Scribbling the Cat

by Alexandra Fuller

  The gorge was the kind of deep-throated slit into the earth that hosts seasonal, lorry-swallowing flash floods. K informed me in a series of breathless shouts that it had spilled its banks in the night and had torn loose the bridge that once spanned it. Now, just twelve hours after the end of the rainstorm, the water had subsided to a series of sedate pools—even though whole limbs of trees hung where they shouldn’t, debris had been thrown high up onto land, and what was left of the bridge was being worn, as a necklace, by a fever tree.

  I scrambled down the bank and waded through a coffee-colored pool. K came to the bank and gave me a hand up the other side. I was aware that I was disheveled to the point of dissolving: sweaty, mud-spattered, and flustered. K did not seem at all affected by the heat. Indeed, with his great expanse of hairless skin, he seemed especially modified to suit the climate. He helped the men press three more branches of a tree into the bank and then he stood back. One man came up to K and they spoke together in Shona, their voices low and urgent. Then the man nodded and slid into the water below the level of the bridge.

  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-scr
aping 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 ringers 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.

  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 wi
th 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."