Scribbling the Cat

by Alexandra Fuller

  "You’d be dead," said K, turning on me and walking away.

  "Scribbled," agreed Mapenga, laughing. He saw my face and said, "Were you worried there for a moment? Did you feel lost?"

  I smiled weakly.

  "We had you in our sights from the start," he said. "We could have shot you anytime." He gave me a kiss. "Hey, cheer up. It’s not for real."

  We kept walking. It was impossible for me to watch where I was going, since the immediate task of keeping flies out of my eyes and disentangling myself from thorny scrub took up most of my attention. K and Mapenga walked easily and quickly. Both of them, from old habit, looked low and far, where the bush cleared the ground and allowed a few inches of space in which the shadow or legs of a person or animal might be visible. No one spoke.

  The heat hounded us. Laughing doves were the only creatures still calling, sounding teasingly like running water. Suddenly, the earth surged skyward and I was forced onto my hands and knees, scrambling and pulling myself up by thick-wristed curls of vine, K and Mapenga were ahead, effortlessly negotiating the steep terrain. About ten meters from the top of the mountain we ran into a band of cliffs. We tottered along the edge of them, trying to finger a way up the chalky surface. Behind us lay Mozambique, bleeding flatly into the lake that shone like a mirage up from the monotonous mopane woodland.

  K handed me the water bottle. I drank thirstily. I handed it back to him. He took a sip, swished out his mouth, and spat.

  "Well?" he said.

  There was nothing to say.

  "This is what it was," he said. "This and wondering if you were about to snuff it and become bits of biltong." He put the butt of an imaginary gun on his hip. "Waka-waka." He licked his lips. "Three weeks, sixty pounds of gear, bored to death, and shit scared. That’s what war is. Until you’re dead."

  "Ja." Mapenga found a thin tug of tree that had somehow found a roothold in a thin crevice. He grabbed one of its branches and swung down until he hung over the edge of the mountain, dangling from the tenacious plant that, in turn, clung impossibly into the shallow scrub of earth. Then Mapenga pumped his legs to and fro until his toes caught a grip on the edge of the cliff and he came to rest next to me, like a bird alighting and folding its wings. The sun blistered us against the chalky cliffs. Heat rose and spiraled off the flat expanse of earth below us, kicking up whirls of sand and dead leaves. A Christmas beetle started screaming. Mapenga crumpled clods of chalky earth between his thumb and forefinger and showered the resulting dirt on my feet. K sat down, legs out in front of him. He put his head back against the cliff and shut his eyes. I crouched next to him. We waited. A bateleur eagle rocked above the woodland below us, swinging back and forth silently, watchfully, on the hot air.

  "I nicked an ou’s water once," said Mapenga softly, throwing a lump of earth off the mountain, so that it sent up little explosions as it fell.

  K opened his eyes. "You did what?"

  "Worst fucking thing I ever did." Mapenga shook his head. He edged away from us until he was on a very thin slice of ledge, below which the mountain dissolved into a narrow chute. "I was so fucking thirsty I couldn’t think about anything else. We had been two nights without water. Now it was the third night. And"—Mapenga took a shallow, shaky breath and started to talk very quickly—"I can still see where the ou was sleeping. I can see everything about that camp to this day. Everyone was asleep, except me. I couldn’t fucking sleep. I was so thirsty I couldn’t even piss, or I would have drunk my own pee. I was hallucinating water, man. So I crawled out of my wank-sack and fuck . . . I fucking crawled over to an anthill where this ou had left his kit, and I took two sips out of his water bottle. One mouthful I used just to get the cake out of my mouth, that white crap that builds up like fucking cement in your mouth. The next sip, I swallowed."

  "Lucky you weren’t shot," said K, "I’d have shot you."

  "Ja, well."

  "That’s how I went from troopie to lance-jack," said K.

  "How?"

  K pointed toward the horizon, away from the lake, where land became an indistinct blue haze and fused into the pale sky. "I had been in for about nine months and we were out there. Dry season. We were tracking gooks and the sarge had a bee up his arse so we kept going after them and it was drier and drier and I kept telling the sarg, 'We’re going to cook out here, sir. We need to hug the hills.'

