Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [57]
“We were in the Darwin area,” said K, and he nodded across the kopje-dotted valley toward the west, “and we had been sitting up on a kopje all day watching a village. I was a lance-jack by then, so it was me and the three ous I was commanding. Two of them were just kids. You could still see where their necks were white, where they’d just had their hair cut. They were just laaities out of school. And they were shit scared and jumpy as rabbits. I said to them, ‘Don’t worry. Trust me.’
“But I could tell the kids weren’t convinced.
“I said, ‘I promise you I am not going to send you chaps home in a body bag. But we still need to get the job done,’ and I pointed down into the village.
“There was a lot of woman activity around the huts, which is unusual because it was cropping time and they should have been in the fields.
“I said, ‘I’m telling you, those women are cooking for gooks. Let’s we go. We’ll find out where the gooks are. Then, waka-waka, dead gondies. Home in time for tea, hey? Come. Follow me.’
“So we went down into the village and we went into a hut with the most smoke coming from it. There were three women sitting there with three huge pots of food.
“We asked them, ‘Who is this food for?’
“They said, ‘It’s for the kids.’
“I kicked one of the pots of food over. I said, ‘You fucking savages never feed your kids. You’re feeding gooks.’ ”
Then K said nothing for a long time and he was driving with one hand. The other hand was clapped over his mouth.
I looked out my window. The black-blue shadow of our racing truck humped and bucked over the red ground. Beyond that were huts lightly scabbed with peeling mud, goats (always goats) and chickens and the odd haunted dog. Around the huts, there were children who stared at us with a mixture of curiosity and hunger that translates, in any language, to wide eyes and distended bellies. A single elderly man perched on a stool in the shade of a leaning mango tree. He was as fragile as wood smoke, barely a memory against the landscape. There were young men pushing bikes and herding oxen. But the women were hidden back against the maize fields. They were the bent, solitary figures, jabbing away at the earth with hoes, their backs swollen with the tiny shape of bundled babies.
At last K spoke again. “A woman is incredibly resistant to pain,” he said, “and they are incredibly strong. A man . . . you can get him to talk by beating him”—K pressed his lips out to show how easy it is to get a man to talk—“but women . . . you have to use your psychology.
“So I looked at the women in the hut. There was an old woman, a grandmother. Then there was a woman who must have been about thirty. Then a young girl, I suppose she must have been sixteen or seventeen. I pointed to her—the young girl. I told the guys, ‘Take her outside.’
“They took her outside.
“I told them, ‘The usual treatment.’
“So, they stripped off her clothes and beat her by her breasts”—K leaned over and grabbed the skin under my arms—“and they hit her ribs right there,” he said. He let go of my skin; the flesh felt bruised and crushed where his fingers had pinched it. He said, “And her shoulders and the soles of her feet. They had taken a sadza stick from the hut to beat her with. The old woman was crying. She had this old, high voice, like the noise a goat makes when you slaughter it. I shut the door of the hut.
“The young girl was squirming away from my men. She was strong, I’m telling you. She was like a snake, all muscle and backbone. One of the ous had to stand on her groin to keep her flat.
“I asked her in Shona, ‘Where are they?’
“Because I knew the gooks had to be close by. Fuck, they were probably watching us. The hair was standing up on the back of my neck. Any minute I expected them to open fire on us. The guys I was with . . . they were scared. One of them looked like he was going to start crying.
“And now there was no time for pissing around—I mean, now that we were off the kopje and in