There was no traffic. I was so exhausted from my ordeal that I fell asleep on the veranda of the immigration hut, until one of the soldiers woke me, several hours later.
“There is a truck going through to Malawi,” he said.
Sure enough. A big blue rig, with a full load of something, had pulled up to the gate.
“Are you going through to Malawi?” I asked the black balding driver.
“Yes, but passengers are prohibited,” he said, averting his eyes.
“Oh” was all I had left.
The soldier who woke me told me to “cross.” I crossed, changing the last of my Zimbabwean dollars into Mozambique currency, with the same guy that endorsed my visa.
“Wait outside,” he said. I waited.
The big blue whale’s driver pulled up to get his visa endorsed. He saw me and looked away. Just as he put the whale into gear again, he glanced back, and then down. His shoulders caved, and he shook his head. He put his right thumb up and came up for air, smiling.
My Cape Mart diver’s bag flew into the back of his cab, just a little faster than I landed in the passenger seat. And we were off. The Mozambique border officials were all waving in my rear-view mirror.
The driver’s name was Jonah. He was driving from Jo’burg to Blantyre in Malawi. It was a dangerous trip through an intensifying war zone, but this was the shortest route and he had done it countless number of times without incident. There was no reason to believe that this time would be any different. I didn’t think it important enough to tell him that my karma had not really been firing on all cylinders.
Mozambique was poor. We passed giant baobabs, upside down-looking elephant skin bottle trees, their branches like roots. The Bushmen believed that the baobab had offended God and, in revenge, he planted them upside down. Bats, inadvertently crashing into them while chasing insects, pollinated their flowers. Worse than the intentional pollination of cardon cactus in Mexican Baja, this place was even more batshit crazy.
Among the baobabs were scattered thatched round mud huts. Half-naked women squatted to defecate in sparse gardens. I didn’t see any men. There were fires everywhere, for no apparent reason. Renamo forces had razed clinics and schools, and the South Africans had been raiding ANC bases relentlessly. Jonah didn’t say much at first, but I thought it was because he was being vigilant. The tires rolled the miles.
We pulled into Tete at sundown. Jonah knew the one remaining restaurant in town. I bought dinner- four dollars of overdone goat, overcooked noodles, and two beers, impressive for their size. But they were just another Mozambique illusion, weak, old and sour, like the fat Portuguese colonial remnant at the next table, who upbraided us for abandoning him to history. I pointed out to him, that it clearly had nothing to do with Jonah, and that I had been otherwise occupied when FRELIMO plunged the country into a war of ‘liberation’. I didn’t feel sorry for him. He should have left that table years ago.
“Let’s go,” said Jonah, wiping his mouth. We went.
Through miles and miles of potholed savannah, and into dark jungle, we were stopped frequently at makeshift chain roadblocks by partially clad paramilitaries with all kinds of weapons. One aimed a rocket-propelled grenade at my head, while Jonah handed out cigarettes and bottles of cheap rum. I thought it was overkill. The full moon was gorgeous and I almost forgot that, in the silent silver beams it flooded over the regenerating forests, we were in a troubled land. I could see Jonah getting tired. I asked if I could help by taking over for a while. Initially, he told me it wasn’t permitted. Later, he asked if I could drive an eighteen-wheeler. He rolled prone, into the space behind the driver’s seat, and I took over. He told me to pull over into a clearing that would be marked by a large fire, in about twenty kilometers. And there I found me. After my undergraduate education with a U-Haul truck to Vancouver, and a pink Cadillac to Los Angeles, I was doing my post-doctoral fellowship, driving the big blue whale through war-torn Mozambique in the moonlight. Sometimes you arrive before the end of the journey.
The entire tribe of half-naked villagers, that had built the signal fire for Jonah, wasn’t expecting a post-doc white mzungu, driving the big blue whale. By the firelight, I saw their eyeballs widen all at once in a collective double take. They retreated some distance, but crowded back around the truck, when Jonah emerged from the back of the cab. He was bringing gifts of sustenance. A few bags of mealie meal were unloaded off the back of the big blue whale, not so many as anyone in Jo’burg would really notice. I wondered why here, why this village, out of so many others in similar need. The little girl hugging Jonah’s right leg answered the question. And the woman holding the other side of him. It was the vulnerable side they were holding, and he was clearly uncomfortable revealing it.
We left an hour later, swapping off the driving every couple of hours. It was my turn when it happened. I heard the ‘ping’ of the chain break, but I honestly hadn’t seen the roadblock until it was two late. The windshield and the passenger side window disappeared in an explosion of falling glass. I looked up at the hole where the decals used to be. A pair of big feet with splayed toes was standing on the wipers. I looked up further, into the final wisp of smoke coming off the barrel of his AK-47.
“Tem cigarillos?” he said.
“Jonah?” I said.
“What?” He didn’t really want to come out from behind my seat.
“Tell me we still have some smokes.”
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Image: ChatGPT remixed