Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier (24 page)

I said, “At least it’s not salvaged tourist meat in the deep freeze. Ha, ha.” But what had sounded ridiculous and impossible a few days ago was beginning to feel increasingly and fatally likely.

When Mapenga sat down on the sofa, the lion piled on top of him, knocked him over, and began vigorously licking his face and arms.

I sat in a chair as far away from the lion as I could get and lit a cigarette.

K went into the house to wash up. The lion was now standing astride his prostrate owner and taking long, appreciative strokes of Mapenga’s neck. “I think he likes the taste of salt from my sweat,” Mapenga laughed. “Hey Mambo, my darling boy. Hey Mambo, Mambo.” The lion took one of Mapenga’s arms in his mouth and chewed on it. “Oh,” laughed Mapenga, wiping blood off his hand from a couple of puncture wounds, “he’s eating me. Don’t eat me Mambo—that hurts.”

“Ha,” I bleated weakly, and regretted instantly that I had uttered any noise at all.

The lion, who had been entirely focused on his master, abruptly turned his yellow-brown eyes on me. His look went straight through me, down my spine, and hit the soles of my feet. Remembering that animals can smell fear, I puffed furiously on my cigarette, creating what I hoped to be a curtain of odorous smoke between the cat and myself. To no effect. The lion jumped off Mapenga, sauntered past the coffee table, and, rising on his back legs, knocked me flat back in my chair.

“He’s just showing you love,” laughed Mapenga as my cigarette flew out of my hand and my sunglasses were knocked off my head. “Just push him off,” he said as the lion cupped both front paws around the back of my neck and tore my shirtsleeve from shoulder to elbow. “Down, Mambo,” said Mapenga as Mambo’s dewclaw caught on the back of my neck. “It’s only play-play biting.”

Once again, K came to my rescue. The lion was plucked off me by the scruff of his neck and pinned to the ground.

“You okay?” K asked me.

I nodded and tried to rearrange what very little was left of my dignity.

“I’m going to put this cat outside,” said K. He held the furious lion by the tail and dragged him off the veranda backward. The lion gave a whimpering sort of grunt as he was sent staggering out onto the lawn, and then he rolled onto his side and looked at K with what I could interpret only as a plea for mercy. K wagged his finger at the lion. “Behave yourself, my boy, or you’ll learn respect the hard way.” The lion laid his ears flat and blinked meekly.

“In the wild, he’d be getting the crap beaten out of him by the other lions,” said K to Mapenga. “You need to beat the crap out of him once in a while, or he’ll turn around and eat you one day.”

“Shit,” Mapenga laughed, “I’m not going to beat the crap out of that lion. He’s stronger than me. I’m scared of the bastard.”

Or Why We Are Here

Mapenga’s boat

MAPENGA WAS IN THE Special Branch of the Rhodesian army during the war. “It’s where they sent the clever bastards,” he said, cracking open a beer and sitting back on his sofa (Mapenga and I were redolent with the stench rubbed onto us by Mambo; K alone still looked and smelled unruffled). “The shit we did.” Mapenga leaned forward and looked into the bottom of my thoughts, his eyes narrowing and direct. He had an unnervingly direct manner and it was impossible to look away from those eyes; intelligent, passionate, mad, piercing. His lips trembled with intensity when he spoke, so that it looked as if he was having a hard time expressing the magnitude of his thoughts. He said, “They taught me well.” He smiled suddenly. “I can get anyone to tell me anything. I can get anyone to do anything for me.”

I looked away.

“Anything,” said Mapenga, sitting back again. “Man, if there was a war crimes tribunal, every damn one of us—from both sides, the gondies weren’t any better—we’d
all
be up for murder. We’d all be in jail. War’s shit.” He lit a cigarette and eyed me through the smoke.

