Scribbling the Cat

by Alexandra Fuller

  We were surrounded by three stone walls, as high as a castle, that reached back to the hill. Inside the belly of the walls, where we stood, was a cultivated garden that had gone beautifully wild. Mint bushes as big as small trees pressed against hedges of rosemary and thyme. A frenzy of tiny white flowers bordered an ancient tangle of passion-fruit creepers. Bright birds swooped and dived from the canopy of heavy-limbed trees that groaned and sawed against their own weight in the mild breeze. Through all this, from a dark hole in the mouth of the hill, a jumping stream bubbled over its rocky banks and set up silver droplets of water.

  "There, lovely creature," said Mapenga, kissing my hand. "I’ve shown you heaven on earth."

  I knelt down and pressed my hands into the moss.

  "Anyone caught in here gets thrown out of the village," said Mapenga. "And anyone found drinking from here . . ." Mapenga knelt next to me and put his lips close to the stream without drinking. "They’re for the chop."

  BY THE TIME we arrived back at the cage, the sun had begun its decline into the lake, dragging with it all the day’s colors. K went out into the garden to pray. Mapenga and I lay on opposites ends of the sofa and drank a cold beer. Neither of us spoke. When darkness fell, K came in from the garden and sat opposite us. The generator came on and the fan started to whirl the warm air around and around. We didn’t bother to switch on the lights, but instead stayed in the darkness until we couldn’t see one another at all. Then Mapenga got up and opened a bottle of wine and poured out two glasses.

  "Here’s to no more spooks," I said.

  Mapenga raised his glass.

  "I’ll have some," said K.

  "Are you sure?" I asked.

  "Just a small one."

  "Okay." I got up and fetched a little glass from the kitchen and poured out a sip for K.

  The three of us knocked glasses together.

  The lion came to the edge of the cage and flung himself against the wire.

  "Look," said Mapenga. "My lion’s lonely. He’s feeling left out." Then he said, "Let’s throw a fish on the fire. We can sit outside with Mambo."

  So we took the wine and a tiger fish outside and built a fire and cooked our meal under the stars while the fire spat mopane smoke at us. The lion lay next to Mapenga, contentedly licking fish flesh off the edge of Mapenga’s plate, and we talked softly about other nights when we had sat around fires in Africa—with different people—listening to wild lions, or hyenas, or to the deep, singing, anonymous night. Above us the sky tore back in violent, endless beauty, mysterious and unattainable. There is no lid to this earth and there is nothing much fettering us to the ground. Eventually we will die and be wafted back into the universe. Bones to dust. Flesh to ashes. Soul into that infinite mystery.

  The cat yawned and fell asleep on Mapenga’s feet.

  K got up and stretched. "I’m off to bed."

  "Me too," I said.

  Mapenga held up the wine bottle. "We haven’t put this out of its misery yet. Here, give me your glass."

  K asked me, "Are you coming?"

  "When I’ve finished this."

  "We have an early start in the morning."

  "I know."

  "Very early."

  "Okay." I lit a cigarette. "Good night." I blew smoke into the sky.

  K walked around to the swing door and I heard him letting himself into the cage. The lights came on in the house.

  The lion started purring. I drank my wine and then I sat with the empty glass between my hands and stared into the fire until it died down into a heap of ashy pink coals. The lights in the house went out. The fishing rigs chugged out for the night’s catch, their lights reflecting like bright pearls off the oily-black water. Feeling stiff and sunburned I stretched and got up.

  "Thanks for showing me that garden," I said.

  "Have some more wine."

  "We have an early, early start," I said. "Thanks anyway."

  Mapenga put his hand up and caught my waist. "Come here," he said.

  So I bent over and kissed him. His lips tasted of salt and wine and cigarettes. "Good night," I said.

  "No," he said. "Come here." He stood up and his chin grazed my cheek. He held me in the small of my back. "Come." He led me down to the lake. I glanced over my shoulder at the lion, who was following us slowly, tail wagging, head low and swinging—he looked sedate. "Don’t worry about the lion," whispered Mapenga.

