Scribbling The Cat: Travel With an African Soldier Read online

  So, Mum and Dad covered their heads with tents of plastic and squelched up to the ponds to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to their fish, which, contrary to all logic, do not seem to like rain. And after lunch (a meal that consisted of several pots of tea and a banana) Mum and Dad trooped down to the end of the farm (shrinking hourly, as chunks of real estate were torn off by the powerful current and swept off down the Pepani to Mozambique) and stood dismal and worried on the riverbank, anxiously looking upstream, toward the brothels and taverns that make up the heart of the town of Sole. Clearly, if the rain kept up, we’d soon be knee-deep in waterlogged prostitutes and drunk truckers.

  Day after day I kept to the shelter of the tamarind tree, in the company of the more sensible dogs, and drank cup after cup of tea. I read my way forward and backward through Mum’s library and watched the sky for signs of the sun setting (however camouflaged by clouds) so that I might be excused the quick dash through the rain to the kitchen for a change of diet from tea to beer.

  This kept up for five days. Finally, on the fifth evening, when the sun had wrapped up the day and folded it into the Pepani Escarpment for the night, we decided that the misery of our own company could not be endured for another moment. The rain had, for the time being, cleared off, so we drove out of camp to find a dry place to drink a cold beer.

  CHONGWE LODGE IS THE sort of place that is more comfortable for its familiarity than for its amenities. Dogs curl up on the floor of the thatched open-air rondavel that houses the bar and a few metal picnic tables. The lights in the bar are unapologetically bright and thousands of insects dash themselves to death on the naked bulbs before sinking into the bar patrons’ hair, glasses of beer, and clothes (a cleavage is a liability in this climate). The formal dining room is a lozenge-shaped room painted Strepsil green. It is a room dominated by a massive satellite television and half a dozen stark tables. Less lively by far than any of the other taverns we pass to get to the lodge, Chongwe is a quiet, gently dissolving drinking hole mostly frequented by the tavern owners up the road (who are exhausted by their own noisy establishments) and by customs officials, businessmen, the local chief and his entourage, policemen, and commercial fishing guides.

  On this night we—my parents and I—swelled the clientele of the bar by double (the other clients being the family of three that own the place).

  I kissed everyone hello. Alex, the father, had just returned from the dead (by way of the Italian mission hospital) after a dose of particularly savage malaria. Marie, his wife, had given up smoking five or six years before, but she had smoked with such ferocity until then that she was still a pale shade of nicotine yellow and she was as fragile as a shard of ancient ivory. Katherine, the willow-thin daughter, pale and beautiful in a tragic, undernourished way, had been divorced for some years and she swallowed down her bitterness with repeated, tall glasses of neat vodka. They were generous people, made brittle with heat and disease.

  "How are the children?" Marie asked.

  "Fine," I replied, missing the two small creatures I had left back in Wyoming.

  "You should bring them home to visit next time you come," Alex scolded.

  "I will," I lied, slapping a mosquito off the back of my neck.

  "And Charlie?" asked Katherine. "Is he well?"

  "Very," I said.

  "Do you like America?" Alex asked. I had lived in America seven years by then, but he still asked in the sort of doubting, tight voice you might use to ask someone "Do you like hell?" or "How is your incarceration?"

  "I like it fine."

  "We watch American shows on the satellite television," said Marie, as if that proved something.

  We took our places around the bar. In acknowledgment of the proximity of Christmas, there was a strand of hairy green tinsel hanging above our heads. And above the cash register, a silver sign (scattershot with flyshit) read, MERRY XWAS (the M had twisted back on itself and no one had bothered to right it). A real tree frog (a large white one) crouched as still as marble on the rafter above a shelf of soldierly, brown brandy bottles—the frog wasn’t a decoration, but he could have been.

  Marie, who had been on the verge of taking herself off to bed-in-a-minute since I was last here a year ago, said, "I was just heading off," but instead she accepted another glass of sweet sherry (the kind that leaves a smeary trail on the edge of the glass) and added, "In a minute then."The dog at her feet, a handsome Rhodesian Ridgeback, had shredded legs from a crocodile attack earlier in the year. Marie kept a protective hand on his head, and he exuded a mild smell of flesh-rot. In the damp heat, the wounds from the crocodile attack were constantly wept open by the prying proboscises of flies. The dog did nothing to help matters with the insistence of his licking tongue.