Then Mapenga added, “We didn’t choose war. War chose us.” He sat for a long time staring at me as if to ensure that this had sunk in. “No one would choose war deliberately. You follow me? But if it’s the hand you’re dealt, then . . . fuck . . . No one who hasn’t gone through it can understand. It’s the shittiest thing there is, and the most beautiful thing too.” Suddenly his voice relaxed and he looked away. “The only way you can look at it is . . . war’s a gift,” he said. “It’s a shit gift. But it’s a gift. I wouldn’t be what I am—I wouldn’t be living here”—he indicated the cage and beyond that a lawn stretching down to the cliffs that soared into a lip of blue sky above the lake—“if it hadn’t been for the war. It taught me about death, but it also taught me about living every single moment to the fullest. When I die and I go up there and Jesus Christ asks me what I did with my life, I’ll say to him, ‘I hope you have a long time to sit and listen, because do I have a story for you!’ ” The startling laugh came again. “Fuck! I certainly haven’t lived a boring one, hey? No. I’ve lived four lives—Christ, more.” He leaned across to me so that I could see black flecks in his blue eyes, and a small crosshatch of creases in his neck, which joined deeper lines. I could see the pull of sinews in his jaw. “How many fucking bastards in a suit can say that?” he asked.

I looked away and lit a cigarette to distance myself from a sudden sharp ache of longing I had to see my children. I itched for the routine of laundry; the apple-air-conditioned scent of the grocery store; the happy predictability of the days that started with tea and porridge, and children crumpled with sleep, and that ended with bath, books, bed. I longed for that bland quality of domesticity that allowed a creature enough stability to take root. Here, I felt as if I might pick up and blow away from a storm of emotion and intensity.

“You know,” said Mapenga suddenly, “I’m square now, hey. But I didn’t always used to be square. I used to be really mad.” Mapenga looked at K. “We were all mad in that war. Ninety percent of us that got out of that war alive—and I mean the real war, not those bloody pawpaws who spent their time sitting around waiting for a gook to show up, but you and me and the boys who went
after
the gooks—we were all mad. That’s why we were so fucking good. You’ll find we all did shit in school, but we were great at war. Because we were mad. We’re the leaders. We’re the leaders of the whole fucking world, but we’re mad.

“You know I got treatment, hey? Finally, all those years of hurting people and fucking people up, and three wives, and man . . . I tormented people, but the person I tormented the most was myself. I got in a fight every fucking weekend—it was unavoidable. And my biggest fear was killing someone. I was sure I was going to kill someone and that scared me. I didn’t want to kill someone and spend the rest of my life in jail. One night I nearly killed my own brother and that’s when my family said to me, ‘Look, you either get help, or we won’t have anything to do with you.’ So I got help. I saw a psychiatrist
and
a psychologist. I drove down to Harare every two weeks for my appointments and I loved it. I finally understood why I was mad.

“They diagnosed me with ADHD—my brain fires too fast—and after experimenting with Prozac and lithium and this drug and that drug they put me on Ritalin and I am lekker now. I am sorted. Hey. And I’ve thought of you often”—Mapenga again glanced over at K—“because I think you’ll find you have the same disease as me. And Saddam Hussein, and George Bush, and Bin Laden—all these guys—they’re fucking brilliant but they’re fucking mad. They all have ADHD. Hitler had it, for sure. You’ll most probably find Jesus Christ had ADHD.”

At which K twitched.

Mapenga leaned forward. “Hey, I heard a rumor you’d gone all happy-clappy now. Is it?”

K nodded.

Mapenga shook his head. “No shit,” he said softly, “no fucking shit. And hooch and weed? You don’t touch it, hey?”

“No.”

“Hey, I respect that,” said Mapenga. He lit a cigarette, opened a beer, and laughed. “Cheers anyway, you mad, miserable bastard.”

IN THE AFTERNOON, the men went fishing. I barricaded myself against the lion on the veranda and read. Toward four, when all the day’s breath had been drawn out of the air, and everything was stung with the need to sleep, Mapenga’s cook arrived and jolted me from the gentle doze into which I had been happily slipping. There was a shout of “Mambo! No! No!” and that was followed by a small skirmish between the lion (who had long since grown bored of trying to stare me into a nervous wreck from beyond the cage) and a man in a khaki uniform. I ran to the edge of the cage in time to see a man with a tray dancing around the lion and swiping at the animal.

