The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  He suffered most when sunlight shot through the windows of the hut and caught him on the face. In the night his teeth chattered. Though he was wrapped in a thickness of sheets—there were no blankets—he could not get warm. He continued dosing himself with chloroquine.

  “Quilt,” he said to Manyenga when one day the man’s face appeared in the wrinkles of the net, but the word meant nothing to him.

  He felt sorry for himself, became tearful. No one cared, but he was comforted by the sight of Zizi and the dwarf on his veranda, standing vigil, it seemed. He heard Manyenga’s voice, an assured murmur, and he envied the man his strength. But it was only a voice—he did not see him.

  When, before dawn one day, the fever eased, he could think more clearly, though he was still lightheaded and weak. The sickness made his situation plain, stripped it of sentiment. He saw the foolishness of his decision. He had come expecting to be welcomed; he’d wanted to contribute something to the village or the district. But no one was interested. Why should they care? They had managed very well without any amenities. They were much worse off than he’d seen them long ago, more cynical and somehow shrewder as a result. Cynicism had strengthened them.

  As a young man, he’d compared malaria to the flu, and in four or five days he’d ridded himself of it. Older, he found the ailment to be like a fatal disease. He lay in bed, too weak to stand, straining even to roll over, and his lack of appetite weakened him more. He understood how frail he was, and the danger of being sick in this remote village. His dreams were fractured and irrational, ugly beaked birds figured in them, crowds of noisy people, great heat. In one dream he imagined that he was visited. He heard inquiring voices, American ones; he heard a car, the thumping of a large vehicle in the compound, the straining of gears as it drove away. The nightmarish part of the whole episode was that he had been ignored.

  In his sickbed, he felt a clarity of mind and a sense of resolve. He’d made a mistake. As soon as he was feeling better he’d find a way of escaping from Malabo.

  Zizi brought him the tea and bananas he asked for, but it was an effort for him to eat. He kept on with his medicine. It consoled him to see her and the dwarf right outside, their heads silhouetted at the window.

  At last he was able to stand, to eat a little porridge.

  “I’m going,” he said, and was not sure whether he was speaking in Sena or English. He called to Zizi: “Get the chief.”

  Manyenga was soon striding across the brightness of the clearing, mopping his head, seeming relieved that Hock had recovered. Hock was standing in the shade of the veranda, swaying slightly, still unsteady on his feet. Behind Manyenga, her short legs working fast, a girl carried a pail of small greenish oranges and some dried fish wrapped in the torn pages of a South African illustrated magazine.

  “Eat, father,” Manyenga said.

  “I need to drink more. Bring me a kettle of hot water for tea.”

  Manyenga, suddenly fierce-faced, ordered the small girl to fetch the kettle. And then he relaxed and stood closer and inclined his head toward Zizi and said, “She likes you, father.”

  “Really?”

  “Too much.”

  “Zizi should be in school.”

  “But the school fees,” Manyenga said. “That is the badness.”

  Hock was too faint to reply and had to sit on the straight-backed chair on the veranda, where he slumped, breathing hard.

  “You must rest, father.”

  Then Hock remembered. In a croaky voice, he said, “I heard noise when I was sick. What was the noise?”

  “Kufafaniza imfa. A man died. His goods were taken. His house destroyed.”

  “You erased his death.”

  “You are so clever, father. You are knowing so much about our customs, eh-eh.”

  Hock said, “I have to leave. I’m going home.”

  “This is your home, father,” Manyenga said.

  Hock shivered as he had in the worst of his fever. He hugged his body, to warm himself, and moved to get his blood up, and that was when he saw the plastic crates. He recognized them as the containers of school supplies he’d asked the American consulate to send.

  “When did that come?”

  “The Americans fetched it here in their vehicle.”

  “Did you tell them I was here?”

  “You were so sick. We did not want to trouble you.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Ujeni,” Manyenga said—whatsit. “This and that.”

  Hock guessed that he had said nothing of his presence, nothing of Hock’s lying in the hut with a high fever.