  "I’m not," I lied.

  Now we were standing on a flat rock above the lake. Here, the edge of the island fell sharply into the water.

  "Lie down," said Mapenga.

  "What?"

  "Lie down."

  I lay down on the rock.

  "On your tummy," said Mapenga.

  I rolled over on the warm rock and it was the temperature of blood, flooding the day’s heat into my stomach. Mapenga lay down next to me and put his hand over my shoulder. "Look out there," he said softly.

  I turned my head. The lion had sauntered out in front of us and was sitting, statuesque, gazing out at the deep night. Beyond the lion, the sky swelled over the lake, reached back again, and touched itself in the water. The world appeared perfectly round, a mirror of itself over and over and over. Mapenga and I were a thin slot of life wedged into the middle of the end of the world. The moon crept out of the lake, tentative and heavy and yellow, stained with heat and age, pieces of it dripping off its side.

  "Which way is up?" Mapenga said, his lips touching my ear. "Everywhere you look, you’re surrounded."

  My arms prickled and I felt suddenly dizzy, too full of the drunken night and of the slow, ponderous moon and the stars and of the heat-soaked day.

  "The edge of the world," whispered Mapenga.

  I rolled onto my back and Mapenga leaned over me. It was a moment before I could make out his face and then his lips were on mine. We kissed and it was some minutes before I felt the sharp edge of rock against my spine and turned my face away.

  I sat up and the lion gave a soft grunt and started to clean himself noisily. I said, "Oh God, I must get to bed."

  Then I hurried off the rock, across the lawn, and back into the cage before the lion could get any ideas about ambushing me.

  I shut the screen door behind me and I stopped, listening. I sensed immediately that K was not asleep. His breathing was uneven and angry. I brushed my teeth and climbed into bed as quickly and quietly as I could. I lay awake for a while, listening to K’s sleeplessness from the other bed, and then I dozed off.

  I awoke an hour or two later into the sudden death of a noise, which in this part of Africa is not silence, exactly, but more a reduction of something steadying and reassuring and man-made. The generator had been switched off. The startling absence of its companionable throb and the corresponding stillness of the fan’s cooling arms above my bed had jolted me awake. I peeled the sheets off my legs and wiped sweat off my forehead.

  Then I heard the crash of something being dropped, a sort of intentionally angry noise that felt directed toward me, rather than accidental. Then another noise, this time louder. As if something were being bashed to death. The hesitant pale light of a flashlight caught the kitchen window and blinked at me. I felt my way past the gauzy embrace of my mosquito net and groped toward the kitchen. Mambo paced next to me on the other side of the wire, his scrubby flanks brushing the fence, issuing the breathy grunt that male lions have of expressing themselves: "Uh-uh-uh-uh."

  "Good boy, Mambo," I told him, not meaning it.

  I slipped into the kitchen, where the smell of far-from-fresh crocodile meat was most powerful.

  K was hunched over a pile on the floor. His shadow jerked and bulged, gray and enormous on the white wall behind him.

  I said, "What are you doing?"

  K picked up his bag. It was packed and zipped closed. He wouldn’t look at me.

  "It’s the middle of the night," I said.

  "I’m leaving." K turned around. "You can find your own way home," he said. He looked murderous,
his lips almost purple and his face indistinct.

  I leaned against the wall and crossed my arms.

  "Get your new friend to drive you home."

  "What’s going on?"

  He said, "You know what you’ve done."

  I sighed.

  "You’re godless," K said. Then he added, "And do you know what absolutely terrifies me?" When I didn’t reply, he thrust his head out at me and raised his eyebrows. "Huh?"

  "No," I said.

  "I haven’t read my Bible once on this trip," he said. "Not once." He breathed at me heavily.

  I said nothing.

  "I believed in you," he said. "I trusted you."

  K sent his bag crashing out of the kitchen onto the veranda, where it hit the side of the cage and startled the lion.

  K came up to where I was and stood above me. He spoke in such a low, angry voice that it sounded more like he was breathing the words than saying them. "I’ve destroyed all your tapes, your film. You have nothing about this trip. You have nothing to say about me."