  "And I knew the gooks weren’t stupid. They must have had plenty of water with them. We had . . . hardly any. And a munt can go twice the distance on half the water. They’re like camels, man.

  "I said, 'They know we’re tracking them, sir. And they’re saving bullets. They’re going to just keep walking and we’ll just keep walking after them and eventually we’ll die of thirst and then they’ll come and rumba on our bodies.'

  "Anyway, we must have been—I shit you not—at least three days’ walk from the last water and the ous run out, the sarge included." K paused. "But I always carried three, four times more than anyone else—you saw my big tin bottle? That thing came with me everywhere. Shit, I didn’t care about the extra weight. I was used to carrying the bazooka—so what was an extra three, four liters of water? Anyway, I still had more than half a bottle left. So we’re in the middle of it"—K flattened his hand and swept the horizon—"not a fucking drop. We were going to die out there, it’s clear. We’ve walked all day and it’s time to graze but the guys can’t eat. They’re too thirsty.

  "Then the sarge checks me. He says, 'Give me your water.'

  "I refuse, 'No, sir.'

  "He says, 'Soldier, I am ordering you to give me water.'

  "'No, sir.'

  "'This is a direct order. Give me some water.'

  "I say, 'If you touch my water, I will kill you, sir.'

  "He stands there. The other guys are watching and I can see they are saying to themselves, 'No, man. This is it. Goffle is going to scribble the sarge.'

  "The sarg looks at me and he looks at my water and I can see the old thought process. He’s wondering, If I grab his water, is this mad bastard really going to snuff me?

  "And I don’t know. Maybe I would. Maybe I wouldn’t have. I’ll never know.

  "He says, 'I’ll have you for insubordination.'

  "I laugh. I tell him, 'Who has the water?' I mean, it seemed to me that whoever had the water was the boss, ja? I say, 'If you’d said "please" I might have considered it.'

  "So the sarge, he licks his lips and his tongue is white, you know, like chalk. He says, 'Please?'

  "I say, 'Too fucking late for that now, sir.'

  "It took us another two days before we found water. I let the other two guys have a sip, but not the sarge. He was the idiot that got us out that far to begin with. And we lost the gooks. Anyway, when we got back to headquarters, the sarge recommended me for a promotion. He told the CO, 'He’s too damned headstrong to keep as a troopie.'"

  Mapenga gave a noise in the back of his throat, like a laugh. I looked up. He was pressed against the white sash of cliffs. He had taken off his hat, which he held by his side, and his head was thrown back. He was looking at the eagle, which was still sashaying across the sky on the waves of scorched air.

  "Ja," he said. "Imagine getting to the point you’d kill someone on your own side for a sip of water. Imagine that. We weren’t animals. No animal would behave like we did. We were worse than animals."

  Then he dropped off the cliff into the gully below him and for a second it seemed that the heat pressing up from the earth would sustain him in flight. He hung on the pale throb of sunlight, and then the air gave way and he sank and tumbled off the mountain. We could hear the gully rushing behind him, a dry avalanche of rocks and thorn bushes and chunks of cliff.

  I stood up.

  White clouds of dust kicked up.

  K said, "I’m not carrying him out if he sprains an ankle."

  "It’s his neck I’m thinking about."

  "Well, if he breaks his neck, then we leave him for the birds."

  I edged
over to the gully and peered down it. The earth was settling back over itself. Mapenga had disappeared.

  K and I took it in turns skidding down a less steep route. We grabbed rocks and trees and shrubs as handholds. Mapenga was waiting at the bottom, picking his teeth with a stalk of grass and staring at his shoes. "Come on, my Chinas," he said without looking up. "What took you so long?"

  "That was fucking stupid," said K, wiping the dust off his lips with the back of his hand.

  Mapenga laughed and scrambled to his feet. "Man, I am parched. How does a cold beer sound to me?"

  K was already ahead of us, as silent on his feet as an owl is on the wing. He walked like a dancer, deliberate with his feet even while he was apparently unconscious of them.

  Mapenga winked at me. "Remember, rule number one of flying."

  "What?"

  "Don’t think about whether it’ll kill you or not. Just spread your wings and drop."

