Free Scribbling the Cat: Travels With an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller Page A

floor.
    “She’ll have to be a very special woman,” said K, softly and looking at me.
    “Yes,” I said.
    And then, maybe it was a trick of the rain-softened light, but I saw K’s face fold with such exquisite torment that my heart turned over for him.
    He said, “There’s been so much destruction. But I’ve learned so much now. I’ve really learned about love.” K’s lips grew fleshy. “I would nurture a woman. She would be the head of the family now. I wouldn’t have to dominate her. I would put everyone else first. I would come last in the family. This is the order: first God, then my wife, then my children, the dogs, the servants. . . . I would be last. I just want to share this”—he gestured to the house, the garden, the slow-churning river—“with someone.”
    I looked away from the house and saw that three fishermen had paddled their canoes around the bend in the river. The evening had brought a kind of careless, extravagant beauty to the world. The sky was rinsed various shades of blue and pink and was scattered with ripped, high clouds. The sun, catching itself in the trees on the far bank, bled red and gold across the water. Peace Mountain and the distant escarpment were softened in a dying light. From the village opposite K’s farm, blue clouds of smoke from cooking fires tugged into the evening sky. It was the time of day when the confusion of color, the churn of cooler air supplanting the heat of the day, the miracle of the journeying river—everything about being alive—seemed more improbable and fleeting and precious than usual.

The Left Behind

    Sole Valley village
    THE ROAD FROM the boundary of K’s farm to the tarmac had not been improved by the day’s rain. The bridge over the gorge had been repaired, but there were several other sections of the road that had given way and were torn in sharp, washed-away gullies. K drove fast and determinedly and although the car sometimes slipped and spun, we managed somehow to stay on track and forge the streams that tumbled brown and frothy in their new, temporary capacity as rivers.
    As we dipped into warm pockets of air that had sunken into dambos and vleis, the air expanded with the comforting smell of the potato bush and there was a ricochet of insects shrilling. We flashed past huts that, in the dim light, had lost their shabby air of poverty and had taken on instead the aura of cozy domesticity. Indistinct shapes huddled over cooking fires, the occasional snatches of life (a child crying, a man shouting, a woman’s high voice calling out) tumbled through the air at us.
    “I like you,” said K suddenly.
    I startled and hesitated before I said, “I like you too.”
    “I don’t like most people,” K said. “Most wazungu.”
    “No.”
    “I find I don’t trust people. It’s hard to trust someone who hasn’t looked up the wrong end of a barrel. You know?”
    “I don’t make a habit of looking up guns’ snouts,” I admitted.
    K persisted. “Ja, how do you know what someone is made of until you’ve broken cover with them at exactly the same time?”
    “But I haven’t broken cover with you,” I pointed out.
    “No, but you’re a woman,” said K, as if that exempted me.
    “Yes,” I agreed, knowing it didn’t.
    K drove in silence for a bit longer. The road ahead—its surface magnified in the headlights—told a vivid story of everything that had walked or run or driven over it since the rain had stopped. Bicycle tracks snaked; goat hooves poked sharp dents; flat feet padded; cows left deep grooves; donkeys were daintier and tripping.
    “Man,” said K, “every time I drive through here I think of Mozambique. This patch of bush just here is exactly like Mozambique. See how it is—this flat sandy mopane with the scrub on the side and these piles from old anthills? It’s just like in Moz.” Then he shuddered and added, “I’m going to give myself spooks, talking about the war all day.”
    “Don’t you usually talk