Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (27 page)

I said, “Ninety-nine, one hundred,” opened my eyes, and began to walk.

I couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds behind the men, but they were gone. The ground told me nothing. There was no trail—no distinct human trail—to follow. The shallow, glittering earth looked scuffed, but not trodden on. I found myself hurrying toward what I hoped was the Train, but I couldn’t tell. Every way I turned, jesse bush stared back at me, implacable and clueless and obscuring any landmarks. I stared up at the sky, but the sun had expanded to fill an indistinct space that might have been perpetual noon. In any case, I hadn’t been paying attention to the sun when I left the car.

Within minutes I felt a fist of panic in the top of my belly: I didn’t know where I was, I had no water. And I realized that even after all this time with him, I didn’t really know K or what he was capable of. I didn’t know how intimately he would want me to feel the sensation of being thirsty, alone, hunted.

“Yoohoo,” I called weakly.

The world crackled back at me.

I wondered where the nearest water was. I considered sitting down and waiting to see if anyone would come back and find me. The palms of my hands were covered in a chilled film of sweat. PUSHED THE ENVELOPE TOO FAR—that would be my epitaph. Or, CURIOSITY SCRIBBLED THE CAT.

A long time ago, I had supposed that if I walked a mile in K’s shoes, I’d understand what he had been through. I had thought that if I walked where he had walked, if I drank from the same septic sludge of water, if I ate nothing all day and smoked a pack of bitter cigarettes, then I’d understand the man better and understand the war better and there would be words that I could write to show that I now understood why that particular African war had created a man like K.

But I already knew that the war hadn’t created K. K was what happened when you grew a child from the African soil, taught him an attitude of superiority, persecution, and paranoia, and then gave him a gun and sent him to war in a world he thought of as his own to defend. And when the cease-fire was called and suddenly K was remaindered, there was no way to undo him. And there was no way to undo the vow of every soldier who had knelt on this soil and let his tears mix with the spilled blood of his comrade and who had promised that he would never forget to hate the man—and every man who looked like him—who took the life of his brother.

You can’t rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on. Looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

Suddenly the pale, leafy shrub in front of me exploded. “Waka-waka-waka.” The men appeared, spraying me with make-believe bullets from pretend rifles, held at hip level.

“You’d be dead,” said K, turning on me and walking away.

“Scribbled,” agreed Mapenga, laughing. He saw my face and said, “Were you worried there for a moment? Did you feel lost?”

I smiled weakly.

“We had you in our sights from the start,” he said. “We could have shot you anytime.” He gave me a kiss. “Hey, cheer up. It’s not for real.”

We kept walking. It was impossible for me to watch where I was going, since the immediate task of keeping flies out of my eyes and disentangling myself from thorny scrub took up most of my attention. K and Mapenga walked easily and quickly. Both of them, from old habit, looked low and far, where the bush cleared the ground and allowed a few inches of space in which the shadow or legs of a person or animal might be visible. No one spoke.

The heat hounded us. Laughing doves were the only creatures still calling, sounding teasingly like running water. Suddenly, the earth surged skyward and I was forced onto my hands and knees, scrambling and pulling myself up by thickwristed curls of vine. K and Mapenga were ahead, effortlessly negotiating the steep terrain. About ten meters from the top of the mountain we ran into a band of cliffs. We tottered along the edge of them, trying to finger a way up the chalky surface. Behind us lay Mozambique, bleeding flatly into the lake that shone like a mirage up from the monotonous mopane woodland.

K handed me the water bottle. I drank thirstily. I handed it back to him. He took a sip, swished out his mouth, and spat.

“Well?” he said.

There was nothing to say.

“This is what it was,” he said. “This and wondering if you were about to snuff it and become bits of biltong.” He put the butt of an imaginary gun on his hip. “Waka-waka.” He licked his lips. “Three weeks, sixty pounds of gear, bored to death, and shit scared. That’s what war is. Until you’re dead.”

