Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (30 page)

Mukumbura had no border post. It had no expectation that anyone would come here for any good reason, not even to flee into Mozambique. Instead of customs and immigration, then, we had to have our passports and vehicle cleared at a small wooden cabin that declared itself the police station. The policemen had taken stools and benches outside and propped themselves up under a mango tree, where they talked and smoked. Seeing us, one of the policemen reluctantly extracted himself from the conversation and followed us lazily into the cabin.

A handwritten sign above the officer in charge’s desk declared good-naturedly, TOGETHER, WE CAN FIGHT CRIME.

Under this was a list of offenses with their corresponding fines:

ASSAULT COMMON—$5000.00
PUBLIC FIGHTING—$5000.00
INSULTING/SCOLDING—$2000.00
GAMBLING—$2000.00
DRIVING CATTLE WITHOUT PERMIT—$5000.00

I pointed to the sign and said to K, “This might get expensive for us.”

But K didn’t respond.

“Are you sulking?”

“No.”

“Looks like it from here.” I handed my passport to the policeman and said, “Is there a fine for sulking?”

“Madam?”

“Kutsamwa,” I said, pulling the corners of my mouth down and stamping my foot.

The policeman laughed. K glowered.

We drove to Harare in almost total silence. It’s a long day’s drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins—real and imagined—and stitched them onto the sack-cloth of his own soul, it is endless. A wide, rocky track climbed up and out into Rusambo and Mount Darwin. I stared out the window at the villages that lay flat and breathless on this inhospitable ground, as if they were so used to being leveled—as they were during the war—that they were still flinching with the memory of it.

Then, a few kilometers beyond Mount Darwin, the road was suddenly pulled back from its ill-behaved sprawl. Here it was paved and smooth. And the ground on either side of it heaved into a sigh of teasing, fertile, red earth. This earth hosted rich groves of fruit trees, avenues of pine and eucalyptus, rolling cattle range. And it also cultivated the intense jealousy and bitterness of the land-starved, power-starved, food-starved villagers in the north who had fought violently for this very land and who now, twenty-three years after independence, had suddenly been given it by a rogue government that, having drowned the economy in a stagnant pool of corruption, was in need of their support. It was bittersweet victory—too late and too poisoned by bad politics to be an unequivocal prize.

Now the resettled villagers blinked despondently at us as we drove past. They waved us down and shouted. They needed a lift to town. There was no fuel to run the tractor. No fertilizer, boss! No pesticide! Hunger! The farm laborers, kicked off the farms by the new tenants, waved us down too. They saw the Zambian license plates and shouted, “Job, boss! Job!”

Bindura tore into the heart of Mazoe Valley. Here, a green tongue of hip-high corn sagged, droughted and underfed, on the side of the road. A lake uncurled beneath the foot of a hill and I caught, on the air, the bell song of frogs. It was the cooling part of the afternoon when the air is most crushed and raw with smells. We passed an orange orchard that had stained the air sweet and hopeful. It made me say, “You could just leave me here.” It seemed as good a place as any to find a lift into town, or a place to spend the night.

K said nothing.

“Or stop sulking.”

“I’m not sulking.”

“Okay.”

“I’m just . . .” Then nothing.

“Would it make you feel better to leave me here?”

“I can’t.”

“Why?”

“It’s not safe.”

“I can look after myself.”

K looked out the window. “You really liked him, didn’t you?”

“Oh God.”

A long silence.

I said, “I can get a bus to Lusaka.”

K laughed.

I said, “You know what your bloody problem is? No one has ever talked back to you because they’ve only had their mouths half open before you’ve laid them flat. But I’m not a banana field, or your wife, or your servant. You can’t tell me what to think or how to feel or what to say or how to grow.”

K said, “I don’t like you like this. I liked you the way you were before.”

“I am the same person.”

K shook his head.

“Yes, I am.” I lit a cigarette. “I am, like it or not.”

THE NEXT MORNING, I took over driving. We hurried west in silence. Three hours into driving I sniffed and hung my head out of the window. “I’ve been smelling burning rubber,” I said. “Can you smell anything?”

