Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [85]
I said, “Ninety-nine, one hundred,” opened my eyes, and began to walk.
I couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds behind the men, but they were gone. The ground told me nothing. There was no trail—no distinct human trail—to follow. The shallow, glittering earth looked scuffed, but not trodden on. I found myself hurrying toward what I hoped was the Train, but I couldn’t tell. Every way I turned, jesse bush stared back at me, implacable and clueless and obscuring any landmarks. I stared up at the sky, but the sun had expanded to fill an indistinct space that might have been perpetual noon. In any case, I hadn’t been paying attention to the sun when I left the car.
Within minutes I felt a fist of panic in the top of my belly: I didn’t know where I was, I had no water. And I realized that even after all this time with him, I didn’t really know K or what he was capable of. I didn’t know how intimately he would want me to feel the sensation of being thirsty, alone, hunted.
“Yoohoo,” I called weakly.
The world crackled back at me.
I wondered where the nearest water was. I considered sitting down and waiting to see if anyone would come back and find me. The palms of my hands were covered in a chilled film of sweat. PUSHED THE ENVELOPE TOO FAR—that would be my epitaph. Or, CURIOSITY SCRIBBLED THE CAT.
A long time ago, I had supposed that if I walked a mile in K’s shoes, I’d understand what he had been through. I had thought that if I walked where he had walked, if I drank from the same septic sludge of water, if I ate nothing all day and smoked a pack of bitter cigarettes, then I’d understand the man better and understand the war better and there would be words that I could write to show that I now understood why that particular African war had created a man like K.
But I already knew that the war hadn’t created K. K was what happened when you grew a child from the African soil, taught him an attitude of superiority, persecution, and paranoia, and then gave him a gun and sent him to war in a world he thought of as his own to defend. And when the cease-fire was called and suddenly K was remaindered, there was no way to undo him. And there was no way to undo the vow of every soldier who had knelt on this soil and let his tears mix with the spilled blood of his comrade and who had promised that he would never forget to hate the man—and every man who looked like him—who took the life of his brother.
You can’t rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on. Looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.
Suddenly the pale, leafy shrub in front of me exploded. “Waka-waka-waka.” The men appeared, spraying me with make-believe bullets from pretend rifles, held at hip level.
“You’d be dead,” said K, turning on me and walking away.
“Scribbled,” agreed Mapenga, laughing. He saw my face and said, “Were you worried there for a moment? Did you feel lost?”
I smiled weakly.
“We had you in our sights from the start,” he said. “We could have shot you anytime.” He gave me a kiss. “Hey, cheer up. It’s not for real.”
We kept walking. It was impossible for me to watch where I was going, since the immediate task of keeping flies out of my eyes and disentangling myself from thorny scrub took up most of my attention. K and Mapenga walked easily and quickly. Both of them, from old habit, looked low and far, where the bush cleared the ground and allowed a few inches of space in which the shadow or legs of a person or animal might be visible. No one spoke.
The heat hounded us. Laughing doves were the only creatures still calling, sounding teasingly like running water. Suddenly, the earth surged skyward and I was forced onto my hands and knees, scrambling and pulling myself up by thickwristed curls of vine. K and