Scribbling the Cat

by Alexandra Fuller

  "Oh God, I’m so sorry."

  K said, "No. It was . . . That was when the Almighty finally got my attention. That’s why I don’t ignore Him now. Even though . . . sometimes it’s tempting, of course.

  "When Luke . . . when he . . . when he passed, that’s when I stopped dopping. I promised God that if He’d give me another chance at a child, I’d bring that child up . . . I wouldn’t drink, I wouldn’t fight." K’s voice broke and tears shone on his cheeks. "Oh shit . . . oh shit. He was a beautiful boy. You can see for yourself, can’t you? He was an angel child. But . . . He was perfect. I wasn’t good enough for him." K shook his head. "If I get another chance . . . If God gives me another chance—if He sees it within His gift to give me another child—I won’t mess it up. I won’t fuck up again. I’ll bring the child up for His glory." The torment in K’s voice, the suffering that he exuded, expanded into every corner of the little room, pushing out air and breath. "But that was it. Luke was the only one. We couldn’t have more kids. It was as if . . . All those people I destroyed, all those lives . . . The Almighty was showing me what it was like to lose a child." Now K was crying so hard that his voice could hardly tear through his throat.

  The little cement cell seemed to close in on us. I put my hand lightly on K’s arm and murmured something and to my surprise I suddenly had the man hanging from my shoulder, his face buried on my neck, his mouth open against my throat in anguish. I was almost pushed off my feet. "Here, sit," I said. "You must sit." I steered K to the bed and his legs folded under him. I knelt on the floor and put my hands on his knees. "What can I do? Jesus, I’m sorry. I had no idea. . . ."

  K shook his head. "If you think about it, it makes sense, doesn’t it? What else could He do? How could He have done anything else with me?"

  I said, "I don’t think children die to punish their parents."

  Then suddenly K was shouting at me through his tears, "Okay, then you explain it! You tell me why I’m here alone! You tell me why He punishes me every fucking day. Every day I wake up and I think of that child. Not . . . a . . . fucking . . . day . . . Oh . . . oh . . . oh . . ."

  Now I was crying too. "I know," I said.

  "No!" K sobbed. "You don’t know. How can you know? Have you lost a child?"

  I shook my head. K blurred in my tears, as if he had been washed into something impermanent and shimmering on the bed.

  "Then you don’t know. You have no idea."

  "No."

  Dispatch had come to the door, which was as far as he dared, and was lying with his head on his paws, ears flat. Sheba and Mischief were confused, milling in front of the window. Sheba whined.

  "It’s all right, guys," said K through his tears, getting up and going to the window. "Hey now, it’s all right," he told the dogs softly. He came back to the bed and put a hand under my chin, so that I was forced to look up at him. His face and neck and shirt were soaked with tears. His mouth was glistening with the salty, thick saliva that comes with crying.

  "It’s okay," I said.

  K wiped his face. "Ja."

  I felt as if I had had the air knocked out of me.

  K ran a thumb under my eyes. "You’ve had your sorrow too."

  "Everyone has," I said. "We all do."

  "Ja."

  "Here," K said. He offered me the end of his shirt. "Wipe your face."

  "I’ll get some bog roll."

  "No," said K, dabbing at my eyes before I could get to my feet. "It’s soaked anyway." For a long time I felt wiped with the scent of K, with his tears and sweat—a salty, earthy mix not unlike the smell of fresh blood.

  Plagues

  Transport—Zambia

  AFTER LUNCH, we packed K’s pickup with fishing rods, drinking water, sleeping bags, mosquito nets, a tent, more than a hundred liters of fuel (there was a politically inspired fuel shortage in Zimbabwe), and food. "My body is a temple for the Almighty," K explained, loading peanuts and green peppers into a tin trunk that served as our larder.

  "And my body is not," I said, adding beer and potato chips to the cache.

  We planned to leave the next morning; driving from K’s farm in Zambia, through Zimbabwe and from there into Mozambique, retracing the geographical path of much of K’s history and with the vague idea that we would find our way back to the battlefields of more than twenty years ago.