K said nothing.

“And look,” I said, tapping the instrument panel, “we seem to have used a lot of fuel.”

K looked out the window.

“That’s odd, don’t you think?”

Silence.

I sang, “I talk to the trees, but they won’t listen to me.”

Nothing.

“Fergodsake,
man. Speak! Is anyone home?!”

“Hand brake’s on,” said K.

“What?”

K pointed to the emergency brake. “You’ve been driving with the brake on.”

“Ah-ha. Well that explains a whole lot.” I took the emergency brake off and the pickup surged forward. “Look at that. Miracle of engineering.”

K looked out of his window again.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

K scowled.

I started to laugh, trying not to, so that the sound welled up in my chest and burst out of my nose. Then I was shaking with laughter and tears were pouring down my cheeks and I couldn’t see the road. I pulled over, got out of the car, and I laughed. I laughed until I looked and sounded like St. Medard, until I was gasping for air and clutching my sides. I laughed until I wept. I laughed until K got out of the car. He sniffed at me. Then he smiled and then there was a gradual sound in the back of his throat, like a growl, and suddenly he was laughing too and then the two of us were howling and holding on to the back of the pickup and laughing, our knees weak.

“Come on,” he said at last. “I’ll drive. You drink beer and tell me what’s happening on the side of the road. You’re very good at that.”

“Okay.”

“Peace?”

I wanted to say that I’d never been at war. Instead, “Peace,” I agreed.

A great storm was gathering in the west and it tumbled toward us. It towered up over our heads and reached into the tops of trees and when we met it, we were swallowed in a wall of water and energy. The pickup was buffeted and pummeled and it planed unsteadily across the slick surface of the road. Other vehicles—few as they were—were almost invisible, materializing only once they were upon us, like ghostly apparitions. We drove on, shouting to each other over the sounds of the storm—roaring rain and a high, wailing song of wind. I felt strangely exhilarated, liberated, by the rain. It had forced us to roll up our windows. It had forced us—two unlikely souls brought together by a spectacular series of accidents that went back long before we were born—back into that necessary sense of partnership. If nothing else, we had brought each other this far, and now we were obliged to get each other home.

We turned off at Mkuti and wound our way back down to Lake Kariwa, leaving the storm rocking and thundering behind us. At Kariwa, K retrieved his gun from his colleague. Then, instead of heading back to Sole immediately, he started to drive to the top of the town, taking a road that wound around the shantytowns (buildings stitched together from used turbines discarded by Kariwa’s hydroelectric project) and through a lush, high-walled suburb until we were on the summit of a cone-shaped hill.

K got out of the car. “I want to show you something.”

I climbed out and followed him to the edge of the road.

“Look,” he said. He pointed down to one of the houses that lay below us. It was a large white building, sandblasted and whitewashed, with a copper roof that gleamed a warm apricot. A vast garden rolled out from beyond the house: a cropped lawn, palm trees, bougainvillea hedges, honeysuckles and creepers cascading golden blooms. A delicious monster plant wrapped itself around a jacaranda tree and a hedge of hibiscus separated a neat vegetable garden that had been fenced in against monkeys. A regiment of poinsettias and snowball bushes lined a meticulous brick driveway. Two gardeners were tending a rock garden, which was speared with aloe and cacti and carpeted with succulents.

K turned and got back into the car and we drove without talking until we reached the Zambian border. It wasn’t until we had cleared the border and were driving out of Sitatunga, on the Zambian side of the border, that K said, “I built that whole place myself.” He took his hands off the steering wheel to show me his work-worn fingers. “Every brick and nail of that house came from these hands.” He looked out the window and I saw his jaw jump. He shook his head. “It’s just an elaborate fucking tomb for Luke now. That’s all it is.”

The road tumbled out of the Kariwa heights and followed the course of the Pepani, down rocky ledges that flapped with peeling paper bark commiphora trees and into the low sink of the valley. Stalls had been set up here at the instigation of aid agencies to promote the manufacture of straw baskets and mats and baobab-bark rugs. It was an attempt to replace the illicit trade in wildlife and gems that had flourished here until recently. I made K stop and I bought laundry baskets for Mum and my sister.

