Scribbling the Cat - Alexandra Fuller [97]
K turned and got back into the car and we drove without talking until we reached the Zambian border. It wasn’t until we had cleared the border and were driving out of Sitatunga, on the Zambian side of the border, that K said, “I built that whole place myself.” He took his hands off the steering wheel to show me his work-worn fingers. “Every brick and nail of that house came from these hands.” He looked out the window and I saw his jaw jump. He shook his head. “It’s just an elaborate fucking tomb for Luke now. That’s all it is.”
The road tumbled out of the Kariwa heights and followed the course of the Pepani, down rocky ledges that flapped with peeling paper bark commiphora trees and into the low sink of the valley. Stalls had been set up here at the instigation of aid agencies to promote the manufacture of straw baskets and mats and baobab-bark rugs. It was an attempt to replace the illicit trade in wildlife and gems that had flourished here until recently. I made K stop and I bought laundry baskets for Mum and my sister.
At the Sole Valley turnoff, we swung east and now this place seemed familiar and kind to me. I waved at the policeman at the roadblock and felt friendly toward the bored truckers and bright prostitutes at the corner tavern (OBEY YOU’RE THUST, someone had painted in large black letters across the white veranda wall in our absence). Evening was coming as we turned into the fish farm, and the light had ripened, sweet and filtered. Doves bobbed stiffly over the road, picking at spilt grain and complaining softly that no one cared, no one cared. They’d never care.
At camp, the dogs were waiting at the top of the steps for someone to bring them their supper. The BBC was discussing world cricket scores from a fork in the tamarind tree. Mum was spraying purple medicine on Isabelle the turkey, who had been bitten by one of the little dogs on the right wing. Dad was smoking his pipe, drinking tea, and reading aloud from Aquaculture Today.
“Thanks,” I said to K.
K nodded.
He helped me carry my bags into the camp and then walked back to the pickup. I followed him. He opened his door, he hung over the top of it, and then he said, “Don’t think that I haven’t thought about giving up.”
“What?” I said.
“Over and over, I’ve asked myself, who would miss me? Why am I doing this? Who am I doing this for?” He paused. “Then I remember that no one is given a burden too heavy for them to carry. That’s why I carry on.” K got in the car and started the engine. He said, “I carry on, because I can.”
And then he shut the door and he was gone. One lonely white pickup bumping and jolting down a red road in the Sole Valley until it came to the corner where the donkeys were grazing, and there it turned, and was gone from view.
The Journey Is Now
THOSE OF US who grow in war are like clay pots fired in an oven that is overhot. Confusingly shaped liked the rest of humanity, we nevertheless contain fatal cracks that we spend the rest of our lives itching to fill.
All of us with war-scars will endeavor to find some kind of relief from the constant sting of our incompleteness—drugs, love, alcohol, God, death, truth. K and I, each of us cracked in our own way by our participation on the wrong side of the same war, gravitated to each other, sure that the other held a secret balm—the magic glaze—that might make us whole. I thought he held shards of truth. He thought I held love.
Those of us who grow in war know no boundaries. After all, that most sacred and basic boundary of all (Thou shalt not kill) is not only ignored in war, but outright flaunted and scoffed at. Kill! Slot! Scribble! We (guilty and secret and surviving, and more cunning than the dead) will seep into unseen cracks to find solace. And we will do so without thinking twice, since we are without skins, without membranes, without the usual containments of civilization. We know that life is cheap and that the secret to an inner peace is so dear and so elusive as to be almost unattainable.
K and I met