  I Don’t Remember Getting Here

  A road

  THE ROADS WE WERE ON, and the towns we were driving through, did not appear on any map. They hadn’t been forgotten. They were never remembered in the first place. They were the new Mozambique. If the roads in some countries in the world were built wide enough to accommodate a carriage turning in the street, a presidential entourage, a celebrity’s limousine, or a Roman chariot, then these roads were built wide enough to accommodate an army truck—a single army truck bearing down in blind rage from the dizzy height of some remote power to quell a rebellion. Or a food-aid truck sent from the even dizzier heights of ever more remote powers to quell a famine.

  "Let me show you some old Mozambique," said Mapenga, suddenly veering off the road and onto something wide enough to allow for a couple of goats. We drove for some distance through a scrubby wasteland of bush, and then suddenly we broke through the scruffy backcountry into a clearing. Here, there was a small, dusty village that had crowded itself around a single, tiny shack serving as a grocery store.

  "This used to be a town in Pork days," said Mapenga. "Believe it or not. Nice place, they say. There was a club, and a hardware store, restaurant. Now look."

  A single telephone pole leaned against a solitary stone building, which blinked under the relentless sun. Its roof and back wall had been blown off, revealing a cross section of remarkably thick walls. A massive mango tree grew out of one of the windows.

  "They arrested me a few years ago and tossed me in there for three nights," said Mapenga. "The usual hunna-hunna about, 'You wazungu think you can come here and do anything.' You know how it is? You fire some lazy bastard and his brother is the local policeman, so they come and arrest you and keep you until they admit they haven’t got any evidence against you." Then Mapenga repeated the word with a Shona accent, "Heavy-dents. Ha!

  "So I tell the policeman, 'What’s stopping me walking out of here?'

  "He said, 'We shoot you.'"

  Mapenga laughed. "See?" he said, slapping my knee. "Heavy-dents. That’s what they say. They say, 'That is not a bullet hole. It is a heavy-dent.' Ha! Ha!"

  Mapenga changed gears and the engine whined. The pickup lurched into a slower pace. "So for three nights I am stuck on this slab of concrete and there are chickens and kids and dogs wandering in and out and there’s a gondie in the mango tree with an AK-47 with the barrel pointing straight at my brain. The kids fetched me burned mealies and water, though. And the guy in the tree with the gun threw mangos down for me once in a while. We became quite good mates. Sometimes I come through here and give him a packet of kapenta."

  A group of four or five women standing by the side of the road, with plastic containers and buckets on their heads, shouted and waved as Mapenga drove past. "My girlfriends," he said, winking at K and slamming on the brakes, so that we were enveloped in a cloak of white dust. He reversed the pickup and the women climbed into the back. Mapenga leaned out the window and said something in Shona; they shrieked and laughed in response.

  K glanced behind at the women. "The Porks weren’t afraid of dipping into the oil drum, hey."

  "Plenty of goffles around here," Mapenga agreed. "Beautiful as well. There are some that are almost white, I promise you." Mapenga lit a cigarette. "It’s tempting, sometimes. There’s a bar in Maputo that I go to where all the prozzies hang out. You know, the classy ones. The ones with Pork blood in them. You’ve never seen such women. More beautiful than wazungu women, I’m telling you." Mapenga cleared his throat. "Ja, so last month I was there and the owner is the slimiest fucking Pork you’ve ever met.

  "He tells me, 'Hey, Mila is in the back room. She’s so drunk. She’s giving it away.'

  "And Mila, I promise, she’s the most beautiful mawhori you’ve seen. And about eight guys have already been in there and done her." Mapenga shook his head. "Death sentence, man.

  "I told the owner, 'No thanks. I’ve seen plenty of The Very Disease. I don’t need to go looking for it.'

  "He said, 'No problemo, she’s clean.'

  "I said, 'If she was clean an hour ago, she certainly isn’t now.'"

  By now we had cleared the village and we were driving through a surprising and sudden pastoral patch of country. It looked like something torn from a storybook of Europe and laid across the ache of scrub that lay behind us. Great fields of gleaming green grass lay cropped on either side of us, like English meadows. All along the road were herds of cattle, flocks of goats, donkey carts, and a multitude of people; a river of patient life, pressing toward the east, like a pilgrimage. Mapenga slowed the pickup to a crawl and then the crowd was too thick for us to make passage through them. So he stopped the vehicle and we all climbed out, the women who had hitched a ride with us thanking Mapenga with clapping hands.

