Scribbling the Cat

by Alexandra Fuller

  ALSO BY ALEXANDRA FULLER

  Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

  THE PENGUIN PRESS

  New York

  2004

  For two African writers who stared war in the face and chose not to look the other way—

  Alexander Kanengoni and the late Dan Eldon

  With much respect

  And for K and Mapenga

  "Only the dead have seen the end of war."

  —Plato

  CONTENTS

  Author's Note

  Part One: Sole Valley, Gambia

  Uncharacteristic Sole Flood

  Characteristic Chongwe Flood

  Worms and War

  Words and War

  Curiosity and Cats

  Dogs and Curiosity

  The Left Behind

  The Leftovers

  God Is Not My Messenger

  Part Two: Mozambique

  Accident Hill

  Cow Bones I

  Plagues

  Brothers in Arms

  Demons and Godsends

  Cow Bones II

  Beware of Land Mines and Speed Guns

  We’re Not Really Lost

  We Just Don't Know Where We Are

  Or Why We Are Here

  Have You Got a Map?

  I Don't Remember Getting Here

  The Big Silence

  The Journey Is Now

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Copyright

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a true story about a man and about the journey that I took with that man. It is a story about the continuing relationship that grew between the man and me and it is a story about the land over which we journeyed. But it is only my story; a slither of a slither of a much greater story. It is not supposed to be an historic document of fact.

  Even if you were to do as I did—leave your family and your real, routine-fat life and follow a feeling in your gut that tells you to head south and east with a man who has a reputation for Godliness and violence—you will not find the man whom I call K. You will not find where he lives. You will not be able to trace our steps.

  I have covered our tracks as a good soldier always does.

  But, as a fallen soldier might, I have broken the old covenant, "What goes on tour, stays on tour."

  Because what is important isn’t K himself, or me myself, or Mapenga and St. Medard and the whole chaotic, poetic mess of people that turned this journey of curiosity into an exploration of life and death and the fear of living and dying and the difficulty of separating love and judgment from passion and duty.

  What is important is the story.

  Because when we are all dust and teeth and kicked-up bits of skin when we’re dancing with our own skeletons—our words might be all that’s left of us.

  Sole restaurant

  P A R T O N E

  So when he finally heard the section commander talking about civilizations that existed in the country before the coming of the white man, he was shocked to discover the history of his people did not start with the coming of the whites. The section commander began with Munhumutapa and the Rozvi empires during the Great Zimbabwe civilization, and continued on to the coming of the white man and the first chimurenga, and on through the various forms of colonial government up to Ian Smith’s UDI, when the last bridge between blacks and whites was burned down and the only way left to communicate was through violence: the war, the second chimurenga.

  From Echoing Silences by Alexander Kanengoni

  Uncharacteristic Sole Flood

  Road sign, Zambia

  BECAUSE IT IS THE LAND that grew me, and because they are my people, I sometimes forget to be astonished by Africans.

  But I was astonished, almost to death, when I met K.

  For a start, K was not what I expected to see here.

  Not here, where the elevation rises just a few feet above ennui and where even the Goba people—the people who are indigenous to this area—look displaced by their own homes, like refugees who are trying to flee their place of refuge. And where the Tonga people—the nation that was shifted here in the 1950s, when the colonial government flooded them out of their ancestral valley to create Lake Kariwa—look unrequitedly vengeful and correspondingly despondent. And where everyone else looks like a refugee worker; sweat-drained, drunk, malarial, hungover, tragic, recently assaulted.

  Down here, even those who don’t go looking for trouble are scarred from the accidents of Life that stagger the otherwise uninterrupted tedium of heat and low-grade fever: boils, guns, bandit attacks, crocodiles, insect bites. No ripped edge of skin seems to close properly in this climate. Babies die too young and with unseemly haste.

  If you count my parents and K, there are maybe two dozen people—out of a total population of about sixty thousand—who have voluntarily moved to the Sole Valley from elsewhere. That’s if you don’t count the occasional, evaporating aid workers who slog out this far from hope and try to prevent the villagers from losing their lives with such apparent carelessness. And if you don’t count the Italian nuns at the mission hospital who are here as the result of a calling from God (more like an urgent shriek, I have no doubt).

