Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [46]
“It’s all right, guys,” said K through his tears, getting up and going to the window. “Hey now, it’s all right,” he told the dogs softly. He came back to the bed and put a hand under my chin, so that I was forced to look up at him. His face and neck and shirt were soaked with tears. His mouth was glistening with the salty, thick saliva that comes with crying.
“It’s okay,” I said.
K wiped his face. “Ja.”
I felt as if I had had the air knocked out of me.
K ran a thumb under my eyes. “You’ve had your sorrow too.”
“Everyone has,” I said. “We all do.”
“Ja.”
“Here,” K said. He offered me the end of his shirt. “Wipe your face.”
“I’ll get some bog roll.”
“No,” said K, dabbing at my eyes before I could get to my feet. “It’s soaked anyway.” For a long time I felt wiped with the scent of K, with his tears and sweat—a salty, earthy mix not unlike the smell of fresh blood.
Plagues
Transport—Zambia
AFTER LUNCH, we packed K’s pickup with fishing rods, drinking water, sleeping bags, mosquito nets, a tent, more than a hundred liters of fuel (there was a politically inspired fuel shortage in Zimbabwe), and food. “My body is a temple for the Almighty,” K explained, loading peanuts and green peppers into a tin trunk that served as our larder.
“And my body is not,” I said, adding beer and potato chips to the cache.
We planned to leave the next morning; driving from K’s farm in Zambia, through Zimbabwe and from there into Mozambique, retracing the geographical path of much of K’s history and with the vague idea that we would find our way back to the battlefields of more than twenty years ago.
In the evening, we walked around the bananas and down to the water pump below an orange orchard on the Chabija. K had built a store on the farm with a small veranda and pretty gardens, overlooking the river. Behind that, upon an open rise where there was an almost constant breeze off the river, there was an impressive, neat row of staff houses. There was no garbage lying about, and the yards in front of the staff houses were swept and clean. It was as if the Africa I knew, with its assault of smells and its flotsam of debris and its inevitable chickens and goats and carelessly strewn life, had been pressed and contained beyond the borders of the electric fence. This farm was a model of industry and discipline.
K told me, “When I first started the farm, there were some bad guys on the place—they were just here to loaf and steal. The worst offender was this guy called John Mapariwa. He was down at the river as the pump guard. I knew he had been stealing, so I fined him. He organized a strike. . . . You know, the usual story. There’s always one bad lot that ruins it for everyone. Anyway, I sorted everything out with the labor.
“I said, ‘Fine. If you want to strike, sit right where you are and you’re gone—consider yourselves fired. If you want to work, then start working.’
“And the workers gradually got up—most of them—and came over to my side. But Mapariwa sat out—so he was fired. And he was bitter about it too. The night the strike was settled I went into my bog and there was a burrowing adder on the shelf above the sink. Now what the hell is a burrowing adder doing in my bathroom? On a shelf? They burrow—they don’t live in houses, on shelves. I knew Mapariwa had put it in there. Or at least I suspected Mapariwa had put it there. My first instinct was to go out to his village, find him, rip his head off, and shove it down his neck, but instead I got down on my knees and I asked the Holy Father what must I do.
“He told me. ‘Read Micah, Chapter two, verses two and three.’ ”
Then K cleared his throat and recited: “ ‘They covet fields, and seize them; houses, and take them away; they oppress householder and house, people and their inheritance. Therefore, thus says the Lord: Now I am devising against this family an evil from which you cannot remove your necks.’
“See?” said K to me.
I nodded.
“So, I took the Bible to Michael—my foreman—and I put my finger on this scripture and I said,