Scribbling The Cat: Travel With an African Soldier Read online

  "What do you see when you look in the mirror?" K asked suddenly. "Do you see yourself?"

  "Yes."

  "But yourself isn’t a thing. How can you see something that isn’t there? You are just meat and bones. That’s what you should see. Flesh and blood, that’s all. And all flesh and blood is . . . Do you want to know what flesh and blood is?" K waited. "You and me and every other person on this earth—we’re all just a bloody corpse waiting to happen. I don’t care how good-looking you think you are. How successful you believe you are. Your body is still just a corpse-in-waiting."

  By now we were back at the fish camp. I could see the pale yellow light of bare bulb that swung from the kitchen roof from under the arch. I could see Mum’s bed, through the window of her room, shrouded with a mosquito net. The signature tune of the BBC World Service sang jauntily out to us. K kept the engine running and his face glowed green in the reflected light from the dashboard. The engine ticked in the heat.

  I took a deep breath. "This corpse-in-waiting could do with a drink," I said.

  K said, "Man, I’m sorry. I’d have stopped at Harry’s Bar if I’d known you were so desperate."

  "That’s okay," I said. "I’m fine, really. Thank you for . . . everything."

  K stared straight ahead. "It was my pleasure," he said stiffly.

  And then, as I was turning to open the car door, K suddenly launched across the cab and planted a hot kiss on my cheek. "Good-bye," he said. And before I had properly closed the door, he was driving away.

  The Leftovers

  Bubo

  AFTER I MET K, there were odd chunks of time when I did not think of him at all. And then there were vast stretches of nights when I woke so full of him that I wondered if I had dreamed him into life by accident. My accident. My fault. It was as if the hot Sole soil had met the unaccustomed flush of that extraordinary rain and out of the violence of this encounter, K had been hallucinated into life as my idea. He had been grafted into reality in the hothouse of my imagination. K the idea. Which is so much worse than K the real person from whom I could walk away.

  K was a fantasy or a nightmare. He was an act of God. Or of Evil. Or of both. K was shell-shocked. K was explosive. K was given to us as a solution, or as a punishment. Depending on whose side you were on. The world was both less equivocal and much more confusing with him in my mind. There was no "warm," no "gray," no "maybe." It was "hot or cold," "black or white," "yes or no."

  Are you in or out?

  In late December I went home to my husband and to my children and to the post-Christmas chaos of a resort town, but instead of feeling glad to be back, I was dislocated and depressed. It should not be physically possible to get from the banks of the Pepani River to Wyoming in less than two days, because mentally and emotionally it is impossible. The shock is too much, the contrast too raw. We should sail or swim or walk from Africa, letting bits of her drop out of us, and gradually, in this way, assimilate the excesses and liberties of the States in tiny, incremental sips, maybe touring up through South America and Mexico before trying to stomach the land of the Free and the Brave.

  Because now the real, wonderful world around me—the place where we had decided to live with our children, because it had seemed like an acceptable compromise between my Zambia and my husband’s America—felt suddenly pointless and trivial and almost insultingly frivolous. The shops were crappy with a Christmas hangover, too loud and brash. Everything was 50 percent off. There was nothing challenging about being here, at least not on the surface. The new year’s party I attended was bloated with people complaining about the weight they had put on over Christmas. I feigned malaria and went home to bed for a week.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to join in the innocent, deluded self-congratulation that goes with living in such a fat, sweet country. I did. But I couldn’t. And confining myself to the house didn’t help. Now I felt like a trespasser in my own home with all its factory-load of gadgets and machines and the ease of the push-button life I was living. And, uninvited, K strolled around in the back of my head and talked his loneliness out of himself and straight into me and would not let me rest and by the end of this, there were pieces of me and pieces of him and pieces of our history that were barbed together in a tangle in my head and I couldn’t shake the feeling that in some inevitable way, I was responsible for K. And he for me.

