Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (9 page)

Sole Valley village

THE ROAD FROM the boundary of K’s farm to the tarmac had not been improved by the day’s rain. The bridge over the gorge had been repaired, but there were several other sections of the road that had given way and were torn in sharp, washed-away gullies. K drove fast and determinedly and although the car sometimes slipped and spun, we managed somehow to stay on track and forge the streams that tumbled brown and frothy in their new, temporary capacity as rivers.

As we dipped into warm pockets of air that had sunken into dambos and vleis, the air expanded with the comforting smell of the potato bush and there was a ricochet of insects shrilling. We flashed past huts that, in the dim light, had lost their shabby air of poverty and had taken on instead the aura of cozy domesticity. Indistinct shapes huddled over cooking fires, the occasional snatches of life (a child crying, a man shouting, a woman’s high voice calling out) tumbled through the air at us.

“I like you,” said K suddenly.

I startled and hesitated before I said, “I like you too.”

“I don’t like most people,” K said. “Most wazungu.”

“No.”

“I find I don’t trust people. It’s hard to trust someone who hasn’t looked up the wrong end of a barrel. You know?”

“I don’t make a habit of looking up guns’ snouts,” I admitted.

K persisted. “Ja, how do you know what someone is made of until you’ve broken cover with them at exactly the same time?”

“But I haven’t broken cover with you,” I pointed out.

“No, but you’re a woman,” said K, as if that exempted me.

“Yes,” I agreed, knowing it didn’t.

K drove in silence for a bit longer. The road ahead—its surface magnified in the headlights—told a vivid story of everything that had walked or run or driven over it since the rain had stopped. Bicycle tracks snaked; goat hooves poked sharp dents; flat feet padded; cows left deep grooves; donkeys were daintier and tripping.

“Man,” said K, “every time I drive through here I think of Mozambique. This patch of bush just here is exactly like Mozambique. See how it is—this flat sandy mopane with the scrub on the side and these piles from old anthills? It’s just like in Moz.” Then he shuddered and added, “I’m going to give myself spooks, talking about the war all day.”

“Don’t you usually talk about it?”

K said, “I don’t usually talk about
anything.
I don’t have anyone
to
talk to except the gondies
.
. . . And you know how it is to talk to these guys? I love these munts, I really do, but . . . I don’t really talk to them. I mean, we talk about the farm and the river and the weather and money—we’re always talking about their blerry money problems—and about their indabas in the village. . . . They tell me all their hunna-hunna about who’s bonking whose wife and who is beating up who and they want me to fine the offenders and tell them who is right and who is wrong, but I can’t tell them about the ex or about myself or about, you know . . . about my life. About the war. If I told Michael what I told you today he’d shit himself. Don’t you think? He’d shit himself.”

“Probably not,” I said.

K was quiet for a few minutes and then said, “Ja, well, in any case, it’s true that I’d rather sit and talk to a fisherman on the Chabija all day about tiger fish and bream and his bloody millet crop than try and spend one afternoon chatting to a honky about his shallow crap. No . . . maybe it’s just that this hondo stuff shouldn’t be spoken at all. Not to a gondie or to you or to anyone.”

And then the pickup gave a jolting buck and we were hiccuped out onto the tarmac. A black, curling ribbon of shiny highway, connecting the fragments of Zambia that fall on this side of the escarpment to the city of Lusaka. As we turned up the dirt road toward my parents’ camp, the headlamps swung briefly against Sole’s candlelit brothels and caught the stunned eyes of drunks on the verandas of the throbbing taverns.

“You must stay for a drink when we get to the camp,” I told K.

“No, I should get home,” said K. “I have a busy day tomorrow. Anyway, I don’t drink anymore.”

“I think I knew that.”

“Who told you?”

“It was an international news flash when you stopped.”

K laughed.
“
Ja, it should have been. I used to drink. Mai we
,
I used to drink!”

Suddenly, a man riding a bike with a woman balanced across his handlebars came reeling out of the village, wobbled in front of the pickup for a few swollen seconds, and then veered out of the way. K spun the steering wheel and the pickup juddered off the road, where it cruised along at a terrifying angle before regaining four wheels.

K carried on talking as if nothing had happened. “All of us guys, you’ll find we drink in binges. Three weeks sober and then a week of being absolutely blallered. Maybe a bottle of vodka and a dozen beers in a night. It’s what we learned in the war.”

I glanced behind us and the man and the woman were toiling on through the mud, quite matter-of-factly, their faces reflected red in the tail lights of the pickup.

“You’re in the shateen for three weeks straight,” K was saying, “and then you’re back in camp for a week and you spend the first three days trying to forget the last three weeks and the next three days trying not to think about the next three weeks and one night with an almighty hangover and then you’re back in the shateen.” K shook his head. “Voddies and Coke was my drink,” he said. “But my hangovers! And my demons! One night about two years after the war I was in a hotel room with the ex, and you know those ceiling fans with a toggle on the end of a string to switch the thing on and off, ja? Well, in my sleep, I guess, I could hear the fan—thuka, thuka, thuka—and the toggle—tinka, tinka, tinka—and in my alcoholic state I thought it was a helicopter coming to chaya me. Man, I woke up and I was screaming and leaping around the bed and donnering that fan with a pillow and there were feathers flying everywhere and the ex was screaming at me. But I honestly thought I was under attack, which was bull if you think about it because in real life, it was
us
with the choppers and the gooks getting stonked with those K-cars.”