  In the evening, we walked around the bananas and down to the water pump below an orange orchard on the Chabija. K had built a store on the farm with a small veranda and pretty gardens, overlooking the river. Behind that, upon an open rise where there was an almost constant breeze off the river, there was an impressive, neat row of staff houses. There was no garbage lying about, and the yards in front of the staff houses were swept and clean. It was as if the Africa I knew, with its assault of smells and its flotsam of debris and its inevitable chickens and goats and carelessly strewn life, had been pressed and contained beyond the borders of the electric fence. This farm was a model of industry and discipline.

  K told me, "When I first started the farm, there were some bad guys on the place—they were just here to loaf and steal. The worst offender was this guy called John Mapariwa. He was down at the river as the pump guard. I knew he had been stealing, so I fined him. He organized a strike. . . . You know, the usual story. There’s always one bad lot that ruins it for everyone. Anyway, I sorted everything out with the labor.

  "I said, 'Fine. If you want to strike, sit right where you are and you’re gone—consider yourselves fired. If you want to work, then start working.'

  "And the workers gradually got up—most of them—and came over to my side. But Mapariwa sat out—so he was fired. And he was bitter about it too. The night the strike was settled I went into my bog and there was a burrowing adder on the shelf above the sink. Now what the hell is a burrowing adder doing in my bathroom? On a shelf? They burrow—they don’t live in houses, on shelves. I knew Mapariwa had put it in there. Or at least I suspected Mapariwa had put it there. My first instinct was to go out to his village, find him, rip his head off, and shove it down his neck, but instead I got down on my knees and I asked the Holy Father what must I do.

  "He told me. 'Read Micah, Chapter two, verses two and three.'"

  Then K cleared his throat and recited: "'They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away; they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance. Therefore, thus says the Lord: Now I am devising against this family an evil from which you cannot remove your necks.'

  "See?" said K to me.

  I nodded.

  "So, I took the Bible to Michael—my foreman—and I put my finger on this scripture and I said, 'An evil will fall upon John Mapariwa. I don’t know what, but something bad is going to happen to him.'"

  K looked at me. "And guess what happened?"

  My mind swam with all the available evils. I shook my head.

  "Two weeks later he was bitten by a black mamba. They brought him to the house—his relatives—in the middle of the night in a wheelbarrow. I was here sleeping and I heard the dogs going benzi, and the watchman beating the gong and I could hear women—you know the sound—ululating. That’s when you know the shit has hit the fan in some major way—either someone was dead or dying.

  "I went up to the workshop to investigate and there’s Mapariwa in the wheelbarrow, barely alive. I put him in the back of pickup and told Michael to run and switch on the generator, so I could have some light and see what was going on. So the lights come on and I see Mapariwa. Shit, he was in rough shape. I knew then that he was going to snuff it, so I put a blanket over him and as I was pulling it up we looked into each other’s eyes and he knew. He knew that I knew. We both knew." K shuddered. "To look in the face of the power of the Almighty like that, it was chilling.

  "I told him, 'I forgive you. But you’d better make it right with Mwari pretty fucking fast, because you’re on your way to the big, fat, fucking oven downstairs if you don’t.'

  "And his lips start to move, bu
t there’s no sound. You know? Just that noise—have you ever heard it? When someone’s about to croak? It’s like their lungs rattle.

  "So I tell him, 'Speak up, my boy, the Almighty needs to hear you.'

  "Then he makes this sighing sound and snuffs it."

  THE NEXT MORNING, while K went to his office to make sure that his foremen knew what work needed to be done on the farm in his absence, I went from the kitchen, to the workshop, and on to the banana fields, asking the people who work for him what they thought of him, of the farm, of their lives. Of course I have no way of knowing what they really thought of K, or of me. Grinning politely they told me that yes, working for Bwana K was very good. Better than before when there was no job. No food. No school. So now things are okay. They are much better, in fact. Thank you for asking. And they obediently went back to the task at hand. For all they knew, I was spying on K’s behalf. For all they knew, I was in line to be the new madam of the farm.

