Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (7 page)

K turned to me. “So you came to see the farm?”

I nodded. “I hope it’s okay. You look busy.”

“Do you want some tea?”

“I don’t want to interrupt you.”

“No, it’s okay. Michael’s here. He’s my farm manager.”

Michael—the man with whom K had just been speaking—crawled up from the riverbed. He was a tall muscular man whose age it was hard to discern, since his face was remarkably clear and unlined while his hair was quite gray. His smile was easy and vivid and belied worried, tired eyes. We shook hands and I told him who I was. Michael nodded—he had heard of my father. And then we swapped the inevitable stories of who we knew in common, which turned out to be more people than I had expected. Half of the men and women on the fish farm were apparently related to Michael, while one of the market women I had befriended in Sole was his aunt.

Then we took our leave and K led me to his pickup. He said that he had never seen such rain since moving here.

“When was that?” I asked.

K opened the passenger door for me. “Five years ago.” He went around to the driver’s side and let himself into the cab; then he slipped the car into gear and we surfed off the muddy bank onto what passed for a road. The engine roared and whined and the tires seethed, the car veered to the side and spun, mud flicked up. K changed gears and the car suddenly surged forward and I found myself flung back. I hung on to the door handle and stared out of the windscreen as the world slashed past me in a violent explosion of color. I had the impression of towering woodland opening up onto a surprising stretch of shaggy savannah and then a jumble of riverside foliage.

Suddenly, the bush peeled away from us and an electric fence glinted sharply in the sun. K turned and shouted at me, “The farm starts here.”

I nodded. We had broken through the chaos of the rain-battered forest onto something almost eerily neat, combed flat, and pinned down. Here, the road was properly graded and graveled, so that the pickup stopped revving and swerving and began to hum along with ease over the wet but firm surface. Lines of soldierly bananas in four distinct blocks made way for a precisely tended vegetable garden and a shade-cloth house of domestic garden plants. Small palm trees jutted their heads up behind carefully landscaped arrangements of shrubs and flowering plants, and a long, clipped lawn swept up from a fence to the workshop and road.

Beyond the farm, the untidy virgin bush that we had just come through waved back at us rude and exuberant. “This was all shateen,
”
said K, sweeping his hand across the obedient plantations of bananas, “all completely wild. I had to clear it one acre at a time. You should have seen the snakes in here”—K circled his thumb and forefinger around his wrist—“as thick as this.”

We stopped at a stand of bananas. “Come and see,” he said.

I followed K into the cool, gloomy world below the wide canopy of banana leaves. The light filtered green and dense from above. The ground below us was bare of any vegetation except for the thick, pulpy trunks of the banana trees.

K kicked the ground with his toe. “See this?” he asked, turning up some grayish soil. “I send the gondies up into the hills to raid the caves for batshit. It’s the best fertilizer on earth.”

The air was bitten with a nitrous reek, like chicken manure, that was mixed with the scent of rotting banana leaves and wet, worm-turned earth. These smells were all the more powerful for being trapped under the almost solid lid of leaves above our heads.

K kept walking, and as we ventured deeper into the bananas, sounds from beyond were increasingly muffled, until at last there was silence, except for the sound of K’s bare feet padding along the weed-free, flattened ground and me stumbling unevenly behind him.

Then K stopped and held up his hand. “Hear that?”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

I held my breath. “Nothing,” I agreed.

“Where else can you go in this country without hearing anything at all? No insects, no birds, no gondies
.
Nothing.”

The air felt suspended and bitter; air that is not used to being chilled and so sinks in on itself and becomes deadened.

“It’s my church,” said K. “Sometimes, I come and kneel in here.” K lifted his hands and I half expected him to fall to his knees in rapture. “Utter peace,” he breathed. “Hear that? Complete serenity.”

“Yes.”

K turned and smiled. “I just wanted you to feel that,” he said. “Now, I must make you some tea.”