  Sole Valley is a V-shaped slot of goat-dusted scrub between the Chabija and Pepani Rivers in eastern Zambia. The town of Sole has metastasized off the cluster of buildings that make up the border post between Zambia and Zimbabwe. It consists of customs and immigration buildings, a (new and very smart) police station, an enormous tarmac parking lot for trucks, and a series of shabby tin and reed shacks that billow tarpaulins or plastic sheeting in a feeble protest against rain or dust and that offer for sale black market sugar, cooking oil, salt, mealie meal, and bread.

  WELCOME TO SOLE, says the sign. SPEED KILLS, CONDOMS SAVE.

  People at the border post climb out of their cars and you see them looking around and you can hear them thinking, Save me from what?

  Guinea fowl destined for a torturous journey into someone’s pot clatter from their bush-tambo baskets, "Nkanga, nkanga!" and the Heuglin’s robins call from the dust-coated shrubs, "It’s-up-to-you, it’s-up-to-you, up-to-you, UP-TO-YOU."

  Truck drivers in diesel-stained undershirts slouch in the shade of brothels and taverns, suffocating their boredom with women, beer, and cigarettes. A sign dangling above the shelves of one tavern, whose wares include not only beer and cigarettes but also condoms and headache pills, asks, HAVE YOU COME TO SOLVE MY PROBLEMS OR TO MULTIPLY THEM? Prostitutes lounge from trucker to trucker, casually soliciting in a hip-sliding sly way that hides their urgency. It’s a deadly business. Cutthroat and throat-cut. Girls as young as twelve will sell themselves to the long-haul truckers for as little as a meal or a bar of soap.

  In the shade of a shack that advertises MAX BARBERS ARC WELDING AND BATTERY CHARGE NOW OPEN, a truck yawns and surveys its parts, which are vomited greasily on the ribbed earth in front of it, while a young man in a shiny nylon soccer shirt has his hair braided into porcupine spikes by a woman with deft fingers.

  And next to a sign that says RELAX & DISCUS RESTARUNT WE SALE SHIMA & TEA, two women from the Watchtower Society sit out in the sun with their legs stretched out in front of them, stern in their reproachfully white robes. They drink Coke and eat cakes of fried mealie meal.

  There are, in Africa, many more glamorous and inhabitable addresses than this low sink of land on the edge of perpetual malaria. Scratch the surface of anyone who has voluntarily come to this place—and who is unguardedly drunk at the time and you will invariably uncork a wellspring of sorrow or a series of supremely unfortunate events and, very often, both.

  Scratch-and-sniff.

  Stiff upper lips crack at the edge of the
bar, and tears spill and waves of unaccustomed emotion swallow whole brandy-and-Coke-smelling days. These tidal waves of sadness and hopeless nostalgia (not the hankering for a happy, irretrievable past, but the much worse sensation of regret for a past that is unbearably sad and irrevocably damaged) are more prevalent when the heat gets too much or when Christmas creeps around and soaks the senses with the memory of all that was once promising and hopeful about life. And then tight tongues grow soft with drink and the unavoidable sadness of the human condition is debated in ever decreasing circles until it sits on the shoulders of each individual in an agonizingly concentrated lump. Eventually someone drinks himself sober and declares that life is short and vicious and unveeringly cruel, and perhaps it’s best not to talk about it.

  The hangovers from these drunken confessions of titanic misery (aborted marriages, damaging madness, dead children, lost wars, unmade fortunes) last nine or ten months, during which time no one really talks about anything, until the pressure of all the unhappiness builds up again to breaking point and there is another storm of heartbreaking confessions.

  But K, perfectly sober and in the bright light of morning, volunteered his demons to me, almost immediately. He hoisted them up for my inspection, like gargoyles grinning and leering from the edge of a row of pillars. And I was too curious—too amazed—to look the other way.

  It bloody nearly killed me.