  Then gradually the winter seeped into spring and I resumed the habits of entitlement that most of us don’t even know we have. And K’s imaginary voice—which had been an almost continuous presence through the cold weather—melted into an only occasional intrusion. I drank coffee at the café on the creek without imagining K asking me how I could pay three times the average Zambian’s daily salary for the privilege; I ate sun-dried tomatoes and wild mushrooms drizzled with extra-virgin olive oil and the ghost of K didn’t appear to tell me that you were either a virgin, or not, but you couldn’t be extra-virgin. And I disentangled myself from my history, one sticky thread at a time, until I was completely, happily reestablished as a Wyoming mother. I started to take the ease for granted.

  Then in late August, I woke up one night into the brittle light of a Rocky Mountain full moon. I had been crow-dropped and caught by the silly bell-bottoms again. I lay in bed feeling rigid and my skin burned with that old terrorist-under-the-bed feeling. The moon had set the world alight in a pale, cold fire of silver. The fir tree outside our bedroom window gleamed blue and rapped an urgent tattoo against the glass. I got out of bed (feet prickling) and went through to the kids’ room. They were both asleep, their faces turned up to the light that shattered through their window. I sat on the edge of their beds and kissed them both, hungry for the kind of peace they usually instilled in me. My daughter turned over and hugged her blanket to her belly. My son muttered. It felt as if I was imparting disquiet into my children, as if my embrace were poisoned.

  I went through to the kitchen—feeling exiled by who I was—and made some tea and sat on the sofa with a blanket over my knees. It was the time of night that precedes dawn and is without perspective or reason. It was the hour when regret and fear overwhelm hope and courage and when all that is ugly in us is magnified and when we are most panic-stricken by what we have lost, and what we have almost lost, and what we fear we might lose.

  Then I remembered an incident from when I was five or six (not yet at boarding school). I remembered waking up into the impenetrable blackness of an African night; we had no electricity and I, who had set my sheets on fire looking under the bed for terrorists, had been banned from touching anything to do with fire and, as extra insurance, all matches and candles had been confiscated from beneath my pillow and from under the mattress where I had been stashing them for months. I lay there in the dark as long as I could stand it and then I exploded with a hissing whisper, "Vanessa! Wake up!"

  My sister, who was three years older than me, groaned, "What?"

  "Light your candle! There’s a terrorist under my bed."

  "No there isn’t. Go back to sleep."

  "There is!"

  "Not."

  "Is."

  And Vanessa, sensing that this might go on until morning, replied (by way of not-much-comfort), "Just think of all the poor terrorists who are lying awake right now, afraid to go to sleep in case they have you under their beds."

  God Is Not My Messenger

  Sole store

  IN OCTOBER, I flew from Wyoming to Zimbabwe to write a story for an English newspaper about the political crisis there—the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, and his cronies had turned on their own people in a vicious reversal of intention, eating the power bestowed on them and tumorous with the excess of it. At the end of my trip, demoralized by the corruption and violence I had witnessed, I bought a bus ticket from Harare to Sole with the intention of spending a few nights with Mum and Dad before returning to the States.

  My fellow bus travelers included several Zimbabweans who were trying to look as if they always brought the kitc
hen sink with them when they came on "holiday" to Zambia but whose shaking hands and sweating faces at the police roadblocks gave them away as political refugees. There were smugglers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo with little glassy rocks for sale in their shirt pockets (diamonds, or they were offered as diamonds to me, who couldn’t remember if you were supposed to bite them or scratch glass with them to see if they were real). There was a Zambian woman who casually told me that she was a prostitute. There were three Mozambican traders with baskets of dried fish, bottles of cooking oil, and bolts of cloth. They sat in the back of the bus like gate-crashers, with the surreptitious, suspicious air of people who have been used to groveling at the depths of what the world has to offer and have suddenly and unexpectedly found their fortunes rising, but who have seen enough of the capriciousness of fate to expect their luck to dry up at any moment.

