Scribbling the Cat Page 9

  "I don’t understand."

  "I think I was terribly mistaken," he said as if he was talking to himself. "There is no way I can reconcile myself with the ghosts of war without beginning in Mozambique."

  From Echoing Silences by Alexander Kanengoni

  Accident Hill

  Innocent in the kitchen on K’s farm

  FOUR MONTHS LATER, in early February, I flew from the States to Lusaka. K was there to meet me at the airport. As I pushed past the crush that had congregated around the customs officials, I could see him standing head and shoulders above everyone else, his breadth creating a vacuum of space around him. He looked even healthier and more powerful than I remembered, as if he had grown younger somehow since I had been here last.

  "You look well," I said.

  "I’m fasting."

  "You’re not eating?"

  "No, I’m eating. Just no meat, tea, coffee, soft drinks, flour, sweets."

  "Ah," I said. It showed in his face—he radiated vigor and a kind of purity, like an athletic monk.

  "Thanks for meeting me."

  "Hazeku ndaba." K seized my bags and strode ahead of me out into the humid swell of the African air, which I swallowed in hungry, happy gulps.

  "Is it good to be home?" he asked.

  "Always."

  "Are you hungry?"

  "Nope."

  "I saw your mum and dad last week."

  "Oh good. Are they okay?"

  "Ja. Looking forward to seeing you when we get back from Moz." K swung my bags into the back of the truck and tied them down with rope.

  I climbed into the car and K handed me a carton of cigarettes. "Gwai," he said.

  "Oh man, I just quit again," I said, lighting one. I let the smoke curl around my tongue before exhaling. "Toasted tobacco, no additives," I said. "Yum. Tastes like childhood." We were racing past the cattle ranches that line the road from the airport and onto the Great East Road, which headed to Malawi on the one hand and into Lusaka on the other. YOUR FAMILY NEED YOU, a sign at the intersection reminded travelers, WEAR A SEAT BELT. USE A CONDOM.

  Lusaka was at its most beautiful, extravagant with the end of the rainy season. The sky stretched above the city clear and fresh. Green pushed up on every available patch of earth. Even the shanties managed to look picturesque, hiding their poverty behind stubby hedges of bougainvillea and tins containing elephant-ear plants. A large white poster flapped at the pedestrian crossing: PREVENT CHOLERA, it instructed next to cartoon pictures of a pair of disembodied hands performing various ablutions.

  We cleared the overpass that avoids a tangle of railway lines and the congestion of the bus and train stations and circled past the Family Planning Building and made our way down Cairo Road, where bright gardens and fountains have replaced dust bowls at traffic circles and where coffee shops and meat-pie take-out restaurants have replaced a ghost strip of broken windows and litter-strewn gutters.

  And then we were peeling out of the city, past the Second-Class District with its open-air butcheries (goat and cow carcasses, swinging from trees, seething with flies), past MundaWanga Wildlife Sanctuary (a happily restored botanical garden, which, a few years before, had been an enclosure of abused, terrified, and starving wild animals), out toward the hills that surround the town of Kafue, and into the escarpment from which we could catch glimpses of the Sole Valley.

  There is a section of the Pepani Escarpment nicknamed Kapiri Ngozi meaning, in Nyanja, "accident hill." Ngozi in Shona can also mean a "vengeful or unsatisfied ghost" and the road is correspondingly disturbed; spilled oil, torn tarmac, shredded guardrails, vandalized wrecks. Every week, at least one lorry is turned onto its back here, like a giant, marooned beetle. Fierce heat pumping up from the Sole Valley and the relentless grade of the road combine to overwhelm the brakes of the trucks that chew steadily up and down this spine of road—on their way through Zambia, into and out of Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Tanzania.

  Sometimes, an accident on Kapiri Ngozi can hold up the flow of traffic on the escarpment for a week or more, and when this happens, entire, spontaneous villages erupt out of the face of the hill: green tarpaulins cast between sparse msasa trees, small cooking fires spire funnels of gray-blue smoke, and men stripped to the waist hunch in front of disabled vehicles. Prostitutes appear from Sole to administer to the stranded drivers. Women haul their baskets off the roofs of buses and set up stalls selling drinks and biscuits and roasted corn.

