking drive three hours there and back—and I phone her and I say, ‘There is no body.’

“ ‘What do you mean?’

“ ‘He was eaten.’

“And she throws her toys out the playpen. No, she needs the body to get the guy’s life insurance. Please won’t I try to find it. Then she says, ‘He had a nice watch. You can keep the watch if you find him.’

“So I think, What the fuck. Might as well try, and I go out there for days and days and finally—kudala, lapa side—I find a little bit of skop floating in the water and a tiny bit of the ou’s backbone, but nothing else. No fucking watch. So I put this lot in a cooler and I go to Maputo to put it on the plane back to South Africa and I explain to the immigration guy the long story, and he looks in his fucking book and he tells me, ‘No, the dead man’s visa has expired. He cannot fly.’ ”

Mapenga starts laughing, his high chicken laugh. “Man! So I say to the guy, ‘That’s okay. I’ll just leave this cold box here until you can get him another visa,’ and I put down the cold box on his desk and start walking away and he starts hunnering, ‘No! No!’ The cold box was on the flight that afternoon, but you know what pisses me off?”

“What?” asked K.

“The fucking widow didn’t even thank me.
And
she’s still got my fucking cold box. It was a bloody good cold box and now she has it.” Mapenga shook his head and pressed the throttle forward. The boat reared slightly in the water and then began to pulse and smack on the little waves, farther and farther from mainland toward his little speck of island. His island was flatter than some of the other chunks of land that poked up into the air, sloping on the west side into steep cliffs.

“I tell you something,” said Mapenga to me, when we had skirted the cliffs with which his island faced the world and arrived at a sandbar upon which the boat was dragged, “you come out here—it’s all mad bastards out here. They’re reasonably mad on the mainland, but they’re madder out here in the middle. The more remote you are, the madder the bastards get.”

K jumped out of the boat and tied it to a post. Mapenga said to me, “They call this island Nyama Musha—‘ village of meat.’ It must have been a poacher’s camp after the hondo
.
I’ve found the odd shell lying around.”

WE WALKED UP to Mapenga’s house from the boat, past his prehistoric-looking fishing boats with their long, kapenta-reaching arms, past the workshops with their rows of chalk-boards giving instructions for the day to the laborers, and onto a wide patch of lawn. Suddenly a lion, who had been crouching behind a stand of lemongrass, came barreling out from his cover, ducked behind Mapenga’s legs, and made straight for me, pouncing from a flat-out run into a soaring attack. I was aware only of something massive and tawny spread-eagled in flight behind me. Before the lion could land on my back, K had caught him with a block to the throat.

The lion was a ten-month-old male, he weighed at least 160 pounds, and every inch of his body was muscle. His paws were bigger, with an inch to spare all around, than the span of my hands. K dropped the lion, and held his foot on the creature’s throat, then he grabbed the lion’s tail and forced it into his mouth, like a bit. The lion lay panting, its mouth hanging wide to avoid biting his own tail. He grunted in protest and flattened his ears and made a low, snarling noise in the back of his throat.

“None of that, my boy,” said K, turning the lion’s tail around in his fist, like a rope, and smacking the animal on the nose. The lion looked away. K waited a beat and then stood up. The lion, watching him warily, edged his haunches under him and his tail flicked back and forth. K stood, shoulders square to the lion, facing him in an unequivocal challenge. The lion looked away again and gave itself an embarrassed lick.

“Sheeee-it!” said Mapenga. “I’ve never seen anyone do that to Mambo before. Ha! And did you see the way my lion is such a clever boy? He went straight for the weakest link,” he said, turning to me. “How do you like that? He sensed you were the wee-wee in the group and you were going to be snuffed,” and he laughed.

I attached myself as closely as I could to K and we negotiated the rest of the journey to the house. The lion tried again and again to insinuate his way past K’s legs and launch himself on me, but K roared at him and gave him a hefty kick in the chest and the lion backed down. Mapenga appeared to find the whole episode amusing, chuckling to himself in a high, mad cackle each time the lion attempted an attack.

Mapenga’s house consisted of a kitchen and bathroom surrounded by a caged-in veranda. “I have to put cages up,” Mapenga explained, “or the lion gets in and chews everything to shreds.” He turned to me. “So you’d better sleep in here, or he’ll eat you in the night,” and again the choke of laughter.

The lion followed us onto the veranda. He was damp and, having played strenuously with his meal that day, he reeked, not only of his own, raucous cat pungency, but also of less-than-fresh catch-of-the-day. Mambo’s diet consisted of chunks of whole, skinned crocodiles salvaged from a peculiar accident of tourism at a nearby camp. Apparently, a few miles farther up the lake, fourteen- and sixteen-foot crocodiles had escaped from a breeding tank on a crocodile farm and had found their way into a swimming pool at a nearby guest lodge. The crocodiles had all been shot by the time breakfast had been laid out on the veranda, although the pool was bloodstained by then and there were a few broken windows.