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

about it?”
    K said, “I don’t usually talk about anything. I don’t have anyone to talk to except the gondies . . . . And you know how it is to talk to these guys? I love these munts, I really do, but . . . I don’t really talk to them. I mean, we talk about the farm and the river and the weather and money—we’re always talking about their blerry money problems—and about their indabas in the village. . . . They tell me all their hunna-hunna about who’s bonking whose wife and who is beating up who and they want me to fine the offenders and tell them who is right and who is wrong, but I can’t tell them about the ex or about myself or about, you know . . . about my life. About the war. If I told Michael what I told you today he’d shit himself. Don’t you think? He’d shit himself.”
    “Probably not,” I said.
    K was quiet for a few minutes and then said, “Ja, well, in any case, it’s true that I’d rather sit and talk to a fisherman on the Chabija all day about tiger fish and bream and his bloody millet crop than try and spend one afternoon chatting to a honky about his shallow crap. No . . . maybe it’s just that this hondo stuff shouldn’t be spoken at all. Not to a gondie or to you or to anyone.”
    And then the pickup gave a jolting buck and we were hiccuped out onto the tarmac. A black, curling ribbon of shiny highway, connecting the fragments of Zambia that fall on this side of the escarpment to the city of Lusaka. As we turned up the dirt road toward my parents’ camp, the headlamps swung briefly against Sole’s candlelit brothels and caught the stunned eyes of drunks on the verandas of the throbbing taverns.
    “You must stay for a drink when we get to the camp,” I told K.
    “No, I should get home,” said K. “I have a busy day tomorrow. Anyway, I don’t drink anymore.”
    “I think I knew that.”
    “Who told you?”
    “It was an international news flash when you stopped.”
    K laughed. “ Ja, it should have been. I used to drink. Mai we , I used to drink!”
    Suddenly, a man riding a bike with a woman balanced across his handlebars came reeling out of the village, wobbled in front of the pickup for a few swollen seconds, and then veered out of the way. K spun the steering wheel and the pickup juddered off the road, where it cruised along at a terrifying angle before regaining four wheels.
    K carried on talking as if nothing had happened. “All of us guys, you’ll find we drink in binges. Three weeks sober and then a week of being absolutely blallered. Maybe a bottle of vodka and a dozen beers in a night. It’s what we learned in the war.”
    I glanced behind us and the man and the woman were toiling on through the mud, quite matter-of-factly, their faces reflected red in the tail lights of the pickup.
    “You’re in the shateen for three weeks straight,” K was saying, “and then you’re back in camp for a week and you spend the first three days trying to forget the last three weeks and the next three days trying not to think about the next three weeks and one night with an almighty hangover and then you’re back in the shateen.” K shook his head. “Voddies and Coke was my drink,” he said. “But my hangovers! And my demons! One night about two years after the war I was in a hotel room with the ex, and you know those ceiling fans with a toggle on the end of a string to switch the thing on and off, ja? Well, in my sleep, I guess, I could hear the fan—thuka, thuka, thuka—and the toggle—tinka, tinka, tinka—and in my alcoholic state I thought it was a helicopter coming to chaya me. Man, I woke up and I was screaming and leaping around the bed and donnering that fan with a pillow and there were feathers flying everywhere and the ex was screaming at me. But I honestly thought I was under attack, which was bull if you think about it because in real life, it was us with the choppers and the gooks getting stonked with those K-cars.”
    K drove in silence for a moment.