Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [50]
“And now?” I asked. “What do you do now?”
“Now we’re fishing up here,” said Riley breathlessly, waving at the expanse of Lake Kariwa. “Civvy street,” he said, as if the word could be picked off his tongue with the debris of loose tobacco that had scattered there from the end of his butchered cigarette.
I asked if he regretted the war and Riley blinked at me, as if I had said something blasphemous. “Regret?” he asked rhetorically. “No. No. Those were the best years of my life. Maybe I could have skipped South Africa. That was bullshit. They treated us like shit. But Rhodesia”—Riley cocked his head in the way that people do when the ability to define a fine wine has eluded them—“Rhodesia . . . That was living.”
“You don’t think it . . .” I searched for a word that could put what I was trying to say delicately. “. . . it affected you? All those years of fighting?”
“War doesn’t have to mess you up”—Riley eyed me suspiciously—“if that’s what you’re trying to say. Is that what you’re trying to say?”
It was, but I shook my head.
Riley bit the head off another Madison and I thought of the Zimbabwean advertisement, Man, make yours Madison. “It didn’t mess me up. I’ve been a soldier most of my life and it didn’t mess me up.” He coughed his metallic-coffin laugh again. “We had information on where the gooks were. We were dropped out of airplanes, did the job, and then they pulled us out. When it got stressful . . . well, yes: it got stressful when there were three or four contacts a day. That’s how it was. Dropped you in, take you back to base to reissue and give you a brief, and then you’re back in the plane. It was okay. It was a job. It was just a job. Better than sitting behind a desk. Now that would have messed me up. Sitting behind a fucking desk with a tie around my neck”—Riley grasped his neck with his powerful hands and throttled himself—“that would have killed me.”
IT WAS ONLY AFTER we had crossed the border from Zambia into Zimbabwe that K remembered that he still had his revolver with him. “Shit,” he laughed, rooting around in his briefcase and emerging with the weapon, “the Almighty was looking after us, my girl. If those customs guys had found this thing”—he waved the revolver around carelessly and the car swerved, narrowly avoiding a stub-tailed chicken that had chosen that moment to scuttle across the road—“we’d both be melting to death in a gondie jail by now.”
“How about we don’t try and cross into Mozambique with it?” I suggested.
“I’ll leave it with a friend,” said K. “You talk to Dingus while I drop the gun.”
That was the other peculiarity of the soldiers I met. None of them went by their given names. K is known variously as the Phantom Sergeant (he refused to stand for troop photographs during the war, and in commando pictures he shows as a white gap in the front row) or Savage or Goffle. The man whom I was about to meet was known, not as Peter, but Dingus after his habit of asking for “that dingus” or “this dingus,” or for referring to a woman as “quite a dingus.” Dingus is Afrikaans for “thing.”
Dingus turned out to be an incredibly soft-spoken man. He almost whispered in answer to my questions. His wife was a vivacious, blonde Englishwoman. Both smoked cigarettes as an apparent substitute for breathing. Dingus’s wife brought out a pot of tea and we sat around a rickety veranda table; its Formica top had curled up at the lip, showing rotting plywood underneath. Dingus and his wife, in common with many Zimbabweans, were leaving Zimbabwe.
“Nothing left here now,” said Dingus, shrugging. “Look, we can stay and starve and wait for the end, or we can leave while we still can.”
Packing cases and boxes waited in stacked, sagging towers.
“Where are you going?”
“North,” said Dingus. He lit a cigarette with the end of one he was just finishing.