  Michael, the foreman, was more talkative. We sat in the shade of the workshop sharing a tray of tea and he told me about his previous work as a welder for an Indian mechanic in Lusaka.

  "Those Indians are even worse," Michael told me, echoing the common prejudice that many black Zambians have against Asians, "greedy and cheating. Bad man."

  "What about here?"

  Michael smiled. "This Bwana, he’s tough. He’s tough, but very square." He shook his head. "He made a good house for the workers even while he was sleeping in a tent. Himself, he still sleeps like a black man, in a black man’s house. And I think he understands Mwari. Maybe they have a way of talking together." Michael told me about the incident with the burrowing adder and the black mamba. "It’s hard," he said, "to find such a man who understands God in this way. I hope I will be here until I die."

  When I told K what Michael had said, K said, "Ja, he’s a good gondie. I really love that man. He’s honest, he’s godly, he’s really one of the best managers I’ve ever had. And let me tell you something about Michael. When I found him, he didn’t know much about farming. But he was willing to learn. I taught him everything and he caught on quickly and he showed that he has a head for responsibility.

  "Now what usually happens around here is that you find a decent gondie, you train them, and then the poor bastard gets Henry the Fourth and dies. Now how do you explain this? Michael can’t get a stiffy. I have the only gondie in Zambia who can’t screw himself to death. Do you think that’s a coincidence? And he’s so bloody good. He’s sent by God, and he has been protected by God."

  I said, "Poor Michael. I am sure he’d rather not be impotent."

  "Yes, but if he could catch a woody, he’d be dead by now. It’s his protection from God. What’s the average life expectancy in Zambia? Thirty-three, thirty-four, if you’re lucky. These poor bastards are dying like chickens and what can you do? I give them cartons of condoms and I’m in the compounds every month with a broomstick showing them how to wear them, how to reuse them, but if screwing was your only pleasure in life, would you use a condom? Of course not.

  "To say nothing of all the other shit that happens. They’re always poking each other’s wives and their own nieces and daughters and sister-in-laws. And then they want kids, of course. The more the merrier. Man!" K threw up his hands. "It’s a fucking plague and now I probably have it. Do you know how many bleeding munts I’ve touched, carried, treated? Dozens. Dozens and dozens. But what can you do? Do you think about AIDS when someone can’t breathe and you have to give them the kiss of life? Do you?"

  I didn’t say anything.

  "Of course you don’t," said K, assuming that I was a better person than I probably am. "If that is the way that God chooses for me to die, then it is His will and what can you do?"

  "Wear gloves?" I suggested weakly.

  K snorted. "I probably should carry a first-aid kit with me wherever I go with a full-body condom in it so I could hop into the thing whenever a gondie decides to get run over, or fall out of a tree or get eaten by a croc. But I don’t. And a little pair of gloves aren’t going to cover a damn thing when the blood is really gushing out. Now, is it?"

  Brothers in Arms

  Soldiers line up for food

  BY THE TIME WE LEFT the farm, the sun had taken its place in the sky, spreading across the divide of east and west, elbowing out sky and color and perspective, and sending a flattening assault of rays to the earth. The greater part of Africa—the vast, uncurling spill of cities and roads, and jungles and savannahs—lay behind us. We were heading steadily toward the Indian Ocean, toward the thick slice of land that curled around Zimbabwe’s eastern shoulder, nudged Zambia, and almost swallowed Malawi off the map altogether. Scattershot in our path were soldiers from K’s war. Hundreds of them probably, most of them silent about the years that were stolen from them and the years that they had stolen from others.

  It’s not hard to find an old soldier in Africa. In fact, there are probably parts of Africa where almost anyone over the age of ten is an old soldier and has held an AK-47 in his hands and let its fire chatter into human flesh. (Christmas-cracker guns is how they seem, cheap and deadly and associated with mass production in China.) And then there are parts of Africa where ammunition and guns aren’t available and citizens—children among them—take up arms against one another with whatever instruments they can find: machetes, hoes, knives, their bare hands.

