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By Root 419 0

—“and here”—he clamped his hand behind his leg—“and here”—he held up his feet—“and here”—he lifted up his shirt and showed me his torso. “So then I bathed in twenty liters of paraffin and my ears bled for a month but still, these lumps kept twitching. I was going benzi, I tell you. Then I injected myself twice a day, every day for a week, with sheep dip, two cc’s at a time. I thought maybe I had sheep maggots under my skin. But no. The sheep dip nearly killed me, I was in bed for a week, but the bloody things kept wiggling under my skin. So I burned my mattress, boiled my clothes, fumigated my bedroom, and cooked my shoes, but still, there they were. These hard, moving lumps under my skin. I finally went to the doctor and he gave me tablets that are supposed to kill worms that these people in West Africa get. I said to the doctor, ‘This is Zambia, not bloody West Africa.’ Six pills a day. They made me so sick, I thought I was going to die. There I was, back in bed, sick as a dog, with twitching lumps. Eventually, I went to a Chinese doctor in Lusaka, Mrs. Ho Ling—she diagnosed me with having inflamed nerve endings.”

I could think of no better response than “Oh.”

“It was just nerves,” K told me, “too much stress. Too much war.”

I assumed he meant The War—which around here would mean the second chimurenga, the Rhodesian War. I said, “But that’s been over for twenty years.”

K looked at me with surprise. “Oh no, I don’t mean the hondo”—he used the Shona word for “war.” “I mean the war with the wife. No, I don’t think the hondo messed me up anything like the war with the wife did.”

K poured himself more tea and started to talk in a tireless, arbitrary manner—about God, and war and divorce—as if a vast jumble of ideas surrounding his dissolving marriage and the nature of God and the state of the universe had been stored up for months in his mind, awaiting a patient audience. The thoughts were coming raw, unfiltered, and untested, directly from K’s mind. He was like a lonely drunk who washes up to the bar after months without company and spills his soul to a complete stranger. Except that K was entirely sober.

While K talked, I studied his body. He was the kind of man whose body told as many stories as his mouth ever could. To begin with, there was the question of his hairlessness; his arms and legs looked as if they had been subjected to hours of waxing. Then, there were a number of scars to contemplate: a sliced head, some light cuts on his arm, a decorously scarred knee, and a round scar on the fleshy part of his calf that, if it was related to a similar scar above his ankle, was almost certainly the entry wound of a bullet. And finally, there were tattoos to consider, barely visible on his tawny-colored skin. On his left forearm he had a cupid (but it had been badly drawn and could also have been interpreted as a set of buttocks suspended between two billowing clouds). Above that, there was a portrait of a Viking. On his right forearm was a winged-sword symbol, like something that has been copied off a coat of arms. Above that, the words “A POS” had been written. The only men I know who have found it practical or necessary to have their blood group indelibly scratched into their limbs in blue ink have been soldiers in African wars.

So when K’s torrent of unstrained observations and ideas had slowed to a halting trickle, I said, “Selous Scouts?” because even twenty years after the end of the second chimurenga, K had the build and attitude of a soldier from Rhodesia’s most infamous, if not elite, unit.

K startled. For a moment I thought he was going to deny it but then he said, “Is it that obvious?”

“Oh no,” I lied.

“No, not the Scouts,” said K. “RLI. Rhodesian Light Infantry. Thirteen Troop.”

The RLI had been Rhodesia’s only all-white unit, highly trained white boys whose “kill ratio” and violent reputation were a source of pride for most white Rhodesians. Their neurotically graded system of racial classification apparently gave the Rhodesians a need to believe in white superiority in all things, even the ability to