Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [59]
“I didn’t need to do that to her. I was an animal. An absolute fucking savage. I had been fighting for so long by then, I had seen so much of what these guys did, I was exhausted. . . .”
And I thought, I own this now. This was my war too. I had been a small, smug white girl shouting, “We are all Rhodesians and we’ll fight through thickanthin.” I was every bit that woman’s murderer. Back then—during the war—I had waved encouragement at the troopies, a thin, childish arm high in the air in a salute of victory, when they dusted past us in their armored lorries with their guns to the ready.
I said, “I had no idea. . . .” But I did. I knew, without really being told out loud, what happened in the war and I knew it was as brutal and indefensible as what I had just heard from K. I just hadn’t wanted to know.
“So her family had me up on a manslaughter charge. The commanding officer said I needed to plead insanity. For three days, I had to talk to psychologists, and I have never lied so much in my life. That’s what the CO told me to do. He said I had to sound insane. So I told those stupid, waste-of-time shrinks that I needed to drink blood. That I was hungry for blood. I told them . . . lies. They’re such a bunch of wee-wees. They wrote in their books and they asked me questions.
“But they were so scared of me. They knew that if they had been in my position they might have done the same thing. They were so shit scared of being who I was.”
K wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Fuck,” he said softly. Then he said, almost with disgust, “It didn’t even go to trial. I got off.”
“What did they do to you then?”
“They sent me back to barracks for six months. They made me a training officer. I trained boys to be soldiers.”
Then K veered off the road and we lunged down a mild bank through the scrubby remains of goat-picked grass until the pickup rocked to a halt under the shade of a stink tree. K switched off the engine and the air sung with the sudden silence of where and who we were.
He said, “I have to go for a walk.”
“Okay.” I stared out the window at the undulating innocent land. It spread out like a stain; earth and sun and huts as far as I could see, interrupted with the odd kopje. It was a land dotted with goats intent on forage, on cattle intent on water, on birds trying to evade the cruelest part of the hot day. The bones of some long-ago-eaten cow had been left here by the side of the road and had lent a pink outline against the red soil, a barely pressed reminder of an entire beast.
We both got out of the car. K came around to me. He looked as if he had been crying with his whole body. His army green shirt was soaked down the front, his face glistened, his eyes were splintered with thin red veins. He stretched out his arms toward me and I noticed that his hands were shaking. I walked into his arms.
He put his face on my neck and breathed deeply, as if trying to breathe me into himself. I closed my eyes, and I let him rock me. Under the pungent warm shade of that deep green, leafy stink tree, I was inhaled in the embrace of a man whose anger had once spilled into something so hateful and so uncontrollable that it had killed a woman too young to have been as brave and upright and courageous as she was. She was a martyr and K and I were free. More or less free. Never free. Not if we thought about what we had done.
And then K left me, walking up into the shadow of a nearby kopje. I watched him leave and it seemed to me that the heat and fumes of his hatred danced after him. I slung down the way I had been taught as a child, African style, so that haunches hang between spread knees. It’s a stance that can be sustained for waiting-hours at a time. I pressed my back into the shade of the tree. My mouth was salty and dry. I pushed the palms of my hands into my eyes until I saw dots, but I could not erase the woman from my mind. And then I cried for a long time, until I was a film of sweat and my mouth was stringy with tears and my throat ached.
“Madam?”
I looked up.
Two children had materialized