  What is harder to find are old soldiers who will talk about their war with strangers. And why should they talk? Those of us who have escaped the horror of being turned—by whatever euphemisms there are for the calculated process of dehumanization—from people into machines that issue, and might reasonably expect to receive, a sentence of death are ill equipped to judge (let alone understand) anyone who has been a soldier. Our minds are still innocent of the stain of sanctioned murder.

  I can recognize a certain breed of ex-soldier, not only for what they look like, but also for how their lives have unraveled. There are the tattoos, the shaggy beards (something about all the years of military seems to instill the need for copious, perhaps disguising, facial hair), the cigarettes, the drinking, the bluster. If you sleep in the same house or camp with them, you will hear their spooks. They shout their ghosts away all night.

  There are the multi-marriages (of the six soldiers I met and talked to in any kind of depth while traveling with K, three were divorced, one had been widowed when her husband committed suicide, one had never married but tore haphazardly through his relationships with women). There is the history of violence: the brawls, the destroyed bars, the nights in jail. And then, when everything else has peeled away from them, there is God.

  The first ex-soldier whom I met on my journey with K had been a soldier for almost all his life. Riley had started out as border patrol for the Rhodesian army in 1962, and had stayed on to fight until shortly before that country’s independence. When he ran out of war in Rhodesia, Riley headed for South Africa. Riley’s wife is also an ex-soldier. She joined up in the 1970s and met Riley in training camp soon after. Her first husband (who had been a soldier too) had shot himself.

  In 1992, when South Africa was clearly on its way to democratic rule and wars in Africa had changed their tone (they had turned in on themselves—tribal, hand-to-hand, and indistinct and no longer the black-and-white wars of the liberation days), Riley and his wife came to Zambia looking for work. For a while, they camped on K’s farm and acted as his farm managers.

  One night, when K was away, armed thieves came to the farm. Riley was shot in the hand before he could return fire. He showed me his hand. "Almost thirty years as a soldier and I don’t get hit," he told me, "and then I get nailed in Sole by a gondie with a sawn-off shotgun!" When Riley laughed, as he did then, it was an alarming event. His laugh caught, like a two-stroke engine on an old motorbike, and turned into its own choking throb until the man had turned a pale, airless green. He broke the filter off a Madison—Zimbabwe’s strongest cigarette—and lit it, which took some doing because
his hand shook so violently that the match almost flitted itself out.

  "That was enough for me," said Riley’s wife, shuddering. "Being out there in the bush with those . . . bloody bandits. I mean it’s not like it used to be, you know. It was safer during the bloody war than it is now.

  "I told Riley, 'No, man. I’m not staying here to get chayaed by some gondie with half a gun. Not after everything . . .'

  "I don’t know how K stays down there alone like he does."

  i 2 ,

  Then we all had to be quiet while Riley was shaken by another fit of coughing. He took a deep drag off the shortened cigarette, and that subdued his cough for a moment.

  I said, "Did you ever catch the guy that shot you?"

  Riley’s eyes slid across to K and there was a significant silence.

  At last K said, "Riley is a highly trained soldier."

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning, 'Rest in peace, gondie,'" said K.

  "And the police?"

  "Were very grateful," said K. "They wrote that the gondie died of natural causes."

  Which sent Riley into another spasm of laughter-turned-coughing. Then he leaned over and said to me, "What you need to understand, Bobo, is that this isn’t how it used to be. There aren’t rules of engagement anymore. The way it used to be, the enemy was there"—Riley moved a box of Madison cigarettes across the table to represent the enemy—"and he was in his uniform. You were over here"—Riley placed a fork opposite the cigarettes—"and you were in your uniform. Then you opened fire and whoever got scribbled lost and whoever didn’t get scribbled won."

  He smashed his fist down on the fork, which sailed in a high, graceful cartwheel off the end of the table, and then he sat back and pulled his lips down. "Now it’s just dog-eat-dog. Gondie-scribble-gondie. No one gives a shit. It’s not about color. People think it’s about color. It’s not about color. If it was about color, it would be easy to understand."