Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (18 page)

Kids

FOR THE NEXT TWO DAYS, we spun across Zimbabwe’s stranded countryside, swallowing with lonely tires the almost empty road that branched up northeast from Harare to Mozambique. Political violence, a regional drought, and fuel shortages had washed up the citizens of this countryside into despondent-looking crowds that clustered near food-aid drops and under the shade of tavern verandas. The towns that we scudded through sound like words in a song: Mutoko, Murewa, and Nyamapanda. It was a land of almost breathtaking beauty or of savage poverty; a land of screaming ghosts or of sun-flung possibilities; a land of inviting warmth or of desperate drought. How you see a country depends on whether you are driving through it, or living in it.

How you see a country depends on whether or not you can leave it, if you have to.

The windows of the pickup were rolled down because we, in common with everyone else in this part of the world, were jealous of every drop of fuel we spent. And, under these circumstances, air-conditioning (like the exorcism of war memories and the act of writing about it) was an unpardonable self-indulgence. K had gone quiet and the muscle at the back of his jaw had begun to quiver. Air-conditioning ices memories with its bland-ness, but with the windows wound down the past came rushing back at K. “Do you smell that?” he asked me more than once, looking at me as if expecting to see the same war-shocked look on my face as he wore on his own. I nodded. But what I was smelling was not what K was smelling. I was smelling now, he was smelling memories.

Places have their own peculiar smells, and here in Murewa the smell was sun on hot rocks (it was a valley stretched between vast erupting kopjes that look like hundred-foot-high boils); it was the nose-stung scent of goats (even back in the seventies, when K was a troopie here on his way to Mozambique, this agriculturally marginal land had been given to the Africans and their small herds of goats, donkeys, a few cattle); it was the smell of Africans, which is soil-on-skin, sun-on-skin, wood smoke, and the tinny smell of fresh sweat; it was the smell of home-brewed beer and burned chicken feathers and kicked-up dust.

It is not a romantic smell. It is not the smell of free people, living as they would choose. Rather, it is the smell of people who labor, strain, and toil for every drop of sustenance their body receives from the earth. It is the smell of people who have been marginalized and disempowered and forgotten. It is the smell of people without a voice in a world where only the loud are fed. It is the smell of people who are alive only because they are cunning, ingenious, and endlessly resourceful. In theory they are “peasants.” In practice they are brilliantly versed in the skill of surviving.

Dad once said to me, “When the world goes tits up and we’re back to square one, I’d bet my money on these buggers surviving. Your bally Wall Street fundi would last about half a day out here before he stubbed a toe and keeled over.”

In the strung-out fields along the road, the maize was stunted from lack of rain and had started to produce sickly, thin ears of corn. The cattle churned mud in almost parched water holes. If this was the end of the rainy season, I dreaded to think what October would look like.

“You know what fear smells like,” said K suddenly. “It’s unmistakable, hey? And munt fear smells different from honky fear. When a munt is shitting himself, it’s the smell of onions, have you ever noticed that? A scared honky smells like sweet cheese. But it’s all from the same place. All fear is . . . fear—it’s the smell of discharged adrenaline.” Then K hauled on the steering wheel so that for a few breathtaking moments we lunged from one side of the road to the other. He laughed and said, “You know that rush? Hey? Was that a rush?”

“Yes,” I said emphatically, not keen to repeat the experiment.

“
That’s
the feeling you get when the first shot is fired,” said K.

“Ah.”

“You think, This is fucking it, and everything is incredibly slowed down so it seems like you are taking half an hour to look over each shoulder and make sure the men are with you, and you’re looking to see if they’ve had their jolt of adrenaline and trying to time it so that everyone’s rush is at the same time. Then you shout, ‘Go!’ when they’ve
just
got that rush. That’s the difference between a good leader and a lousy leader. It’s knowing when everyone’s ready to do it. . . .”

Two children standing by the side of the road hooted after us, “Wa-wa-wa!” Their sharp voices caught like gravel on the rise of hot air and tumbled onto our laps.

