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

guess you could say I lost that round. I had to bareka, or he was going to chaya me.” He sighed. “Man, I hate to lose.” Then he took a deep breath and leaned forward. “I get that from my mother,” he told me. “She was a cheeky one that. Incredibly determined. Half Greek and half South African—we used to say she was the Greek salad. You know, she was also an incredible athlete, my mom. Very competitive. She played hockey for South Africa.”
    “Under water?” I asked.
    “No, field,” said K. “When she was in her early twenties—right in the middle of her career as an athlete—she got polio. That was it, she was finished. She was a complete cripple. The doctors said she’d never walk again, but she was a stubborn woman. She could do anything she set her mind to. The doctor said she’d never have kids. She had three of us. Okay, she couldn’t have us naturally. But still she had us. She could get pregnant normally, but then she had to have cesareans to get us out. In Rhodesia in the fifties, that was a mission, I’m telling you. But that’s the kind of woman she was. She had absolutely no muscles left in her stomach. You must see photos of her—I’ll show you a photo of her sometime—she was completely collapsed on the side.” K held his hands out to the side as if cradling an enormous bulge of unrestrained stomach. “Her stomach went all the way out here and she was all tipping over sideways, but it never stopped her.”
    K lifted up his left leg with both his hands and let it drop. “That’s how she used to drive. She used to have to pick up her leg and drop it on the clutch or the accelerator or the brake. She only had two speeds in the car, flat out, or stopped dead.” K laughed. “People used to see her coming and they’d dive off the road.” He shook his head. “ Gondies flying into the ditches left and right. Everyone used to bail out when they saw the Old Lady coming their way. Oh man, I’m telling you”—K looked at me slyly to see if I was listening and smiled—“that’s when we were living on the farm in Kaleni, here in Zambia. Northern Rhodesia in those days. I was at boarding school in Matabuka. Shit, I hated it. I was only happy when I came home and I used to take my gun and a bit of biltong and bread and head out into the shateen all day. That, I loved. I’ve always loved the bush.
    “But school was another story.” K shook his head. “The house-mistress gave me stripes my first day of school for insolence—I was five years old. You should have seen”—K held up a thick thumb—“welts this thick on my arse . The Old Lady was cross about that.” K paused. “She went into the mistress’s office on Monday morning and she told her, ‘Beat the little bastard as much as you want. But I see welts on his rear again and you will regret the day you laid a finger on him.’ ”
    And then K got quiet and when he spoke again, his voice had lost its joking tone. “You know we went through three of the Old Lady’s wheelchairs. I used to tie them to the back of the tractor and take my sisters for rides over the tobacco fields. It was bloody funny until the wheels came off and then Mom would be furious and she’d say, ‘Wait till your father comes home,’ and then I’d shit myself, because Dad had a sjambok and Mom didn’t mind if he left welts on our backsides.”
    K continued, “Anyway, after we’d scribbled all the wheelchairs, Mom decided it was too expensive to keep buying the things for us to tear apart. So she taught herself to walk using crutches. She could get around okay, but if she fell down, she was finished. She had to lie there until someone came to help her. But she was also an incredibly proud woman—incredibly proud. If she fell down in the garden and the Old Man was out in the fields and my sisters and I were at school, she’d crawl, hand over hand, all day to get to the veranda rather than allow a gondie to lay a finger on her. That’s how proud