Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [89]
Now we joined the surge of bodies, along braided paths under an avenue of fragile fir trees that seeped a northern scent into the air. People clucked and sang to their livestock, children suckled and cried, feet and hooves kicked up a billowing atmosphere of manure-scented dust. I found myself shoulder to shoulder with Mapenga on the one side and, on the other, a woman and her child. She had covered her head from the sun with a drape of bright blue-and-red cloth. A flock of goats trotted ahead of her. She was calling to them, or singing to her baby, I couldn’t tell which, in a soft, monotonous nasal tone. K was forging ahead like a man accustomed to crossing a sea of humanity and livestock.
Then, quite suddenly, we came to a standstill and the swarm of animals and people arranged themselves into a thick rope that snaked down from a small hill, all the way to a mango orchard that lay below us. Towering up all around us, and providing an almost liquid shade, was an eruption of enormous trees, a vast thicket of lush green.
The place—milling as it was with women, men, children, and livestock—was suddenly strangely silent. Except for the animals complaining softly, and the odd bleat of babies, few people were talking and those who were talked in hushed, reverent tones. Everyone appeared to be waiting for someone or something. The queer peace was broken only by the occasional, high shrill sound of a man yelling and the sharp report of a whip cracking.
Mapenga seized my hand. “Follow me.”
We pressed through the crush of cows and people and into a tiny area that looked like an old stone chapel without a roof. K was already standing in front of the chapel walls.
“Look,” said Mapenga.
The floor of the chapel was a deep, clear well, echoing its own brilliance back at us, light turquoise layering down to dark indigo, reaching deeper and deeper into the earth until it became a narrow black pinprick of infinity. Straddling above the well, on a great bench provided for the purpose, was a big man in a grubby white undershirt and rolled-up trousers, which were hitched at the waist with a belt made from a strip of inner-tube rubber. He was cracking a huge leather whip above his head and it occasionally stung down on the backs of animals or people who jumped their place in a queue that snaked from here all the way into the heart of the mango orchard behind us.
“Dry season, wet season, year after year, this well never dries up,” said Mapenga.
It was a miracle of pure water in a place that was otherwise so thinly blessed. I watched as a woman stooped and filled her buckets, and then, putting her buckets aside, she led her cattle by the nose, one at a time, to drink from the well. Then it was the chance of her goats and her dogs and her children, who fell on their knees next to the lapping animals and scooped water to their mouths in handfuls. And then another woman took her place and the ritual was repeated.
I turned to K. “Did you know about this place during the war?”
K looked sullen. “We never came here,” he said shortly.
Mapenga looked at K and laughed. “Lying bastard. The Rhodesians poisoned every well between here and Mukumbura. You mean you came here once, poisoned the thing, and never came back.”
“I didn’t poison it.”
“Okay, not you personally,” Mapenga agreed, “but the Porks or the Rhodesians did. Someone did, and it wasn’t these poor bastards.”
K said, “I’ll go and wait