“If you leave it too long,” K said, “then the rush is over. Then all you get is a bunch of troopies with shit in their pants, but if you time it right . . .” K was swinging back and forth from the steering wheel and his eyes were shining. “Then the whole lot of you get up out of cover, ‘Arghhhh!’ and ah, the rush. . . . You don’t feel a fucking thing, you just, ‘Arghhhh!’ You know? You have this noise coming out of your throat and you’re not thinking about anything except killing. And I don’t mean you want to kill, but it’s the opposite of being killed yourself, so you’re running straight for the gooks and trying to keep steady enough and the gun is like this extension of yourself and . . . That’s why I’m deaf in this ear”—K pulled at his left earlobe—“because you’re running through the bush firing away and the guy to your left, his discharge is going off right in your ear, and you’re just trying to slow everything down enough to get a decent shot. And you know what saved us?”

“No,” I said.

“
Munts can’t shoot straight. That’s what saved us. They had shitty training and they’re sent out to the middle of nowhere with half the food and half the equipment we had and their guns were hopeless. Mind you, a munt can go twice as far on half as much as we could. We could maybe make it . . . what . . . three days out there without water. A munt could go five. And a munt could walk—I’ve seen one-legged munts dragging themselves out of the bush for ten, twelve, eighteen ks. Look at these guys,” said K, waving into the unkind land that uncoiled into the great swells of barren, picturesque rock. “They had an advantage in the bush, because there’s nothing tougher than a munt. There just isn’t. But when it came to a contact—we just blasted them out of the shateen. They didn’t have a prayer. We were better trained, better equipped.”

K held an imaginary gun out of his window and aimed at a teenager lounging under a mango tree. “Click. Shoot.
Waka.
One time. All of a sardine, dead gook.”

I took a deep breath. “How many people did you kill?” I asked.

K went quiet for a long time. Then he said, “When I was demobbed they gave us therapy. Half an hour with the shrink. What is that? Six minutes for every year I was in the bush. Three minutes for every person whose eyes I looked into before I pulled the trigger.

“The guy asked me, ‘Do you feel remorse for all the people you killed?’

“I told him, ‘I was just doing my job. No, sir, I feel no remorse.’

“Then he asked, ‘How many people did you kill?’

“I said, ‘As many as I could, sir.’

“He said, ‘You must be repressing your feelings.’

“I told him, ‘Fuck you, sir!’

“He said, ‘You killed a lot of people. You killed civilians.’

“I said, ‘Sir, there was a war on, people got in the way.’ ”

K stared out the window. An unraveling mural of rural African life flashed outside.

Suddenly K said, “I have to tell you this.” His jaw bunched hard. “This was something . . . I haven’t talked about this . . .”

When I turned on my tape recorder he shook his head and I turned it off again.

K looked distant—the way that a familiar view can suddenly become hazed and remote with smoke or dust. Suddenly he leaned over to my side of the cab and smudged my cheek with briny lips. “There,” he said. “Now I’ve kissed you. Because when I tell you this . . .”

He didn’t talk for a few minutes and then he started to cry. I said, “You don’t have to tell me,” but I was lying. I felt somehow that if I knew this one secret about K—this one, great, untold story—then everything else about him would become clear and I could label him and write him into coherence. And then I would know what I was doing here and how I had arrived here and I’d know more about who
I
was.

K said, “You’re the only person I would ever trust with this story.”

My heart plunged. I wanted his story, but I didn’t want his trust. And now I could tell that K’s story wasn’t something I wanted to carry with me back into my other life. Into the life-as-mother, life-as-wife. The insistently bright, loudly optimistic life that was my
real
life.

“We were in the Darwin area,” said K, and he nodded across the kopje-dotted valley toward the west, “and we had been sitting up on a kopje all day watching a village. I was a lance-jack by then, so it was me and the three ous I was commanding. Two of them were just kids. You could still see where their necks were white, where they’d just had their hair cut. They were just laaities out of school. And they were shit scared and jumpy as rabbits. I said to them, ‘Don’t worry. Trust me.’

“But I could tell the kids weren’t convinced.

“I said, ‘I promise you I am not going to send you chaps home in a body bag. But we still need to get the job done,’ and I pointed down into the village.

“There was a lot of woman activity around the huts, which is unusual because it was cropping time and they should have been in the fields.

