Scribbling The Cat: Travel With an African Soldier Page 3

  I could think of no better response than "Oh."

  "It was just nerves," K told me, "too much stress. Too much war."

  I assumed he meant The War—which around here would mean the second chimurenga, the Rhodesian War. I said, "But that’s been over for twenty years."

  K looked at me with surprise. "Oh no, I don’t mean the hondo"—he used the Shona word for "war." "I mean the war with the wife. No, I don’t think the hondo messed me up anything like the war with the wife did."

  K poured himself more tea and started to talk in a tireless, arbitrary manner—about God, and war and divorce—as if a vast jumble of ideas surrounding his dissolving marriage and the nature of God and the state of the universe had been stored up for months in his mind, awaiting a patient audience. The thoughts were coming raw, unfiltered, and untested, directly from K’s mind. He was like a lonely drunk who washes up to the bar after months without company and spills his soul to a complete stranger. Except that K was entirely sober.

  While K talked, I studied his body. He was the kind of man whose body told as many stories as his mouth ever could. To begin with, there was the question of his hairlessness; his arms and legs looked as if they had been subjected to hours of waxing. Then, there were a number of scars to contemplate: a sliced head, some light cuts on his arm, a decorously scarred knee, and a round scar on the fleshy part of his calf that, if it was related to a similar scar above his ankle, was almost certainly the entry wound of a bullet. And finally, there were tattoos to consider, barely visible on his tawny-colored skin. On his left forearm he had a cupid (but it had been badly drawn and could also have been interpreted as a set of buttocks suspended between two billowing clouds). Above that, there was a portrait of a Viking. On his right forearm was a winged-sword symbol, like something that has been copied off a coat of arms. Above that, the words "A POS" had been written. The only men I know who have found it practical or necessary to have their blood group indelibly scratched into their limbs in blue ink have been soldiers in African wars.

  So when K’s torrent of unstrained observations and ideas had slowed to a halting trickle, I said, "Selous Scouts?" because even twenty years after the end of the second chimurenga, K had the build and attitude of a soldier from Rhodesia’s most infamous, if not elite, unit.

  K startled. For a moment I thought he was going to deny it but then he said, "Is it that obvious?"

  "Oh no," I lied.

  "No, not the Scouts," said K. "RLI. Rhodesian Light Infantry. Thirteen Troop."

  The RLI had been Rhodesia’s only all-white unit, highly trained white boys whose "kill ratio" and violent reputation were a source of pride for most white Rhodesians. Their neurotically graded system of racial classification apparently gave the Rhodesians a need to believe in white superiority in all things, even the ability to kill. During the worst years of the war, a quarter to a third of RLI members had been foreigners covertly recruited from Britain, West Germany, the United States, Canada, Australia, France, Belgium, New Zealand, and South Africa in a desperate attempt to ensure the unit remained lily-white.

  K said, "I passed the selection course for the Scouts, but it wasn’t my scene. I stuck with the troopies. 'The Incredibles.'"

  "Oh?"

  "I’m a hunter," K explained. "We did the hunting, we found the gooks. We had to sniff them out." K rubbed his knee as if an old injury had begun to twinge with the memory of combat. "Five years in Mozambique," he said. Then he added, "Of course by the end of the war, the RLI weren’t hunters anymore. They were just killing machines—but by then I was out of it. I missed Operation Fireforce by about a year. You know, when ous were flown in and dropped on top of gooks for an almighty dustup—four, five times a day. Thankfully, I was out of it by then."

  "How was the selection course?"

  "For the Scouts, you mean?"

  I nodded.

  "You know what they called that training camp for the Scouts?"

  I shook my head.

  "Wasa Wasa. In Shona wasa wafara means, 'Those who die, die.'"

  "So it was tough."

  K shook his head. "Not so bad. They left four of us on an island in the middle of the lake for a couple of weeks. I’ve done worse. You weren’t allowed anything except a shirt and a pair of shorts. When we got hungry enough we chased a baboon into the lake and drowned it."

  "How’d that taste?"

  K considered. "Well, if I had to do it all over again, I’d cook the fucking thing first."

