Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (28 page)

“They arrested me a few years ago and tossed me in there for three nights,” said Mapenga. “The usual hunna-hunna about, ‘You wazungu think you can come here and do anything.’ You know how it is? You fire some lazy bastard and his brother is the local policeman, so they come and arrest you and keep you until they admit they haven’t got any evidence against you.” Then Mapenga repeated the word with a Shona accent, “Heavy-dents. Ha!

“So I tell the policeman, ‘What’s stopping me walking out of here?’

“He said, ‘We shoot you.’ ”

Mapenga laughed. “See?” he said, slapping my knee.
“Heavy-dents.
That’s what they say. They say, ‘That is not a bullet hole. It is a heavy-dent.’ Ha! Ha!”

Mapenga changed gears and the engine whined. The pickup lurched into a slower pace. “So for three nights I am stuck on this slab of concrete and there are chickens and kids and dogs wandering in and out and there’s a gondie in the mango tree with an AK-47 with the barrel pointing straight at my brain. The kids fetched me burned mealies and water, though. And the guy in the tree with the gun threw mangos down for me once in a while. We became quite good mates. Sometimes I come through here and give him a packet of kapenta.”

A group of four or five women standing by the side of the road, with plastic containers and buckets on their heads, shouted and waved as Mapenga drove past. “My girlfriends,” he said, winking at K and slamming on the brakes, so that we were enveloped in a cloak of white dust. He reversed the pickup and the women climbed into the back. Mapenga leaned out the window and said something in Shona; they shrieked and laughed in response.

K glanced behind at the women. “The Porks weren’t afraid of dipping into the oil drum, hey.”

“Plenty of goffles around here,” Mapenga agreed. “Beautiful as well. There are some that are almost white, I promise you.” Mapenga lit a cigarette. “It’s tempting, sometimes. There’s a bar in Maputo that I go to where all the prozzies hang out. You know, the classy ones. The ones with Pork blood in them. You’ve never seen such women. More beautiful than wazungu women, I’m telling you.” Mapenga cleared his throat. “Ja, so last month I was there and the owner is the slimiest fucking Pork you’ve ever met.

“He tells me, ‘Hey, Mila is in the back room. She’s so drunk. She’s giving it away.’

“And Mila, I promise, she’s the most beautiful mawhori you’ve seen. And about eight guys have already been in there and done her.” Mapenga shook his head. “Death sentence, man.

“I told the owner, ‘No thanks. I’ve seen plenty of The Very Disease. I don’t need to go looking for it.’

“He said, ‘No problemo, she’s clean.’

“I said, ‘If she was clean an hour ago, she certainly isn’t now.’ ”

By now we had cleared the village and we were driving through a surprising and sudden pastoral patch of country. It looked like something torn from a storybook of Europe and laid across the ache of scrub that lay behind us. Great fields of gleaming green grass lay cropped on either side of us, like English meadows. All along the road were herds of cattle, flocks of goats, donkey carts, and a multitude of people; a river of patient life, pressing toward the east, like a pilgrimage. Mapenga slowed the pickup to a crawl and then the crowd was too thick for us to make passage through them. So he stopped the vehicle and we all climbed out, the women who had hitched a ride with us thanking Mapenga with clapping hands.

Now we joined the surge of bodies, along braided paths under an avenue of fragile fir trees that seeped a northern scent into the air. People clucked and sang to their livestock, children suckled and cried, feet and hooves kicked up a billowing atmosphere of manure-scented dust. I found myself shoulder to shoulder with Mapenga on the one side and, on the other, a woman and her child. She had covered her head from the sun with a drape of bright blue-and-red cloth. A flock of goats trotted ahead of her. She was calling to them, or singing to her baby, I couldn’t tell which, in a soft, monotonous nasal tone. K was forging ahead like a man accustomed to crossing a sea of humanity and livestock.

Then, quite suddenly, we came to a standstill and the swarm of animals and people arranged themselves into a thick rope that snaked down from a small hill, all the way to a mango orchard that lay below us. Towering up all around us, and providing an almost liquid shade, was an eruption of enormous trees, a vast thicket of lush green.