  I ducked under his face, sank onto my haunches, and wrapped my arms around my knees. Mambo attacked the cage, trying to paw the duffel bag into life.

  "Don’t worry. I don’t hit women," K said.

  I looked up. "I’m not scared."

  "You’re not worth it."

  There was a long silence.

  "Evil," said K, dropping down and pressing his mouth close to my face.

  Then he got up and pulled some fishing line out of a reel that had been lying near the kitchen sink and bit through it, so that a small piece of gleaming green line snapped back on his lip. He put the reel into his fishing box and slapped the box shut. "You play with men. You know that? You play with men and you play with their feelings and you are going to destroy yourself. You’re going to destroy your family."

  I stared down at the floor. A line of ants was hurrying from the top of the kitchen table, in long, quivering formation, down the table’s leg and into a crack in the cement at my feet. Each ant carried a grain of white sugar in its jaws. K dropped his fishing box on top of the line and the ants swarmed in a frenzy of confusion. I lifted my feet until the orderly line had re-formed.

  When K’s voice came again it was low, but very distinct. "This place is evil. I can feel the evil all around me. It’s like fingers around my neck. That’s how much I can feel evil. . . like fingers around my neck."

  I said, "I don’t know what you’re thinking."

  K laughed humorlessly. "Don’t try that with me."

  "Whatever it is, it’s likely to be worse than the truth."

  "I wasn’t born yesterday."

  "No," I agreed.

  "And you can’t write my story. I won’t let you write about this."

  "It’s not up to you what I do."

  "Yes it is!" Suddenly K imploded, his face fell in on itself, and his shoulders collapsed. "You fucked him, didn’t you? You fucked him!"

  I stared at K. I said, "No." But I knew that whatever I said it wouldn’t make any difference. K had gone into that place in his head that is beyond reason.

  "Then if you didn’t fuck him, you . . . you . . . you did something else. I told you," he hissed, "you have nothing to say about me. I’ve destroyed the interviews. Your film. All of it. You’re evil!"

  I glanced up at the shelf, where my suitcase lay and in which I had kept my tape recorder and camera, my tapes, film, notes, and my diary. It was open and my stuff lay strewn across the top of it.

  K’s eyes followed mine and he nodded. "All of it," he repeated.

  At that moment I hated K, not for trying to reclaim what he had given me (that I could understand), but for assuming that he could claim what was mine.

  We faced each other in the shimmering light of the flashlight.

  Then he said, threatening, "I’m leaving." But he didn’t move.

  "It’s okay," I said. "Leave if you want." I covered the back of my neck with my hands and rocked back and forth on my heels, curled up completely against K. And against Mapenga and the lion. And against everything these men had ever done and everything they would ever do. And against everything I had ever done and ever would do. I wanted to get off the island and wash their words and their war and their hatred from my head and I wanted to be incurious and content and conventional. I didn’t care about the tapes, or the film. I didn’t care about K’s story or Mapenga’s bravado. I didn’t care about any of it, because putting their story into words and onto film and tapes had changed nothing. Nothing K and Mapenga had told me, or shown me—and nothing I could ever write about them—could undo the pain of their having been on the planet. Neither could I ever undo what I had wrought.

  I said, "I’m sorry."

  "What?"

  "You’re right," I said. "I have nothing to say about you." I stood up and looked at him. "Nothing."

  I had shaken loose the ghosts of K’s past and he had allowed me into the deepest corners of his closet, not because I am a writer and I wanted to tell his story, but because he had believed himself in love with me and because he had believed that in some very specific way I belonged to him. And in return, I had listened to every word that K had spoken and watched the nuance of his every move, not because I was in love with him, but because I had believed that I wanted to write him into dry pages. It had been an idea based on a lie and on a hope neither of us could fulfill. It had been a broken contract from the start.

  An age of quiet spun out in front of us. Even the creatures outside had ceased pulsing and calling, as if the heat of K’s anger had rushed out of the room to the world beyond the veranda and stilled the restive frogs, trilling insects, and crying night birds. Sweat gathered in a little stream under my chin and plopped onto the floor between my feet.