  "Ha."

  Then K said, "Was it this?" He put his hand over the sword-symbol tattoo.

  "Perhaps," I said.

  K’s voice sank. "This is the sign for the paraquedistas."

  "For the what?"

  "The Portuguese paratroopers," said K. "The Pork-and-Cheese jumpers, we used to call them. I tracked for them a few times."

  "Portuguese from Portugal?"

  K’s chin gave an abrupt pop backward, which I took as a gesture of the affirmative.

  "Were they good soldiers?" I asked.

  "Yes, they were good. They could shoot straight. They had a pretty good kill ratio."

  I took cover behind my teacup and said, "So did the RLI. Didn’t they?"

  K threw the dogs off his lap and dusted his hands. I thought he might get up and leave now.

  Instead K said, "Ja, not bad." He leaned forward, fixed me in his lionlike gaze, and added in a soft voice, "Look, the life I’ve lived . . . shit, I wouldn’t be here . . . you might not be here—a lot of people might not be here—if I, if we, couldn’t slot people faster than they could slot us. I was good at what I did. . . . It was my job. I did it."

  And then to my alarm I saw tears swell and tremble on the brims of K’s eyelids. His nose grew pale-rimmed and tight.

  "I’m sorry," I said.

  K threw back his head. Two lines of tears were sliding freely down his cheeks.

  I poured him some more tea and shoved the cup toward him. "Here, drink this."

  K only stared into the branches of the tamarind tree. Tears had found their way into the dark folds on his neck, so that they shone in purple creases. Then K gave himself a little shake and wiped his face with the flattened palm of his hands, a gesture that I think of as being very African, the gesture of people who are not accustomed to the conveniences of napkins or towels. K sucked air in over his teeth and said, his voice watery, "It’s a good thing the Almighty forgives all of us. It doesn’t matter"—now he leaned forward and fresh tears sprung—"how much of a shit you are, how much you’ve destroyed. . . . The Almighty forgives us. He holds us all in His hands." K took a moment to compose himself before he could continue. "I just thank Him," he said finally.

  And after that, a silence that might have been visible from space stretched in front of K and me. It was a splintering silence full of all the things I thought I already knew about K and all the things he thought I thought I knew about him.

  "Anyway," he said. "That’s all old news now, hey? The war’s over. Best we forget about it. Dead and buried."

  "Right," I said.

  "I’m sorry you had to listen to me." He gave an embarrassed laugh. "I didn’t mean to . . . No one comes out to my farm, so I don’t see women very often. I mean white women. It catches me off guard."

  "Don’t apologize."

  K stood up and tugged the end of his shorts, "Ja. Well, I should probably head back to the farm and see what those Einsteins have been up to in my absence."

  By now, it was early afternoon. It was the slow part of day when heat gathers like fingering thieves into your body and steals energy and desire and initiative.

  I stood up. "I imagine Dad’s still down at the fish tanks if you wanted to see him."

  "No." K stretched. "I didn’t come to see your dad in particular. Just a white face in general. Any white face will do." He smiled. "Mission accomplished."

  I trailed up the steps to the arch after K. The dogs, who were belly-up on the chairs or splayed out on the lawn, watched us
leave the camp—they did not move. Anything with a brain and with any feeling at all was staying as still as it could. Only the flies spun and buzzed and twirled and dive-bombed.

  "You must come out and see me on my farm sometime," said K as he climbed into his pickup. "How long are you out here for?"

  "I go back to the States the week after Christmas," I said.

  "Well, then there’s plenty of time. Come and see my bananas."

  I nodded. "Maybe," I said, but my voice was drowned out by the revving engine.

  K gave a dismissive wave and turned his attention to the road.

  I watched the pickup back out of the yard and, in a paste of mud, grind up the slick driveway. Mud splattered the side of the vehicle and flew out behind the back wheels in little red pellets. A cascade of egrets, rattled by the commotion, erupted up out of the green grass and banked around to the fish ponds above the camp, their wings paper-white against gray clouds.

