Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [94]
I waited for his reaction. To my surprise, K took the edge of his shirt and wiped the sweat off my face and the tears from his cheeks. Then he smiled and cupped the back of my head—which, speaking from experience, is not unlike getting cuffed by a lion. He said, “Okay, my girl. Get yourself under a mosquito net before you get bitten to death.”
WE SLEPT FOR a couple more hours. Before dawn I heard K get up. The screen door on the veranda whined open and slammed shut as he let himself out of the cage. I lay in bed watching the gray dawn turn pink and the lake magic itself into a shiny, flat, rose-colored mirror. Mapenga was up—I heard him talking to the lion as he hurried up from the pavilion to the workshops. Kapenta rigs motored home steadily; I could see their craning necks and long-reaching nets. They evoked a brood of ancient herons. As they pulled up onto the island, I could hear the men who crewed the boats shouting to one another. They were calling out the night’s catch in high, singing voices and I envied them.
Mapenga was saying to the lion in a steady, laughing voice, “Mambo Jambo, boy. How’s the lion? Mambo, my boy. How’s Mambo?”
I got up and lit the stove to make tea. K came back from his early-morning prayer session. He looked, as he often did after being with God, as if his face had been lightly glazed—a sort of peeling shine glowed off his cheeks. He put his arm over my shoulder and asked if I was okay.
“Fine.”
Mapenga shouted to me that he’d like some tea, if I was making some anyway. K asked for hot water and honey. I cleared a place from the debris of last night’s supper (wineglasses, the remains of a fish skeleton seething with greasy ants). Mambo came to the wire and took a few, halfhearted swipes at the laundry I had hung up over the top of the cage. He needed breakfast.
The routine of tea, the casual domesticity, the drying underwear on the fence, the unfed cat, the two-o’clock-in-the-morning quarrels, the implied apology, the unwashed dishes.
From a distance, whatever this was could easily be mistaken for a marriage.
The Big Silence
The Elders
MUKUMBURA IS WHERE K was stationed when he wasn’t on patrol. It was where he came to relax from the war. Once a month he left the bush and came back to Mukumbura to sleep and get drunk and clean his gun and have a shower. And to account for every round fired in the last three weeks.
“Bullets aren’t free, man. We need a gook for every round.”
Then he was issued with fresh ammunition and three weeks’ supply of food and sent back out into the bush with three other men. There, jumpy and cracking, and worn down by the heat and the dirt and the fear and the killing, they shot at everything that moved. Fuck the bullet counter back at HQ.
Mukumbura-by-the-Sea, they called it. But there was no sea. Just a huge, ugly sand dune; a desolate stretch of land that looked as if all the leftovers from the beautiful parts of the country were snipped off and left here in an untidy pile of tailings and scrub. To its north, the silted wasteland sank into a river and thereafter into Mozambique. To the south it roped over rocky knots of land until it stalled in the lush valleys that fell beyond Mount Darwin.
Of all the places we came to follow K’s war, this was the most frozen in time. It was as if the war had stepped away from its desk for a moment, but would be right back. Loops of barbed wire ran along high security fences, which snaked and seared through a uniformly blond landscape. A flagpole poked stiffly from the tired tide of sand. Long, low buildings buckled under a flat glare of sun—green and metallic and hot. These crouching saunas were buildings for men without women, men who had no expectation or need of comfort. The old airstrip was still serviceable, not because of any upkeep since the war days but because nothing had had the energy to ruin it. For nearly thirty years, it had baked itself flatter and firmer. A flock of goats helpfully kept its surface nibbled