Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [54]
“So I said, ‘But you can’t see it, can you?’
“She said, ‘No.’ ”
K started to laugh humorlessly. “It’s the same with God. You can believe in Him without seeing Him. He’s there! He’s there!” He slammed his fist into the dashboard twice to emphasize his point.
I said, “Steady on. Remember what happened to the taxi.”
K glanced at me and his look was so purple with fury that I choked back my words and lit another cigarette. Then I looked out of the window at the way the bush uncurled a more vivid shade of green as the black clouds rolled on. The tree trunks were like charcoal-blackened posts in the painted red soil. Suddenly, a man emerged out of the bush with an enamel basin full of wild wood mushrooms. He had a yellow plastic fertilizer bag over the top of his head against the spitting rain. He sprang forward at the sight of our lonely car, almost into the path of our tires, and I caught the edge of his high voice, “Boss! Mushrooooms! Boss! Madam!”
I said, “Oh look, someone selling mushrooms. Should we buy some?”
Barely pausing, K hauled the car around in the road, peeled out a U-turn on the wet tarmac, and bore down on the little mushroom man. As K climbed out of the car, the man pressed back in response. K has that effect on people—a sort of don’t-even-think-about- thinking-about-messing-with-me look about his shoulders. But when K spoke, the neck-aching fury of late had left his voice. He sounded almost gentle and cheerful. He spoke Shona quickly, too fluently for me to follow entirely, but I understood enough to know that he asked about the man’s business and asked how things were these days.
Yes, things were hard with this government, the man agreed.
K wanted to know, How was the man’s family.
The man looked away. The smallest child had died. The mother of his children was in Malawi with her people. No, times were very hard.
And K tutted under his breath and asked the man whether he preferred Zimbabwean dollars or Zambian kwacha for his mushrooms. K pulled out a plastic bag in which we were carrying cash for our trip: a wad of Zambian kwacha, a stack of Zimbabwean dollars, and a pile of Mozambican meticals. K waved the alternatives at the man. The man responded, “Kwacha, boss. Please, boss. Zim dollar is buggered.” So K gave him the money and he didn’t haggle about the price of the mushrooms and then he put a hundred-dollar bill in the man’s shirt pocket and said, “Bonsella.”
K put the mushrooms into the tin trunk with the beer and chips and nuts and green peppers. “Tatenda, eh.”
“Tatenda, boss.”
As we were about to leave, the mushroom seller leaned into the car and pressed another bag of mushrooms onto K’s lap. “For you, boss. God go with you.”
I slumped back into my seat and closed my eyes.
I don’t think we have all the words in a single vocabulary to explain what we are or why we are. I don’t think we have the range of emotion to fully feel what someone else is feeling. I don’t think any of us can sit in judgment of another human being. We’re incomplete creatures, barely scraping by. Is it possible—from the perspective of this quickly spinning Earth and our speedy journey from crib to coffin—to know the difference between right, wrong, good, and evil? I don’t know if it’s even useful to try.
“God go with you!” the mushroom man had said, and I was grateful to him.
Because if anyone was going to be with us on this journey, it might as well be God. Especially if the alternatives were K’s demons, those loud little creatures with their party hats and whistles and tap-dancing shoes that caught in the front of the pickup and sucked up all the air.
Cow Bones II
Kids
FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS, we spun across Zimbabwe’s stranded countryside, swallowing with lonely tires the almost empty road that branched up northeast from Harare to Mozambique. Political violence, a regional drought, and fuel shortages had washed up the citizens of this countryside into despondent-looking crowds that clustered near food-aid drops and under the shade of tavern verandas. The towns that we scudded through sound