Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [56]
“If you leave it too long,” K said, “then the rush is over. Then all you get is a bunch of troopies with shit in their pants, but if you time it right . . .” K was swinging back and forth from the steering wheel and his eyes were shining. “Then the whole lot of you get up out of cover, ‘Arghhhh!’ and ah, the rush. . . . You don’t feel a fucking thing, you just, ‘Arghhhh!’ You know? You have this noise coming out of your throat and you’re not thinking about anything except killing. And I don’t mean you want to kill, but it’s the opposite of being killed yourself, so you’re running straight for the gooks and trying to keep steady enough and the gun is like this extension of yourself and . . . That’s why I’m deaf in this ear”—K pulled at his left earlobe—“because you’re running through the bush firing away and the guy to your left, his discharge is going off right in your ear, and you’re just trying to slow everything down enough to get a decent shot. And you know what saved us?”
“No,” I said.
“Munts can’t shoot straight. That’s what saved us. They had shitty training and they’re sent out to the middle of nowhere with half the food and half the equipment we had and their guns were hopeless. Mind you, a munt can go twice as far on half as much as we could. We could maybe make it . . . what . . . three days out there without water. A munt could go five. And a munt could walk—I’ve seen one-legged munts dragging themselves out of the bush for ten, twelve, eighteen ks. Look at these guys,” said K, waving into the unkind land that uncoiled into the great swells of barren, picturesque rock. “They had an advantage in the bush, because there’s nothing tougher than a munt. There just isn’t. But when it came to a contact—we just blasted them out of the shateen. They didn’t have a prayer. We were better trained, better equipped.”
K held an imaginary gun out of his window and aimed at a teenager lounging under a mango tree. “Click. Shoot. Waka. One time. All of a sardine, dead gook.”
I took a deep breath. “How many people did you kill?” I asked.
K went quiet for a long time. Then he said, “When I was demobbed they gave us therapy. Half an hour with the shrink. What is that? Six minutes for every year I was in the bush. Three minutes for every person whose eyes I looked into before I pulled the trigger.
“The guy asked me, ‘Do you feel remorse for all the people you killed?’
“I told him, ‘I was just doing my job. No, sir, I feel no remorse.’
“Then he asked, ‘How many people did you kill?’
“I said, ‘As many as I could, sir.’
“He said, ‘You must be repressing your feelings.’
“I told him, ‘Fuck you, sir!’
“He said, ‘You killed a lot of people. You killed civilians.’
“I said, ‘Sir, there was a war on, people got in the way.’ ”
K stared out the window. An unraveling mural of rural African life flashed outside.
Suddenly K said, “I have to tell you this.” His jaw bunched hard. “This was something . . . I haven’t talked about this . . .”
When I turned on my tape recorder he shook his head and I turned it off again.
K looked distant—the way that a familiar view can suddenly become hazed and remote with smoke or dust. Suddenly he leaned over to my side of the cab and smudged my cheek with briny lips. “There,” he said. “Now I’ve kissed you. Because when I tell you this . . .”
He didn’t talk for a few minutes and then he started to cry. I said, “You don’t have to tell me,” but I was lying. I felt somehow that if I knew this one secret about K—this one, great, untold story—then everything else about him would become clear and I could label him and write him into coherence. And then I would know what I was doing here and how I had arrived here and I’d know more about who I was.
K said, “You’re the only person I would ever trust with this story.”
My heart plunged. I wanted his story, but I didn’t want his trust. And now I could tell that K’s story wasn’t something I wanted to carry with me back into my other