Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [37]
And then we were peeling out of the city, past the Second-Class District with its open-air butcheries (goat and cow carcasses, swinging from trees, seething with flies), past MundaWanga Wildlife Sanctuary (a happily restored botanical garden, which, a few years before, had been an enclosure of abused, terrified, and starving wild animals), out toward the hills that surround the town of Kafue, and into the escarpment from which we could catch glimpses of the Sole Valley.
There is a section of the Pepani Escarpment nicknamed Kapiri Ngozi meaning, in Nyanja, “accident hill.” Ngozi in Shona can also mean a “vengeful or unsatisfied ghost” and the road is correspondingly disturbed; spilled oil, torn tarmac, shredded guardrails, vandalized wrecks. Every week, at least one lorry is turned onto its back here, like a giant, marooned beetle. Fierce heat pumping up from the Sole Valley and the relentless grade of the road combine to overwhelm the brakes of the trucks that chew steadily up and down this spine of road—on their way through Zambia, into and out of Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Tanzania.
Sometimes, an accident on Kapiri Ngozi can hold up the flow of traffic on the escarpment for a week or more, and when this happens, entire, spontaneous villages erupt out of the face of the hill: green tarpaulins cast between sparse msasa trees, small cooking fires spire funnels of gray-blue smoke, and men stripped to the waist hunch in front of disabled vehicles. Prostitutes appear from Sole to administer to the stranded drivers. Women haul their baskets off the roofs of buses and set up stalls selling drinks and biscuits and roasted corn.
When we arrived at the escarpment we found a chaos of cars, vans, buses, and trucks. A lorry had lost control coming down Kapiri Ngozi, narrowly avoided tumbling over the edge into the deep valley below, and had jackknifed across the road. A curse of confusion had ensued. There were a mass of passengers and stranded travelers straggling from one vehicle to another or draped under shade on the side of the road. Fires had been kindled and the trader women were already arguing over the most favorable vending positions. A policeman was taking cover behind a plump woman trader, from where he occasionally bleated directions that went largely ignored.
K got out the cab. “Let me go and see what has happened.”
He disappeared into the milling crowd. A small boy appeared and offered to sell me a jerry can of pilfered diesel.
“No thanks.”
The boy poked his head in the window and his swiveling eyes took in the contents of the cab. “Money!” he demanded at last.
I shook my head.
“Give me!” he said.
“No.”
“Why won’t you give me? Give me!”
I closed my eyes, but the boy still breathed on me. “Hunger,” he declared at last.
“Okay.” I searched the cab and found a banana and some biscuits. “Here.”
“You shouldn’t do that,” said K, appearing at my side. “You’ll make a beggar out of him.”
“For God’s sake,” I said, looking after the boy, who had sauntered to the next vehicle with his jerry can, “he’s a child, not a Jack Russell.”
K’s shoulders sagged. “Myself, I always give to blind people. The Almighty is very specific about that. But if you try to help everyone . . . you can’t help everyone.”
A group of men who had scrambled up to the cliff above the road were now heaving boulders over the edge to create a bridge on the side of the road on which the lorry could be circumvented.
“How does it look up there?”
“Oh, we’ll be here for hours,” said K. “Half the drivers are fighting and the other half are inspired with liquid intelligence.”
“With what?”
“They’re drunk.”
“Oh”—I stared out the windscreen without surprise—“well, that doesn’t seem like such a bad idea, considering the alternative.”
K laughed at me and, as usual, I was surprised by how sudden and generous his laugh was and by how this one gesture shaved