War Wounds; Alexandra Fuller's memorable tangle with a heart of darkness.(Scribbling the Cat)(Book Review)

Byline: Malcolm Jones

Alexandra Fuller remembers precisely the moment that "Scribbling the Cat" got tricky. "I was sitting in the Denver airport three years ago," she said in a phone interview from outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she lives with her husband and two children. She was reading over a draft of a story that would run in The New Yorker about a white African--an ex-soldier in the Rhodesian Army and a born-again Christian. "The magazine had asked for 6,000 words and already I was up to 30,000, and sitting in the airport I felt sick when it hit me that to tell the story, I was going to have to write about myself the way I'd planned to write about this man." Doing it right, she realized, meant telling the reader, "There's a piece of him that you see as vulnerable and only I saw that piece, because he had decided he was in love with me. And in a bizarre way, it was this love story. Part of me felt true love for him. And part of me was utterly, utterly horrified."

"Scribbling the Cat" describes the racked friendship of Fuller, 35, and the man she calls simply K, as they travel through Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique. An extended version of The New Yorker article, it is no more a simple profile of an ex-soldier than Fuller's first book, the acclaimed best seller "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight," was merely a memoir of growing up. That book was all about growing up wrong as the child of parents on the white-supremacist side of the Rhodesian civil war in the '70s. "Scribbling" is about what happens ...