Scribbling the Cat

by Alexandra Fuller

  It was close to midnight by the time we ate. K said grace, which was wasted on everyone else. St. Medard looked as if he was approaching alcoholic collapse. He swayed over his plate blearily and occasionally took swipes with his fork at the food, some of which made it into his mouth, but most of which ended up in his beard. Mapenga was sounding insistent and argumentative about something—or perhaps a series of things. Whatever it was, Mapenga was right about it and everyone else was wrong. K ate steadily, calmly. Andrew had cooked an extraordinarily good vegetable curry, although it was harder to appreciate the meal than it otherwise might have been because, aside from everything else, it was impossible to escape the clammy, ever present odor of rotting crocodile flesh (the generator-run deep freeze was obviously incapable of keeping several full-grown crocodiles fresh).

  St. Medard wiped his plate clean with a slice of bread and then gave a soggy hiccup.

  "That’s the thing you fuckers don’t understand," Mapenga was saying, jabbing his fork at K. "Because people are afraid to see the truth . . ."

  Suddenly, St. Medard pushed his plate away, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and said, "Right. I’ve had enough of this. You!" He hooked his finger under Mapenga’s collar. "I’ve had enough of your shit. You’re talking shit."

  Mapenga blinked with surprise, then got quickly to his feet. His chair crashed to the floor. He grabbed St. Medard by the beard. "Fuck you."

  "Let’s go."

  The two men supported each other unsteadily out of the cage. They were swearing loudly as they crashed past the kitchen, through the swing door, and out on the lawn.

  Andrew came to clear the plates.

  K was picking his teeth discreetly with his penknife.

  Andrew asked if I’d like some fruit for pudding.

  St. Medard suddenly lunged into view on the lawn with Mapenga’s head gripped in the crook of his elbow. Both men gleamed in the light of the fat silver moon. Between here and there, they had somehow managed to shed every last stitch of clothing.

  "No fruit for me, thanks," said K.

  "Madam?"

  "What? Ah. No, thanks Andrew. That was delicious."

  "You fucking bastard!" came a shout from the lawn.

  St. Medard sailed into our range of vision again, followed by the lion. There was a roar from Mapenga. The lion ducked and slinked into the shrubbery.

  "Tea or coffee, boss?"

  "No thanks."

  "Arghhhh!" Mapenga’s face staggered toward the cage, followed, after what seemed like a pause, by the rest of his body. He hit the cage, spun, and crouched, and his arms were spread-eagled for balance. His back and shoulders were strung with muscle over bone. He swayed back and forth on his hips, like a sailor on a rolling deck, and then he sank lower before catapulting himself at St. Medard, feet first.

  If this was the man at fifty, and drunk, I’d have hated to be on the receiving end of him thirty years ago, drunk or not.

  "Well, I think I’ll go to bed," said K. "Good night."

  I pointed to the lawn. "Should we . . .?"

  "Fuck them."

  Andrew brought me tea. "Thank you, Andrew."

  St. Medard made a sound like someone had abruptly let the air out of him.

  "Good night, madam."

  "Good night, Andrew."

  I took my tea to bed. Andrew glided off the veranda and past the pool of light that gleamed out from the house and disappeared into the darkness. I changed quickly into my nightdress, then sat up under my mosquito net peering out onto the lawn at the occasional flashes of flesh that hurled, spun, or staggered into view. Within five minutes the men were clutched around each other’s necks, breathless and speechless, completely spent. The lion trotted out of the shadows and started rubbing against their legs, purring resoundingly. There was a period of back-slapping and a few indistinct terms of endearment were thrown about: "I fucking love you, you miserable cunt."

  "I fucking love you too."

  Then the generator throbbed to a halt and darkness licked from the deep, African night into the cage. I lay down and held my breath.

  "Are you asleep?" asked K from down the veranda.

  "No."

  "Are you scared?"

  "No."

  "Do you need to come in here with me?"

  "No."

  "I’m here if you need me."

