Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [10]
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,