At the Sole Valley turnoff, we swung east and now this place seemed familiar and kind to me. I waved at the policeman at the roadblock and felt friendly toward the bored truckers and bright prostitutes at the corner tavern (OBEY YOU’RE THUST, someone had painted in large black letters across the white veranda wall in our absence). Evening was coming as we turned into the fish farm, and the light had ripened, sweet and filtered. Doves bobbed stiffly over the road, picking at spilt grain and complaining softly that no one cared, no one cared. They’d never care.

At camp, the dogs were waiting at the top of the steps for someone to bring them their supper. The BBC was discussing world cricket scores from a fork in the tamarind tree. Mum was spraying purple medicine on Isabelle the turkey, who had been bitten by one of the little dogs on the right wing. Dad was smoking his pipe, drinking tea, and reading aloud from
Aquaculture Today.

“Thanks,” I said to K.

K nodded.

He helped me carry my bags into the camp and then walked back to the pickup. I followed him. He opened his door, he hung over the top of it, and then he said, “Don’t think that I haven’t thought about giving up.”

“What?” I said.

“Over and over, I’ve asked myself, who would miss me? Why am I doing this? Who am I doing this for?” He paused. “Then I remember that no one is given a burden too heavy for them to carry. That’s why I carry on.” K got in the car and started the engine. He said, “I carry on, because I can.”

And then he shut the door and he was gone. One lonely white pickup bumping and jolting down a red road in the Sole Valley until it came to the corner where the donkeys were grazing, and there it turned, and was gone from view.

The Journey Is Now

THOSE OF US who grow in war are like clay pots fired in an oven that is overhot. Confusingly shaped liked the rest of humanity, we nevertheless contain fatal cracks that we spend the rest of our lives itching to fill.

All of us with war-scars will endeavor to find some kind of relief from the constant sting of our incompleteness—drugs, love, alcohol, God, death, truth. K and I, each of us cracked in our own way by our participation on the wrong side of the same war, gravitated to each other, sure that the other held a secret balm—the magic glaze—that might make us whole. I thought he held shards of truth. He thought I held love.

Those of us who grow in war know no boundaries. After all, that most sacred and basic boundary of all (Thou shalt not kill) is not only ignored in war, but outright flaunted and scoffed at. Kill! Slot! Scribble! We (guilty and secret and surviving, and more cunning than the dead) will seep into unseen cracks to find solace. And we will do so without thinking twice, since we are without skins, without membranes, without the usual containments of civilization. We know that life is cheap and that the secret to an inner peace is so dear and so elusive as to be almost unattainable.

K and I met and journeyed and clashed like titans. And, at the end of it all, he asked me not to contact him again. Instead of giving each other some kind of peace and understanding, we had inflamed existing wounds. Far from being a story of reconciliation and understanding, this ended up being a story about what happens when you stand on tiptoe and look too hard into your own past and into the things that make us war-wounded the fragile, haunted, powerful men-women that we are. K and I fell headlong—free fall—into terror, love, hate, God, death, burial.

It’s more than a body can take.

Then, months after our journey together, as this book was on its way out of my hands, I received the following e-mail from him:

Hi Bo,

It’s been a loooong time Precious, but at last i have email. Have laughed off ever trying to get a phone. Tree fell on the last antenna. I asked you not to contact this arse for a few reasons. Number one: that you could write what you wished without you writing to ask for the odd input from the Scribbs. So everything written is yours, not mine. Number two: I needed to sort out my own shit. Number three: To water the compost, and hope a teeny bit of brain popped up. So far, lots of water but only fungus up to now.

Hey you’re still Precious and and and . . .

I Hope we see one another. This is my eeeeeemail address now and will down load every week. So if you wish To watch the new TV soap, glue yourself to the computer screen.

As Always
Scribbs

GLOSSARY

A guide to the idiosyncratic mix of slang and languages used in the text.

All of a sardine: all of a sudden

Appy: apprentice