  By the time we had broken down once, lost luggage once (the rope holding everyone’s belongings to the roof had snapped), and made numerous stops for one or another of the passengers to crouch behind a bush or tree, it was late afternoon. By then, the heat from the day had gathered itself together for a final assault on the earth and was pounding onto the road, which shuddered in a series of dislocated heat waves before us, and onto the land on either side of the road and into the bus. As we crawled off the escarpment at Mkuti and sank into the Pepani Valley, the dry air rushed up to meet us and we all opened our windows as wide as they would go and some of us drank beer, warm from the bottle. The prostitute passed around pieces of chicken, which, if it had ever been cold, was back up to oven temperature by now.

  I’d forgotten how October eats at the landscape in the lowveldt. It is the most discouraging time of year: long enough after the last rains so that they are barely worth the ache of remembering and too far until the next rains to waste the energy on hope. All signs of the memorable excesses of ten months ago had disappeared and it was hard to believe that the same valley could accommodate such disparate worlds. The sky was cloudless but stained wildfire yellow and the deep haze caught at the heat waves. Goats and donkeys stood with their backs to the sun and closed their eyes, panting (visibly rocking with every labored breath). The ground around the villages was exposed, brick hard and grazed clean of vegetation.

  The Goba people say October is Gumiguru, meaning "month of the big ten"; November is the infinitely more hopeful Mbuzdi, meaning "month of goat fertility," but October is big and ominous and obscurely ten. The Goba wisely avoid holding wedding and initiation ceremonies in October. White locals know it as suicide month. The Nyanja call it Mwenzi wa zuma, meaning "month of the sun." They also call it Kusi piya (from kusi piya weka, "to kill yourself"). It is not a month to be toyed with.

  Dad was waiting at the border for me. He was sitting on the front of the pickup, feet hooked over the front bumper, in the shade of a mango tree. He was smoking his pipe and staring placidly through the anarchic tumult of money traders (flapping fists of money at him, as if they had caught wild birds and were trying to sell them) and the drunks who lurched occasionally into the street from nearby taverns, blinked with dismay at the unremitting sun, and then tottered back into the humid gloom of the bars. Dad smiled and waved when he saw me stagger through the gates, laden with computer, backpack, and baskets of gifts acquired at the Harare market.

  "Hello, Bobo," he said. "Manage to stay out of the clanger?"

  I kissed him. "Bit bloody scary, though," I said, looking back over the river to Zimbabwe, which, from the safely of here, looked deadened and stultified by the terrific heat and too dazed for any hope of an uprising. Which is what it needed. Either that, or a variation on a medieval theme. In those years, to ensure the continuing prosperity of the land, the Shona people of the great Munhumutapa empire had not allowed their Mambo to grow old. Instead, the Mambo was ritually slain after four years and an unfortunate replacement selected.

  "Other than that, okay?" asked Dad.

  I nodded. "Fine. Thanks for coming to fetch me."

  "Mum wouldn’t let me make you walk to the farm," said Dad. "Not since the last bloke snuffed it."

  "Who snuffed it?"

  "Some Pom from Lusaka wanted to be shown around the farm a couple of weeks ago, so I took him out for a little walk and he did a heels-up."

  "Completely?"

  "Fell off his perch."

  "What do you mean by 'a little walk'?"

  "Just around the farm."

  "God, Dad."

  "Heat exhaustion or some bloody thing." Dad heaved my suitcase into the back.

  "Poor man."

  "He wasn’t very talkative to begin with and then he went completely quiet."

  "Dad!"

  "Mum went to the funeral," said Dad defensively.

  "I suppose that’s something," I said.

  "I told her not to look conspicuous but she still dressed like a bloody bullfighter, wore a hat that could start a rebellion, and apparently sat as close as she could get to the coffin without falling into it."

  "Ha."

  Dad looked over at me and allowed himself a little laugh.

  THE FIRST TWO DAYS passed quietly. Mum and Dad were busy on the farm all morning (fish, if nothing else, seem to breed and grow extravagantly in October) and I stayed up at the camp pretending to write while they were gone. Everything felt entangled by the heat, as if it were able to throw out limb-snagging webs that caught at our ankles, our arms, and even our tongues, making us all slower-moving than usual and more languid of speech.

