Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [35]
K lifted me into the boat and said, “Should we drift for a while?”
“Why not?” I put my feet up on the cooler and lit a cigarette.
The boat nosed silently into the current and we were tugged downstream. The sun was poised to sink behind the hills in Zimbabwe. A hatch of mosquitoes drifted out of the water and floated off in a tender swell of air, cool and slow, casually drifting to shore. A noisy clutch of ibises burst off an island. “Ha-de-da! Ha-de-da!” they mocked. Weaver bird nests hung over the water and their occupants swooped out of them and into riverside foliage. The world was held in a confusion of color; the sun, diffused through heat and haze, seemed to lick everything golden red and orange while darker blue shadows crouched under the fig trees and riverbanks.
“I asked God if you were the one,” said K suddenly.
“What?” I dropped my cigarette into the bottom of the boat.
“I asked Him, ‘Why do you send her to me if she is not the one?’ ”
I found the cigarette before it could roll into the greasy film of petrol, water, and oil in the back of the boat. “God, that was close,” I said.
“What?”
“We nearly blew up.” I drowned the remainder of the cigarette in a sludge of beer at the bottom of a bottle.
“Why did He send you, if you are not it?”
“But He didn’t send me,” I pointed out. “I came of my own accord. I came to see Mum and Dad.”
“Ja, but then, why did He send them?”
“You’re reading too much into this.”
K was silent for a while and then he said softly, “Ja, maybe. Maybe.”
The boat gurgled against a ruffle of current. A swoop of bats skated out from the trees and swerved across the top of the water following the flutter of night insects.
I said, “Don’t worry. Someone will appear.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I guess I’m happy either way.” But he didn’t sound happy.
I lit another cigarette and kept my hand cupped around it this time.
It was the time of day that hurries too quickly past, those elusive, regrettably beautiful moments before night, which are shorter here than anywhere else I have been. The achingly tenuous evening teetered for a moment on the tip of the horizon and then was overcome by night and suddenly the business of returning back to shelter was paramount. It is the time of day the Goba call rubvunzavaeni, “when visitors ask for lodging.”
K said, “The Good Book says, ‘Thou shalt not yoke yourself to disbelievers.’ ”
“That’s me,” I said. “Disbelieving Thomas.”
K smiled. “Ja.”
“I think God also said something about not yoking yourself to married women.”
K laughed. “No,” he said. “He was right. You’re not the one.”
“Nope.”
Then we drifted in companionable silence until the evening star appeared and pointed the way home.
“Time to go back,” said K.
I took my place at the front of the boat (I was on the look-out for hippos and rocks that I now would not be able to see in any case). I said, “A priest from the Chimanimanis once told me God made Africa first, while He still had imagination and courage.”
“Ja,” K said. “Struze fact. Although how would I know? I’ve hardly seen the world. A swimming pool in Holland when we were playing underwater hockey and the arse end of a blinking sewer in Turkey about sum up my traveling experience.”
I smiled.
“And South Africa a few times. And Mozambique,” said K, lowering the propeller into the water. “I’ve traveled there a whole hobo.”
“Have you been back there since the war?”
K said, “To Beira only. I’ve never been back to Tete. That’s where the kak was during the hondo. Long kak in Tete.”
I paused and then said, the words tumbling from my lips before I had a chance to catch the thought that preceded them, “What if we went back? You and me.”
“What?”
“To Mozambique.”
“Why the hell would you want to go to Moz?”
“I could write about it and you could get over your spooks.”
“Write about what?”
“I don’t know. You? The war?”
“No ways, man. You want me to end up in Ingutchini?”
K started the engine and curled the boat up toward