  He went cold again, and he could not tell whether it was the recurrence of his fever or the faint brush of terror at feeling abandoned. Nothing that Manyenga had said was menacing, yet Hock was so weak, so feeble in response, he felt he was no match for Manyenga.

  “I have a very big question to ask you.”

  “Go ahead,” Hock said, “ask me.”

  “Not now. At the proper time. We will have a ten-drum ngoma tomorrow. Then—” He smiled and gestured with his hands, spreading his arms, meaning, it seemed, that all would become clear.

  After he had gone, Zizi peeled some of the oranges and put them in a tin bowl and served him. He gave some to the dwarf, who ate messily, chewing as he always did with his mouth open and grunting, his face and fingers smeared with the juice.

  Zizi ate with dainty grace, separating the orange segments, chewing, her eyes cast down.

  Refreshed by the fruit, having eased his stomach pain, Hock was suffused with a feeling of well-being, sitting in the shade, the sun whitening the earth, heating the motionless dusty leaves of the bushes next to the hut, curling the dead leaves on the ground. A strange conceit occurred to Hock as he straightened himself on his chair—that he was a chief, as they said, with his retainers, the serving girl and his fool, at his feet.

  “It’s time for me to go,” he said in English. “I have no business here.”

  The dwarf grunted. Perhaps he was muttering “Fee-dee-dom.” Pincering with the broken nails of two skinny fingers, Zizi covertly picked her nose, and Hock sat, finding a scrap of contentment in the absurdity.

  Remembering that his stash of money had been raided, he went back to the school the next day—the hot interior, the heaps of dead leaves—and poked around for another snake. He had let the twig snake go. He found a small puff adder and brought it back to his hut. He eased it into a basket and put his envelopes of money inside with it, saying “Mphiri,” making sure that Zizi and the dwarf saw what he was doing.

  Sleep and more fruit, and some bread with the dried fish, restored him. It only remained for him to get his strength back. Living there was a daily intimation of death, and these days he felt like a corpse. The fever had subsided, leaving him gaunt. I might have died, he thought, and reflected on Malabo as a terrible place to die—alone, in this heat, among strangers.

  PART III

  Downriver

  16

  THE TEN-DRUM NGOMA that Manyenga promised was announced by boys wagging torches of oil-soaked rags flaming on poles, and the boys, Hock saw, were two of the orphans who’d abandoned the work at the school. They’d scuttled away then; they were marching in a stately procession now. They beckoned, then turned to lead him, and with the torches held high, preceded him across the field to Manyenga’s, Zizi and the dwarf following.

  “Welcome, father,” Manyenga said, showing him to a chair and offering him a glass of nipa. The rest, all men and boys, were seated on the ground, a few cross-legged on woven mats. A piece of meat, an angular blackened leg, was dripping on a spit, and Manyenga’s elder wife was stirring a sludge of sodden, dark green leaves in a large tin pot. Several of the men were very old, staring into the fire, their eyes wild with the glow of the cooking fire, sputtering under the meat.

  “Goat,” Hock said. “Mutton.”

  “It is an impala for you,” Manyenga said.

  “You poached it.”

&nbs
p; “God provided this bush meat to us because we are hungry.”

  Manyenga introduced the men as chiefs from nearby villages, and Hock recognized them as some of the men he had met on his first day at Nyachikadza’s hut, when they had decided to cremate the small dead crocodile with the poisonous liver. He remembered his excitement at arriving at the Lower River; he was ashamed at the memory of his innocence.

  “And those boys,” Manyenga said.

  As he was waited on by women and small boys, the conceit he’d had the previous day of being like a chief returned to him. He sat contented, picking at the shreds of meat on his plate, hearing Manyenga praise him.

  “Now, father”—and Manyenga called one of the boys over. “This young chap is needing something to go to South Africa for work.”

  “Salani bwino,” Hock said, as a formal farewell.

  “But he is needing ndalama,” Manyenga said. He used a Sena word as a euphemism, because “money” was too blunt.

  The boy stood straight, bug-eyed with fear in the firelight, a scarecrow in his too big shirt and torn trousers, his bony wrists pressed against his sides. A yellow pencil stub stuck into his dense hair, the pink eraser protruding, was like a badge of scholarly seriousness.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Name of Simon.”