  When we arrived at the escarpment we found a chaos of cars, vans, buses, and trucks. A lorry had lost control coming down Kapiri Ngozi, narrowly avoided tumbling over the edge into the deep valley below, and had jackknifed across the road. A curse of confusion had ensued. There were a mass of passengers and stranded travelers straggling from one vehicle to another or draped under shade on the side of the road. Fires had been kindled and the trader women were already arguing over the most favorable vending positions. A policeman was taking cover behind a plump woman trader, from where he occasionally bleated directions that went largely ignored.

  K got out the cab. "Let me go and see what has happened."

  He disappeared into the milling crowd. A small boy appeared and offered to sell me a jerry can of pilfered diesel.

  "No thanks."

  The boy poked his head in the window and his swiveling eyes took in the contents of the cab. "Money!" he demanded at last.

  I shook my head.

  "Give me!" he said.

  "No."

  "Why won’t you give me? Give me!"

  I closed my eyes, but the boy still breathed on me. "Hunger," he declared at last.

  "Okay." I searched the cab and found a banana and some biscuits. "Here."

  "You shouldn’t do that," said K, appearing at my side. "You’ll make a beggar out of him."

  "For God’s sake," I said, looking after the boy, who had sauntered to the next vehicle with his jerry can, "he’s a child, not a Jack Russell."

  K’s shoulders sagged. "Myself, I always give to blind people. The Almighty is very specific about that. But if you try to help everyone . . . you can’t help everyone."

  A group of men who had scrambled up to the cliff above the road were now heaving boulders over the edge to create a bridge on the side of the road on which the lorry could be circumvented.

  "How does it look up there?"

  "Oh, we’ll be here for hours," said K. "Half the drivers are fighting and the other half are inspired with liquid intelligence."

  "With what?"

  "They’re drunk."

  "Oh"—I stared out the windscreen without surprise—"well, that doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, considering the alternative."

  K laughed at me and, as usual, I was surprised by how sudden and generous his laugh was and by how this one gesture shaved the edge off the part of this man that I found most terrifying and unattractive. "I’d get out there and do something, but I’d only end up killing someone," K said. He sounded helplessly resigned, the way other people might say, "I’d help you do the dishes, but I always seem to break plates."

  "Better not," I said.

  "I punched a guy here last year."

  "A South African," I said. "I heard."

  "See?" said K. "Shit. My reputation! That’s why I won’t fight anymore." K sighed. "Wherever I go people have heard about me before I even arrive. And the thing is"—K spread out his hands—"I’ve never punched anyone who didn’t deserve it. I’ve never gone looking for a fight in my life."

  I leaned back on the front seat so that my feet could dangle out the window and catch the weak puff of warm wind that lifted off the valley floor and up the escarpment. I lit a cigarette and watched the smoke trickle off the tips of my fingers. "How many people do you reckon you’ve punched? I mean, put on the floor."

  K looked down at me for a long time, considering. "I don’t know," he said at last. Then he asked, "Not counting the war?"

  "Not counting combat," I agreed.

  "Maybe a couple of hundred."
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  "Two hundred!" I said, sitting up.

  "Hey, I’m not proud of it," said K.

  "And how many of those ended up in hospital?"

  K shrugged. "Well, I put three in at once, does that count as three people or one?"

  "Three people are three people."

  "Then, let me see . . ." K stared at his hands for a moment. "A dozen, I reckon."

  The heat outside sung its stinging tune. There were shouts from the men on the cliff. Rocks tumbled down onto the road and exploded in dust and shards of splintered granite. The trader women argued and shouted and chased children and flies from the food. The men who weren’t fighting or rolling rocks off the cliff sat in whatever shade they could find and drank beer.

