Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [77]
At which K twitched.
Mapenga leaned forward. “Hey, I heard a rumor you’d gone all happy-clappy now. Is it?”
K nodded.
Mapenga shook his head. “No shit,” he said softly, “no fucking shit. And hooch and weed? You don’t touch it, hey?”
“No.”
“Hey, I respect that,” said Mapenga. He lit a cigarette, opened a beer, and laughed. “Cheers anyway, you mad, miserable bastard.”
IN THE AFTERNOON, the men went fishing. I barricaded myself against the lion on the veranda and read. Toward four, when all the day’s breath had been drawn out of the air, and everything was stung with the need to sleep, Mapenga’s cook arrived and jolted me from the gentle doze into which I had been happily slipping. There was a shout of “Mambo! No! No!” and that was followed by a small skirmish between the lion (who had long since grown bored of trying to stare me into a nervous wreck from beyond the cage) and a man in a khaki uniform. I ran to the edge of the cage in time to see a man with a tray dancing around the lion and swiping at the animal.
I hurried around to the door of the cage and stood at the ready to fling it open for the man, who sidestepped quickly across the lawn and slipped in behind me, laughing. I said something very rude about the lion.
The man, still laughing, shook his head. He said in shocked tones, “No, no. It is a good lion. The lion is okay.” He told me that it didn’t bother him to be pounced on by the lion. Anyway, it kept the island safe. No one wanted to come onto the island because of that lion there, so there was no stealing, no trouble of tsotsis coming from the mainland.
“But it jumps on you,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but I have no fear,” the man said, “so he will not hurt me. A tsotsi—he will have fear in his heart because he is here with bad thoughts in his head—and so he will die. That lion can only hurt you if you fear it.”
I stared out into the garden, where the lion was now launching himself at a jute dummy strung up in a tree for that purpose, and admitted, “I fear it.”
“No. You shouldn’t be scared,” said the man. He paused and then said in a puzzled voice, “Are you a new wife for Mapenga?”
I laughed. “No. No, I’m an old wife for someone else. I am only here to visit.”
The man explained, “There have been some wives—or maybe they are girlfriends—who come here and they stay maybe a few months or a year and then they go back somewhere, I don’t know. . . . I thought maybe . . .” His voice trailed off.
We introduced ourselves and shook hands. Then I followed Andrew around while he did chores (hacking a chunk of crocodile off a carcass in the deep freeze for the cat, boiling water from the lake for drinking, chopping vegetables, ironing clothes on a table behind the kitchen).
Andrew had worked for Mapenga for some years, he said. Maybe five or six years. Nowadays things were good because the boss was very square. He was not mad anymore. So things were good. Before, yes, the boss had been very crazy. That is why the furniture here was made of iron. Anything made of wood or glass was broken. One time, Andrew said, the boss was so angry that he took everything from the house—including the radio, and cups and plates and sheets, beds and knives, toilet paper and chairs and the engine of the boat—and threw it all in the lake. But what good did that do? Because after that the boss had to sleep on the floor and he only had one set of clothes—what he had been wearing the day he threw everything in the water. And for many days and nights the island was surrounded by fishermen coming to catch shoes and mattresses and whatever else they could salvage from the bottom of the lake. And this also made the boss crazy and he yelled and he screamed, but he had nothing left to throw at the fishermen, so they just stayed there fishing and laughing at him until the engine was found and stripped and dried and was working and he could get in his boat and scare the fishermen away.
I asked what he had done before working for Mapenga. Andrew spat on the iron and thumped it down on a shirt. He was sweating heavily with the