Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [51]
“God help us,” said his wife with feeling.
Dingus, like K, had found God. I asked him what prompted his conversion and he told me that after the war he had been such a violent man—so angry all the time—that he had gone through two marriages (he said this the way a rally driver might talk about needing to change shredded tires in the middle of a grueling race). “During the war it didn’t matter. The aggression was—well, you needed it. It was a way to survive. It was afterward. . . . When my second wife left me, that was when I woke up.” He, like K, had joined the army straight out of school. “I could hardly read,” he said, “but I knew how to shoot. I could fight.”
Looking at him, it was hard to believe that he was any kind of young man, or soldier. His eyes washed pale and blue into the back of a yielding face. His lips were indecisive and sad, looped down at the edges. He carried a soft paunch over which was stretched a holey, pale blue vest. He looked like a man who had surrendered. And, like so many Africans, he’d had his gut of tragedy. Four years before his daughter died of malaria. He talked softly—almost mouthing the words—about her death, his voice barely rising above the tenure of breath. There were no other children. His wife looked stunned and stiff while he talked and her eyes filled with tears.
Then he talked about the war, his regret that he had any part in what he now saw as mindless killing. And he talked about what was happening in Zimbabwe now—the way that land redistribution, from landed whites to landless blacks, had turned into a full-scale war of looting, thievery, and political oppression.
“It’s just wrong,” Dingus told me in a disappearing voice, “criminal. That man”—he meant Mugabe—“should be stopped before he destroys this entire country.”
Only when Dingus talked about God did his voice sound as if it were on firm footing, gripping on something actual and strong and real. But he whispered about his life before God and the death of his daughter, as if, by whispering, he could undo his own history.
When K returned from stashing the gun and we took our leave in the late afternoon, Dingus leaned over the edge of his veranda to see us off. The rusted rails of the veranda looked too fragile against the press of his belly and the ache of his past. He waved good-bye, saying to K, “Don’t let the ghosts in Moz bite you, Goffle!” and at that moment, the sun glittered off our windscreen and blotted his face into an obliterating white and he flinched back, his hand to his cheek.
When I looked over at K, he had tears in his eyes.
As we drove away, K said, “Dingus and I are closer than this”—K crossed his fingers. “Look at our lives? The army, then broken marriages, then . . . The drinking, the violence, all that is there too. Then, you know, we both realized at some point that the way we were going was killing us, killing the people around us. We were destroying so much. You know after I lost Luke, that’s when I woke up and started to listen to the Almighty. Dingus had to lose a wife before he woke up.” K shook his head. “He’s a lovely man, that. A lovely, lovely man. I’ll miss him when he heads up north. He’s the only man . . . he’s probably the only person in the world who knows why I am the way I am. He’s maybe the only human being who knows everything I’ve done—every good thing, every shit thing. And he still loves me.” K sniffed. “Now that’s really something, hey?”
Demons and Godsends
Road sign, Zimbabwe
K LOOKED AT ME SIDEWAYS. We were climbing out of the valley into which Lake Kariwa spills, gushing out of the gorges of the Pepani River and slamming to a standstill at the wall near a rock that the Tonga people call Kariwa—the trap. This escarpment was a road of memories for K. He moved here with his young wife a few years after the war and this was where his son was born, and died. He said, “I love this valley,” and his jaw bulged in a way that I now recognized as a prelude to something that made my heart grab at the edges of my ribs.