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

she was. But you know,” said K, pressing his thumbs into the palms of his hands, “she had these huge knots in her tendons from holding on to the crutches. Her hands were like claws. So when I was fourteen—I was at high school in Que Que by then, in Rhodesia—the Old Lady went to have her tendons operated on in Bulawayo.” K sighed. “She was forty-four years old and she died on the operating table.”
    “Oh God.” I put my teacup down with a crash. “How awful.”
    K said, “The headmaster called me out of class. He said, ‘Your mother’s dead. You can take the weekend off.’ So that was a Friday. I went on the train to Bulawayo for the funeral. I met the Old Man there, and my sisters. On Monday I was back at school.”
    “That’s it?” I said.
    “Ja,” said K.
    “You must have been devastated.”
    K shrugged. “Ja, ja . Of course. It was a mission. But it was worse for Dad. He was a shell after Mom died. That’s when he left Zambia and moved to Rhodesia.”
    “You only had the weekend to get over your mom’s death.”
    K nodded.
    “Did you cry?”
    “Not really,” said K. “But all my hair fell out. Even on my head. I was so bloody cold that winter, I wore underrods on my head and the master gave me the cane because he thought I was trying to be clever. I wasn’t. I showed him—‘Sir, I’m bald. My bloody head’s freezing’—but he still gave me stripes. Although it’s grown back on my head now”—K rubbed his hand over his hair—“but nowhere else.”
    “How did your sisters cope?”
    “Okay, I think.”
    “Do you see much of them?”
    “On and off.”
    We drank tea in silence together for a while. The sun had fallen behind the escarpment and evening was starting to creep its way up from the river. “What are you doing tomorrow?” asked K suddenly.
    I looked at the pile of notes, the computer, the spilling ashtray, and the pyramid of old teacups on the veranda. “I should really try to do something about this,” I said.
    “Take a break,” he said. “Come out fishing with me.”
    “I can’t stand fishing.”
    “Then you sit in the boat and I fish.”
    “I don’t know,” I said, feeling guilty already and looking at my computer again.
    “Look, maybe a day away from it and you’ll come up with something to write.”
    I hesitated.
    “Come on. It’s too hot to work anyway.”
    “Okay.”
    “We’ll take your old man’s rig.”
    So, the next day, just after breakfast, K arrived with fishing rods, a hat, a cooler, and a basket of food (fruit from his farm mostly, with some vegetarian samosas from the truck stop at the bottom of the escarpment). He smeared sunscreen on my nose, put a hat on my head, and hurried me down to the canal that cuts up from the Pepani River into the fish farm.
    Dad’s boat is an old and ordinary banana boat, a bit leaky from the time a hippo bit it when Dickie, my brother-in-law, was out fishing over new year’s, but it works, more or less, and has the charmed river smells of mud, weed, fish, and sunscreen. The boat was loosely tied was in the middle of a canal. K scooped me into his arms and waded thigh-deep into the water and I closed my eyes and envisioned crocodiles, and then he deposited me on the cooler and pushed the boat out into the weak current.
    Where the canal met the Pepani, the current grabbed the nose of the boat and we were flung out into the wide expanse of river. I kept a wary eye on the hippos, which K appeared to be ignoring, and we motored downstream into the bright glare of water that swirled ahead. K fished and I read, cringing from the sun under a wide hat and a towel. If I shut my eyes I felt suspended in a hot bubble of peace; the water licking the edge of the boat, the creak of the hull, the sounds of K fishing, the occasional eerie cry from the fish eagles.
    We ate lunch pulled up on an island with our toes dug in the sandy beach, keeping half an eye on the boat, which was bellied up on a stretch of sand just