“Ja.” Mapenga found a thin tug of tree that had somehow found a roothold in a thin crevice. He grabbed one of its branches and swung down until he hung over the edge of the mountain, dangling from the tenacious plant that, in turn, clung impossibly into the shallow scrub of earth. Then Mapenga pumped his legs to and fro until his toes caught a grip on the edge of the cliff and he came to rest next to me, like a bird alighting and folding its wings. The sun blistered us against the chalky cliffs. Heat rose and spiraled off the flat expanse of earth below us, kicking up whirls of sand and dead leaves. A Christmas beetle started screaming. Mapenga crumpled clods of chalky earth between his thumb and forefinger and showered the resulting dirt on my feet. K sat down, legs out in front of him. He put his head back against the cliff and shut his eyes. I crouched next to him. We waited. A bateleur eagle rocked above the woodland below us, swinging back and forth silently, watchfully, on the hot air.

“I nicked an ou’s water once,” said Mapenga softly, throwing a lump of earth off the mountain, so that it sent up little explosions as it fell.

K opened his eyes. “You did what?”

“Worst fucking thing I ever did.” Mapenga shook his head. He edged away from us until he was on a very thin slice of ledge, below which the mountain dissolved into a narrow chute. “I was so fucking thirsty I couldn’t think about anything else. We had been two nights without water. Now it was the third night. And”—Mapenga took a shallow, shaky breath and started to talk very quickly—“I can still see where the ou was sleeping. I can see everything about that camp to this day. Everyone was asleep, except me. I couldn’t fucking sleep. I was so thirsty I couldn’t even piss, or I would have drunk my own pee. I was hallucinating water, man. So I crawled out of my wank-sack and fuck . . . I fucking crawled over to an anthill where this ou had left his kit, and I took two sips out of his water bottle. One mouthful I used just to get the cake out of my mouth, that white crap that builds up like fucking cement in your mouth. The next sip, I swallowed.”

“Lucky you weren’t shot,” said K, “I’d have shot you.”

“Ja, well.”

“That’s how I went from troopie to lance-jack,” said K.

“How?”

K pointed toward the horizon, away from the lake, where land became an indistinct blue haze and fused into the pale sky. “I had been in for about nine months and we were out there. Dry season. We were tracking gooks and the sarge had a bee up his arse so we kept going after them and it was drier and drier and I kept telling the sarg, ‘We’re going to cook out here, sir. We need to hug the hills.’

“And I knew the gooks weren’t stupid. They must have had plenty of water with them. We had . . . hardly any. And a munt can go twice the distance on half the water. They’re like camels, man.

“I said, ‘They know we’re tracking them, sir. And they’re saving bullets. They’re going to just keep walking and we’ll just keep walking after them and eventually we’ll die of thirst and then they’ll come and rumba on our bodies.’

“Anyway, we must have been—I shit you not—at least three days’ walk from the last water and the ous run out, the sarge included.” K paused. “But I always carried three, four times more than anyone else—you saw my big tin bottle? That thing came with me everywhere. Shit, I didn’t care about the extra weight. I was used to carrying the bazooka—so what was an extra three, four liters of water? Anyway, I still had more than half a bottle left. So we’re in the middle of it”—K flattened his hand and swept the horizon—“not a fucking drop. We were going to die out there, it’s clear. We’ve walked all day and it’s time to graze but the guys can’t eat. They’re too thirsty.

“Then the sarge checks me. He says, ‘Give me your water.’

“I refuse, ‘No, sir.’

“He says, ‘Soldier, I am ordering you to give me water.’

“ ‘No, sir.’

“ ‘This is a direct order. Give me some water.’

“I say, ‘If you touch my water, I will kill you, sir.’

“He stands there. The other guys are watching and I can see they are saying to themselves, ‘No, man. This is it. Goffle is going to scribble the sarge.’

“The sarg looks at me and he looks at my water and I can see the old thought process. He’s wondering, If I grab his water, is this mad bastard really going to snuff me?

