Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [19]
Beyond the farm, the untidy virgin bush that we had just come through waved back at us rude and exuberant. “This was all shateen,” said K, sweeping his hand across the obedient plantations of bananas, “all completely wild. I had to clear it one acre at a time. You should have seen the snakes in here”—K circled his thumb and forefinger around his wrist—“as thick as this.”
We stopped at a stand of bananas. “Come and see,” he said.
I followed K into the cool, gloomy world below the wide canopy of banana leaves. The light filtered green and dense from above. The ground below us was bare of any vegetation except for the thick, pulpy trunks of the banana trees.
K kicked the ground with his toe. “See this?” he asked, turning up some grayish soil. “I send the gondies up into the hills to raid the caves for batshit. It’s the best fertilizer on earth.”
The air was bitten with a nitrous reek, like chicken manure, that was mixed with the scent of rotting banana leaves and wet, worm-turned earth. These smells were all the more powerful for being trapped under the almost solid lid of leaves above our heads.
K kept walking, and as we ventured deeper into the bananas, sounds from beyond were increasingly muffled, until at last there was silence, except for the sound of K’s bare feet padding along the weed-free, flattened ground and me stumbling unevenly behind him.
Then K stopped and held up his hand. “Hear that?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I held my breath. “Nothing,” I agreed.
“Where else can you go in this country without hearing anything at all? No insects, no birds, no gondies. Nothing.”
The air felt suspended and bitter; air that is not used to being chilled and so sinks in on itself and becomes deadened.
“It’s my church,” said K. “Sometimes, I come and kneel in here.” K lifted his hands and I half expected him to fall to his knees in rapture. “Utter peace,” he breathed. “Hear that? Complete serenity.”
“Yes.”
K turned and smiled. “I just wanted you to feel that,” he said. “Now, I must make you some tea.”
Dogs and Curiosity
Road to K’s farm
K’S HOUSE TURNED out to be a single cement bedroom—low and bleak, like a prison cell—with a veranda attached to it overlooking a view of an island at a bend in the Chabija River. Here, the river turned back on itself as if to admire its own languid journey toward the Pepani, which it joined a few kilometers downstream. At the bend, the riverbank towered thirty or forty feet high—a sheer wall of red clay exploding with carmine bee-eaters whose nest holes bored into the cliff and whose calls echoed across the water, “terk terk.” The river was the color of milky tea, unsettled with the recent rain. Three hippos had set up house off the point of an island in front of K’s bedroom and they occasionally erupted with complaining shouts of “Hot! It is too damn hot today,” then blew a fountain of spray from their nostrils or wagged manure into the water.
A tiny bathroom, militarily stark in its simplicity with a small washbasin and a loo, was attached to the bedroom. A bed, a chair, a table, and a metal closet made up the bedroom’s furniture. On the wall, K had hung some wildlife prints and framed photographs of various stiffly posing people of several generations, whom I took to be members of his family. Next to K’s bed, on the little wooden table, were a leather-bound Bible and a small plastic clock. A tiny fan had been bolted onto the window ledge (there was no windowpane, just a metal grille and mosquito gauze with a reed mat that could be rolled down in heavy rain). There was no way to communicate with