  “How will he go? Bus from Blantyre?”

  Manyenga rocked a little on his heels and grunted at the idea of such a straightforward way of traveling. The others shook their heads and clucked.

  “Down the river, father. From Magwero. Through the Dinde Marsh to Morrumbala. To Mozambique. Zambezi River. Then Beira side, if he is finding a lorry. Then catching a bus—and what, and what—to Maputo. Then—” Manyenga shrugged, hinting at much more. “A jinny, father. A challenge.”

  “How will he get to Magwero?”

  “Marsden will lift him on my motorbike tomorrow.”

  The very thought of such a trip, trespassing over borders, saddened Hock, as the thought of humble, perhaps hopeless struggle always did. He’d expected such struggle, but he hadn’t imagined so much would be expended in the effort of leaving Malabo and the Lower River. It made Malabo so remote. He was part of that remoteness.

  “How much?”

  “What you are willing, father.”

  Hock nodded, hoping to appear noncommittal, but he knew that they had read his mind. They were masterly at discerning the nuances of gesture, a mere eye blink or a way of breathing revealed a state of mind. It was not sorcery; they were illiterate, and so they could read perfectly with every other sense. Hock thought that anyone who said literacy made a person brighter was wrong. Being illiterate, not speaking a language well, out of your element and perhaps feeling insecure, unnerved, and suspicious—all these made a person much more observant.

  Because they saw that he had been moved by the boy standing there, and knew what he would do, they filled his glass again with kachasu and toasted him. They sent the unmarried girls, among them Zizi, to serve him more food, a cut of the impala meat, platters of grilled fish, and roasted slices of cassava.

  The older girls, including Zizi, were bare-breasted tonight. Hock felt that they somehow knew this nakedness meant more to a mzungu, that they were appealing to his foreigner’s weakness, teasing him and looking for a reaction.

  After the girls served him, the women sang, clapping their hands, and the girls sang with them, and danced before him, standing in a line. He knew some of the words: “Our father, our chief, our mzungu in Malabo.” Their skin shone with perspiration, and dust clung to it, creating a weird plastery cosmetic. Their growly harmonizing resonated in the pit of his stomach. He could separate Zizi’s voice from the others; it stirred something in him—a purring within him that answered her.

  On any other night he would have excused himself and crept across the clearing to his hut, flashing his torch. But he was the guest of honor—Manyenga kept calling him nduna, minister— and could not leave, could not rise from his chair, was not allowed to choose his own food. They insisted upon waiting on him, the eager men, the solemn girls, the skinny boys, the cackling women, filling his plate, topping up his glass.

  At last he called to the boy Simon, motioning him to his side. He gave the boy some money, folded under his fingers.

  Everyone saw. Manyenga said, “You are our nduna, dear father.”

  During the night, under the folds of his mosquito net, he conceived his plan. Then he dozed, and when he woke he thought it through again. It was so simple and spontaneous and seemingly foolproof he could not add to it or find a flaw. All he needed was an accomplice, and he knew he had one. After that, in his excitement, he could not sleep.

  Or perhaps he had fallen asleep. The bump and scrape of bare feet on the veranda planks startled him, made him remember his plan. He got up quickly, pushed the curtains of the netting aside, and whispered to the figure at the window.

  “Sister, come here. Inside.”

  But Zizi froze at the words, which she’d never before heard from him. He cracked the door open, reached for her wrist, and she allowed herself to be drawn into the room. Her hard fingers tightened in his as he tugged further.

  “Quick, get into the bed.”

  Her face swelled with thought and became expressionless. She drew in her lips and pressed down, and she wrapped herself in her skinny arms, confused but stubborn.

  Hock took her by her shoulders. Her skin was cool; she must have been crouching by the door awhile in the darkness. She dug her big toe against the floor. She was not resisting, she was bewildered. Quick, get into the bed!