The place—milling as it was with women, men, children, and livestock—was suddenly strangely silent. Except for the animals complaining softly, and the odd bleat of babies, few people were talking and those who were talked in hushed, reverent tones. Everyone appeared to be waiting for someone or something. The queer peace was broken only by the occasional, high shrill sound of a man yelling and the sharp report of a whip cracking.

Mapenga seized my hand. “Follow me.”

We pressed through the crush of cows and people and into a tiny area that looked like an old stone chapel without a roof. K was already standing in front of the chapel walls.

“Look,” said Mapenga.

The floor of the chapel was a deep, clear well, echoing its own brilliance back at us, light turquoise layering down to dark indigo, reaching deeper and deeper into the earth until it became a narrow black pinprick of infinity. Straddling above the well, on a great bench provided for the purpose, was a big man in a grubby white undershirt and rolled-up trousers, which were hitched at the waist with a belt made from a strip of inner-tube rubber. He was cracking a huge leather whip above his head and it occasionally stung down on the backs of animals or people who jumped their place in a queue that snaked from here all the way into the heart of the mango orchard behind us.

“Dry season, wet season, year after year, this well never dries up,” said Mapenga.

It was a miracle of pure water in a place that was otherwise so thinly blessed. I watched as a woman stooped and filled her buckets, and then, putting her buckets aside, she led her cattle by the nose, one at a time, to drink from the well. Then it was the chance of her goats and her dogs and her children, who fell on their knees next to the lapping animals and scooped water to their mouths in handfuls. And then another woman took her place and the ritual was repeated.

I turned to K. “Did you know about this place during the war?”

K looked sullen. “We never came here,” he said shortly.

Mapenga looked at K and laughed. “Lying bastard. The Rhodesians poisoned every well between here and Mukumbura. You mean you came here once, poisoned the thing, and never came back.”

“I
didn’t poison it.”

“Okay, not you personally,” Mapenga agreed, “but the Porks or the Rhodesians did. Someone did, and it wasn’t these poor bastards.”

K said, “I’ll go and wait at the car.” He turned and walked back through the crowd to the fir trees.

Mapenga looked after him. “That man needs my pills too, I promise you. Then he’ll be square. You too. You should take them too, then we’ll all be square.” Then he seized my hand and pulled me in the opposite direction, to the front of the queue, until I was standing below the man with the sjambok. Mapenga spoke to the man in Shona and the man, not taking his eyes off the throng in front of him, nodded his head and replied, “Yes, Mapenga. You may go to see.” His whip sailed down and then abruptly cracked back, barely glancing the hide of an ox that was about to step into the well. “But not to taste,” the man warned.

“Come.” Mapenga pressed me ahead of him, around the edge of the well and through a tiny slot in the chapel wall. I crouched on hands and knees to get through the cool, dark passage of stone, which was about six feet long and so narrow that I had to turn sideways in places to force my shoulders through. I landed on a carpet of moss and looked up at pieces of torn sky breaking through a dense roof of foliage. It was like being born into a place beyond the world. Suddenly the noise and dust and heat of the last few days were forgotten. All here was fragrant and soft and whispering. Mapenga helped me to my feet. And there we stood, hand in hand, in the garden of Eden.

We were surrounded by three stone walls, as high as a castle, that reached back to the hill. Inside the belly of the walls, where we stood, was a cultivated garden that had gone beautifully wild. Mint bushes as big as small trees pressed against hedges of rosemary and thyme. A frenzy of tiny white flowers bordered an ancient tangle of passion-fruit creepers. Bright birds swooped and dived from the canopy of heavy-limbed trees that groaned and sawed against their own weight in the mild breeze. Through all this, from a dark hole in the mouth of the hill, a jumping stream bubbled over its rocky banks and set up silver droplets of water.

“There, lovely creature,” said Mapenga, kissing my hand. “I’ve shown you heaven on earth.”

I knelt down and pressed my hands into the moss.

“Anyone caught in here gets thrown out of the village,” said Mapenga. “And anyone found drinking from here . . .” Mapenga knelt next to me and put his lips close to the stream without drinking. “They’re for the chop.”