  Words and War

  Mum and Dad’s shower and bath

  WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, spinning around in the cycle of violence that I understood, only very vaguely, as Rhodesia’s war of independence, I used to have a recurring dream that I was being abducted by a massive crow; it scooped me up from the garden where I had been playing and flew with me to Mozambique, where it dropped me on a land mine. And then I would wake up screaming, still floating toward the mine (absurdly slowly, because it was the mid-1970s and I was, at the time, fond of a pair of large hand-me-down bell-bottom jeans, which served the dual purpose, in my dream at least, of fashion statement and parachute).

  The night after I first met K, I had that same old war dream and I woke up, choking on a scream, bell-bottoms billowing by my ears and the tinny taste of helplessness (the taste that comes before a scream) in my mouth. I lay in the darkness feeling my heart smack against the edge of my ribs until, at last, thinking I would not be able to get back to sleep, I let myself out of my mosquito net and into the insect-creaking night beyond its lacy comfort. I felt my way down the uneven steps (toes curled against frogs and centipedes) and toward the picnic table, which lurked shadowy and indistinct under the deep-forever night that leaked through the branches of the tamarind tree.

  The rain, as Dad had predicted, had stopped by now and left the air a little cooler. Where the clouds had ragged apart, the sky reached back until the beginning of time, black poured on black. I groped around the picnic table for Dad’s cigarettes and scraped a chair back. One of Mum’s guinea fowls purred at me from its perch as I sat down.

  "Just don’t take me to Mozambique," I told the guinea fowl, blowing a funnel of blue smoke at it.

  The guinea fowl spluttered and the wind gave a breathy sigh. Raindrops shook off the leaves of the tamarind tree and plopped onto my shoulders and bare legs. I shivered and pulled one of the little dogs onto my lap.

  Dad woke up just before dawn and came down to the picnic table. He wore a length of bright chitenge cloth around his waist, above which his body gleamed white in the shape of his shirt, his arms and neck burned a ruddy brown. He said, "Sleep all right?"

  "Fine."

  "Leave any for me?" he asked, shaking the box of cigarettes.

  "One or two."

  Dad coughed and lit a cigarette. "How long have you been down here?"

  "Hours," I said.

  "Then why didn’t you make the bloody tea yet?"

  "I had a nightmare."

  Dad pinched the end of the match out between his thumb and forefinger. "Nightmare make you afraid of the kettle?"

  "Nope."

  "Miss your electric stove in America?" asked Dad, breathing smoke at me.

  "Maybe."

  Dad made a fire and boiled water, grunting in a soft, mildly complaining way as he laid a tray with cups, a jug of milk, sugar, the cigarette caught in the corner of his mouth. Then we moved up to the top of the camp, sat on the edge of Mum’s flower bed, and watched the graying dawn stroke mist through the rain-startled bush, and a snaky wisp of cloud rise off the Pepani River. We were quiet for a long time, drinking and smoking.

  Then I asked, "Do you ever have nightmares about the war?"

  "Nope."

  I lit the last cigarette. "Liar."

  Dad cleared his throat.

  I said, "I hear you shouting in your sleep sometimes."

  "I’m not asleep. I’m shouting at the bloody dogs."

  "You’re shouting, 'Heads down!' and 'Shit, we’re hit!'"

  Dad poured himself more tea and shook the empty cigarette box. "It wasn’t much of a war," he said at last.

  "Were you ever scared?"

  "Scared to death. Bored to death. Both."

  I had seen my father go off to fight in the war. He didn’t have to go very far from our farm near Umtali, on Rhodesia’s border with Mozambique. He walked to the end of the driveway, where he was picked up in a camouflage-painted Land Rover and taken off with five other farmers to the hills above our house, where they crept about for a couple of weeks hoping not to get noticed by the enemy. My father was called up into the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit (PATU), an outfit known colloquially as Dad’s Army.

  "Cannon fodder was what we were," Dad said. "We were just a bunch of bumbling farmers buggering around in the bush without much of a clue. We were lucky to get out of the war without shooting each other, let alone the bloody gooks."

