Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [55]
How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.
The windows of the pickup were rolled down because we, in common with everyone else in this part of the world, were jealous of every drop of fuel we spent. And, under these circumstances, air-conditioning (like the exorcism of war memories and the act of writing about it) was an unpardonable self-indulgence. K had gone quiet and the muscle at the back of his jaw had begun to quiver. Air-conditioning ices memories with its bland-ness, but with the windows wound down the past came rushing back at K. “Do you smell that?” he asked me more than once, looking at me as if expecting to see the same war-shocked look on my face as he wore on his own. I nodded. But what I was smelling was not what K was smelling. I was smelling now, he was smelling memories.
Places have their own peculiar smells, and here in Murewa the smell was sun on hot rocks (it was a valley stretched between vast erupting kopjes that look like hundred-foot-high boils); it was the nose-stung scent of goats (even back in the seventies, when K was a troopie here on his way to Mozambique, this agriculturally marginal land had been given to the Africans and their small herds of goats, donkeys, a few cattle); it was the smell of Africans, which is soil-on-skin, sun-on-skin, wood smoke, and the tinny smell of fresh sweat; it was the smell of home-brewed beer and burned chicken feathers and kicked-up dust.
It is not a romantic smell. It is not the smell of free people, living as they would choose. Rather, it is the smell of people who labor, strain, and toil for every drop of sustenance their body receives from the earth. It is the smell of people who have been marginalized and disempowered and forgotten. It is the smell of people without a voice in a world where only the loud are fed. It is the smell of people who are alive only because they are cunning, ingenious, and endlessly resourceful. In theory they are “peasants.” In practice they are brilliantly versed in the skill of surviving.
Dad once said to me, “When the world goes tits up and we’re back to square one, I’d bet my money on these buggers surviving. Your bally Wall Street fundi would last about half a day out here before he stubbed a toe and keeled over.”
In the strung-out fields along the road, the maize was stunted from lack of rain and had started to produce sickly, thin ears of corn. The cattle churned mud in almost parched water holes. If this was the end of the rainy season, I dreaded to think what October would look like.
“You know what fear smells like,” said K suddenly. “It’s unmistakable, hey? And munt fear smells different from honky fear. When a munt is shitting himself, it’s the smell of onions, have you ever noticed that? A scared honky smells like sweet cheese. But it’s all from the same place. All fear is . . . fear—it’s the smell of discharged adrenaline.” Then K hauled on the steering wheel so that for a few breathtaking moments we lunged from one side of the road to the other. He laughed and said, “You know that rush? Hey? Was that a rush?”
“Yes,” I said emphatically, not keen to repeat the experiment.
“That’s the feeling you get when the first shot is fired,” said K.
“Ah.”
“You think, This is fucking it, and everything is incredibly slowed down so it seems like you are taking half an hour to look over each shoulder and make sure the men are with you, and you’re looking to see if they’ve had their jolt of adrenaline and trying to time it so that everyone’s rush is at the same time. Then you shout, ‘Go!’ when they’ve just got that rush. That’s the difference between a good leader and a lousy leader. It’s knowing when everyone’s ready to do it. . . .”
Two children standing by the side of