Read Online Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller - Free Book Online Page B

.” K looked out at the river and went quiet. Then he said, “Always, forever after”—K crossed his fingers and held up his hand to show me—“you will not forget them. Even the Yanks from Vietnam and those crazy buggers from Northern Ireland, and the Frogs and the Kiwis. . . . We were all in it together, it didn’t matter where you came from. And I learned a lot from those ous. By the end of the war, I could say ‘fuck you,’ ‘fuck me,’ and ‘fuck off’ in four different languages.” K laughed and then he said, “Unless you’ve licked the arse end of the world with a man, you can’t know what it’s like to have that kind of relationship with someone. It’s closer than family. And that’s why it hurt. . . .” K looked away and shook his head; when he spoke again, his voice was strangled with tears: “The guy lying in the wank-sack next to you might have been a jerk in the real world, but out there in the shateen. . . . We all knew that none of us were angels, but we covered for each other. We were so close with each other that . . . it was like we spoke a different language—our own language.”
    K sighed and his shoulders sagged. “There was this one ou—my best friend, you could say he was my Stone China. He was the guy that was always right there, by my side for five years. After the war he was nailed by some gondies in Jo’burg. They jumped him at a red light and they blallered his skop and stole his car. He was completely spazzed out for months but when he got out of hospital I told him he must come and live with us, with me and my wife. So he came and lived with us because he wasn’t square—he couldn’t look after himself, he couldn’t really talk, his brain was like sadza . But, of course, I took care of him under my own roof. I told my wife, ‘Treat him as if he were your own brother.’ ” K paused. “And then I come to find the bloody cripple’s screwing my wife.” K made a choking noise that might have been a laugh. “Ja, that’s how he thanked me for taking care of him for three years. That’s how he treated his best friend.”
    The hippos surfaced and shouted their objection into the lowering sun.
    “So that was the marriage over, more or less. It had been on the rocks for a while, but that was the final straw. Me, I decided, ‘Screw this.’
    “I told the ex: ‘You take everything, my girl. The house, the garden, the car, the business. Me, I am heading into the bush.’
    “I got sod all except a boat. So that year, at the end of the rains, I hopped in the boat and I started at the top of the gorge and I floated down these rivers every chance I got for two years. And one day, I was coming along here”—K pointed upstream— “and I look up on the shore, and there’s a lekker crop of turbo cabbage.” K put an imaginary joint to his lips and sucked in a deep lungful of air. “I pulled my boat over and I go looking to see whose weed it is. But there’s no one here. Not a soul. It’s just shateen for miles and bloody miles. The dagga was wild, self-cultivated. But man! I dried some and smoked it and the stuff almost blew my wig off. Anyway, the cabbage wasn’t the point. It was this land.
    “I spent two nights here that first time, just sleeping on the ground, under the stars. Right here under this tree, I cleared the damn jesse scrub and buffalo bean and slept right here. All night, I kept asking the Almighty, ‘Is this what You want for me?’ And all day I walked, deeper and deeper into the shateen and I just kept seeing that it was more and more beautiful and more and more wild.
    “Then the next month I found the chief having a few drinks with Alex and Marie down at Malidadi and he agreed to have discussions with me and after a few months he granted me the land. Have you met him? Old Chief Chabija.”
    I nodded. The chief was well respected from Sole to Kariwa, ruthlessly stubborn and notoriously fair. (He rejected land claims by anyone who arrived at his