Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (8 page)

I tried to picture K elsewhere and failed. Like the African earth itself, he seemed organic and supernatural all at the same time, romantic and brutish, a man who was both savior and murderously dangerous. And he was much, much more complicated than the stereotypes it was so tempting to use to describe him. Seeing him on this farm, I couldn’t decide if the man had shaped the land or the other way around.

“How did you find this place?” I asked.

K stroked one of the dogs and said nothing for a long time and then, when he did speak, his voice was almost unbearable to hear. His resigned sadness, as real and tangible as humidity, wrapped itself around my shoulders, and I felt ruined with pity. “It’s lekker, isn’t it?” he said.

“Beautiful,” I agreed.

“Sometimes,” said K, “when I am lying in bed at night and thinking about how I got here, I can only say that it must have been God’s plan from the start. Every step of my life has been one step closer to this.” K shrugged, as if he was helpless to prevent the seclusion and remoteness and as if his heart had finally broken. He seemed to me then to be a man not so much wallowing in his good fortune, but accepting his inevitable punishment.

“You know”—K cleared his throat—“I was called up when I was seventeen. I was an appy at a workshop in Que Que when I got my papers. I wanted to be a welder.” He sighed. “See? I started off with good intentions. Then . . . well, I was called up into the regulars and the first week in camp I was slow getting out of bed one morning, so the sergeant—some bullying prick— comes up to me and boots me as hard as he can in the small of the back. He told me, ‘Get up, soldier!’

“Ja, well I learned to defend myself in boarding school, so man . . . I didn’t mess around. In about three seconds I had the sarge with my hand around his neck, pinned half a meter off the floor to the barracks door. I knew right then that if I stayed in the regulars I’d end up killing someone on the wrong side—I mean on our own side: some idiot who didn’t have a clue and who thought he could bully me just because he had a stripe on his shoulder and I didn’t.

“What you have to understand is that I grew up in the shateen, I grew up with a gun, I grew up with the gondies, I grew up fighting. The war was not a mission for me. It was like I’d done all my life except instead of hunting game, I was hunting gooks.”

The early afternoon had turned a mellow golden color. The rain swallowed itself back up into the clouds. The lemon-colored sun sank down and bulged in the high western sky. The land beyond the river looked as if it was steaming gently.

“And I could hunt gooks better than anyone because I could think like one. When I was a laaitie, my folks had a farm in Kalamo, in southwestern Zambia. It was still Northern Rhodesia in those days. I must have been about four when my grandfather took me with him herding cattle from Munz to Kaleni. I walked with the munts the whole way—a couple of hundred kilometers—while the old boy drove. At night, the old man camped in a tent, and I slept with the cattle boys around the fire. And they showed me how to think like a munt, and how to track—even after cows have trampled the shateen down to a toothpick, they showed me how to pick up traces of spoor—and they showed me to hunt, just little things, like mice and rabbits.” K paused. “If you can track a rat, you can sure as shit track a person. So,” continued K, “I joined the RLI.”

“Did they check under your fingernails to make sure you were white?”

K laughed. “No, but they sent me into the shateen with a savage sergeant to see if I could survive for three weeks in the bush with that arsehole. Which I could. Then they gave me a gun to see if I could hit a target. Which I could. Then they did everything they could think of to kill me for months and months, and when I was still alive at the end of it, they said, ‘Congratulations.’ They gave me a bazooka and said, ‘Go forth and scribble.’ So I phoned up my dad and I told him I was in Thirteen Troop and he said to me, ‘If you want to fuck up your life, go ahead.’ ” The muscles in the back of K’s jaw hopped. “But”—he let his breath out—“it was too late by then. I was in.”

“Do you regret it?”

