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

space that billowed above it and the great expanse of mopane forest that spread out on either side of it. Very quickly, the pickup became a shimmying white dot against the black road, and then it was gone. I started to walk.
    The road to K’s farm was really more of a fitful dirt track than a road in the conventional sense of the word, an irregular cut into the bush, soupy with the recent rain. Within minutes, gluey clay stuck on the soles of my shoes, until I was teetering on a platform of the stuff. I took my shoes off and walked barefoot, letting sausages of mud ease between my toes. As soon as the sun tipped the edge of the horizon and fingered through the mopane trees, the air grew languid with the kind of clammy heat that promises worse to come. On either side of me, there were wallowing settlements—clusters of huts and thorn-branch kraals—exhaling in the post-rain morning sun. There was a salty, sinewy smell of smoked goat meat on the air, mixed with the scent of damp thatch and the raw, churning smell of sun on wet manure. Small, nose-and-eye-seeking mopane flies clustered on my face and congregated in the sweat-cut creases in my neck and behind my knees. Children, desperately malnourished and filthy, made a wake of shouting chorus behind me, practicing their English with triumphant insistence: “How are you? What is your name? Where are you going? Give me your shoes!”
    I passed the church—a stern white building set apart from the sporadic jumble of fields and the disarray of huts that made up the villages along here. Its blue wooden doors were locked and its windows, bare narrow slots, were too high for me to see into. The school, a ramshackle affair, was set back from the church on an eroding hill. Next to it, a muddy soccer field lay waterlogged and churned. Two goats and a donkey were nibbling grass near one of the goalposts.
    I kept walking and eventually crossed a wide, sandy river and then a reed-spiked wetland, and now the track narrowed to a threaded ribbon through the trees, barely wide enough to allow the passage of a lorry. The villages had thinned to small settlements hacked out of the bush surrounded by balding patches of flooded millet and maize. Chicken coops, suspended from stilts, tilted in the clay, threatening to topple over altogether. At one of these outposts, an old man shuffled out of the bush, tightening a string around the top of ragged trousers. We greeted each other. The old man rubbed rheumy eyes and spat prolifically—he looked and sounded as if he had been smoked over a wood fire for a long, long time.
    “Mr. Banana?” I asked, pointing into the ever thickening country ahead of me.
    The old man adjusted his trousers and cleared his throat. “Ee,” he agreed, and then indicated that he’d like a cigarette. We stood together in the morning sun for the space of one smoke; then he turned and scuffed off into his hut and I returned to the track.
    I walked for another kilometer or two and then the feeble track that I had been following abruptly forked, the broader part of it peeling off to the left and the right petering out to an almost indiscernible footpath. The trees were varied and enormous here, great black-barked msasas and wide-bellied winter thorns. I took the left fork and kept walking.
    It was late morning by the time my ear caught the sound of men shouting in unison. It was the sound that I associate, in Zambia at least, with men doing work that in much of the rest of the world is done by machines. I hurried toward the noise and there, a few kilometers before the boundary to his farm, were K and a span of laborers. The men were stripped to the waist and were trying to shore up the greasy banks of a steep gorge with the great arms of a mopane tree. K was shouting orders in Shona and the men were scrambling and slithering in response, crying words of exertion and exhortation to one another: “Pamsoro, pamsoro, pamsoro! Sumudza!”
    The gorge was the kind of