  K stretched and said lazily, "My last week in the army, I was in an accident. I was in a truck that rolled. I was sitting in the back and I tried to jump clear but the damn thing came down on me. I did this"—K showed me his knee, which was snaked with a thick, brown scar. "It was a blerry mess. The army docs fixed it and sent me home on sick leave and I got so pie-eyed my first night home that I drove my own car off an embankment. They reckon it was thirty meters high, more. I should have been dead probably, but I just got my crutches out of the wreck and walked back to the bar and the bartender told me, 'You’ve had enough,' so I turned the place upside down. I told him, 'Who the fuck do you think you are? No one tells me when I’ve had enough.' I locked him in the storeroom and I started to drink the bar dry except the cops came and dragged me off to jail. It took six of them." K sighed unhappily. "That’s where I was when I got my papers getting me out of the army. I was in chook with the biggest babalas of my life."

  I closed my eyes. K started to tell me a story about a time, shortly after that, when he destroyed three taxi drivers and a cab in Bulawayo: "I was still on crutches too. Man! I remember ripping a door off the taxi and then my mind went. . . . You know, one moment I was aware of fighting . . . These ous had a crowbar, and they broke open the top of my head. Then my mind went blank. I wasn’t unconscious, I just don’t remember . . . I mean, my mind was blank from rage, not from getting knocked out. When I was aware of what was going on again, the taxi drivers had fucked off. But the taxi! The thing looked like it had been rolled. The roof was squashed in, the steering wheel twisted, the rims buckled, and I had the rearview mirror in my hand.

  "I had to go to court three weeks later—assault and grievous blerry harm—and the taxi drivers were still a mess. One of them was in a wheelchair, one had to come to court on a stretcher, the other guy . . . fuck, I’d ripped his scalp off. It was frightening. I got fined two thousand bucks for that and a ten years’ suspended sentence.

  "The judge said, 'Animals like you should not be allowed to walk freely on the streets.'"

  K’s voice hummed on and on.

  I slept.

  When I woke up an hour later we hadn’t moved, but K, who had been wearing a khaki-colored bush shirt and a pair of olive green corduroys from the early eighties, slightly flared at the ankle and beginning to strangle a little at the thigh, had stripped off and now had a towel wrapped around his waist. There had been a decided change in the mood of the previously cheerful travelers. At least one man, near the accident, had been punched and the men who were filling the ditch with rocks had gone on strike and had said that they refused to throw down another boulder unless we all agreed to pay them a few thousand kwacha for their efforts. With all the cars squashed up behind us and the disabled lorry in front of us, there was no immediate hope of our heading back to Lusaka or forward to K’s farm.

  I bought two ears of burned maize and a beer off one of the market women and found a place on the side of the road next to some truck driver. It was, I realized, the best place from which to observe the primping prostitutes who had recently toiled up from Sole, dressed to kill. Late afternoon sun throbbed onto the road. There was a smell of hot tarmac and fresh sweat and steady wood smoke and old burning rubber. Children curled up and slept on the bare ground, damp and oblivious and happily released, for the moment, from the tedium of waiting.

  IT WAS EVENING by the time we reached the farm, too dark to walk to the river or see the bananas. The sudden evening had already stolen light off the river and a gibbous moon crept up behind the acacia trees to the east. K lit a lantern and showed me the way to the shower—a small ablution block set downwind from the bedroom and kitchen. "Here," he said, "I’ll get you a cold beer. Anything else?"

  "No. Thanks."

  The hot water for the shower was heated by an old-style Rhodesian boiler (a drum of water set over a fire in a structure like a pizza oven). The room, freshly tiled, was meticulously clean and furnished with clean towels. As I was showering, K shouted, "I left a beer on the step for you."

  We set up in the kitchen, me on a wooden crate wrapped in a chitenge and K at the counter chopping vegetables for a casserole. Sheba and Mischief slept at my feet. Dispatch shadowed K, sitting behind his master’s legs and keeping one slit eye on me all the time. I put a tape recorder on the table.

  "What’s that?"

  "Ignore it," I said.

  Then neither of us said anything for a long time. The dogs dozed and scratched on the floor, the cicadas buzzed from the winter thorn trees, the odd mosquito droned. From up at the workshop, the generator hummed and sawed, the lights dimming and soaring in response. I sipped my beer and looked out at the star-spotted sky. K crushed garlic.

  At last K said, "Okay, what do you want to know?"

  I tried to think of something that would be easy for K to talk about, something uncontroversial. "What about school?" I asked. "Why don’t you tell me about school?"

