Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [44]
K showed me photos of himself as a kid—there weren’t many and they were mostly blurry, as if taken in an impatient hurry. Then there were suddenly pictures of K in army uniform. In less than a dozen photos, the child had become a soldier. In one photo, K was building a long drop in the bush with his fellow troopies, laughing in triumph at the jute-covered hole in the ground. K, in full camouflage with his arm slung over his grandmother’s shoulders. Another picture showed him at night, in full uniform, with belt and shiny boots, beret and dark glasses. From the date on the back of the picture I calculated that K could not have been much older than nineteen at the time the photograph was taken, but he looked terrifyingly unboyish.
“What’s this?” I asked, showing him the photograph.
“Oh, that was at my sister’s wedding. I had to wear dark glasses because a bazooka blew up in my face in Moz, and my eyes were . . . shit, that hurts! To have a gun blow up in your face? Ooha blicksem! My eyes were swollen out to here”—K held curled hands out in front of his face—“and crawling with flies. I’d only been out of barracks a month or six weeks.”
“Did they let you out until you were better?”
K looked surprised. “I couldn’t see properly,” he said, “but I could still see. No, they sent me back in. Two days off for the wedding, that was it. Then straight back into the shateen.”
Then K showed me a picture of his father as an old man. It showed a fragile-looking man, bent in the spine and staring at the camera from beneath suspicious, nervous brows.
“That was Dad when he was an old toppie. He was never the same after Mom died. He left the farm in Zambia, moved to Rhodesia, and lived in a little flat in Bulawayo. He was a mess, you know. A complete shell. He was older than her—I think fifteen years or so. I don’t think he ever expected to outlive her, and he couldn’t cope with being alone. One weekend when I was on R and R from the army he phoned me up and asked me if I’d help him move in with this woman—this nice old lady he had met at church. So I spent the whole weekend moving my old man’s shit into this woman’s flat.
“Three months later he phones me up and says, ‘Son, help me move out of here.’
“I said, ‘Dad, what’s wrong? Don’t you like her?’
“ ‘No, it’s not that. But she doesn’t like to have sex.’
“Sheesh! Sixty years old and he’s still worried about not getting his oats, hey. That’s about as close as he ever got to telling me anything about anything.” K stared out at the river, then said, “So he was a horny old bugger. I know that much. But nothing else. I don’t know what else he had bottled up inside him. Maybe nothing. Maybe all kinds of bullshit. Who knows? He didn’t laugh, he didn’t talk, he didn’t hardly drink, he never looked at another woman while he was with Mom. He smoked four cigarettes a day. Every day was the same for him. He worked his tail off, he never made money. But when he died, he didn’t owe anyone anything and he had a roof over his head, and he had his pride. That’s not a bad achievement, hey? I mean just to come onto the earth and leave it, having done the best you could with what you had.”
“How did he die?”
“He keeled over of heart failure, six months before Luke . . . before my son . . . died. He was sitting in the backseat of my sister’s car. She was taking him on holiday to Durban-by-the-Sea. He hadn’t been on holiday for . . . shit . . . all his life.
“Then they get to the border and she says, ‘Okay, Dad. We need to get out and do customs and immigration,’ and the old man doesn’t budge. So she says, ‘Hey, Dad, we’re here,’ and she gives his shoulder a shake, you know, and he still doesn’t budge. So that’s when she twigs that he’s snuffed it.
“So she phones me in a murra of a panic. ‘Dad’s died. What do I do?’
“I tell her, ‘Keep your hair on, sis, just bring him back to Bullies.’
“So she drives him all the way back to Bulawayo and I meet her there and by now he’s been dead hours and hours. I had to break both his arms to get him in a coffin. My sister was having