Dogs and Curiosity

Road to K’s farm

K’S HOUSE TURNED out to be a single cement bedroom—low and bleak, like a prison cell—with a veranda attached to it overlooking a view of an island at a bend in the Chabija River. Here, the river turned back on itself as if to admire its own languid journey toward the Pepani, which it joined a few kilometers downstream. At the bend, the riverbank towered thirty or forty feet high—a sheer wall of red clay exploding with carmine bee-eaters whose nest holes bored into the cliff and whose calls echoed across the water, “terk terk.” The river was the color of milky tea, unsettled with the recent rain. Three hippos had set up house off the point of an island in front of K’s bedroom and they occasionally erupted with complaining shouts of “Hot! It is too damn hot today,” then blew a fountain of spray from their nostrils or wagged manure into the water.

A tiny bathroom, militarily stark in its simplicity with a small washbasin and a loo, was attached to the bedroom. A bed, a chair, a table, and a metal closet made up the bedroom’s furniture. On the wall, K had hung some wildlife prints and framed photographs of various stiffly posing people of several generations, whom I took to be members of his family. Next to K’s bed, on the little wooden table, were a leather-bound Bible and a small plastic clock. A tiny fan had been bolted onto the window ledge (there was no windowpane, just a metal grille and mosquito gauze with a reed mat that could be rolled down in heavy rain). There was no way to communicate with the world beyond Chabija from here; no phone, no computer, no radio, no television.

The kitchen was a separate, bare-boned building, which could be reached via a brick path from the bedroom. It was a simple affair, three half walls along the front and sides and a whole wall along the back holding up an asbestos-sheet roof. A shelf along the back wall held a kettle, a pot, a pan, a few plates and cups. A gas stove and a sink took up most of the front wall. A washing line hung over the woodstove, bright with K’s shirts and shorts. Three dogs and a cat were splayed out on the floor. The dogs were named Sheba, Mischief, and Dispatch.

“Dispatch?”

K said, “The gondies call him Dizzy-patch.” K tickled the dozing dog with his toe and the dog flipped onto his feet with a soft growl and then, seeing K, began to wag his tail and grin. “He’s a good dog,” said K, patting the dog’s head, “incredible watchdog.”

I said, “Hello Dizzy-patch.”

Dispatch backed into K’s legs, flattened his ears, and bared his teeth at me. He was a low, squat dog, the kind that steals up to you from behind—a ground-scraping shadow—and sinks his teeth into your leg before you’ve seen or heard him coming.

K prepared the tea himself. “I don’t like to have gondies around the house,” he said. “I have someone in the morning to clean and do laundry and the gardener comes in the morning to water and weed and then”—K indicated the gate with his head—“if anyone wants me they must hit the gong by the gate.”

I slid along the kitchen wall, keeping a wary eye on Dispatch, and followed K down to a picnic table overlooking the river, where we sat with cups balanced on our laps. The cat crouched over a saucer of milk and the dogs lined up for their biscuits (sugary Zimbabwean tea biscuits sold at the Sole market by Michael’s aunt). K had fried battered okra, which we ate with salt, licking our fingers against the grease.

On the other side of the Chabija, I could see a village perched on the riverbank. It was a series of huts facing toward K’s camp, their doors like yawning mouths into the gloomy interiors that lay anonymously within. Sitting around the outside of the huts, the curved shape of men, seated on low stools, focused on playing a game. Beyond that, two men in ragged shorts were laboriously mending a fishing net spread out on the ground between them. A woman was kneeling in a clearing near a small cooking hut, pounding maize, her body falling and rising from the hips, her arms outstretched and gripping the pestle. Children and goats and chickens fell in and out of shadows.

“That village has sprung up since I’ve been here,” said K. “Before I came, there was nothing here at all. No road, no village. Nothing. Now I have about twelve families living over there and about two thirds of their economy is stealing from this farm—just petty stuff, but that leads to bigger stuff. The really dangerous tsotsis come from Sole and Chabija townships. They come prepared for a proper dustup—sawn-off shotguns and machetes.”