I hurried around to the door of the cage and stood at the ready to fling it open for the man, who sidestepped quickly across the lawn and slipped in behind me, laughing. I said something very rude about the lion.

The man, still laughing, shook his head. He said in shocked tones, “No, no. It is a good lion. The lion is okay.” He told me that it didn’t bother him to be pounced on by the lion. Anyway, it kept the island safe. No one wanted to come onto the island because of that lion there, so there was no stealing, no trouble of tsotsis coming from the mainland.

“But it jumps on you,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but I have no fear,” the man said, “so he will not hurt me. A tsotsi—he will have fear in his heart because he is here with bad thoughts in his head—and so he will die. That lion can only hurt you if you fear it.”

I stared out into the garden, where the lion was now launching himself at a jute dummy strung up in a tree for that purpose, and admitted, “I fear it.”

“No. You shouldn’t be scared,” said the man. He paused and then said in a puzzled voice, “Are you a new wife for Mapenga?”

I laughed. “No. No, I’m an old wife for someone else. I am only here to visit.”

The man explained, “There have been some wives—or maybe they are girlfriends—who come here and they stay maybe a few months or a year and then they go back somewhere, I don’t know. . . . I thought maybe . . .” His voice trailed off.

We introduced ourselves and shook hands. Then I followed Andrew around while he did chores (hacking a chunk of crocodile off a carcass in the deep freeze for the cat, boiling water from the lake for drinking, chopping vegetables, ironing clothes on a table behind the kitchen).

Andrew had worked for Mapenga for some years, he said. Maybe five or six years. Nowadays things were good because the boss was very square. He was not mad anymore. So things were good. Before, yes, the boss had been very crazy. That is why the furniture here was made of iron. Anything made of wood or glass was broken. One time, Andrew said, the boss was so angry that he took everything from the house—including the radio, and cups and plates and sheets, beds and knives, toilet paper and chairs and the engine of the boat—and threw it all in the lake. But what good did that do? Because after that the boss had to sleep on the floor and he only had one set of clothes—what he had been wearing the day he threw everything in the water. And for many days and nights the island was surrounded by fishermen coming to catch shoes and mattresses and whatever else they could salvage from the bottom of the lake. And this also made the boss crazy and he yelled and he screamed, but he had nothing left to throw at the fishermen, so they just stayed there fishing and laughing at him until the engine was found and stripped and dried and was working and he could get in his boat and scare the fishermen away.

I asked what he had done before working for Mapenga. Andrew spat on the iron and thumped it down on a shirt. He was sweating heavily with the effort, and drops of sweat were dropping onto the cloth. “I was just in my village,” he said.

“And before that?”

Andrew propped the iron up on its end and stared out at the garden, where the lion was now tossing a crocodile leg into the air and catching it again. “Before that,” he said, picking up the iron again and slamming it down hard onto the shirt, “I was fighting.”

“For Frelimo?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Oh.”

Both of us were quiet for some time. Then I said, “Were you fighting in this area?”

“Yes, madam.”

I took a deep breath. “Do you know that Mapenga was fighting for the Rhodesians?”

“Yes, madam.”

“Perhaps you were fighting each other.”

Andrew sighed and stared down at the shirt that he was now folding neatly. “But, of course.” He picked a pair of shorts out of the laundry basket and laid them on the table in place of the shirt. “Yes, there was war for a long time.” He took a swipe at the shorts with the iron. “So many, many of us. Everyone who lives here has been fighting. War is no good.” The iron hissed and gasped a cloud of steam into Andrew’s face. “It’s a no-good thing.”

“Do you hate them?”

“Who?”

“The people you were fighting.”

Andrew frowned. “Why?” he asked. “The war is over. No fighting now.” He turned the shorts over and ran the iron over them. “All that fighting for so many years . . .” He shrugged. “Sometime I am there in the shateen and I have even forgotten what is this thing I am fighting for. And then there is somebody who says, ‘You are fighting for freedom.’ But what does that mean? I fight for freedom.” Andrew plucked at the beginning of a hole in the seat of the shorts. “Look at this,” he said, showing me the threadbare patch in the offending shorts.