  Now we joined the surge of bodies, along braided paths under an avenue of fragile fir trees that seeped a northern scent into the air. People clucked and sang to their livestock, children suckled and cried, feet and hooves kicked up a billowing atmosphere of manure-scented dust. I found myself shoulder to shoulder with Mapenga on the one side and, on the other, a woman and her child. She had covered her head from the sun with a drape of bright blue-and-red cloth. A flock of goats trotted ahead of her. She was calling to them, or singing to her baby, I couldn’t tell which, in a soft, monotonous nasal tone. K was forging ahead like a man accustomed to crossing a sea of humanity and livestock.

  Then, quite suddenly, we came to a standstill and the swarm of animals and people arranged themselves into a thick rope that snaked down from a small hill, all the way to a mango orchard that lay below us. Towering up all around us, and providing an almost liquid shade, was an eruption of enormous trees, a vast thicket of lush green.

  The place—milling as it was with women, men, children, and livestock—was suddenly strangely silent. Except for the animals complaining softly, and the odd bleat of babies, few people were talking and those who were talked in hushed, reverent tones. Everyone appeared to be waiting for someone or something. The queer peace was broken only by the occasional, high shrill sound of a man yelling and the sharp report of a whip cracking.

  Mapenga seized my hand. "Follow me."

  We pressed through the crush of cows and people and into a tiny area that looked like an old stone chapel without a roof. K was already standing in front of the chapel walls.

  "Look," said Mapenga.

  The floor of the chapel was a deep, clear well, echoing its own brilliance back at us, light turquoise layering down to dark indigo, reaching deeper and deeper into the earth until it became a narrow black pinprick of infinity. Straddling above the well, on a great bench provided for the purpose, was a big man in a grubby white undershirt and rolled-up trousers, which were hitched at the waist with a belt made from a strip of inner-tube rubber. He was cracking a huge leather whip above his head and it occasionally stung down on the backs of animals or people who jumped their place in a queue that snaked from here all the way into the heart of the mango orchard behind us.

  "Dry season, wet season, year
after year, this well never dries up," said Mapenga.

  It was a miracle of pure water in a place that was otherwise so thinly blessed. I watched as a woman stooped and filled her buckets, and then, putting her buckets aside, she led her cattle by the nose, one at a time, to drink from the well. Then it was the chance of her goats and her dogs and her children, who fell on their knees next to the lapping animals and scooped water to their mouths in handfuls. And then another woman took her place and the ritual was repeated.

  I turned to K. "Did you know about this place during the war?"

  K looked sullen. "We never came here," he said shortly.

  Mapenga looked at K and laughed. "Lying bastard. The Rhodesians poisoned every well between here and Mukumbura. You mean you came here once, poisoned the thing, and never came back."

  "I didn’t poison it."

  "Okay, not you personally," Mapenga agreed, "but the Porks or the Rhodesians did. Someone did, and it wasn’t these poor bastards."

  K said, "I’ll go and wait at the car." He turned and walked back through the crowd to the fir trees.

  Mapenga looked after him. "That man needs my pills too, I promise you. Then he’ll be square. You too. You should take them too, then we’ll all be square." Then he seized my hand and pulled me in the opposite direction, to the front of the queue, until I was standing below the man with the sjambok. Mapenga spoke to the man in Shona and the man, not taking his eyes off the throng in front of him, nodded his head and replied, "Yes, Mapenga. You may go to see." His whip sailed down and then abruptly cracked back, barely glancing the hide of an ox that was about to step into the well. "But not to taste," the man warned.

  "Come." Mapenga pressed me ahead of him, around the edge of the well and through a tiny slot in the chapel wall. I crouched on hands and knees to get through the cool, dark passage of stone, which was about six feet long and so narrow that I had to turn sideways in places to force my shoulders through. I landed on a carpet of moss and looked up at pieces of torn sky breaking through a dense roof of foliage. It was like being born into a place beyond the world. Suddenly the noise and dust and heat of the last few days were forgotten. All here was fragrant and soft and whispering. Mapenga helped me to my feet. And there we stood, hand in hand, in the garden of Eden.