“I said, ‘I’m telling you, those women are cooking for gooks.
Let’s we go.
We’ll find out where the gooks are. Then, waka-waka, dead gondies. Home in time for tea, hey? Come. Follow me.’

“So we went down into the village and we went into a hut with the most smoke coming from it. There were three women sitting there with three huge pots of food.

“We asked them, ‘Who is this food for?’

“They said, ‘It’s for the kids.’

“I kicked one of the pots of food over. I said, ‘You fucking savages never feed your kids. You’re feeding gooks.’ ”

Then K said nothing for a long time and he was driving with one hand. The other hand was clapped over his mouth.

I looked out my window. The black-blue shadow of our racing truck humped and bucked over the red ground. Beyond that were huts lightly scabbed with peeling mud, goats (always goats) and chickens and the odd haunted dog. Around the huts, there were children who stared at us with a mixture of curiosity and hunger that translates, in any language, to wide eyes and distended bellies. A single elderly man perched on a stool in the shade of a leaning mango tree. He was as fragile as wood smoke, barely a memory against the landscape. There were young men pushing bikes and herding oxen. But the women were hidden back against the maize fields. They were the bent, solitary figures, jabbing away at the earth with hoes, their backs swollen with the tiny shape of bundled babies.

At last K spoke again. “A woman is incredibly resistant to pain,” he said, “and they are incredibly strong. A man . . . you can get him to talk by beating him”—K pressed his lips out to show how easy it is to get a man to talk—“but women . . . you have to use your psychology.

“So I looked at the women in the hut. There was an old woman, a grandmother. Then there was a woman who must have been about thirty. Then a young girl, I suppose she must have been sixteen or seventeen. I pointed to her—the young girl. I told the guys, ‘Take her outside.’

“They took her outside.

“I told them, ‘The usual treatment.’

“So, they stripped off her clothes and beat her by her breasts”—K leaned over and grabbed the skin under my arms—“and they hit her ribs right there,” he said. He let go of my skin; the flesh felt bruised and crushed where his fingers had pinched it. He said, “And her shoulders and the soles of her feet. They had taken a sadza stick from the hut to beat her with. The old woman was crying. She had this old, high voice, like the noise a goat makes when you slaughter it. I shut the door of the hut.

“The young girl was squirming away from my men. She was strong, I’m telling you. She was like a snake, all muscle and backbone. One of the ous had to stand on her groin to keep her flat.

“I asked her in Shona, ‘Where are they?’

“Because I knew the gooks had to be close by. Fuck, they were probably watching us. The hair was standing up on the back of my neck. Any minute I expected them to open fire on us. The guys I was with . . . they were scared. One of them looked like he was going to start crying.

“And now there was no time for pissing around—I mean, now that we were off the kopje and in the village, we had to find the gooks before they had a chance to find us.

“So I told them, ‘Drown her.’

“Because, you know, a munt doesn’t like water. So one of the kids stripped off his shirt and dipped it in water and put it over her head. Then one of the other ous punched her in the solar plexus and she sucked in her breath, and the wet shirt stuck in her mouth and she thought she was drowning.” K feigned drowning under wet cloth. He caught his breath and flailed, grabbing at the air with both his hands so that the truck rumbled along unpiloted for a moment.

“But still she wouldn’t talk. I thought I was going to strangle her. I kept looking over my shoulder, man. I kept expecting to see a gook or ten appearing for lunch.

“So I tell the men, ‘Get her to talk, for fuck’s sake.’

“Shit! There were four of us and a whole fucking countryside full of
them
and I’m thinking, What have I done? These kids are going to end up in a body bag unless the bitch talks.

“So I left the boys for half an hour. I said, ‘Get her to talk. I’ll be right back.’

“I start skirting the village, trying to see if I could spot spoor, you know? Gook prints, gook smell. Gook anything. Nothing. So I come back. She still hadn’t talked. She still hadn’t told us where the gooks were.

“So I told the guys, ‘Beat her some more.’

“We beat her feet and her back some more. She wouldn’t talk. Instead, she spat on one of the boys. And . . . She was lying there, naked and crying and there’s snot everywhere and she’s got these fucking welts on her breasts and her ribs and then . . . raises her head and she spits. That’s when I saw red, man. I lost control.”