Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [95]
Mukumbura had no border post. It had no expectation that anyone would come here for any good reason, not even to flee into Mozambique. Instead of customs and immigration, then, we had to have our passports and vehicle cleared at a small wooden cabin that declared itself the police station. The policemen had taken stools and benches outside and propped themselves up under a mango tree, where they talked and smoked. Seeing us, one of the policemen reluctantly extracted himself from the conversation and followed us lazily into the cabin.
A handwritten sign above the officer in charge’s desk declared good-naturedly, TOGETHER, WE CAN FIGHT CRIME.
Under this was a list of offenses with their corresponding fines:
ASSAULT COMMON—$5000.00
PUBLIC FIGHTING—$5000.00
INSULTING/SCOLDING—$2000.00
GAMBLING—$2000.00
DRIVING CATTLE WITHOUT PERMIT—$5000.00
I pointed to the sign and said to K, “This might get expensive for us.”
But K didn’t respond.
“Are you sulking?”
“No.”
“Looks like it from here.” I handed my passport to the policeman and said, “Is there a fine for sulking?”
“Madam?”
“Kutsamwa,” I said, pulling the corners of my mouth down and stamping my foot.
The policeman laughed. K glowered.
We drove to Harare in almost total silence. It’s a long day’s drive any way you look at it. With a man who has taken your sins—real and imagined—and stitched them onto the sack-cloth of his own soul, it is endless. A wide, rocky track climbed up and out into Rusambo and Mount Darwin. I stared out the window at the villages that lay flat and breathless on this inhospitable ground, as if they were so used to being leveled—as they were during the war—that they were still flinching with the memory of it.
Then, a few kilometers beyond Mount Darwin, the road was suddenly pulled back from its ill-behaved sprawl. Here it was paved and smooth. And the ground on either side of it heaved into a sigh of teasing, fertile, red earth. This earth hosted rich groves of fruit trees, avenues of pine and eucalyptus, rolling cattle range. And it also cultivated the intense jealousy and bitterness of the land-starved, power-starved, food-starved villagers in the north who had fought violently for this very land and who now, twenty-three years after independence, had suddenly been given it by a rogue government that, having drowned the economy in a stagnant pool of corruption, was in need of their support. It was bittersweet victory—too late and too poisoned by bad politics to be an unequivocal prize.
Now the resettled villagers blinked despondently at us as we drove past. They waved us down and shouted. They needed a lift to town. There was no fuel to run the tractor. No fertilizer, boss! No pesticide! Hunger! The farm laborers, kicked off the farms by the new tenants, waved us down too. They saw the Zambian license plates and shouted, “Job, boss! Job!”
Bindura tore into the heart of Mazoe Valley. Here, a green tongue of hip-high corn sagged, droughted and underfed, on the side of the road. A lake uncurled beneath the foot of a hill and I caught, on the air, the bell song of frogs. It was the cooling part of the afternoon when the air is most crushed and raw with smells. We passed an orange orchard that had stained the air sweet and hopeful. It made me say, “You could just leave me here.” It seemed as good a place as any to find a lift into town, or a place to spend the night.
K said nothing.
“Or stop sulking.”
“I’m not sulking.”
“Okay.”
“I’m just . . .” Then nothing.
“Would it make you feel better to leave me here?”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“It’s not safe.”
“I can look after myself.”
K looked out the window. “You really liked him, didn’t you?”
“Oh God.”
A long silence.
I said, “I can get a bus to Lusaka.”
K laughed.
I said, “You know what your bloody problem is? No one has ever talked back to you because they’ve only had their mouths half open before you’ve laid them flat. But I’m not a banana field, or your wife, or your servant. You can’t tell me what to think or how