Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [67]
Then K finally stopped and switched off the engine. Into the ticking silence that followed the relentless hum and whine of the car engine he said, “I have no fucking idea where we are.”
WE NEVER DID find our way. It was Connor who eventually found us. We had parked near a double-story hut that had loomed out of the darkness and shone yellow and black, shaggyhaired and strangely reminiscent of something I would associate with China more than Africa.
“Looks like a double-story hut to me,” said K, directing the headlamps on the hut and unfolding his piece of paper with the directions on it. “So we should turn left here. Except there’s no left turn.”
Suddenly, out of the monotonous darkness car lights bore down on us (we were, unusually, on something closer to a road than to a goat track) and a land cruiser slammed to a stop next to us.
“Connor,” said a man, climbing out of the land cruiser and extending his hand.
“Oh, what a coincidence! We were just looking for you,” I said, employing great restraint not to fling myself upon the man in relief.
“I got a message that there were two wazungu out here. Get lost, did you?”
“No, no. I know this place inside and out,” K said. “We’re not lost, we were just—”
“Lost,” I said loudly.
K tapped his paper. “My directions said to turn off at the double-story hut.”
Connor turned and looked at the hut. “Oh, those are all over the place,” he said, waving expansively into the nameless, deep bush.
“It looks almost Chinese,” I said. “Like a mini thatched pagoda.”
“That’s exactly what it is,” said Connor, “these gondies were sent to China so that the Chinks could teach them how to be gooks. First against the Porks and then against each other.”
“Ah.”
“All these black limbs,” said Connor, making a broad sweeping motion, “from Angola to Moz and Tanzania—they were all trained by the Russkies and the Chinks. Then the wall came down and suddenly no one gave a crap whose side the gondies were on. You could almost feel sorry for the poor bastards. All those years getting help from the Commies or the Yanks and then the Cold War is over and all of a sudden they’re on their lonesomes.”
I lit a cigarette and offered one to Connor. “No, no,” he said, “I quit. Although I don’t know why I bothered. It’s not like I’m going to live any longer just because I don’t smoke.”
I said, “We’ve been driving around the lake for hours.”
“An hour,” corrected K.
Connor laughed. “Ja well,” he said cheerfully, “good thing I found you before you went off on any of the side roads here. Mbambaira everywhere.”
“Mbambaira?” I said.
“Ja, you know. Potatoes. That’s what they call them, potatoes—mbambaira in Shona. It’s a joke. It means ‘land mines.’ Place is riddled with them.”
I glared at K.
CONNOR IS GARRULOUS in four languages (he speaks Portuguese, Shona, English, and Makua-Lomwe with ease) with the result that his accent has morphed from a white Zimbabwean accent (known as a Rhodie accent) into something resembling a scramble of black Mozambican and southern European. An energetic, cheerful man in his late thirties, with an insistently bright and pragmatic outlook on life, he seems uniquely suited to an existence on the banks of Wasa Basa. An ability to find a solution to the most crushing problems and an illogically optimistic outlook on the worst of circumstances are two of his most impressive survival skills. Five years before, after his farm in Zimbabwe was taken over, at the implicit encouragement of Zimbabwe’s president, by a gang of squatters calling themselves “war veterans” (supposedly of the Rhodesian War), Connor moved here to manage a kapenta-fishing operation.
His house is a tall, dank shed that seems to trap the heat of the day and turn it, by night, into foul-smelling steam. His dining room and