K looked at me for a long time, considering the question. “Not like you’d expect,” he said at last. “My whole life would have been different if it hadn’t been for the war so . . . In some ways, the war years were the best of my life. Those boys that I fought with—there were four of us in a troop, that’s it . . . man, I knew them better than I knew myself. You walk into the shateen with three strangers and a month later you walk out with ous that you’ve had to trust with your life and who have trusted you with their lives and you know them so well. You’ve seen them shit themselves with fright, you’ve cried with them, you’ve laughed a lot. . . .” K looked out at the river and went quiet. Then he said, “Always, forever after”—K crossed his fingers and held up his hand to show me—“you will not forget them. Even the Yanks from Vietnam and those crazy buggers from Northern Ireland, and the Frogs and the Kiwis. . . . We were all in it together, it didn’t matter where you came from. And I learned a lot from those ous. By the end of the war, I could say ‘fuck you,’ ‘fuck me,’ and ‘fuck off’ in four different languages.” K laughed and then he said, “Unless you’ve licked the arse end of the world with a man, you can’t know what it’s like to have that kind of relationship with someone. It’s closer than family. And that’s why it hurt. . . .” K looked away and shook his head; when he spoke again, his voice was strangled with tears: “The guy lying in the wank-sack next to you might have been a jerk in the real world, but out there in the shateen. . . . We all knew that none of us were angels, but we covered for each other. We were so close with each other that . . . it was like we spoke a different language—our own language.”

K sighed and his shoulders sagged. “There was this one ou—my best friend, you could say he was my Stone China. He was the guy that was always right there, by my side for five years. After the war he was nailed by some gondies in Jo’burg. They jumped him at a red light and they blallered his skop and stole his car. He was completely spazzed out for months but when he got out of hospital I told him he must come and live with us, with me and my wife. So he came and lived with us because he wasn’t square—he couldn’t look after himself, he couldn’t really talk, his brain was like sadza
.
But, of course, I took care of him under my own roof. I told my wife, ‘Treat him as if he were your own brother.’ ” K paused. “And then I come to find the bloody cripple’s screwing my wife.” K made a choking noise that might have been a laugh. “Ja, that’s how he thanked me for taking care of him for three years. That’s how he treated his best friend.”

The hippos surfaced and shouted their objection into the lowering sun.

“So that was the marriage over, more or less. It had been on the rocks for a while, but that was the final straw. Me, I decided, ‘Screw this.’

“I told the ex: ‘You take everything, my girl. The house, the garden, the car, the business. Me, I am heading into the bush.’

“I got sod all except a boat. So that year, at the end of the rains, I hopped in the boat and I started at the top of the gorge and I floated down these rivers every chance I got for two years. And one day, I was coming along here”—K pointed upstream— “and I look up on the shore, and there’s a lekker crop of turbo cabbage.” K put an imaginary joint to his lips and sucked in a deep lungful of air. “I pulled my boat over and I go looking to see whose weed it is. But there’s no one here. Not a soul. It’s just shateen for miles and bloody miles. The dagga was wild, self-cultivated. But man! I dried some and smoked it and the stuff almost blew my wig off. Anyway, the cabbage wasn’t the point. It was this land.

“I spent two nights here that first time, just sleeping on the ground, under the stars. Right here under this tree, I cleared the damn jesse scrub and buffalo bean and slept right here. All night, I kept asking the Almighty, ‘Is this what You want for me?’ And all day I walked, deeper and deeper into the shateen and I just kept seeing that it was more and more beautiful and more and more wild.

“Then the next month I found the chief having a few drinks with Alex and Marie down at Malidadi and he agreed to have discussions with me and after a few months he granted me the land. Have you met him? Old Chief Chabija.”

I nodded. The chief was well respected from Sole to Kariwa, ruthlessly stubborn and notoriously fair. (He rejected land claims by anyone who arrived at his boma carrying bribes, but nevertheless expected gifts from his visitors commensurate with their means. The difference between a bribe and a gift seemed to depend on the chief’s assessment of the gift-giver.) Anyone requesting land from the chief—my parents included—could expect both arbitrary and thorough inspections, as well as a rigorous trial period during which the chief ensured the land was being developed as promised and that jobs were going to his people, and not to workers from other provinces.

K said, “Half his relatives work here now, so I’m long Chinas with the chief.”

The sun caught the tip of the escarpment and flooded the lower western sky with a golden thread. A young man clad in a camouflage-patterned tank top and green trousers came to the gate and beat the gong.