  I shut my eyes tightly and tried to unpick the thoughts and actions that had landed me here, so that I might retrace my steps back to wherever it was I had left off a perfectly safe platform and dived into the space that resulted in this free fall into insanity.

  St. Medard came stumbling back onto the veranda, brushing past my bed. I heard him crashing about on the east side of the cage and then the skid of metal legs against concrete as he collapsed, muttering to himself, on the sofa. Within a minute or two he was snoring loudly. There was half an hour of relative peace, if one could ignore the snoring. And then, quite suddenly, St. Medard screamed.

  I sat up. "What’s the matter?"

  K got out of bed. "Hey, man!"

  There was no reply from the sofa.

  K said, "What the fuck is the matter with you, man?"

  A string of obscenities flew from the sofa.

  K came back to bed. "He’s fast asleep," he said.

  "He sounds like a bloody army at war with itself."

  "Welcome to St. Medard’s spooks," said K.

  A kapenta boat chugged out past the island. I heard the engine, the watery throb and roar of it and the fishermen shouting to one another. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked out at the lake and saw the boat sliding along the gleaming trail of the moon’s reflection. A tall man was silhouetted on the bow, a lean figure standing alone with the moon licking his skin silver-edged. I watched until the boat melted behind the corner.

  Eventually, I went to sleep, but was woken up an hour or so later by St. Medard shouting, this time in terror. This was followed by wracked sobbing. Then the whole cycle of war dreams started again with a series of battle cries. Soon I heard K getting dressed, and he let himself out of the cage.

  I got up to boil water for tea. The sky was only just beginning to pale in the east, the underbelly of day breaking first. I sat on the sofa opposite St. Medard and watched him sleeping, his naked body exposed to a misty and persistent cloud of mosquitoes. K let himself back into the cage and found me.

  "Huzzit?" he said.

  "They should show videos of this man to kids who think they want to join the army."

  "What?"

  "Nothing." I held up my cup. "Tea?"

  K put up his hand. "No thanks."

  "Oh sorry, I forgot."

  K sat on an armchair.

  St. Medard made a noise like he was choking, a great intake of breath and then a rattling noise, like plates being shaken on a shelf during an earthquake.

  "That could have been me right there," said K, staring at the ruined man on the sofa opposite us.

  "Could have been any of us."

  "Hey?"

  "You’re your own accident of biology and geography and time. He’s his. I’m mine. We all might have been one another but for a minor hiccup of fate."

  "This close," agreed K, showing me his thumb and forefinger pressed together to measure the degree of separation.

  I took a swallow of tea. "Closer than that." I squinted my eyes and squashed my thumb and finger together. "This close."

  St. Medard groaned and slapped his belly.

  K shook his head again. "That man will be dead in a year, you watch."

  "I don’t see why," I said, pressing lumps of powdered milk into my tea. "He’ll probably live forever. It’s everyone else that will be dead in a year."

  Have You Got a Map?

  Mapenga and Mambo

  MAPENGA CAME TO JOIN us. He sat next to me on the sofa and asked, "Is there tea for me, China?" There was a small swelling on his cheek and a cut above his eye.

  I poured a cup for him and he kissed me on the
cheek. "Man, it’s nice to see a woman around the place." He looked at K. "Especially when you look at the fucking competition. Ha! Ha!" Mapenga took a swallow of tea. "Usually it’s just me and the lion. And if I’m lucky I get that bastard for company." Mapenga nodded at the sleeping, monumental ruin in front of us. "Ha!"

  K got up noisily.

  "Where are you off to, mad bastard?"

  "Shower."

  "Can’t you beat the crap out of my lion first?" asked Mapenga.

  "You’re still drunk," said K.

  "What me? No chance. I just haven’t taken my medication yet. Always a bit jumpy until I take my pills."

  K left without saying anything.

  I lit a cigarette. Mapenga hummed under his breath and put his arm carelessly over my shoulders. The lion came to the edge of the cage and settled down on his belly to watch us.

