Scribbling the Cat

by Alexandra Fuller

  "You were too busy putting people on the floor," I said.

  K turned his lips down at me.

  Connor frowned. "Do you want to see him? I’d get my foreman to take you to his island in my boat, but he caught a lift with one of the other crazy bachelors to Tete to do some shopping yesterday."Then Connor added, "But I can call Mapenga on the radio if you like. If he’s on mainland maybe he’ll come around and have a cup of tea."

  Mapenga was raised on the radio.

  "Are you on mainland? Over," asked Connor.

  "Affirmative. Over."

  "There’s a mate of yours here from Zambia. Over."

  "I don’t know any fucking Zambians. Over."

  Connor laughed helplessly and fingered the handset, embarrassed. "Ja, well, that’s Mapenga for you," he said apologetically.

  K said, "Give me that radio." He took the handset. "Oscar?"

  Silence hissed back.

  "Oscar? It’s Savage here."

  "Who?"

  "Savage."

  There was another long silence and then the reply came, "Hang five, man. I’m coming there right now. Don’t fucking move. Over and out."

  "Every now and again," said Connor while we waited, "Mapenga decides he needs silence in his life. So he stops talking for four days, or a week. He doesn’t talk to the guys that work for him or any of us. He won’t answer his radio. The last time it happened he didn’t answer his radio for so long we thought his lion had eaten him. So someone went over to the island to see if he was okay and he was fine. He was just walking around in silence, all by himself. He wouldn’t say hello or anything. So the guy that had gone over to check on him came back and reported that Mapenga was just being his usual penga self. Then all of a sudden Mapenga decides he’s talking again and he decides he wants company and he’ll come over to the mainland and want to have a big party, and everyone else has had enough of him and doesn’t want to talk to him anymore." Connor shook his head. "He’s a lekker guy, but he’s mad as hell."

  Mapenga looked exactly how you’d expect a man to look who spends his life alone on an island in the middle of a lake in Mozambique with a lion. He had a week or ten days’ worth of beard on his face, a torn shirt, scratches up and down his arms and legs, and a deep, raw tan, blending to deep red in his neck. He had vivid blue eyes, deeply creased on the edges with laughter (but the eyes themselves had a worried, restless, haunted look), and a sunburned nose. His smile was sudden and beautiful and careless and came easily. His energy was quick and electric, as if you might be shocked by physical contact with him. He was about five foot ten, powerfully built, and wiry with shoulders that looked coiled and ready for a fight.

  K and Mapenga hugged, thumping each other violently on the back. It looked like the meeting of two gladiators. "Fucking bastard!" yelled Mapenga.

  "You mad asshole!"

  "This bastard," yelled Mapenga, clasping K around the neck in the crook of his elbow, "he tried to kill fucking Father Christmas one year! This one is the maddest bastard I know."

  "He deserved it," said K. "The guy had no manners."

  "You can’t scribble Father Christmas," said Mapenga, "just because he doesn’t have manners."

  "His kid called my wife a bitch," explained K, "so I punched him."

  "And stuffed his beard down his throat," laughed Mapenga.

  K said, "I don’t fight anymore."

  "Bullshit."

  "I promise you. I swear it’s the truth. I haven’t hit someone for a year. Longer maybe."

  "Really?" Mapenga stared at K, his mouth open. "Then what the fuck do you do with yourself all day now?"

  K laughed.

  "Who’s this?" said Mapenga turning to me.

  I was introduced.

  "Do you like to fish?"

  "Not really," I admitted.

  "Good, you can come and stay on my island then," said Mapenga to K. "She can cook and we’ll go fishing. Shit, that will be lekker. You’ll come?"

  K nodded.

  And Mapenga laughed with delight, a surprising noise, like a chicken getting chased around a farmyard.

  We packed up a duffel of clothes and some food and Mapenga drove us around the lake to where his boat was tied up. We climbed into the boat and chugged off across the lake to Mapenga’s island. The lake is incongruous because it is new (not yet thirty years old) and so it looks as if it is still trying to be land. The tops of kopjes surge from the water, as if gasping for air, and the fingering limbs of dead trees poke eerily up from the watery depths. Storms are known to produce violently bad-tempered waves on this lake, which is also famous for its aggressive crocodiles. The combination has proved to be the end of plenty of fishermen.