K put his hand out to stay the dogs. “Come!” he told the man.

The young man came down to the veranda. “I am Innocent,” he announced.

“Bo,” I said, shaking his hand.

Innocent took the tea tray to the kitchen and began to retrieve clothes from the washing line. I glanced at my watch and said that I thought it was time I started to head home.

K stood up. “But there’s something I want to show you first.”

“Perhaps another time,” I suggested. “I have a long walk back to the road.”

“No, no. You don’t need to leave right now. You’re in no hurry. I’ll drive you home. I’ll drive quickly,” said K. “Did you have enough tea? Enough to eat?”

“Plenty, thank you.”

“Come now,” ordered K. He led me away from the veranda and garden, through the farmyard, and cut sharply toward the bend in the river, on a path cleared through the bush. Vervet monkeys clattered overhead and openbill storks stood sentry in the top reaches of a winter thorn tree. Suddenly, the bush opened up into an expanse of rain-misted lawn. A half-built redbrick house in the middle of a freshly planted lawn stood watch over the river, facing the square head of a mountain on the far bank.

“That,” said K, pointing across the river, “is Peace Mountain.”

I had seen the mountain before from the tarmac road. It is a distinctive wedge-shaped rise of land with a wide band of cliffs at its neck. “I didn’t know it had a name,” I said.

“It didn’t,” said K. “I named it.” His voice thickened. “I climbed it last year. I got caught on a cliff. I just had to hang there and wait for the Almighty to tell me what to do. If it hadn’t been for Him . . . It took me until well after dark to get down, just praying to Him to guide me as I went.” K demonstrated a massive bowl of a hand. “You have to remember that He holds each and every one of us right there, right in the palm of His hand.”

“Luckily,” I said.

K frowned. “Come,” he said, leading me up to the house. It stood stubbornly in the middle of the lawn, the reverse of a ruin (something being built up against the press of the Sole Valley sun, instead of the more usual experience of something crumbling and melting back into the ground).

“And this,” said K as he stepped into the roofless house, “is where we’ll live one day. I’ll finish building it soon. I have to get the farm going a bit more first, though. But what do you think?”

I wondered who “we” was, but I didn’t ask. Instead I said, “It’s lovely.”

“Look,” said K, “it’s all set up for books. Shelves here, and here. Maybe you could put ornaments on this shelf. This is the kitchen. See? A view of the mountain out the window.” He turned to me and I can describe the look on his face only as transported. “I don’t think,” he said, “that God is going to have me make this journey alone. He will send me a woman when the time is right.”

A blue-headed lizard scampered up the wall where the larder shelves would be one day and one of the dogs darted after it, barely catching the end of its tail, which sloughed off and wiggled hysterically on the cement-dusted floor.

“She’ll have to be a very special woman,” said K, softly and looking at me.

“Yes,” I said.

And then, maybe it was a trick of the rain-softened light, but I saw K’s face fold with such exquisite torment that my heart turned over for him.

He said, “There’s been so much destruction. But I’ve learned so much now. I’ve really learned about love.” K’s lips grew fleshy. “I would nurture a woman. She would be the head of the family now. I wouldn’t have to dominate her. I would put everyone else first. I would come last in the family. This is the order: first God, then my wife, then my children, the dogs, the servants. . . . I would be last. I just want to share this”—he gestured to the house, the garden, the slow-churning river—“with someone.”

I looked away from the house and saw that three fishermen had paddled their canoes around the bend in the river. The evening had brought a kind of careless, extravagant beauty to the world. The sky was rinsed various shades of blue and pink and was scattered with ripped, high clouds. The sun, catching itself in the trees on the far bank, bled red and gold across the water. Peace Mountain and the distant escarpment were softened in a dying light. From the village opposite K’s farm, blue clouds of smoke from cooking fires tugged into the evening sky. It was the time of day when the confusion of color, the churn of cooler air supplanting the heat of the day, the miracle of the journeying river—everything about being alive—seemed more improbable and fleeting and precious than usual.

The Left Behind