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

at least, of fashion statement and parachute).
    The night after I first met K, I had that same old war dream and I woke up, choking on a scream, bell-bottoms billowing by my ears and the tinny taste of helplessness (the taste that comes before a scream) in my mouth. I lay in the darkness feeling my heart smack against the edge of my ribs until, at last, thinking I would not be able to get back to sleep, I let myself out of my mosquito net and into the insect-creaking night beyond its lacy comfort. I felt my way down the uneven steps (toes curled against frogs and centipedes) and toward the picnic table, which lurked shadowy and indistinct under the deep-forever night that leaked through the branches of the tamarind tree.
    The rain, as Dad had predicted, had stopped by now and left the air a little cooler. Where the clouds had ragged apart, the sky reached back until the beginning of time, black poured on black. I groped around the picnic table for Dad’s cigarettes and scraped a chair back. One of Mum’s guinea fowls purred at me from its perch as I sat down.
    “Just don’t take me to Mozambique,” I told the guinea fowl, blowing a funnel of blue smoke at it.
    The guinea fowl spluttered and the wind gave a breathy sigh. Raindrops shook off the leaves of the tamarind tree and plopped onto my shoulders and bare legs. I shivered and pulled one of the little dogs onto my lap.
    Dad woke up just before dawn and came down to the picnic table. He wore a length of bright chitenge cloth around his waist, above which his body gleamed white in the shape of his shirt, his arms and neck burned a ruddy brown. He said, “Sleep all right?”
    “Fine.”
    “Leave any for me?” he asked, shaking the box of cigarettes.
    “One or two.”
    Dad coughed and lit a cigarette. “How long have you been down here?”
    “Hours,” I said.
    “Then why didn’t you make the bloody tea yet?”
    “I had a nightmare.”
    Dad pinched the end of the match out between his thumb and forefinger. “Nightmare make you afraid of the kettle?”
    “Nope.”
    “Miss your electric stove in America?” asked Dad, breathing smoke at me.
    “Maybe.”
    Dad made a fire and boiled water, grunting in a soft, mildly complaining way as he laid a tray with cups, a jug of milk, sugar, the cigarette caught in the corner of his mouth. Then we moved up to the top of the camp, sat on the edge of Mum’s flower bed, and watched the graying dawn stroke mist through the rain-startled bush, and a snaky wisp of cloud rise off the Pepani River. We were quiet for a long time, drinking and smoking.
    Then I asked, “Do you ever have nightmares about the war?”
    “Nope.”
    I lit the last cigarette. “Liar.”
    Dad cleared his throat.
    I said, “I hear you shouting in your sleep sometimes.”
    “I’m not asleep. I’m shouting at the bloody dogs.”
    “You’re shouting, ‘Heads down!’ and ‘Shit, we’re hit!’ ”
    Dad poured himself more tea and shook the empty cigarette box. “It wasn’t much of a war,” he said at last.
    “Were you ever scared?”
    “Scared to death. Bored to death. Both.”
    I had seen my father go off to fight in the war. He didn’t have to go very far from our farm near Umtali, on Rhodesia’s border with Mozambique. He walked to the end of the driveway, where he was picked up in a camouflage-painted Land Rover and taken off with five other farmers to the hills above our house, where they crept about for a couple of weeks hoping not to get noticed by the enemy. My father was called up into the Police Anti-Terrorist Unit (PATU), an outfit known colloquially as Dad’s Army.
    “Cannon fodder was what we were,” Dad said. “We were just a bunch of bumbling farmers buggering around in the bush without much of a clue. We were lucky to get out of the war without shooting each other, let alone the bloody gooks.”
    Dad gave up guns—even for hunting or crop protection—after the war. So now he and his men chase hippos and elephants off