Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier Read Online Free PDF

tremble on the brims of K’s eyelids. His nose grew pale-rimmed and tight.
    “I’m sorry,” I said.
    K threw back his head. Two lines of tears were sliding freely down his cheeks.
    I poured him some more tea and shoved the cup toward him. “Here, drink this.”
    K only stared into the branches of the tamarind tree. Tears had found their way into the dark folds on his neck, so that they shone in purple creases. Then K gave himself a little shake and wiped his face with the flattened palm of his hands, a gesture that I think of as being very African, the gesture of people who are not accustomed to the conveniences of napkins or towels. K sucked air in over his teeth and said, his voice watery, “It’s a good thing the Almighty forgives all of us. It doesn’t matter”—now he leaned forward and fresh tears sprung—“how much of a shit you are, how much you’ve destroyed. . . . The Almighty forgives us. He holds us all in His hands.” K took a moment to compose himself before he could continue. “I just thank Him,” he said finally.
    And after that, a silence that might have been visible from space stretched in front of K and me. It was a splintering silence full of all the things I thought I already knew about K and all the things he thought I thought I knew about him.
    “Anyway,” he said. “That’s all old news now, hey? The war’s over. Best we forget about it. Dead and buried.”
    “Right,” I said.
    “I’m sorry you had to listen to me.” He gave an embarrassed laugh. “I didn’t mean to . . . No one comes out to my farm, so I don’t see women very often. I mean white women. It catches me off guard.”
    “Don’t apologize.”
    K stood up and tugged the end of his shorts, “Ja . Well, I should probably head back to the farm and see what those Einsteins have been up to in my absence.”
    By now, it was early afternoon. It was the slow part of day when heat gathers like fingering thieves into your body and steals energy and desire and initiative.
    I stood up. “I imagine Dad’s still down at the fish tanks if you wanted to see him.”
    “No.” K stretched. “I didn’t come to see your dad in particular. Just a white face in general. Any white face will do.” He smiled. “Mission accomplished.”
    I trailed up the steps to the arch after K. The dogs, who were belly-up on the chairs or splayed out on the lawn, watched us leave the camp—they did not move. Anything with a brain and with any feeling at all was staying as still as it could. Only the flies spun and buzzed and twirled and dive-bombed.
    “You must come out and see me on my farm sometime,” said K as he climbed into his pickup. “How long are you out here for?”
    “I go back to the States the week after Christmas,” I said.
    “Well, then there’s plenty of time. Come and see my bananas.”
    I nodded. “Maybe,” I said, but my voice was drowned out by the revving engine.
    K gave a dismissive wave and turned his attention to the road.
    I watched the pickup back out of the yard and, in a paste of mud, grind up the slick driveway. Mud splattered the side of the vehicle and flew out behind the back wheels in little red pellets. A cascade of egrets, rattled by the commotion, erupted up out of the green grass and banked around to the fish ponds above the camp, their wings paper-white against gray clouds.

Words and War

    Mum and Dad ’s shower and bath
    WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, spinning around in the cycle of violence that I understood, only very vaguely, as Rhodesia’s war of independence, I used to have a recurring dream that I was being abducted by a massive crow; it scooped me up from the garden where I had been playing and flew with me to Mozambique, where it dropped me on a land mine. And then I would wake up screaming, still floating toward the mine (absurdly slowly, because it was the mid-1970s and I was, at the time, fond of a pair of large hand-me-down bell-bottom jeans, which served the dual purpose, in my dream