Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [65]
One of the policemen sauntered up to the car. He was very polite. He showed us the speed gun, of which he was evidently very proud. “You can’t excuse this gun,” he told us, rather obscurely. “Man he can lie, but not this equipment.”
K stared with, what I thought was, unnecessary interest at the machine and then asked—in what I assumed was a deliberate snub to my bladder—to see how it worked.
“No, no,” said the policeman. “You can’t unless there is a speeding car.”
“Well, how many cars come on this road every day?”
The policeman wobbled his head, considering. “Maybe one hundred. Or two.”
“How many of those are speeding?”
“If they are foreign,” said the policeman slyly, “then it is one hundred. Or two.”
“Nice little business,” commented K.
The policemen laughed appreciatively. “Come back to where I am sitting with my friend. Let us talk.”
“Pay anything,” I implored as K got out of the car, “and let’s find a place for me to stop.”
By now a curious cluster of children had congregated noiselessly around the car. They had approached me crouched, like soldiers, bellying their way over the ground toward the road and making silent “feed me” gestures with cupped hands. I couldn’t understand their reticence, until they caught the eye of one of the policemen, who threw himself after them with handfuls of rocks, shrieking at the top of his voice. The children exploded back to the hut from which they had snuck, backs arched in a futile attempt to avoid the barrage of rocks that hailed down on their little bodies.
I turned to the policeman with the beginnings of a protest on my lips, but he cut me off, saying, “Those childs. You know! If you are not looking, even if you are looking—they steal even the shirt you are wearing on your body.”
K returned to the car and announced that the fine was astonishingly steep and payable only in American dollars, which seemed suspect and I said as much. K said, “I can haggle if you want. But we’ll be here for hours.”
“Forget it,” I said. “Let’s just pay and get to the nearest tree.”
We’re Not Really Lost
Double-story hut—Mozambique
WE TOOK A LEFT turn before Tete, on the road that declared itself (on a grand, green sign) to be leading to towns that we never reached, or if we did, they didn’t exist when we got there. We were heading for the area around Wasa Basa Lake. K had a friend in Harare who knew someone by the name of Connor who had a fishing camp on the lake and who had said that he would be willing to let us camp on his premises. When K was a soldier here, the lake had not existed. At that time, the place that the lake now covers was the lower end of the Pepani River. It had been a land of many kopjes, dry and densely covered with mopane woodland. The acid soil gave the air a slightly saline scent.
I can’t remember at what point the straight, new aid-donor tar road we were on disintegrated into a dirt track and when, in turn, that dirt track dissolved into something that looked like a footpath. But we were on increasingly rougher tracks, the kind that showed where cattle and goats had been herded but had no tire prints on them. Once or twice, K pulled a tatty piece of paper out of his breast pocket and said, “Would you have said that was a village, or just a cluster of huts?” or “Did that look like a left branch in the road to you?”
I sighed. “This doesn’t look like a road to me at all, left branch or not.”
“Well, if that was a left branch in the road, there’s supposed to be a double-story hut somewhere here,” said K, peering out into the failing light. He tapped the piece of paper. “That’s what it says here in these directions.”
“I’ve never heard of a double-story hut. That’s absurd.”
“I promise,” said K, waving the piece of disintegrating paper at me. “Read my notes.”
I felt bruised by the road, battered by the pickup, assaulted by the border post, and incredibly grimy. “Maybe we should just camp right here,” I suggested, “before it’s too dark to set up our mosquito nets.”
“No, no. We must be nearly there,” K said.