  "Last year," Mapenga told us, slowing the boat down to a crawl and shouting to be heard above the engine and the wind and the water, "there were some South Africans fishing on the lake and they went out even though there was a storm brewing and, sure enough, their boat got swamped." Mapenga indicated a place farther into the lake. "They were right out there, in the middle. So two of them swam for a tree, but the third guy didn’t make it and he drowned. By the time we found the two ous, like baboons clinging to the tree, the drowned guy was gone. And the guys in the tree said they didn’t know where he had gone. I said to them, 'Get in the boat. But I’m just telling you miserable nickers right now that this is the first and last time you will ever ride in my boat and I should probably leave you in that fucking tree until the vultures come because you deserve to die a shit death.'"

  Mapenga turned to K. "What kind of prick lets their mate drown and then, on top of that, loses the fucking body?"

  K shook his head.

  "Anyway, the drowned bloke, ja? Well, his widow sends a message. She says she needs his body for burial. So I go to Tete—I fucking drive three hours there and back—and I phone her and I say, 'There is no body.'

  "'What do you mean?'

  "'He was eaten.'

  "And she throws her toys out the playpen. No, she needs the body to get the guy’s life insurance. Please won’t I try to find it. Then she says, 'He had a nice watch. You can keep the watch if you find him.'

  "So I think, What the fuck. Might as well try, and I go out there for days and days and finally—kudala, lapa side—I find a little bit of skop floating in the water and a tiny bit of the ou’s backbone, but nothing else. No fucking watch. So I put this lot in a cooler and I go to Maputo to put it on the plane back to South Africa and I explain to the immigration guy the long story, and he looks in his fucking book and he tells me, 'No, the dead man’s visa has expired. He cannot fly.'"

  Mapenga starts laughing, his high chicken laugh. "Man! So I say to the guy, 'That’s okay. I’ll just leave this cold box here until you can get him another visa,' and I put down the cold box on his desk and start walking away and he starts hunnering, 'No! No!' The cold box was on the flight that afternoon, but you know what pisses me off?"

  "What?" asked K.

  "The fucking widow didn’t even thank me. And she’s still got my fucking cold box. It was a bloody good cold box and now she has it." Mapenga shook his head and pressed the throttle forward. The boat reared slightly in the water and then began to pulse and smack on the little waves, farther and farther from mainland toward his little speck of island. His island was flatter than some of the other chunks of land that poked up into the air, sloping on the west side into steep cliffs.

  "I tell you something," said Mapenga to me, when we had skirted the cliffs with which his island faced the world and arrived at a sandbar upon which the boat was dragged, "you come out here—it’s all mad bastards out here. They’re reasonably mad on the mainland, but they’re madder out here in the middle. The more remote you are, the madder the bastards get."

  K jumped out of the boat and tied it to a post. Mapenga said to me, "They call this island Nyama Musha—'village of meat.' It must have been a poacher’s camp after the hondo. I’ve found the odd shell lying around."

  WE WALKED UP to Mapenga
’s house from the boat, past his prehistoric-looking fishing boats with their long, kapenta-reaching arms, past the workshops with their rows of chalkboards giving instructions for the day to the laborers, and onto a wide patch of lawn. Suddenly a lion, who had been crouching behind a stand of lemongrass, came barreling out from his cover, ducked behind Mapenga’s legs, and made straight for me, pouncing from a flat-out run into a soaring attack. I was aware only of something massive and tawny spread-eagled in flight behind me. Before the lion could land on my back, K had caught him with a block to the throat.

  The lion was a ten-month-old male, he weighed at least 160 pounds, and every inch of his body was muscle. His paws were bigger, with an inch to spare all around, than the span of my hands. K dropped the lion, and held his foot on the creature’s throat, then he grabbed the lion’s tail and forced it into his mouth, like a bit. The lion lay panting, its mouth hanging wide to avoid biting his own tail. He grunted in protest and flattened his ears and made a low, snarling noise in the back of his throat.