BY THE TIME we arrived back at the cage, the sun had begun its decline into the lake, dragging with it all the day’s colors. K went out into the garden to pray. Mapenga and I lay on opposites ends of the sofa and drank a cold beer. Neither of us spoke. When darkness fell, K came in from the garden and sat opposite us. The generator came on and the fan started to whirl the warm air around and around. We didn’t bother to switch on the lights, but instead stayed in the darkness until we couldn’t see one another at all. Then Mapenga got up and opened a bottle of wine and poured out two glasses.

“Here’s to no more spooks,” I said.

Mapenga raised his glass.

“I’ll have some,” said K.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Just a small one.”

“Okay.” I got up and fetched a little glass from the kitchen and poured out a sip for K.

The three of us knocked glasses together.

The lion came to the edge of the cage and flung himself against the wire.

“Look,” said Mapenga. “My lion’s lonely. He’s feeling left out.” Then he said, “Let’s throw a fish on the fire. We can sit outside with Mambo.”

So we took the wine and a tiger fish outside and built a fire and cooked our meal under the stars while the fire spat mopane smoke at us. The lion lay next to Mapenga, contentedly licking fish flesh off the edge of Mapenga’s plate, and we talked softly about other nights when we had sat around fires in Africa—with different people—listening to wild lions, or hyenas, or to the deep, singing, anonymous night. Above us the sky tore back in violent, endless beauty, mysterious and unattainable. There is no lid to this earth and there is nothing much fettering us to the ground. Eventually we will die and be wafted back into the universe. Bones to dust. Flesh to ashes. Soul into that infinite mystery.

The cat yawned and fell asleep on Mapenga’s feet.

K got up and stretched. “I’m off to bed.”

“Me too,” I said.

Mapenga held up the wine bottle. “We haven’t put this out of its misery yet. Here, give me your glass.”

K asked me, “Are you coming?”

“When I’ve finished this.”

“We have an early start in the morning.”

“I know.”

“Very early.”

“Okay.” I lit a cigarette. “Good night.” I blew smoke into the sky.

K walked around to the swing door and I heard him letting himself into the cage. The lights came on in the house.

The lion started purring. I drank my wine and then I sat with the empty glass between my hands and stared into the fire until it died down into a heap of ashy pink coals. The lights in the house went out. The fishing rigs chugged out for the night’s catch, their lights reflecting like bright pearls off the oily-black water. Feeling stiff and sunburned I stretched and got up.

“Thanks for showing me that garden,” I said.

“Have some more wine.”

“We have an early, early start,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”

Mapenga put his hand up and caught my waist. “Come here,” he said.

So I bent over and kissed him. His lips tasted of salt and wine and cigarettes. “Good night,” I said.

“No,” he said. “Come here.” He stood up and his chin grazed my cheek. He held me in the small of my back. “Come.” He led me down to the lake. I glanced over my shoulder at the lion, who was following us slowly, tail wagging, head low and swinging—he looked sedate. “Don’t worry about the lion,” whispered Mapenga.

“I’m not,” I lied.

Now we were standing on a flat rock above the lake. Here, the edge of the island fell sharply into the water.

“Lie down,” said Mapenga.

“What?”

“Lie down.”

I lay down on the rock.

“On your tummy,” said Mapenga.

I rolled over on the warm rock and it was the temperature of blood, flooding the day’s heat into my stomach. Mapenga lay down next to me and put his hand over my shoulder. “Look out there,” he said softly.

I turned my head. The lion had sauntered out in front of us and was sitting, statuesque, gazing out at the deep night. Beyond the lion, the sky swelled over the lake, reached back again, and touched itself in the water. The world appeared perfectly round, a mirror of itself over and over and over. Mapenga and I were a thin slot of life wedged into the middle of the end of the world. The moon crept out of the lake, tentative and heavy and yellow, stained with heat and age, pieces of it dripping off its side.

“Which way is up?” Mapenga said, his lips touching my ear. “Everywhere you look, you’re surrounded.”

My arms prickled and I felt suddenly dizzy, too full of the drunken night and of the slow, ponderous moon and the stars and of the heat-soaked day.

“The edge of the world,” whispered Mapenga.

I rolled onto my back and Mapenga leaned over me. It was a moment before I could make out his face and then his lips were on mine. We kissed and it was some minutes before I felt the sharp edge of rock against my spine and turned my face away.

I sat up and the lion gave a soft grunt and started to clean himself noisily. I said, “Oh God, I must get to bed.”