Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [84]
Mapenga handed me his cup. “Okay. But only because you suggested it and so now you are officially madder than me and I like to know that there is at least one person who is madder than I am. Otherwise it gets lonely for me here in the asylum. So, we’ll climb the Train. But give me another cup of tea first. It’s dry out there, I’m telling you.”
I poured Mapenga more tea. He lit a cigarette. K came out of the shower, naked but for a towel around his waist.
“We thought we might climb the Train today,” I said.
K said nothing. He made himself more hot water and honey.
“You want to do that?” I asked.
“Ja, okay.”
St. Medard woke up. It was not quite seven, but the sun had already thrown off any pretense of kindness and had started a relentless attack on the front of the house and he was bathed in a dewy layer of sweat. He sat up like a man coaxed to life by his lungs. He choked and hacked and growled and thumped his chest; the end of his nose went white and his lips went blue. He lit a cigarette and sucked on it desperately until his coughing subsided. Then he caught sight of Mapenga and me.
“Get up to any guava-stretching exercises last night?” he asked.
YOU CAN SEE the Train for a long time before you get to it. A long, low mountain on the other side of the town of Dhakwa, it is a thoroughly distinctive landmark. The closer we drove to it, the more apprehensive K became. I was wedged between K and Mapenga in the front seat, gripping one leg of each man as a way to avoid either hitting my head or being launched through the windscreen. The road was far from predictable and the noise of the engine made speech difficult, so we roared along without speaking. Mapenga drove as if life were something you can pick up on the side of the road for nothing. He seemed to pay no attention to bridges (such as they were) or riverbeds or pigs or villagers or even the road itself but simply hurled the vehicle into the space ahead of us as ferociously as he could. At last he shouted, “There’s a game path to the left there. Look out your window and see if you can spot it.”
As the foliage whipped past us, K spotted the track and Mapenga wrenched the pickup around and hurtled off into the bush. The moment we stopped, the heat and the flies settled on us. We walked away from the car. Elephant droppings were scattered around, and there were signs, too, of smaller antelope—duiker and impala perhaps. The land—at least this stretch of it—seemed to have shaken off its legend as a symbol of the war. Now it was just a very densely scrubbed patch of arid ground, silently, impassively allowing us passage—as it had allowed the elephants before us and, almost thirty years ago, K and the men he was trying to kill and the men with whom he killed.
I watched K’s back as we walked, my eyes half closed against the persistent annoyance of mopane flies. Mapenga was hurrying ahead of both of us, effortlessly tearing through the bush, as if his skin repelled the thorns. K carried the water. Conversation dried on our tongues. I felt blundering and soft-skinned and breathless. After an hour or so, Mapenga suddenly stopped at some unusual-looking humps of earth and waited for us to catch up. “What do you think?” he asked.
K speculated, “Ammo dumps?”
Mapenga said, “Or mass graves?”
The men exchanged a look I could not read—a look that went back to a time when pacts of silence were made over secrets like these unspeaking heaps of ground.
“The worst thing,” said Mapenga, “about it . . . You pour petrol on them and set them alight and their insides come out of their penises.”
“Christ,” I muttered. “Why?”
Then K said, “Don’t ask questions.”
“Why?”
“Because there aren’t answers,” said Mapenga.
“Here,” said K, “I want to show you something.” He seized my shoulders and spun me around and around. “Close your eyes,” he said. “Count to one hundred.” Then he let go and he and Mapenga walked away.
“No peeking,” said Mapenga.
“You’re peeking!” shouted K.
The men started running. Within moments I could no longer hear them. Their footsteps had been engulfed by the