Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [48]
“Yes, but if he could catch a woody, he’d be dead by now. It’s his protection from God. What’s the average life expectancy in Zambia? Thirty-three, thirty-four, if you’re lucky. These poor bastards are dying like chickens and what can you do? I give them cartons of condoms and I’m in the compounds every month with a broomstick showing them how to wear them, how to reuse them, but if screwing was your only pleasure in life, would you use a condom? Of course not.
“To say nothing of all the other shit that happens. They’re always poking each other’s wives and their own nieces and daughters and sister-in-laws. And then they want kids, of course. The more the merrier. Man!” K threw up his hands. “It’s a fucking plague and now I probably have it. Do you know how many bleeding munts I’ve touched, carried, treated? Dozens. Dozens and dozens. But what can you do? Do you think about AIDS when someone can’t breathe and you have to give them the kiss of life? Do you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Of course you don’t,” said K, assuming that I was a better person than I probably am. “If that is the way that God chooses for me to die, then it is His will and what can you do?”
“Wear gloves?” I suggested weakly.
K snorted. “I probably should carry a first-aid kit with me wherever I go with a full-body condom in it so I could hop into the thing whenever a gondie decides to get run over, or fall out of a tree or get eaten by a croc. But I don’t. And a little pair of gloves aren’t going to cover a damn thing when the blood is really gushing out. Now, is it?”
Brothers in Arms
Soldiers line up for food
BY THE TIME WE LEFT the farm, the sun had taken its place in the sky, spreading across the divide of east and west, elbowing out sky and color and perspective, and sending a flattening assault of rays to the earth. The greater part of Africa—the vast, uncurling spill of cities and roads, and jungles and savannahs—lay behind us. We were heading steadily toward the Indian Ocean, toward the thick slice of land that curled around Zimbabwe’s eastern shoulder, nudged Zambia, and almost swallowed Malawi off the map altogether. Scattershot in our path were soldiers from K’s war. Hundreds of them probably, most of them silent about the years that were stolen from them and the years that they had stolen from others.
It’s not hard to find an old soldier in Africa. In fact, there are probably parts of Africa where almost anyone over the age of ten is an old soldier and has held an AK-47 in his hands and let its fire chatter into human flesh. (Christmas-cracker guns is how they seem, cheap and deadly and associated with mass production in China.) And then there are parts of Africa where ammunition and guns aren’t available and citizens—children among them—take up arms against one another with whatever instruments they can find: machetes, hoes, knives, their bare hands.
What is harder to find are old soldiers who will talk about their war with strangers. And why should they talk? Those of us who have escaped the horror of being turned—by whatever euphemisms there are for the calculated process of dehumanization—from people into machines that issue, and might reasonably expect to receive, a sentence of death are ill equipped to judge (let alone understand) anyone who has been a soldier. Our minds are still innocent of the stain of sanctioned murder.
I can recognize a certain breed of ex-soldier, not only for what they look like, but also for how their lives have unraveled. There are the tattoos, the shaggy beards (something about all the years of military seems to instill the need for copious, perhaps disguising, facial hair), the cigarettes, the drinking, the bluster. If you sleep in the same house or camp with them, you will hear their spooks. They shout their ghosts away all night.
There are the multi-marriages (of the six soldiers I met and talked to in any kind of depth while traveling with K, three were divorced, one had been widowed when her husband committed suicide, one had never married but tore haphazardly through his relationships