  We were on our second drink when the next round of rain came. It was dark outside by then so that we had not seen the clouds leave the edge of the escarpment and billow with stealth above our heads. There was a sudden cannon roll of thunder and then the world around us was a solid wall of water again. Conversation was impossible and there was only the task of drinking and of staring out at the silver-soaked night. But after half an hour of pounding rain, the storm subsided into a crackling hymn, like a stuck vinyl record left too long on the player. Our voices, once again, had power.

  "That’s some rain," said Dad, lighting his pipe and blowing a fragrant bloom of smoke at the rose beetles that were dive-bombing his brandy.

  "Yup," said Alex. "I bet the gorge on K’s place has flooded by now," and everyone squinted out in the shimmering night, which had taken on a dancing quality, as if we were able to confirm Alex’s suspicion from the safety of a bar stool.

  "Who’s K?" I asked.

  "Zimbabwean chap at the bend in the river," said Marie, pointing upstream toward the west. She took a swallow of sherry (her frailty is such that one expects to see the sherry light up her throat in a fire-red stream). "He’s miles from anywhere," she said, "and in the rains—like this—his road is impossible. And when the rains really set in, he’s stuck for real. Sometimes it’s days and days when he can’t get a lorry off his farm." She sucked in her lips and added, in a sad, knowing voice, "God, things must get pretty lonely on the farm for him."

  Dad shook his head and grunted into his pipe, "Tough bugger, that."

  "He doesn’t drink," remarked Alex, which, in this part of the world, is newsworthy in and of itself.

  "It’s just as well," said Katherine. "He told me once that he’s a violent drunk."

  Marie said, "God forbid, he’s a violent enough teetotaler."

  "He’s good-looking though," said Katherine, "but born again." Her head jerked up, the way an impala jerks its head to dislodge a persistent fly. "Isn’t that typical? We finally get a half-decent-looking man down here and he turns out to be a bloody holy roller."

  We went back to watching the rain play itself out against the dark night and drinking in silence.

  Then Katherine said, "He almost killed some guy on the road to Lusaka the other day. A huge South African who wouldn’t move his lorry because he was in a fight with some other driver who had nicked his side mirror. K had a lorry load of bananas that needed to get into town and this South African had stalled traffic for days on the escarpment. There were lorries all the way from there"—Katherine stretched her arms wide to indicate the hundred kilometers of tarmac road that stretch from the mountains to the valley—"to here." She flicked the ash off her cigarette decisively onto the floor and added, "K had the guy pinned up against his bull bars in about three seconds flat. He got his bananas to town, I can tell you that much."

  "Did you see the fight?"

  Katherine shook her head, and bent her neck to capture the end of her cigarette with her lips. She took a deep pull and blew smoke at me. "No," she said, "but everybody knows about it. The police think it’s lekker having K here. Finally, someone who can sort out hassles. The police—you know how it is—never have transport, half of them are nearly dead from AIDS, they’re scared to
death of the truckers. They’re not going to get themselves hurt trying to clear the escarpment. Now, if there’s someone who needs to be sorted out, they just wait for K to arrive on the scene."

  "He’s a bloody good fighter," said Alex.

  Dad grunted and knocked out his pipe on the heel of his shoe to show that he wasn’t impressed.

  But I said, "Really?"

  "Well, that’s what they say."

  "Who’s 'they'?"

  Alex paused. "Come to think of it, K himself says."

  Then Marie, fingering her gun, said, in a vague, unpromising way, "I’ll be taking myself off to bed then in a minute," but she didn’t move. Each member of this family carries a pistol to bed, and it is only when they are all armed (pistols wrapped in white canvas bank-bags) that they falter off into the night for their various chalets that are dotted around the grounds of the lodge. I keep waiting to hear about the string of accidents and misunderstandings that will lead, one day, to a major family shoot-out, like an episode of Bonanza-gone-Addams-Family.

