Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [11]
“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