Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [49]
The first ex-soldier whom I met on my journey with K had been a soldier for almost all his life. Riley had started out as border patrol for the Rhodesian army in 1962, and had stayed on to fight until shortly before that country’s independence. When he ran out of war in Rhodesia, Riley headed for South Africa. Riley’s wife is also an ex-soldier. She joined up in the 1970s and met Riley in training camp soon after. Her first husband (who had been a soldier too) had shot himself.
In 1992, when South Africa was clearly on its way to democratic rule and wars in Africa had changed their tone (they had turned in on themselves—tribal, hand-to-hand, and indistinct and no longer the black-and-white wars of the liberation days), Riley and his wife came to Zambia looking for work. For a while, they camped on K’s farm and acted as his farm managers.
One night, when K was away, armed thieves came to the farm. Riley was shot in the hand before he could return fire. He showed me his hand. “Almost thirty years as a soldier and I don’t get hit,” he told me, “and then I get nailed in Sole by a gondie with a sawn-off shotgun!” When Riley laughed, as he did then, it was an alarming event. His laugh caught, like a two-stroke engine on an old motorbike, and turned into its own choking throb until the man had turned a pale, airless green. He broke the filter off a Madison—Zimbabwe’s strongest cigarette—and lit it, which took some doing because his hand shook so violently that the match almost flitted itself out.
“That was enough for me,” said Riley’s wife, shuddering. “Being out there in the bush with those . . . bloody bandits. I mean it’s not like it used to be, you know. It was safer during the bloody war than it is now.
“I told Riley, ‘No, man. I’m not staying here to get chayaed by some gondie with half a gun. Not after everything . . .’
“I don’t know how K stays down there alone like he does.”
Then we all had to be quiet while Riley was shaken by another fit of coughing. He took a deep drag off the shortened cigarette, and that subdued his cough for a moment.
I said, “Did you ever catch the guy that shot you?”
Riley’s eyes slid across to K and there was a significant silence.
At last K said, “Riley is a highly trained soldier.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, ‘Rest in peace, gondie,’ ” said K.
“And the police?”
“Were very grateful,” said K. “They wrote that the gondie died of natural causes.”
Which sent Riley into another spasm of laughter-turned-coughing. Then he leaned over and said to me, “What you need to understand, Bobo, is that this isn’t how it used to be. There aren’t rules of engagement anymore. The way it used to be, the enemy was there”—Riley moved a box of Madison cigarettes across the table to represent the enemy—“and he was in his uniform. You were over here”—Riley placed a fork opposite the cigarettes—“and you were in your uniform. Then you opened fire and whoever got scribbled lost and whoever didn’t get scribbled won.”
He smashed his fist down on the fork, which sailed in a high, graceful cartwheel off the end of the table, and then he sat back and pulled his lips down. “Now it’s just dog-eat-dog. Gondie-scribble-gondie. No one gives a shit. It’s not about color. People think it’s about color. It’s not about color. If it was about color, it would be easy to understand.”
“No,” agreed Riley’s wife, wagging her finger at me, “not about color.”
Riley said, “You want to know what it’s about? It’s about pure animal survival. And these lazy bastards want something for nothing. Why go out and get a job when you can wave a shotgun in someone’s face and get money for nothing?”
“Life’s expendable,” said K. “It doesn’t matter to these guys if they get plugged because they’re going to starve to death anyway. It’s what . . . ? What do you say when there are no rules of engagement anymore?”
“Anarchy,” replied Riley. “Pure and simple anarchy.”
“Ja,” said Riley