Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [12]
“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