  Dad gave up guns—even for hunting or crop protection—after the war. So now he and his men chase hippos and elephants off the bananas with gongs and branches of fire and Dad’s brave, thin shouts ragged in the thick, Pepani night, "Come on, you buggers! Off my bananas!"

  I said, "K was in the RLI."

  "Really?"

  "That’s what I thought at first too." I took a sip of tea.

  "Ha." Dad shook his head. "In any case, those baskets were tough, I wouldn’t want to argue with one of those troopies."

  The soldiers in the RLI were called troopers (or, colloquially, troopies). The guerrillas nicknamed them MaBruka because the troopers wore very short shorts. Brookies, in Rhodesian slang, are little girls’ underwear.

  "Did you believe in the war?"

  "What?"

  "Did you think it was right?"

  Dad said, "Fergodsake, Bobo. The sun’s not even over the top of the bananas."

  "Well?"

  "No."

  "Then why did you fight?"

  "Call-up."

  "You could have been a conscientious objector."

  "A what?"

  "A pacifist."

  "No, I couldn’t."

  "Why not?"

  "I was there and the war was there and that’s what I had to do. That’s what we all had to do—they didn’t give you a choice. It was stay and fight or get out. We would have lost the farm. We would have lost everything."

  "We lost the farm anyway," I pointed out.

  Dad grunted. "In any case, I wasn’t going to sit the war out and let some other poor bastard get snuffed on my account."

  "Do you regret it?"

  Dad stood up and rubbed his belly. "I’m going to have a shower and then I am going to see my fish," he said.

  "Why won’t you talk about it?"

  "Nothing to talk about."

  TALK KILLS, the posters above bars from the Eastern Highlands to Wankie had declared during the war. LOOSE TONGUES COST LIVES. I can just about guarantee Dad never killed anyone with his tongue.

  I said, "It might do you good to talk about it."

  Dad grunted. "I tell you what would do me good."

  "What?"

  "If my daughter left her old man a few bloody cigarettes for his breakfast." He tromped off to the shower—a loose grass enclosure at the top of the camp that was open to the sky and occasionally sagged open at the edges, revealing glimpses of the soapy, white body within. A silver bucket was suspended by a rope pulley over a circle of red gravel, a rickety bush-pole table held a candle (in a green wine bottle), a dish of soap, and a bottle of shampoo. Frogs and snakes nested
in the grass fence and scorpions peered with glinting black eyes from the drain. The dogs trotted after Dad, looking forward to their morning encounter with the shower’s variety of wildlife. In a few moments I heard the squeak of the bucket as it was lowered over my father, then a gush and Dad muttering under his breath at the shock of cold water. One of the Jack Russells came trotting out with her tail raised in victory and a lizard clenched between her jaws.

  BY THE MID-1960S, all but a handful of African countries had gained independence from their European settlers. The Southern Rhodesian government, led by Ian Smith, in a panic lest the British prime minister turn their country over to the Africans too, made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on November 11, 1965. Under UDI whites retained power and black Rhodesians remained unable to vote. Wrex Tarr, Rhodesia’s resident wag, reflected the casualness with which whites regarded this momentous decision by tagging UDI a "Universal Declaration of Indifference." A state of emergency was declared—but this was more a way to keep uppity blacks in line than to placate satiated whites.

  Britain and the United Nations Security Council responded to Smith’s move by slamming economic sanctions on the rogue state, and black Rhodesian nationalists began preparing for war, training in countries that were sympathetic to their cause: Zambia, Ghana, Tanzania, China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union. For a time, the nationalist guerrillas dispatched into Rhodesia were quickly captured and killed by government forces; they were, as one white farmer put it, "only a pinprick in our sides" and "merely garden boys." But, in 1972, the rebels intensified their war. No longer operating from beyond Rhodesia’s borders, they infiltrated the northeast of the country, caching arms near Centenary and Mount Darwin, and living in and off the local villages. From these bases, they attacked white farmers and intimidated their laborers; they laid mines and set ambushes. The garden boys," it turned out, weren’t nearly as inept or inefficient as the whites had painted them, and they were serious about gaining their independence.