  THE YEAR THAT I went home from Wyoming to Zambia for Christmas—the year I met K—it had been widely reported by the international press that there was a drought in the whole region. A drought that had started by eating the crops in Malawi and Zimbabwe and had gone on to inhale anything edible in Zambia and Mozambique. It was a drought that didn’t stop gorging until it fell into the sea, bloated with the dust of a good chunk of the lower half of Africa’s belly.

  News teams from all around the world came to take pictures of starving Africans and in the whole of central and southern Africa they couldn’t find people more conveniently desperate—by which I mean desperate and close to both an international airport and a five-star hotel—than the villagers who live here. So they came with their cameras and their flak jackets and their little plastic bottles of hand sanitizer and took pictures of these villagers who were (as far as the villagers themselves were concerned) having an unusually fat year on account of unexpected and inexplicably generous local rain and the sudden, miraculous arrival of bags and bags of free food, which (in truth) they could use every year, not only when the rest of Africa suffered.

  The television producers had to ask the locals—unused to international attention—to stop dancing and ululating in front of the camera. Couldn’t they try to look subdued?

  "Step away from the puddles."

  Rain slashed down and filming had to stop. The sun came out and the world steamed a virile, exuberant green. The Sole Valley looked disobediently—at least from the glossy distance of videotape—like the Okavango Swamps. Women and children gleamed. Goats threatened to burst their skins. Even the donkeys managed to look fortunate and plump. In a place where it is dry for nine months at a stretch, even the slightest breath of rain can be landscape-altering and can briefly transform the people into an impression of tolerable health.

  "Explain to them that this is for their own good. God knows, I am not doing this for my entertainment."

  If the television crews had wanted misery, they had only to walk a few meters off the road and into the nearest huts, where men, women, and children hang like damp chickens over long drops losing their lives through their frothing bowels. But HIV/AIDS is its own separate documentary.

  Life expectancy in this dry basin of land has just been officially reduced to thirty-three. How do you film an absence? How do you express in pictures the disappearance of almost everyone over the age of forty?

  "Please ask those young boys to look hungry."

  The young boys obligingly thrust their hips at the camera and waggled pink tongues at the director.

  Sole Valley children

  Characteristic Chongwe Flood

  Mum and dogs

  IT RAINED AND IT RAINED and it rained.

  Year after year—within my decade-long relationship with it anyhow—Sole had been so parched that its surface curled back like a dried tongue and exposed red, bony gums of erosion. But now when the international news crews were finally on hand to document its supposedly dry misery—the valley had apparently grown bored of being a desert and had decided to turn itself into a long, shallow lick of lake. Where once goats and donkeys hung rib-strung over bare ground, knee-high greenery appeared. Land that once danced, dry heaving with heat waves, now sung with the deadly whine of mosquitoes. While the surrounding land began to take on the hollow-eyed aspects of a glittering desert with stunted maize and bony cattle, Sole Valley grew small tidal waves and an infestation of frogs. Anything not big or strong enough to hold its head above the water took in a lungful of liquid and died, ballooned and stinking, in ditches and ravines. Many chickens and the odd small goat, surprised by so much unaccustomed water, died from disgust.

  At Mum and Dad’s fish and banana farm, eleven kilometers off the tarmac and downstream from the brothels, the biblically dead earth sprung green with a plague of luscious weeds. All day, day after day, battleship gray clouds gathered force over the Pepani Escarpment with such gravity that they threatened to oppress the sun. Insects tumbled out of the sky, with wings cracking and prickly legs. Christmas beetles shrilled. The wind picked up and tossed the leaves of the banana trees into shreds. The dogs hid their ears under their paws and looked anxious. The turkeys crouched under the wood stack and shat piles of reeking white, and the wild birds fell silent. The clouds menaced and massed.

  Above my parents’ camp, where the land sloped away into mopane pans, giant African bullfrogs that had lain in a tomb of concrete-solid earth for the last nine months exploded from the ground to mate and breed and roar for a few days before sinking back into the silence of the mud. They were enormous (as big as a soup bowl), Dracula-fanged and lurid yellow-green. They had black, lumpy ridges along their backs, like a pattern of ritualized scars from a nation of warriors.