  Dad made a sound in the back of his throat and gave Marie an abbreviated bow. "Interesting evening. Thanks very much. Time for us to depart, Fullers all." He spoke with abrupt grace, as if he were some minor member of the royal family taking his leave from an obscure aboriginal ceremony in an overlooked corner of the British empire. Mum and I finished our drinks and hurried after him into the night. Out here, beyond the reach of the electric glare that spread from the rondaval, the witching darkness was so turbulent and vaporous with freshly hatched life and with its immediate contemporaries, death and decay, that the air seemed softly boiling with song, and with rustling wings and composting bodies.

  Worms and War

  Soldier at target practice

  MIDMORNING THE FOLLOWING DAY, I was drinking orange juice at the picnic table and reading when the dogs suddenly spilled off my lap, as one indignant body, and scrambled up the steps toward the top of the camp in a hail of furious yelps. I looked up and there, under the arch (over which Mum had trailed a healthy vine of passion fruit), stood a man who seemed to straddle an unusually wide span of space for one person.

  "Huzzit?"

  "Hi," I said back, putting my book above my eyes as a shield against the high beat of light that scorched from the pale sun.

  He said his name. I said mine. And then, for a long moment, I stood by the picnic table looking up at him and he stood under the passion fruit vine looking down at me and neither of us said anything.

  Even at first glance, K was more than ordinarily beautiful, but in a careless, superior way, like a dominant lion or an ancient fortress. He had a wide, spade-shaped face and wary, exotic eyes, large and khaki colored. His lips were full and sensual, suggesting a man of quick, intense emotion. His nose was unequivocal—hard and ridged, like something with which you’d want to plow a field. His thick hair was battleship gray, trimmed and freshly washed. He had large, even, white teeth.

  He looked bulletproof and he looked as if he was here on purpose, which is a difficult trick to pull off in this woolly climate. He looked like he was his own self-sufficient, debt-free, little nation—a living, walking, African Vatican City. As if he owned the ground beneath his feet, and as if the sky balanced with ease on his shoulders.

  He looked cathedral.

  What is a man of your obvious beauty and talent doing in a place like this?

  And then K took the steps that separated us, from the arch to the tamarind tree, in great strides like a man accustomed to consuming vast tracts of land in one helping. I noticed he was barefoot, but barefoot with a confidence born of familiarity rather than necessity, as if defying Africa to rear back and bite him. The dogs scattered and Mum’s Barberton daisies bowed their heads as he marched toward me.

  We faced each other over the picnic table. He stood, legs apart, as if trying to hold his balance against the unstable wobble of Earth’s orbit. His smile, when it came, was surprisingly shy.

  "Tea?" I asked.

  K looked over his shoulder and hesitated.

  "Mum and Dad are down at the tanks, sexing their fish."

  "Doing what?"

  "They’re British," I reassured him. "I am sure it’s less fun than it sounds."

  K ran thick fingers through his hair. "Ja, well in that case . . . Cheers, I’d love some tea."

  I went into the kitchen and shuffled the big black kettle over the hottest part of the fire, jiggling the branches over the glowing embers to give them fresh life. K leaned against one of the pillars that holds up the roof over the kitchen, like a piece of architecture himself; six foot two and 190 pounds. He watched me in silence. The branches spat and belched unruly smoke into the kitchen. My eyes spurted tears.

  "Oh dear," I said, feeling ridiculous.

  The turkey that had been roosting on the kitchen wall scuttled out into the garden gobbling her displeasure.

  "Wood’s wet," I explained.

  K came over and crouched in front of the fire. He grasped a hot coil in his fingers and moved it, not quickly, but thoughtfully, as if arranging something artistically, to the front of the fire, then he pulled the branches to one side and blew gently over the wood. In a few moments a red-yellow flame lapped the bottom of the kettle.

  "Wet wood’s not a problem," said K. "Fire needs to breathe."

  "Right."

  "You can burn water grass if you just let the air in."

  Perhaps I didn’t look convinced because K said, "In Bangladesh, the curry munchers burn cowshit."

  "Do they?" I said.