  "None of that, my boy," said K, turning the lion’s tail around in his fist, like a rope, and smacking the animal on the nose. The lion looked away. K waited a beat and then stood up. The lion, watching him warily, edged his haunches under him and his tail flicked back and forth. K stood, shoulders square to the lion, facing him in an unequivocal challenge. The lion looked away again and gave itself an embarrassed lick.

  "Sheeee-it!" said Mapenga. "I’ve never seen anyone do that to Mambo before. Ha! And did you see the way my lion is such a clever boy? He went straight for the weakest link," he said, turning to me. "How do you like that? He sensed you were the wee-wee in the group and you were going to be snuffed," and he laughed.

  I attached myself as closely as I could to K and we negotiated the rest of the journey to the house. The lion tried again and again to insinuate his way past K’s legs and launch himself on me, but K roared at him and gave him a hefty kick in the chest and the lion backed down. Mapenga appeared to find the whole episode amusing, chuckling to himself in a high, mad cackle each time the lion attempted an attack.

  Mapenga’s house consisted of a kitchen and bathroom surrounded by a caged-in veranda. "I have to put cages up," Mapenga explained, "or the lion gets in and chews everything to shreds." He turned to me. "So you’d better sleep in here, or he’ll eat you in the night," and again the choke of laughter.

  The lion followed us onto the veranda. He was damp and, having played strenuously with his meal that day, he reeked, not only of his own, raucous cat pungency, but also of less-than-fresh catch-of-the-day. Mambo’s diet consisted of chunks of whole, skinned crocodiles salvaged from a peculiar accident of tourism at a nearby camp. Apparently, a few miles farther up the lake, fourteen- and sixteen-foot crocodiles had escaped from a breeding tank on a crocodile farm and had found their way into a swimming pool at a nearby guest lodge. The crocodiles had all been shot by the time breakfast had been laid out on the veranda, although the pool was bloodstained by then and there were a few broken windows.

  I said, "At least it’s not salvaged tourist meat in the deep freeze. Ha, ha." But what had sounded ridiculous and impossible a few days ago was beginning to feel increasingly and fatally likely.

  When Mapenga sat down on the sofa, the lion piled on top of him, knocked him over, and began vigorously licking his face and arms.

  I sat in a chair as far away from the lion as I could get and lit a cigarette.

  K went into the house to wash up. The lion was now standing astride his prostrate owner and taking long, appreciative strokes of Mapenga’s neck. "I think he likes the taste of salt from my sweat," Mapenga laughed. "Hey Mambo, my darling boy. Hey Mambo, Mambo." The lion took one of Mapenga’s arms in his mouth and chewed on it. "Oh," laughed Mapenga, wiping blood off his hand from a couple of puncture wounds, "he’s eating me. Don’t eat me Mambo—that hurts."

  "Ha," I bleated weakly, and regretted instantly that I had uttered any noise at all.

  The lion, who had been entirely focused on his master, abruptly turned his yellow-brown eyes on me. His look went straight through me, down my spine, and hit the soles of my feet. Remembering that animals can smell fear, I puffed furiously on my cigarette, creating what I hoped to be a curtain of odorous smoke between the cat and myself. To no effect. The lion jumped off Mapenga, sauntered past the coffee table, and, rising on his back legs, knocked me flat back in my chair.

  "He’s just showing you love," laughed Mapenga as my cigarette flew out of my hand and my sunglasses were knocked off my head. "Just push him off," he said as the lion cupped both front paws around the back of my neck and tore my shirtsleeve from shoulder to elbow. "Down, Mambo," said Mapenga as Mambo’s dewclaw caught on the back of my neck. "It’s only play-play biting."

  Once again, K came to my rescue. The lion was plucked off me by the scruff of his neck and pinned to the ground.

  "You okay?" K asked me.

  I nodded and tried to rearrange what very little was left of my dignity.

  "I’m going to put this cat outside," said K. He held the furious lion by the tail and dragged him off the veranda backward. The lion gave a whimpering sort of grunt as he was sent staggering out onto the lawn, and then he rolled onto his side and looked at K with what I could interpret only as a plea for mercy. K wagged his finger at the lion. "Behave yourself, my boy, or you’ll learn respect the hard way." The lion laid his ears flat and blinked meekly.