K drove in silence for a moment. Then he said, “Thank God—I thank the Almighty—that I stopped the old elbow-lifting exercises because those other boys . . . binge? Ja
,
that’s how they still operate. They work like dogs for three weeks and then they soup it up for a solid week. That’s how we got through the war. That’s how we learned to get through real life.”

K paused and then he said, “I can’t blame them though. You know, if I didn’t believe in the Heavenly Father, I think I might have scribbled myself by now, either by accident or on purpose. Because what’s the point of life? Do you know what the point of life is?”

“No,” I said, “I haven’t figured it out yet.”

“I’ll tell you,” said K. “Unless you have been saved by Jesus, life is just the few seconds you have before death. That’s it. Over and out . . . Without Jesus as your savior, that’s all life is. . . . And doing everything you can to forget that you’re going to snuff it shortly is your single mission in life.” K turned to me in the darkness. “Do you know how I know this?”

“No,” I said.

K was speaking with a preaching voice, a voice that was supposed to reach into the dark, cool corners of a church. “We were all lost after the war,” he told me. “I reckon those of us who stopped dopping and sucking cabbage, we started to feel . . . shit! I mean, we actually started to think about what had happened to us because—you know—we had sobered up. How come we aren’t dead? Where are we? Why are we here? What are we doing? We went from this incredible structure, this incredible focus and sense of purpose . . . You were either in, or out. Alive or dead. And then it was over and . . . All of a sardine, we had to figure it out by ourselves and what we found is that nothing seemed to matter about the outside world. It was all pointless. How much can it matter what kind of car you drive? How can it matter what you eat, I mean as long as you have enough to eat? How much can it matter what you wear? When you get down to it, what can matter more than being alive? But then what? You’re alive and then . . . what?”

All around us the rinsed air and sky and world seemed endlessly black, as if you could plunge into it in any direction and fall forever. A nightjar exploded up from in front of the headlights and seemed to hang there for an age before dipping into the night. By now, we had turned off the mud-rutted road that leads from Sole to Malidadi and onto the high gravel spine of driveway that leads through the mopane pan to Mum and Dad’s camp. Only a few days ago an army of bullfrogs had frolicked and seethed here. Now the shallow lake rippled out on either side of the track, vast and anonymous and almost silent.

“What do you see when you look in the mirror?” K asked suddenly. “Do you see yourself ?”

“Yes.”

“But yourself isn’t a thing. How can you see something that isn’t there? You are just meat and bones. That’s what you should see. Flesh and blood, that’s all. And all flesh and blood is . . . Do you want to know what flesh and blood is?” K waited. “You and me and every other person on this earth—we’re all just a bloody corpse waiting to happen. I don’t care how good-looking you think you are. How successful you believe you are. Your body is still just a corpse-in-waiting.”

By now we were back at the fish camp. I could see the pale yellow light of bare bulb that swung from the kitchen roof from under the arch. I could see Mum’s bed, through the window of her room, shrouded with a mosquito net. The signature tune of the BBC World Service sang jauntily out to us. K kept the engine running and his face glowed green in the reflected light from the dashboard. The engine ticked in the heat.

I took a deep breath. “This corpse-in-waiting could do with a drink,” I said.

K said, “Man, I’m sorry. I’d have stopped at Harry’s Bar if I’d known you were so desperate.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m fine, really. Thank you for . . . everything.”

K stared straight ahead. “It was my pleasure,” he said stiffly.

And then, as I was turning to open the car door, K suddenly launched across the cab and planted a hot kiss on my cheek. “Good-bye,” he said. And before I had properly closed the door, he was driving away.

The Leftovers

Bobo

AFTER I MET K , there were odd chunks of time when I did not think of him at all. And then there were vast stretches of nights when I woke so full of him that I wondered if I had dreamed him into life by accident. My accident. My fault. It was as if the hot Sole soil had met the unaccustomed flush of that extraordinary rain and out of the violence of this encounter, K had been hallucinated into life as my
idea.
He had been grafted into reality in the hothouse of my imagination. K the idea. Which is so much worse than K the real person from whom I could walk away.

K was a fantasy or a nightmare. He was an act of God. Or of Evil. Or of both. K was shell-shocked. K was explosive. K was given to us as a solution, or as a punishment. Depending on whose side you were on. The world was both less equivocal and much more confusing with him in my mind. There was no “warm,” no “gray,” no “maybe.” It was “hot or cold,” “black or white,” “yes or no.”

Are you in or out?

In late December I went home to my husband and to my children and to the post-Christmas chaos of a resort town, but instead of feeling glad to be back, I was dislocated and depressed. It should not be physically possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips, maybe touring up through South America and Mexico before trying to stomach the land of the Free and the Brave.

Because now the real, wonderful world around me—the place where we had decided to live with our children, because it had seemed like an acceptable compromise between my Zambia and my husband’s America—felt suddenly pointless and trivial and almost insultingly frivolous. The shops were crappy with a Christmas hangover, too loud and brash. Everything was 50 percent off. There was nothing challenging about being here, at least not on the surface. The new year’s party I attended was bloated with people complaining about the weight they had put on over Christmas. I feigned malaria and went home to bed for a week.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to join in the innocent, deluded self-congratulation that goes with living in such a fat, sweet country. I did. But I couldn’t. And confining myself to the house didn’t help. Now I felt like a trespasser in my own home with all its factory-load of gadgets and machines and the ease of the push-button life I was living. And, uninvited, K strolled around in the back of my head and talked his loneliness out of himself and straight into me and would not let me rest and by the end of this, there were pieces of me and pieces of him and pieces of our history that were barbed together in a tangle in my head and I couldn’t shake the feeling that in some inevitable way, I was responsible for K. And he for me.