  He said softly, "You’re not what I thought you were."

  "No."

  Mambo groaned and pressed himself up against the cage, and a rooster from the laborers’ village gave a high, warning howl, "Ro-o-o-o-ooooo!"

  K said, "It doesn’t matter."

  "No," I said. "It doesn’t."

  Because at that moment it seemed to me that who K and I were mattered less than the fact that we were in this together. Two people in a faint pool of light from a dying flashlight beyond which there was darkness, Mambo, an insomniac cockerel, a great stretch of crocodile-rich water, Mozambique, and Africa. And beyond that, a whole, confused world where people like us were doing exactly what we were doing—trying to patch together enough words to make sense of our lives.

  Suddenly K’s face was level with mine—he was kneeling in front of me—and I could see, by the light of the lamp, that he was crying. Two silver trails, like the gleaming path left on cement by a snail, shone down his cheeks. "Sorry," he said. The tears came out of his eyes in sheets and out of his voice in clouds, making his words blurred and sluggish, like a drunk’s. "Shit, I’m so sorry."

  I said, "Me too."

  A mosquito drifted onto my wrist like a casual piece of fairy dust. I pressed it with my thumb and it left a smudge of blood on my skin. I wondered, vaguely curious, if it was K’s blood, or mine.

  "Why do I destroy?" he asked.

  I said, "Why do I push people to destruction?"

  "Because you’re a woman," he said.

  I said, "Because it’s what you do. It’s what you’ve always done. You have a genius for it."

  I waited for his reaction. To my surprise, K took the edge of his shirt and wiped the sweat off my face and the tears from his cheeks. Then he smiled and cupped the back of my head—which, speaking from experience, is not unlike getting cuffed by a lion. He said, "Okay, my girl. Get yourself under a mosquito net before you get bitten to death."

  WE SLEPT FOR a couple more hours. Before dawn I heard K get up. The screen door on the veranda whined open and slammed shut as he let himself out of the cage. I lay in bed watching the gray dawn turn pink and the lake magic itself into a shiny, flat, rose-colored mirror. Mapenga was up—I heard him talking
to the lion as he hurried up from the pavilion to the workshops. Kapenta rigs motored home steadily; I could see their craning necks and long-reaching nets. They evoked a brood of ancient herons. As they pulled up onto the island, I could hear the men who crewed the boats shouting to one another. They were calling out the night’s catch in high, singing voices and I envied them.

  Mapenga was saying to the lion in a steady, laughing voice, "Mambo Jambo, boy. How’s the lion? Mambo, my boy. How’s Mambo?"

  I got up and lit the stove to make tea. K came back from his early-morning prayer session. He looked, as he often did after being with God, as if his face had been lightly glazed—a sort of peeling shine glowed off his cheeks. He put his arm over my shoulder and asked if I was okay.

  "Fine."

  Mapenga shouted to me that he’d like some tea, if I was making some anyway. K asked for hot water and honey. I cleared a place from the debris of last night’s supper (wineglasses, the remains of a fish skeleton seething with greasy ants). Mambo came to the wire and took a few, halfhearted swipes at the laundry I had hung up over the top of the cage. He needed breakfast.

  The routine of tea, the casual domesticity, the drying underwear on the fence, the unfed cat, the two-o’clock-in-the-morning quarrels, the implied apology, the unwashed dishes.

  From a distance, whatever this was could easily be mistaken for a marriage.

  The Big Silence

  The Elders

  MUKUMBURA IS WHERE K was stationed when he wasn’t on patrol. It was where he came to relax from the war. Once a month he left the bush and came back to Mukumbura to sleep and get drunk and clean his gun and have a shower. And to account for every round fired in the last three weeks.

  "Bullets aren’t free, man. We need a gook for every round." Then he was issued with fresh ammunition and three weeks’ supply of food and sent back out into the bush with three other men. There, jumpy and cracking, and worn down by the heat and the dirt and the fear and the killing, they shot at everything that moved. Fuck the bullet counter back at HQ.