Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [53]
“Anyway, I told the ex, ‘The Almighty is my shield. Put the gun down.’
“She told me, ‘Your God is your God, and I respect that. But I don’t communicate with Him.’
“And I told her that she needed to get onto her knees and ask His forgiveness.
“She said, ‘No.’ Then she said, ‘Leave me alone.’
“I said, ‘Can I pray for you?’
“She said, ‘I want you to leave now.’
“I put my finger on her cheek and she screamed at me, ‘Don’t touch me.’
“I thought, I honestly thought, that I’d feel something. That God would give me the power to heal her. What I felt was”—K flicked the top of my arm—“like that, a small electric shock. That was all. Nothing else.”
By now we were beyond the road that snakes out of the Pepani Valley and that describes the long eastern border between Zambia and Zimbabwe which surfaces at Mkuti. Here, the Pepani Escarpment gathers to a long, undulating ridge as far as the eye can see; a quivering headdress of spring-red msasa leaves and lichen-covered branches. A gray cloud swung its belly over the brush at the summit and fat drops of rain burst on the windscreen and splattered into the car and dotted up and down my arms. I hung out of the car and let the rain fall on my face.
K said, “When I drove home, the cross that Dingus had made on the windscreen with cooking oil, it nearly drove me benzi, I tell you. I kept staring at it and I wanted to wipe it off the windscreen. It hadn’t bothered me when I was driving out to the house, but coming back, it was making me crazy. What does that tell you?”
I brushed the rain off my forearm and pressed myself against the door. “Maybe the light hit it differently,” I said. Since K kept his car, like everything else in his life, meticulously washed and clean, I was not surprised to hear that he found a smudge of oil on his windscreen annoying.
“No,” said K, “it tells me that I had Satan within me. And when I got home to Dingus’s house, he made some tea and I took the cup from him and I found my hand was shaking so much I couldn’t get the cup to my lips.” K took his hand off the steering wheel to demonstrate how much his hands had been shaking. His hand fluttered in my face, like a bird trapped indoors. “Just like that. And the next thing I knew I was on the ground and this . . . scream . . . It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my voice. It was something else. This powerful scream came out of my throat. A roar, I guess. It was like a lion and it felt like my neck was going to burst.” Looking at K’s neck now, I had the same concern. “And this great yell. And then I blacked out.”
He gave me a long, significant look. He said, “That was the power of the Almighty. That was the Almighty fighting Evil.”
Anyone who has, involuntarily or voluntarily, starved in the course of her life knows the light-headed, almost hallucinatory effect of an extensive fast. I said, very quietly, “You don’t think you just needed a square meal in your tummy?”
“You think I’m benzi, don’t you?”
“No,” I said. And then, “Well, yes. A bit.”
“Do you believe in love?”
“What?”
“Love,” insisted K urgently. “Do you believe in it?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Can you see love?” K persisted but before I could reply K shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, you can’t.” He let this sink in before saying, “The ex made me go to a shrink after that. She also thought I was benzi.”
“Yes.”
“The shrink told me God wasn’t real. She told me that I couldn’t see God or demons. That I was hallucinating or imagining stuff.” K was sweating. Under the spice of his aftershave, he exuded wood smoke, the singe of charcoal-ironed clothes, and an aroma like a freshly turned field. “So I asked her, ‘Do you believe in love?’
“She