Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [39]
I slept.
When I woke up an hour later we hadn’t moved, but K, who had been wearing a khaki-colored bush shirt and a pair of olive green corduroys from the early eighties, slightly flared at the ankle and beginning to strangle a little at the thigh, had stripped off and now had a towel wrapped around his waist. There had been a decided change in the mood of the previously cheerful travelers. At least one man, near the accident, had been punched and the men who were filling the ditch with rocks had gone on strike and had said that they refused to throw down another boulder unless we all agreed to pay them a few thousand kwacha for their efforts. With all the cars squashed up behind us and the disabled lorry in front of us, there was no immediate hope of our heading back to Lusaka or forward to K’s farm.
I bought two ears of burned maize and a beer off one of the market women and found a place on the side of the road next to some truck driver. It was, I realized, the best place from which to observe the primping prostitutes who had recently toiled up from Sole, dressed to kill. Late afternoon sun throbbed onto the road. There was a smell of hot tarmac and fresh sweat and steady wood smoke and old burning rubber. Children curled up and slept on the bare ground, damp and oblivious and happily released, for the moment, from the tedium of waiting.
IT WAS EVENING by the time we reached the farm, too dark to walk to the river or see the bananas. The sudden evening had already stolen light off the river and a gibbous moon crept up behind the acacia trees to the east. K lit a lantern and showed me the way to the shower—a small ablution block set downwind from the bedroom and kitchen. “Here,” he said, “I’ll get you a cold beer. Anything else?”
“No. Thanks.”
The hot water for the shower was heated by an old-style Rhodesian boiler (a drum of water set over a fire in a structure like a pizza oven). The room, freshly tiled, was meticulously clean and furnished with clean towels. As I was showering, K shouted, “I left a beer on the step for you.”
We set up in the kitchen, me on a wooden crate wrapped in a chitenge and K at the counter chopping vegetables for a casserole. Sheba and Mischief slept at my feet. Dispatch shadowed K, sitting behind his master’s legs and keeping one slit eye on me all the time. I put a tape recorder on the table.
“What’s that?”
“Ignore it,” I said.
Then neither of us said anything for a long time. The dogs dozed and scratched on the floor, the cicadas buzzed from the winter thorn trees, the odd mosquito droned. From up at the workshop, the generator hummed and sawed, the lights dimming and soaring in response. I sipped my beer and looked out at the star-spotted sky. K crushed garlic.
At last K said, “Okay, what do you want to know?”
I tried to think of something that would be easy for K to talk about, something uncontroversial. “What about school?” I asked. “Why don’t you tell me about school?”
“Okay,” said K. “From scratch?”
“Sure.”
“I went to kindergarten in Zambia, in Matabuka,” said K, “but I told you about that already, didn’t I?”
I nodded.
“Well, then when I was eight, my fossils sent me to Zim—Rhodesia in those days—Mweni Junior in Bulawayo.” K rummaged through a cardboard box that was on the steps outside the kitchen. “Don’t ask me why they did it,” he said, coming back with three tomatoes. “Because the school was full of Jews, and from day one they beat the crap out of me, those little bastards. They picked on the kids who weren’t Jewish,” K. said. “And that was me and about five other kids.”
“Oh?”
K put down the knife with which he had been cubing sweet potatoes and glanced at the tape recorder. “I’m not against Jews, you know. I didn’t have a quarrel with them—they picked on me. What was I supposed to do? Stand there and take it?”
I said nothing.
So K insisted, “What would you have done?”
“I don’t know.”
“Those little Jews taught me to hate Jews. I didn’t hate Jews before I got there. I didn’t even know what a Jew was.”
“Do you still hate Jews now?”
“No,