  We woke very early—mashambanzou, the Goba say, "when the elephants wash"—to take advantage of what little respite from the sun the night might have given us (the earth swallowed heat all day and regurgitated it all night). But by midmorning, when the buffalo beans tossed up stinging hairs from their fruit into the air—hairs that found skin and burrowed into flesh with burning insistence—all activity on the farm came to a halt. Everyone found refuge in the damp shade of the banana plantation, or in the cool gloom of a hut, and slept off the poisonous part of the day, awaking in late afternoon feeling tongue-swollen and bleary. Then, we drank tea and worked for another two or three hours, until sundown approached.

  In the evenings—marirangwe, the Goba say, "when the leopard calls out"—we took cold beers down to the banks of the river and watched the sky turn from a sun-wrecked wash of pale yellow-blue to a vivid display of reds and yellows and lurid, clashing streaks of purple. Doves called and trilled prettily to one another from the fig trees, crickets buzzed in the whispering dry grass, and, from the villages, an intermittent volley of dog barks and the wails of children shattered the air. Hippos, pink and gray humps scattered like rocks off the edges of eddies, occasionally surfaced under a spray of water and honked a warning at the shadowy dugout canoes that skimmed past them.

  Late on the afternoon of the third day, after Mum and Dad had gone down to the tanks to admire a fresh crop of fingerlings, K appeared, looming under the arch at the top of the camp as he had the first time I had met him, and blocking out the sun, which spread indistinctly in a pale explosion behind a mile-thick choke of dust and wood smoke.

  "Hi." I shaded my eyes against the beat of light.

  "Huzzit?" K took the steps that lead down from the archway to the tamarind tree in his characteristically greedy gulps. "I heard you had come home," he said, pulling up a camp chair next to me and pouring himself a cup of tea, draining the pot.

  "Should I brew some fresh?"

  K swallowed down the tea and said, "Please." He followed me into the kitchen. "You’ve been okay?" he asked.

  This time, when I lit a match, the firewood was parchment dry and caught easily onto the flame. I put the kettle over the hottest part of the fire. "Ja, I’ve been fine."

  The little dogs—those that had not gone with Mum and Dad to stare down into tanks and tanks of identical fish babies—had barely lifted their heads at K’s arrival. Now a couple of them thumped their tails in greeting and K bent down to fondle their ears. They l
ay in panting crescent-shaped heaps across the relatively cool kitchen floor, miniature lakes of saliva forming in silver pools below their mouths.

  When the water boiled, splattering and hissing and adding to the general atmosphere of hellish heat, I poured it onto the small pile of tea leaves in the enamel pot and set the tea tray with a jug of milk and two clean cups.

  "Here," said K, "let me take that for you."

  We went back under the tamarind tree. K put the tray down on the picnic table and then sat down next to me. I poured the tea and handed K a cup.

  "How long are you here for?" he asked.

  "A couple more days," I said.

  "How are things in the States?"

  "Fine."

  "The kids and Charlie?"

  "Well."

  "Cheers."

  We sipped our tea. A redchested cuckoo predicted, without any basis for her optimism, "It will rain! It will rain!"

  "What are you working on?" asked K, looking at the computer and the sliding avalanche of notes and tapes.

  "A newspaper article," I said.

  "Is it going all right?"

  "Not really." I lit a cigarette. "I’m trying to make sense of the mess in Zimbabwe in twelve hundred words."

  K let this sink in for a moment and then he gave such a guffawing laugh that he sprayed tea over the table and then I started to laugh too. I slammed the lid of my computer shut, losing all unsaved work in one careless gesture, and said, "Oh God, how arrogant. You’re right. Crazy to even try."

  "No," said K earnestly, "you’re not crazy to try. Sorry for laughing." He made an attempt at a straight face. "Sorry," he apologized, laughing again and covering his mouth with his hand. Then we were both laughing more than the comment had any right to.