  "Okay," said K. "From scratch?"

  "Sure."

  "I went to kindergarten in Zambia, in Matabuka," said K, "but I told you about that already, didn’t I?"

  I nodded.

  "Well, then when I was eight, my fossils sent me to Zim—Rhodesia in those days—Mweni Junior in Bulawayo." K rummaged through a cardboard box that was on the steps outside the kitchen. "Don’t ask me why they did it," he said, coming back with three tomatoes. "Because the school was full of Jews, and from day one they beat the crap out of me, those little bastards. They picked on the kids who weren’t Jewish," K. said. "And that was me and about five other kids."

  "Oh?"

  K put down the knife with which he had been cubing sweet potatoes and glanced at the tape recorder. "I’m not against Jews, you know. I didn’t have a quarrel with them—they picked on me. What was I supposed to do? Stand there and take it?"

  I said nothing.

  So K insisted, "What would you have done?"

  "I don’t know."

  "Those little Jews taught me to hate Jews. I didn’t hate Jews before I got there. I didn’t even know what a Jew was."

  "Do you still hate Jews now?"

  "No, man, I don’t hate anyone. I love all people the same. I don’t care if you’re a Yank, a Pom, a Chink, a fucking purple alien, a goffle." K wagged the pointy edge of the knife at me, then suddenly threw back his head and laughed. When he looked at me again, I saw that there were tears on his cheeks. "Oh ja!" he said. "A hobo of people have accused me of being a goffle. Ha!" K laughed, "Ha! Because in the sun I go almost black, hey? Have you seen? So people used to call me Goffle in the war. That was one of my nicknames." He slid potatoes and carrots into a pot and then he sighed and shook his head. His lips puckered and folded down at the edges.

  I asked, "So why do you think your parents sent you to a Jewish school?"

  K took such a long time to answer that I almost repeated the question. Then he said abruptly, almost angrily, "I don’t know. I don’t think they knew it was mostly Jews. You know? They hardly came to the school. They just put me on the train in Vic Falls and, 'Bye, chap, see you in three months,' and off I went."

  "Did you ask your folks to take you out?"

  "Ja, every time I went home. But my old lady wouldn’t listen. Anyway, I begged her—on my hands
and knees—not to send me to Mweni Senior because that’s where all the big brothers of all the little Jews were, and I knew they would make mincemeat out of me. So she sent me to Wilson High in Que Que." K chopped at a heap of onions angrily and tears flooded down his checks. "And the bullying didn’t end there. You know? Anyone who went to a boys’ boarding school in those days will tell you, if they’re being honest, it was savage. If you couldn’t stick up for yourself, you’d end up being rammed by every prick in the school."

  There was a long pause while K sniffed, and wiped his face with the back of his hand. Then he said, "When I was fourteen, I was held down by two guys from my class while this older boy raped me."

  Another long pause. Dispatch sat down abruptly and whined.

  "That was it," said K, turning around and thrusting his knife into an eggplant. "I am not saying that being raped damaged me for life or anything, and it didn’t make me hate homos. I have nothing against moffs as long as they leave me alone. I don’t think that guy was a moff in any case; I think he was just a bully. But that was it for me. I had had enough. So I was in the shower one day and the guy—the arsehole that raped me—came in and I stepped out of the shower and I punched him. One time. Flat. That’s when I realized I knew how to hit. Not even to talk. One punch right there"—K pointed to the tip of his chin with the knife—"and then in the goolies on the way down, and then a kick to the head when they’re on the floor. That’s all it takes. That’s when I started to get a reputation as someone who could fight. People three and four years older than me picked fights with me because of that reputation. Half the fights I got into weren’t even my fault."

  K cut some bread and fed slices of it to the dogs.

  "After that . . . I don’t know, there probably wasn’t a week when I didn’t get into a fight with some damn idiot. All the little squirts wanting to see if they could get the better of me and all the big monsters trying to see if they could squash me. I learned the hard way—smack them hard first. Soon as you see them coming. One, two, three. Then it’s over. Pointless dragging the thing out. You know, all these ous dancing about, flapping their fists all over the show? What’s the point?"