Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [29]
Then I remembered an incident from when I was five or six (not yet at boarding school). I remembered waking up into the impenetrable blackness of an African night; we had no electricity and I, who had set my sheets on fire looking under the bed for terrorists, had been banned from touching anything to do with fire and, as extra insurance, all matches and candles had been confiscated from beneath my pillow and from under the mattress where I had been stashing them for months. I lay there in the dark as long as I could stand it and then I exploded with a hissing whisper, “Vanessa! Wake up!”
My sister, who was three years older than me, groaned, “What?”
“Light your candle! There’s a terrorist under my bed.”
“No there isn’t. Go back to sleep.”
“There is!”
“Not.”
“Is.”
And Vanessa, sensing that this might go on until morning, replied (by way of not-much-comfort), “Just think of all the poor terrorists who are lying awake right now, afraid to go to sleep in case they have you under their beds.”
God Is Not My Messenger
Sole store
IN OCTOBER , I flew from Wyoming to Zimbabwe to write a story for an English newspaper about the political crisis there—the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, and his cronies had turned on their own people in a vicious reversal of intention, eating the power bestowed on them and tumorous with the excess of it. At the end of my trip, demoralized by the corruption and violence I had witnessed, I bought a bus ticket from Harare to Sole with the intention of spending a few nights with Mum and Dad before returning to the States.
My fellow bus travelers included several Zimbabweans who were trying to look as if they always brought the kitchen sink with them when they came on “holiday” to Zambia but whose shaking hands and sweating faces at the police roadblocks gave them away as political refugees. There were smugglers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo with little glassy rocks for sale in their shirt pockets (diamonds, or they were offered as diamonds to me, who couldn’t remember if you were supposed to bite them or scratch glass with them to see if they were real). There was a Zambian woman who casually told me that she was a prostitute. There were three Mozambican traders with baskets of dried fish, bottles of cooking oil, and bolts of cloth. They sat in the back of the bus like gate-crashers, with the surreptitious, suspicious air of people who have been used to groveling at the depths of what the world has to offer and have suddenly and unexpectedly found their fortunes rising, but who have seen enough of the capriciousness of fate to expect their luck to dry up at any moment.
By the time we had broken down once, lost luggage once (the rope holding everyone’s belongings to the roof had snapped), and made numerous stops for one or another of the passengers to crouch behind a bush or tree, it was late afternoon. By then, the heat from the day had gathered itself together for a final assault on the earth and was pounding onto the road, which shuddered in a series of dislocated heat waves before us, and onto the land on either side of the road and into the bus. As we crawled off the escarpment at Mkuti and sank into the Pepani Valley, the dry air rushed up to meet us and we all opened our windows as wide as they would go and some of us drank beer, warm from the bottle. The prostitute passed around pieces of chicken, which, if it had ever been cold, was back up to oven temperature by now.
I’d forgotten how October eats at the landscape in the lowveldt. It is the most discouraging time of year: long enough after the last rains so that they are barely worth the ache of remembering and too far until the next rains to waste the energy on hope. All signs of the memorable excesses of ten months ago had disappeared and it was hard to believe that the same valley