Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [43]
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Ja.” He stood up. “Come, bring your tea, there’s something I want to show you.”
K led me into his bedroom. He searched under his bed and reappeared with a dented black tin trunk—the kind we used to take to boarding school as kids—with his name stenciled on the lid in white paint. K heaved the trunk onto his bed and opened it. It was full to bursting with papers, documents, and photographs.
“This is it,” he said. “You want to know about me? Well, here it is. My whole life. Or what was left of it after the ex took everything.” He picked up a couple of photographs that had been lying on the top of everything else. “Here,” he said, handing me the photograph, “that was the ex.”
A tiny, very pale redheaded woman with stunningly blue eyes stared out of the shiny paper. She was beautiful in a ghostly, luminous way, like the pale flame that comes from lighting dry mopane.
Then K shook himself and grew businesslike. “Okay, let’s see,” he said, turning his attention back to the trunk. “Oh look,” he said, handing me a black-and-white photograph. “My fossils on their wedding day.”
I took the picture and held it up to the light at the window. It showed a man and a woman of average height and indeterminate age (thirties or forties, their stern pose and their conventional 1940s clothes made it hard to tell) on the steps of a church. K’s father—of whom K appeared to be a giant version—looked like a man of passion trapped into a suit of careful clothes and tight leather shoes. He had a dark complexion, full lips, and black eyes that looked deep into the camera. He was handsome in a way that suggested he might, in another life, have been romantic and jaunty: a B-grade actor, a lounge singer, or an artist in a Mediterranean tourist town, instead of a tobacco farmer on a dry scrape of land in Northern Rhodesia.
K’s mother was laughing, not at the camera, but at someone over the photographer’s shoulder. She was being held up by K’s father, who had his arm firmly around her ribs as if catching her fall. She was mildly pretty, in a comfortable, unobtrusive way, but there was no bone structure for her face to hold on to and hers were the kind of looks that would dissolve with child-bearing and middle age. Her stomach bulged—because of her polio, K had told me—weakly.
“You look like your dad,” I observed.
“Turkish,” said K quickly.
“Turkish?”
“Originally his people came from the border of Turkey and Bulgaria.”
“Ah.”
“Me, I’m related to Genghis Khan,” said K.
“I see.”
“My dad was born in India,” said K. “His great-grandfather went out there as an engineer.”
“Oh,” I said, “so he was part Indian?”
K looked shocked. “No,” he said. “No wagon burners in the bloodline. They got their wives from Europe.”
“Like racehorses,” I said.
“Look.” K handed me his father’s papers, from which I could read that the man was born in Calcutta in 1915. In 1938, he enlisted with the Indian army. He fought in Egypt from September 1940 until June 1942, when he was taken prisoner at the fall of Tobruk and held as a prisoner of war in an Italian prison camp from June 1942 until May 1945. At the end of the war he was demobbed from the Indian army and went to South Africa.
His “Final Assessment of Conduct and Character on Leaving the Colours” read like a school report, rather than the assessment of a grown man: “Exemplary,” someone has penned in neat ink next to the printed category “Military Conduct” and below that, “This man was a prisoner of war for over three years. A reliable, intelligent, hardworking man. Always cheerful. Fit for a responsible job. He should do well.”
K held the papers on his lap. “I didn’t know any of this until after the old boy died. He never talked about India, or the war, or the prisoner camp. To tell you the truth, he didn’t talk about anything. I mean he literally did not open his mouth. He was a good father, though. Don’t get me wrong. He put a roof over our heads, he fed us three square meals a day, he sent us to school, and he beat us regularly for the shit we did. You