  "In the wild, he’d be getting the crap beaten out of him by the other lions," said K to Mapenga. "You need to beat the crap out of him once in a while, or he’ll turn around and eat you one day."

  "Shit," Mapenga laughed, "I’m not going to beat the crap out of that lion. He’s stronger than me. I’m scared of the bastard."

  Or Why We Are Here

  Mapenga’s boat

  MAPENGA WAS IN THE Special Branch of the Rhodesian army during the war. "It’s where they sent the clever bastards," he said, cracking open a beer and sitting back on his sofa (Mapenga and I were redolent with the stench rubbed onto us by Mambo; K alone still looked and smelled unruffled). "The shit we did." Mapenga leaned forward and looked into the bottom of my thoughts, his eyes narrowing and direct. He had an unnervingly direct manner and it was impossible to look away from those eyes; intelligent, passionate, mad, piercing. His lips trembled with intensity when he spoke, so that it looked as if he was having a hard time expressing the magnitude of his thoughts. He said, "They taught me well." He smiled suddenly. "I can get anyone to tell me anything. I can get anyone to do anything for me."

  I looked away.

  "Anything," said Mapenga, sitting back again. "Man, if there was a war crimes tribunal, every damn one of us—from both sides, the gondies weren’t any better—we’d all be up for murder. We’d all be in jail. War’s shit." He lit a cigarette and eyed me through the smoke.

  Then Mapenga added, "We didn’t choose war. War chose us." He sat for a long time staring at me as if to ensure that this had sunk in. "No one would choose war deliberately. You follow me? But if it’s the hand you’re dealt, then . . . fuck . . . No one who hasn’t gone through it can understand. It’s the shittiest thing there is, and the most beautiful thing too." Suddenly his voice relaxed and he looked away. "The only way you can look at it is . . . war’s a gift," he said. "It’s a shit gift. But it’s a gift. I wouldn’t be what I am—I wouldn’t be living here"—he indicated the cage and beyond that a lawn stretching down to the cliffs that soared into a lip of blue sky above the lake—"if it hadn’t been for the war. It taught me about death, but it also taught me about living every single moment to the fullest. When I die and I go up there and Jesus Christ asks me what I did with my life, I’ll say to him, 'I hope you have a long time to sit and listen, because do I have a story for you!'" The startling laugh came again. "Fuck! I certainly haven’t lived a boring one, hey? No. I’ve lived four lives—Christ, more." He leaned across to me so that I could see black flecks in his blue eyes, and a small Crosshatch of
creases in his neck, which joined deeper lines. I could see the pull of sinews in his jaw. "How many fucking bastards in a suit can say that?" he asked.

  I looked away and lit a cigarette to distance myself from a sudden sharp ache of longing I had to see my children. I itched for the routine of laundry; the apple-air-conditioned scent of the grocery store; the happy predictability of the days that started with tea and porridge, and children crumpled with sleep, and that ended with bath, books, bed. I longed for that bland quality of domesticity that allowed a creature enough stability to take root. Here, I felt as if I might pick up and blow away from a storm of emotion and intensity.

  "You know," said Mapenga suddenly, "I’m square now, hey. But I didn’t always used to be square. I used to be really mad." Mapenga looked at K. "We were all mad in that war. Ninety percent of us that got out of that war alive—and I mean the real war, not those bloody pawpaws who spent their time sitting around waiting for a gook to show up, but you and me and the boys who went after the gooks—we were all mad. That’s why we were so fucking good. You’ll find we all did shit in school, but we were great at war. Because we were mad. We’re the leaders. We’re the leaders of the whole fucking world, but we’re mad.

  "You know I got treatment, hey? Finally, all those years of hurting people and fucking people up, and three wives, and man . . . I tormented people, but the person I tormented the most was myself. I got in a fight every fucking weekend—it was unavoidable. And my biggest fear was killing someone. I was sure I was going to kill someone and that scared me. I didn’t want to kill someone and spend the rest of my life in jail. One night I nearly killed my own brother and that’s when my family said to me, 'Look, you either get help, or we won’t have anything to do with you.' So I got help. I saw a psychiatrist and a psychologist. I drove down to Harare every two weeks for my appointments and I loved it. I finally understood why I was mad.