  She allowed herself to be helped beneath the mosquito net, and she sat and drew her long legs under the damp sheet that served as a coverlet. It all happened so fast that in spite of himself Hock was aroused—there she lay, the skinny shaven-headed girl in his bed, her fists jammed under her chin, her eyes wide open, looking anxious but not fearful. But Hock felt less like a lover than a father, tucking his daughter into bed. She seemed fragile on her back, her head on the crushed pillow, so dark against the sheets.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Hock said. “Just stay here. If anyone knocks on the door, don’t say anything. Turn over, don’t let them see your face. Keep the net closed.”

  She raised her head a little. “You are coming back?”

  “Yes. I’m coming back to get you.”

  He kissed her lightly, and tasting the warmth on her lips, kissed her again, bumping her teeth in his eagerness. And for the first time in the course of making his plan he hesitated, considered abandoning it, to stay beside this pretty girl. She would have allowed him.

  “Don’t move,” he said.

  Zizi began to sing in her throat, a frantic murmuring, as she did when she was anxious.

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  He hated his lie, but it was the only way to get her to stay in the bed, under the mosquito net. And he hated his lie, too, because he was tempted to change his plan. In a crowded vision, standing in the hut, he was confronted by images of his life with her, the flight to Boston, his proud explanations to his friends: I’m her guardian. She deserves a better life. I knew her family. The clothes he’d buy—he saw her wearing them. He saw her sitting at his kitchen table drinking a glass of milk, saw her with an armful of books on the steps of a college. A good daughter. Smiling, because she seldom smiled here.

  Those thoughts made him grim as he picked up his bag and slipped into the darkness, locking the door behind him, passing behind the house, cutting through the maize patch, a roundabout way to the road. And then he walked fast, trying to make time before the sun rose.

  He reached the six-hut settlement of Lutwe as the sun, just bulging at the horizon, rinsed the darkness from the sky, and the day grew light, a pinky glow behind the trees, the sky going bluer. And before the sun blazed at the level of the low bushes Hock was at the crossroads. There he waited until he heard the rapping of the motorbike, and the warble of its rise and fall on the uneven road.
r />   Seeing him, the driver of the motorbike slowed and came clumsily to a skidding stop. The boy Simon was seated on the back.

  “Father,” said the driver—Marsden, Manyenga’s nephew, who’d been at the ceremony—and then he corrected himself, “Nduna,” and, correcting further, attempted “Meeneestah.”

  “I’ll take this boy to Magwero,” Hock said.

  Marsden said nothing but was clearly baffled. The engine was idling. He brushed at the flies settling on his face.

  “It’s all right,” Hock said. “You can walk to Magwero. Or you can wait here and I’ll pick you up on the way back.”

  “Chief Manyenga said to me—”

  “This is the revised plan,” Hock said. “The new plan.” His words made the boy blink, and he was still batting the flies.

  “The chief said—”

  “I’m the chief.”

  Marsden cut the engine, and both boys got off the bike, Marsden propping it on its kickstand as he swung his leg over. When Hock mounted it and stamped on the lever to start the engine again, the boys seemed bewildered. They backed away as though in fear from a thief, their thin bodies tensed in their loose clothes, on the point of fleeing.

  Hock said, “Get on, Simon, you have to catch your boat.”

  The boy got onto the back seat and steadied himself by holding Hock’s hips.

  “Luggages,” Marsden said, handing Hock his bag.

  “Thanks—almost forgot,” Hock said, and smiled. He’d begun to believe the lie he’d told them about coming back.

  “Maybe they’ll miss you at Malabo,” Marsden said. He knew it was forbidden for Hock to leave the village without supervision. Hock was theirs. The whole village knew that.

  “It’s all right,” Hock said. “They won’t miss me.”

  They’ll go to my house—and with this thought he saw them at the door, gingerly knocking—then see the lumped-up body under the mosquito net. They would whisper, “Sleeping,” and would go away. And not until midmorning, when Zizi got tired of lying with the sheet over her head and might be looking for Hock, would they realize that Hock had gone. By then he would be in the dugout, and the motorbike would be parked at Magwero, and the boy Marsden would be waiting under this tree at Lutwe, and in all this confusion Hock would be well into the marsh, headed downriver, passing Morrumbala into Mozambique. That was the plan.