  "Look at that handsome cat," muttered Mapenga. "Just like his owner. Ha, ha!" He lit a cigarette and winked at me. "Hey? Hey?"

  I got up and poured more hot water in the teapot.

  "Fuck, you people are boring," Mapenga complained, blowing smoke after me. "I’m bored already. What shall we do? What do you want to do today, China?"

  I stared at St. Medard, asleep in a fog of hangover, and I thought about the lion.

  "Fishing?" he suggested.

  "I hate fishing," I said.

  "You can tie my bait."

  "No thanks."

  "Damn," said Mapenga, "that’s what all the women say. Ha, ha!"

  "There is a landmark near here I want to see," I said.

  "That’s more like it. Come on then. Prepare yourself. It’s three feet long. Ha, ha!"

  "You know the Train?"

  "No one’s ever called it that before."

  "Mapenga!"

  Mapenga looked subdued. "Sorry. I’ll be belter when I’ve had my pills. Ja, ja. What train? The mountain?"

  "Ja."

  "Ja. I know it."

  "Let’s climb it," I said.

  Mapenga crushed out his cigarette. "What?"

  "Can we manage in a day?"

  "You want to climb the Train? That mountain?" said Mapenga, pointing with his teacup to the east.

  I nodded.

  "You’re fucking madder than I am."

  "The exercise will do us good," I said.

  "Why the hell do you want to do a thing like that?"

  "Just because," I said.

  Because I had come to Mozambique to see where K had spent his war and the Train had been a symbol of that war. And because the Train had served as a landmark for both sides of the conflict—the freedom fighters and the Rhodesian forces. And because the Train had hosted a base camp for the freedom fighters until the RLI came along and took it over for themselves. And because I had heard about the Train for years from soldiers who had come out of Mozambique. It was where the helicopters refueled, where the troopies on patrol were resup-plied, where numerous battles had been fought. And because, before I had set out on this journey, I thought that I might find the answer to K and to the war and to the splinters in my own psyche at the Train.

  Mapenga handed me his cup. "Okay. But only because you suggested it and so now you are officially madder than me and I like to know that there is at least one person who is madder than I am. Otherwise it gets lonely for me here in the asylum. So, we’ll climb the Train. But give me another cup of tea first. It’s dry out there, I’m telling you."

  I poured Mapenga more tea. He lit a cigarette. K came out of the shower, naked but for a towel around his waist.

  "We thought we might climb the Train today," I said.

  K said nothing. He made himself more hot water and honey.

  "You want to do that?" I asked.

  "Ja, okay."

  St. Medard woke up. It was not quite seven, but the sun had already thrown off any pretense of kindness and had started a relentless attack on the front of the house and he was bathed in a dewy layer of sweat. He sat up like a man coaxed to life by his lungs. He choked and hacked and growled and thumped his chest; the end of his nose went white and his lips went blue. He lit a cigarette and sucked on it desperately until his coughing subsided. Then he caught sight of Mapenga and me.

  "Get up to any guava-stretching exercises last night?" he asked.

  YOU CAN SEE the Train for a long time before you get to it. A long, low mountain on the other side of the town of Dhakwa, it is a thoroughly distinctive landmark. The closer we drove to it, the more apprehensive K became. I was wedged between K and Mapenga in the front seat, gripping one leg of each man as a way to avoid either hitting my head or being launched through the windscreen. The road was far from predictable and the noise of the engine made speech difficult, so we roared along without speaking. Mapenga drove as if life were something you can pick up on the side of the road for nothing. He seemed to pay no attention to bridges (such as they were) or riverbeds or pigs or villagers or even the road itself but simply hurled the vehicle into the space ahead of us as ferociously as he could. At last he shouted, "There’s a game path to the left there. Look out your window and see if you can spot it."