I shielded my eyes from the sun. “Those villagers look as if they have quite a well-established setup,” I said.

“What?! They’re pissing about with half an acre of millet and then whatever they can catch in the river. Anyway, why work when you can steal from me and then sit on your arse for the rest of the day? Just wait, though. Now, now I’ll get my electric fence wired up and then hokoyo! Zap! One time, fried gondie.”

K rubbed Dispatch’s belly with his toe. “I can’t turn away their kids, though. Their laaities come to my little school on the farm and I end up treating all of them at the clinic when they’re sick. Mind you, the clinic is just for the ordinary things like malaria and coughs. If someone gets really sick, then I take them to the mission. Or if they get in a messy accident . . .” K licked his lower lip. “There was a woman here just the other day—when was it?” He frowned. “October, November time. It was before the rains, you know, when everything is so dry. Anyway this nanny was down there doing her washing and she got grabbed by a flattie. Just down there”—K pointed to the river below the village—“I was up at the office and Innocent, my cookboy, he comes running from the house and he’s chemering, ‘Bwana! Bwana! Crocodile!’

“And I come running after him and I hear this noise—Waaaaah! Waaaaah! The other nannies were on the bank tossing rocks at the flattie and screaming. Man! So I’m up here thinking, Do I get my gun or what? But I was scared of losing sight of her—you know, if it pulled her down, then what the hell do I do? And how was I going to shoot the flattie and miss the nanny? So I start yelling, man! I’m just screaming at Him, ‘Father! Help me! Help me!’ And I am running down to the river as fast as I can, picking up rocks and grabbing branches, and I bloody nearly fell into the river myself.”

K was African in his storytelling, reliving the incident with dramatic gestures and loud shouting. The veins in his neck were standing out and he was sweating. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and then he went on more quietly. “And wouldn’t you know, just as I get down there, the damn thing let her go. She was pretty shredded, though.” K let this sink in for a moment before adding, “So I go wading in there, and my fucking hair must have been standing straight up, because the whole time I’m thinking there’s a pissed-off flattie swimming around in here and he still wants his nosh. But what the hell am I going to do? The nanny was drowning. I had to go after her. I told the Lord, ‘You keep that flattie away from me or I will scribble one of your own creatures.’ And then I am in the current and I am just swimming. . . . I grab the nanny and she’s just like”—K raked his nails up and down his arms—“it was like she had been chewed and digested and shat back into the water. I couldn’t even tell if she was alive, but I hold on to her chin and I pull her to shore and there’s blood everywhere. There’s blood on the nanny and blood on me and blood in the water, and I’m sure every croc from here to Wasa Basa was on his way up to check it out.

“Anyway, I pick up the nanny and I run!” K laughed. “I must have made it from the riverbank to the pickup in about thirty seconds and the whole time I’m telling God, ‘Don’t let her die now. Please, God, don’t let her die now.’ But for all I know, she was already dead, because she was as gray as a bloody sheet. And I drove to the mission like a . . . what now? Bee-ba! Bee-ba,” said K, laughing and imitating a siren. “Anyway, sure enough, she lived. When I brought her back from the mission—all stitched up from head to toe—I told them, ‘You must thank the Father for giving you back your sister.’ I said, ‘Next time He might not be so kind.’ ”

As if in response to K’s story, the river burped with barely submerged life and there was a sudden splash. The air hummed with insects and with the anticipation of more rain, and as we sat there, the drops began to fall, silver beads that speckled the river and drew a curtain of wet around us. The dogs slunk onto the veranda and the cat streaked for the kitchen. We could hear the workers shouting to one another as they ran for shelter. The rain intensified and we joined the dogs, pulling up chairs until our knees pressed together in the tight patch of dry afforded by the shallow breadth of roof. Our sense of isolation was complete.