  Mum and I waded up to the top of the farm to inspect the frogs. Mum had read in her Amphibians of Central and Southern Africa that they can live for up to twenty years. "Do you think they’re any good for eating?" she asked.

  "Mum!"

  Mum rolled her eyes at me. "Don’t be so squeamish, Bobo." She prodded one of the bullfrogs with her walking stick. "Come on," she said to it. "Hop. Let’s have a look at those thighs."

  "Mum!"

  "My frog book was vague about their palatability."

  "It probably didn’t want to encourage people like you."

  But then we found an old Tonga man collecting the frogs in a reed basket.

  "See," said Mum, "you’re overreacting, Bobo. I imagine lots of people eat them."

  She asked the man if the frogs made good eating, but as she spoke no Tonga and the sekuru spoke no English, the conversation was reduced to pantomime. Mum hopping about and croaking while chomping on a fistful of fresh air and the ancient Tonga man blinking at Mum and shoving heaps of snuff at his nose, which he sneezed back at us in little toxic, black clouds. From inside the reed basket, the bullfrogs growled and hissed. Just as I was about to point out that this cultural exchange was getting all of us nowhere and some of us embarrassed, the sekuru grasped Mum’s meaning. He unfurled his reed basket, seized a bullfrog by the throat, and lunged at us with it, grinning generously and gesturing that we should have it. The bullfrog barked and bared his fangs at me.

  There is not, in any of the teach-yourself books of the local languages that line the shelves of my parents’ bathroom bookshelf, the useful phrase "Thank you for your kind offer but I am a vegetarian."

  Mum, who is an extreme omnivore, took the bullfrog back to the kitchen but lost her nerve at the last moment and set it free, whereupon it leaped under the firewood pile and glared at us wi
th a mixture of alarm and disdain for the next several days. When it eventually died-—which it did behind the pantry—it swelled up to the size of a soccer ball and Mum (who is of Scottish descent and has lived in Africa all her life and therefore cannot, both from habit and blood, waste anything at all) said, "What a pity it’s so smelly now. It might have made an interesting lamp shade."

  MUM AND DAD don’t have a house to speak of on their fish farm, which is fine for most of the time. Usually, walls are an unnecessary barrier to what little breeze might condescend to lift off the Pepani River and swirl around our legs and shoulders as we sweat over our meals under the tamarind tree. The kitchen is a roof held up by four pillars and a half wall. The entire south side of the kitchen is taken up with a woodstove and a heap of firewood. The north side houses shelves of crockery and Mum’s shortwave radio, perpetually tuned to the BBC World Service. The east is open to stairs that lead up through the garden to the workshop and offices, down which rain cascades in what might be a picturesque waterfall if it didn’t back up into a small, greasy eyesore of a pond in the kitchen.

  In this thoroughly quenching rainy season, Mum glared at the sky and said to it in a loud voice, intended for my father’s deaf ears, "My roof leaks." And, "Can’t you see, we don’t have walls in our sitting room?" But Dad smoked his pipe in silence, absorbed in Aquaculture Today, apparently unaware that he was being rained upon until Mum said, "Tim, if you sit there much longer in that rain, you’ll take root."

  Then Dad folded up his magazine and said, mildly, "What’s that, Tub? Time to get to work, is it?"

  So, Mum and Dad covered their heads with tents of plastic and squelched up to the ponds to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to their fish, which, contrary to all logic, do not seem to like rain. And after lunch (a meal that consisted of several pots of tea and a banana) Mum and Dad trooped down to the end of the farm (shrinking hourly, as chunks of real estate were torn off by the powerful current and swept off down the Pepani to Mozambique) and stood dismal and worried on the riverbank, anxiously looking upstream, toward the brothels and taverns that make up the heart of the town of Sole. Clearly, if the rain kept up, we’d soon be knee-deep in waterlogged prostitutes and drunk truckers.