  As the foliage whipped past us, K spotted the track and Mapenga wrenched the pickup around and hurtled off into the bush. The moment we stopped, the heat and the flies settled on us. We walked away from the car. Elephant droppings were scattered around, and there were signs, too, of smaller antelope—duiker and impala perhaps. The land—at least this stretch of it—seemed to have shaken off its legend as a symbol of the war. Now it was just a very densely scrubbed patch of arid ground, silently, impassively allowing us passage—as it had allowed the elephants before us and, almost thirty years ago, K and the men he was trying to kill and the men with whom he killed.

  I watched K’s back as we walked, my eyes half closed against the persistent annoyance of mopane flies. Mapenga was hurrying ahead of both of us, effortlessly tearing through the bush, as if his skin repelled the thorns. K carried the water. Conversation dried on our tongues. I felt blundering and soft-skinned and breathless. After an hour or so, Mapenga suddenly stopped at some unusual-looking humps of earth and waited for us to catch up. "What do you think?" he asked.

  K speculated, "Ammo dumps?"

  Mapenga said, "Or mass graves?"

  The men exchanged a look I could not read—a look that went back to a time when pacts of silence were made over secrets like these unspeaking heaps of ground.

  "The worst thing," said Mapenga, "about it . . . You pour petrol on them and set them alight and their insides come out of their penises."

  "Christ," I muttered. "Why?"

  Then K said, "Don’t ask questions."

  "Why?"

  "Because there aren’t answers," said Mapenga.

  "Here," said K, "I want to show you something." He seized my shoulders and spun me around and around. "Close your eyes," he said. "Count to one hundred." Then he let go and he and Mapenga walked away.

  "No peeking," said Mapenga.

  "You’re peeking!" shouted K.

  The men started running. Within moments I could no longer hear them. Their footsteps had been engulfed by the indistinct buzzing that made up the chorus of insects and crackling, dry grass. I couldn’t see them either. The world had taken on a pale sun-bleached color, shadowless and uniform.

  I said, "Ninety-nine, one hundred," opened my eyes, and began to walk.

  I couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds behind the men, but they were gone. The ground told me nothing. There was no trail—no distinct human trail—to follow. The shallow, glittering earth looked scuffed, but not trodden on. I found myself hurrying toward what I hoped was the Train, but I couldn’t tell. Every way I turned, jesse bush stared back at me, implacable and clueless and obscuring any landmarks. I stared up at the sky, but the sun had expanded to fill an indistinct space that might have been perpetual noon. In any case, I hadn’t been paying attention to the sun when I left the car.

  Within minutes I felt a fist of panic in the
top of my belly: I didn’t know where I was, I had no water. And I realized that even after all this time with him, I didn’t really know K or what he was capable of. I didn’t know how intimately he would want me to feel the sensation of being thirsty, alone, hunted.

  "Yoohoo," I called weakly.

  The world crackled back at me.

  I wondered where the nearest water was. I considered sitting down and waiting to see if anyone would come back and find me. The palms of my hands were covered in a chilled film of sweat. PUSHED THE ENVELOPE TOO FAR—that would be my epitaph. Or, CURIOSITY SCRIBBLED THE CAT.

  A long time ago, I had supposed that if I walked a mile in K’s shoes, I’d understand what he had been through. I had thought that if I walked where he had walked, if I drank from the same septic sludge of water, if I ate nothing all day and smoked a pack of bitter cigarettes, then I’d understand the man better and understand the war better and there would be words that I could write to show that I now understood why that particular African war had created a man like K.

  But I already knew that the war hadn’t created K. K was what happened when you grew a child from the African soil, taught him an attitude of superiority, persecution, and paranoia, and then gave him a gun and sent him to war in a world he thought of as his own to defend. And when the cease-fire was called and suddenly K was remaindered, there was no way to undo him. And there was no way to undo the vow of every soldier who had knelt on this soil and let his tears mix with the spilled blood of his comrade and who had promised that he would never forget to hate the man—and every man who looked like him—who took the life of his brother.

  You can’t rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on. Looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

  Suddenly the pale, leafy shrub in front of me exploded. "Waka-waka-waka." The men appeared, spraying me with make-believe bullets from pretend rifles, held at hip level.