“And I don’t know. Maybe I would. Maybe I wouldn’t have. I’ll never know.

“He says, ‘I’ll have you for insubordination.’

“I laugh. I tell him, ‘Who has the water?’ I mean, it seemed to me that whoever had the water was the boss, ja? I say, ‘If you’d said “please” I might have considered it.’

“So the sarge, he licks his lips and his tongue is white, you know, like chalk. He says, ‘Please?’

“I say, ‘Too fucking late for that now, sir.’

“It took us another two days before we found water. I let the other two guys have a sip, but not the sarge. He was the idiot that got us out that far to begin with. And we lost the gooks. Anyway, when we got back to headquarters, the sarge recommended me for a promotion. He told the CO, ‘He’s too damned headstrong to keep as a troopie.’ ”

Mapenga gave a noise in the back of his throat, like a laugh. I looked up. He was pressed against the white sash of cliffs. He had taken off his hat, which he held by his side, and his head was thrown back. He was looking at the eagle, which was still sashaying across the sky on the waves of scorched air.

“Ja,” he said. “Imagine getting to the point you’d kill someone on your own side for a sip of water. Imagine that. We weren’t animals. No animal would behave like we did. We were worse than animals.”

Then he dropped off the cliff into the gully below him and for a second it seemed that the heat pressing up from the earth would sustain him in flight. He hung on the pale throb of sunlight, and then the air gave way and he sank and tumbled off the mountain. We could hear the gully rushing behind him, a dry avalanche of rocks and thorn bushes and chunks of cliff.

I stood up.

White clouds of dust kicked up.

K said, “I’m not carrying him out if he sprains an ankle.”

“It’s his neck I’m thinking about.”

“Well, if he breaks his neck, then we leave him for the birds.”

I edged over to the gully and peered down it. The earth was settling back over itself. Mapenga had disappeared.

K and I took it in turns skidding down a less steep route. We grabbed rocks and trees and shrubs as handholds. Mapenga was waiting at the bottom, picking his teeth with a stalk of grass and staring at his shoes. “Come on, my Chinas,” he said without looking up. “What took you so long?”

“That was fucking stupid,” said K, wiping the dust off his lips with the back of his hand.

Mapenga laughed and scrambled to his feet. “Man, I am parched. How does a cold beer sound to me?”

K was already ahead of us, as silent on his feet as an owl is on the wing. He walked like a dancer, deliberate with his feet even while he was apparently unconscious of them.

Mapenga winked at me. “Remember, rule number one of flying.”

“What?”

“Don’t think about whether it’ll kill you or not. Just spread your wings and drop.”

I Don’t Remember Getting Here

A road

THE ROADS WE WERE ON, and the towns we were driving through, did not appear on any map. They hadn’t been forgotten. They were never remembered in the first place. They were the new Mozambique. If the roads in some countries in the world were built wide enough to accommodate a carriage turning in the street, a presidential entourage, a celebrity’s limousine, or a Roman chariot, then these roads were built wide enough to accommodate an army truck—a single army truck bearing down in blind rage from the dizzy height of some remote power to quell a rebellion. Or a food-aid truck sent from the even dizzier heights of ever more remote powers to quell a famine.

“Let me show you some old Mozambique,” said Mapenga, suddenly veering off the road and onto something wide enough to allow for a couple of goats. We drove for some distance through a scrubby wasteland of bush, and then suddenly we broke through the scruffy backcountry into a clearing. Here, there was a small, dusty village that had crowded itself around a single, tiny shack serving as a grocery store.

“This used to be a town in Pork days,” said Mapenga. “Believe it or not. Nice place, they say. There was a club, and a hardware store, restaurant. Now look.”

A single telephone pole leaned against a solitary stone building, which blinked under the relentless sun. Its roof and back wall had been blown off, revealing a cross section of remarkably thick walls. A massive mango tree grew out of one of the windows.