Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [18]
It was late morning by the time my ear caught the sound of men shouting in unison. It was the sound that I associate, in Zambia at least, with men doing work that in much of the rest of the world is done by machines. I hurried toward the noise and there, a few kilometers before the boundary to his farm, were K and a span of laborers. The men were stripped to the waist and were trying to shore up the greasy banks of a steep gorge with the great arms of a mopane tree. K was shouting orders in Shona and the men were scrambling and slithering in response, crying words of exertion and exhortation to one another: “Pamsoro, pamsoro, pamsoro! Sumudza!”
The gorge was the kind of deep-throated slit into the earth that hosts seasonal, lorry-swallowing flash floods. K informed me in a series of breathless shouts that it had spilled its banks in the night and had torn loose the bridge that once spanned it. Now, just twelve hours after the end of the rainstorm, the water had subsided to a series of sedate pools—even though whole limbs of trees hung where they shouldn’t, debris had been thrown high up onto land, and what was left of the bridge was being worn, as a necklace, by a fever tree.
I scrambled down the bank and waded through a coffee-colored pool. K came to the bank and gave me a hand up the other side. I was aware that I was disheveled to the point of dissolving: sweaty, mud-spattered, and flustered. K did not seem at all affected by the heat. Indeed, with his great expanse of hairless skin, he seemed especially modified to suit the climate. He helped the men press three more branches of a tree into the bank and then he stood back. One man came up to K and they spoke together in Shona, their voices low and urgent. Then the man nodded and slid into the water below the level of the bridge.
K turned to me. “So you came to see the farm?”
I nodded. “I hope it’s okay. You look busy.”
“Do you want some tea?”
“I don’t want to interrupt you.”
“No, it’s okay. Michael’s here. He’s my farm manager.”
Michael—the man with whom K had just been speaking—crawled up from the riverbed. He was a tall muscular man whose age it was hard to discern, since his face was remarkably clear and unlined while his hair was quite gray. His smile was easy and vivid and belied worried, tired eyes. We shook hands and I told him who I was. Michael nodded—he had heard of my father. And then we swapped the inevitable stories of who we knew in common, which turned out to be more people than I had expected. Half of the men and women on the fish farm were apparently related to Michael, while one of the market women I had befriended in Sole was his aunt.
Then we took our leave and K led me to his pickup. He said that he had never seen such rain since moving here.
“When was that?” I asked.
K opened the passenger door for me. “Five years ago.” He went around to the driver’s side and let himself into the cab; then he slipped the car into gear and we surfed off the muddy bank onto what passed for a road. The engine roared and whined and the tires seethed, the car veered to the side and spun, mud flicked up. K changed gears and the car suddenly surged forward and I found myself flung back. I hung on to the door handle and stared out of the windscreen as the world slashed past me in a violent explosion of color. I had the impression of towering woodland opening up onto a surprising stretch of shaggy savannah and then a jumble of riverside foliage.
Suddenly, the bush peeled away from us and an electric fence glinted sharply in the sun. K turned and shouted at me, “The farm starts here.”
I nodded. We had broken through the chaos of the rain-battered forest onto something almost eerily neat, combed flat, and pinned down. Here,