  I brought the tray into the shade of the tamarind and K followed me from the kitchen. We sat opposite each other on camp chairs and the dogs picked their targets and scrambled up onto our laps.

  They said you’d be rained out by now," I said, pouring two cups of tea and handing one over to K.

  "Who’s 'they'?"

  "At the lodge. We were there for a drink last night."

  K smiled and rubbed his lips together. "Ja, ja," he said. "Well it’s bloody sticky, but I could get through." He drank half the cup down and then sighed, as if the tea had fulfilled some thirst deeper than anything physical. Then he turned back to me and asked, "You don’t live here anymore, do you? Where do you live now?"

  "America."

  K grunted, as if absorbing this information, then he said, "What do they call their munts over there?"

  "You mean African Americans?"

  "No, I mean your original munts."

  "Native Americans," I said.

  K laughed.

  I frowned.

  "But they still shot them in the back the first chance they got."

  "Who?"

  "The wazungu. It doesn’t matter what they call them, they still shot them in the back and shoved them in compounds."

  "Reservations."

  "Same thing."

  "It’s complicated," I agreed.

  "No, it’s not."

  I lit a cigarette.

  "They hide behind their bullshit by calling it something else, but bullshit still smells like bullshit to me."

  I scratched the crop of mosquito bites that was flourishing on my ankles.

  "There’s bad malaria here," K warned.

  "I know."

  "You should eat dried pawpaw seeds. Works better than anything for most hu-hoos. Even malaria."

  "Really?" I said.

  K blinked at me, then he suddenly leaned forward and, sweeping aside the formalities of small talk, seized my finger and led it to a place just under the sharp rise of his right cheekbone. "Feel that? Can you feel that?"

  I couldn’t feel anything, but I thought it impolite not to say yes.

  K tightened his grip on the end of my finger. In the humidity, K’s skin was slick with a light film of sweat. He had an organic, unadulterated smell, not at all unpleasant, but slightly acid-sweet, like salted tomatoes.

  "Two years ago I started getting these moving, jumping lumps under my skin," K continued, pressing my finger deeper i
nto his flesh. "There. See?"

  I nodded.

  "What do you think that is?"

  I shook my head and reclaimed my finger. "Putsis?" I ventured, thinking of the eggs laid under the skin by flies in the rainy season that emerge later as erupting maggots.

  K shook his head and pressed his lips together victoriously. "No."

  "Worms?"

  "Wrong again," said K.

  "Pimple," I said. "I don’t know. Boil, welt, carbuncle, locust."

  K stared at me unsmiling, like a teacher waiting for an errant student to settle down before delivering the lesson of the day. He said, "It was a couple of years ago. I had just rescued this kitten—it was the rainy season and you know how these poor bloody kittens just wash up on the side of the road like drowned rats? Well, I found this kitten and brought it home and about a week later, these bumps start appearing everywhere. I thought I’d caught worms off the kitten, so I ate pawpaw seeds. No result. So I tried deworming pills Nothing. Except I got the trots. So then I soaked both of us in dog dip and I bloody nearly killed the poor kitten, but these lumps were still hassling me. They were here"—K pointed to his face—"and here"—he clamped his hand behind his leg—"and here"—he held up his feet—"and here"—he lifted up his shirt and showed me his torso. "So then I bathed in twenty liters of paraffin and my ears bled for a month but still, these lumps kept twitching. I was going benzi, I tell you. Then I injected myself twice a day, every day for a week, with sheep dip, two cc’s at a time. I thought maybe I had sheep maggots under my skin. But no. The sheep dip nearly killed me, I was in bed for a week, but the bloody things kept wiggling under my skin. So I burned my mattress, boiled my clothes, fumigated my bedroom, and cooked my shoes, but still, there they were. These hard, moving lumps under my skin. I finally went to the doctor and he gave me tablets that are supposed to kill worms that these people in West Africa get. I said to the doctor, 'This is Zambia, not bloody West Africa.' Six pills a day. They made me so sick, I thought I was going to die. There I was, back in bed, sick as a dog, with twitching lumps. Eventually, I went to a Chinese doctor in Lusaka, Mrs. Ho Ling—she diagnosed me with having inflamed nerve endings."