Scribbling the Cat by Alexandra Fuller

Author:Alexandra Fuller
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Travel, Contemporary, Biography, History
ISBN: 9781101118801
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2004-01-01T10:00:00+00:00

IT WAS ONLY AFTER we had crossed the border from Zambia into Zimbabwe that K remembered that he still had his revolver with him. “Shit,” he laughed, rooting around in his briefcase and emerging with the weapon, “the Almighty was looking after us, my girl. If those customs guys had found this thing”—he waved the revolver around carelessly and the car swerved, narrowly avoiding a stub-tailed chicken that had chosen that moment to scuttle across the road—“we’d both be melting to death in a gondie jail by now.”

“How about we don’t try and cross into Mozambique with it?” I suggested.

“I’ll leave it with a friend,” said K. “You talk to Dingus while I drop the gun.”

That was the other peculiarity of the soldiers I met. None of them went by their given names. K is known variously as the Phantom Sergeant (he refused to stand for troop photographs during the war, and in commando pictures he shows as a white gap in the front row) or Savage or Goffle. The man whom I was about to meet was known, not as Peter, but Dingus after his habit of asking for “that dingus” or “this dingus,” or for referring to a woman as “quite a dingus.” Dingus is Afrikaans for “thing.”

Dingus turned out to be an incredibly soft-spoken man. He almost whispered in answer to my questions. His wife was a vivacious, blonde Englishwoman. Both smoked cigarettes as an apparent substitute for breathing. Dingus’s wife brought out a pot of tea and we sat around a rickety veranda table; its Formica top had curled up at the lip, showing rotting plywood underneath. Dingus and his wife, in common with many Zimbabweans, were leaving Zimbabwe.

“Nothing left here now,” said Dingus, shrugging. “Look, we can stay and starve and wait for the end, or we can leave while we still can.”

Packing cases and boxes waited in stacked, sagging towers.

“Where are you going?”

“North,” said Dingus. He lit a cigarette with the end of one he was just finishing. “I got a job as a boat mechanic on Lake Tanganyika.”

“God help us,” said his wife with feeling.

Dingus, like K, had found God. I asked him what prompted his conversion and he told me that after the war he had been such a violent man—so angry all the time—that he had gone through two marriages (he said this the way a rally driver might talk about needing to change shredded tires in the middle of a grueling race). “During the war it didn’t matter. The aggression was—well, you needed it. It was a way to survive. It was afterward. . . . When my second wife left me, that was when I woke up.” He, like K, had joined the army straight out of school. “I could hardly read,” he said, “but I knew how to shoot. I could fight.”

Looking at him, it was hard to believe that he was any kind of young man, or soldier. His eyes washed pale and blue into the back of a yielding face.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.