The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  Only as dawn was breaking, brightening the wide blades of elephant grass and the delicate tassels on the banks of reeds in the marsh at the edge of the river, and with the night animals dispersed—the feathered girlish shrieks of the birds seeming to drive them off—did he slump to the ragged mat at the back of the hut and sleep until the midmorning sun scorched his face.

  The thought of the tangle of children and the insolence of the cruel sharp-faced boy roused him. His bag served as his pillow. The sight of the leather and canvas bag, his companion since leaving Medford, moved him—it was bruised and worn, faded from Malabo, stained from the puddle of bilge and fish guts in the big dugout, wet from yesterday’s canoe, crusted with mud. It had the humble and mute look of loyalty; just a bag but also a talisman. It reflected the beating that he had taken. He snatched it up and felt stronger as he walked away from the hut, heading across the clearing and down the sloping path to the tall reeds. He knew the landing was there, and the Lower River that flowed south into the Zambezi. He’d find a boat, and a way out.

  The children had awakened, the fires were smoking and sending up smuts, and a blue haze of wood smoke curled in the windless air of the village. What had seemed at first to him an almost charming place of industrious and innocent children now was a vision of pure menace—stupid unreasonable children, and too many of them, hungry, irrational, impulsive, and somehow resentful, seeing him as an enemy. And the smoke stinging his eyes in the unbreathable air made it all worse.

  He expected one or two of them to interfere with him on his way to the riverbank. But as on the day before, they turned their backs on him. Why did it seem a greater hostility that they ignored him rather than faced him with insults? He was shamed by his memory of bantering with them like the silliest safari tourist, believing he could deal with children. His years of teaching had shown him that, misleadingly so. No, he was the father of an ungrateful and spoiled child—that’s who he was, and here were more of them.

  Yet in another sense these children were like a separate species altogether, feral and damned. A village of adults might have listened, might have been persuadable, might have understood his predicament, his need to get down the river and go home. But these children had an infantile indifference and probably no thought of him except when he was close by. They had no notion of his plight, perhaps no idea of what home or attachment meant; they were too small, too abused, too rat-like and lost. They had no sympathy, either, and if they seemed to him like an alien species—cold, weird, cruel, hungry, blighted, dim, with dirty feet—then he must have seemed to them like a hairy giant, big and pale, in a sweat-stained shirt, clutching a bag, who’d come ashore to pester them.

  A fat stick of wood landed near him, hard, clacking on the stones—someone had thrown it. He whirled around and saw a small boy laughing, and just in time to bat another stick away. What to do? It was foolish to lob a stick at one of these tormenting children, and when he reprimanded the laughing boy, saying, “Stop that!” the other children hooted at him. They were small and unafraid and looked compact and indestructible.

  So he walked on, and glancing back he saw a boy behind him, mimicking the way he walked, feet apart, arms swinging—and there was more laughter.

  The children were fearless. He walked faster, trying to be obvious in ignoring them, but when he got to the riverbank he saw that the canoe was gone. The river was dark green and depthless in the morning light. The buoyant clumps of ragged hyacinth—flowers and roots—in the wrinkles of current scarfing through the reeds showed the speed of the river’s flow. Swimming was out of the question. There were hippos, crocs, snakes, and just as dangerous, the burrowing bilharzia snails. The Lower River was as the people on its banks said—a snake, a poisonous one.

  A kingfisher came to rest on a reed, and there it swayed. When it flew off, Hock felt a pang at the ease of its departure. He hoped to see a passing dugout, the sort of boat that had brought him here. But he knew that because the border between Malawi and Mozambique was so close, this was essentially a no man’s land, avoided by most travelers and many fishermen.

  Unshaven and dirty, his shirt wet against his body, his trousers heavy with dampness, the cuffs muddy, he sat on his bag and batted at the mosquitoes around his head. Hunger, and the lumps of undercooked food he’d eaten the night before, made his mouth foul, his teeth slimy, and the morning sun slanting in his eyes made his head ache.

  The river surged past him, gulping and chuckling in the muddy hollows where it undercut the bank, and he was teased by its speed, seeing the torn vines spinning downstream. Meditating this way, he began to find his old composure, the strength he often felt in solitude. Yet he had to fight the other thoughts—that he’d been a fool to return to Malabo, that he should have raised an alarm there, that he’d abandoned Zizi with the lie “I’m coming back,” that it had been a mistake to attempt an escape downriver instead of to the boma at Nsanje.

  Breathing deeply, making his intake of breath a hopeful prayer, he calmed himself, vowing, I will find a way out and never come back. But at some point in this meditation he must have let out a sigh or a sob, a sound revealing of weakness, because no sooner had he released it than another sound rose as a mocking echo, and another, and a flutter of low laughter and tongue clicks and whispers.

  He turned and saw twenty gleaming faces, boys in front, girls behind them, some holding infants, all of them blocking the path. They laughed again, and now his heart beat faster, making him hotter.

  He stood, tottering, and began to move—he was at the edge of the bank—and they stood too, advancing on him, crowding him so that he had to step back. And when he slipped on the mud and struggled to maintain his balance, they advanced again, a low wall of chattering children in dirty shirts, pressing him back to the muddy lip of the embankment.

  The river flowed just below him, swirling against the two poles that served as a mooring, curls of green current encircling the uprights. While he watched, a large wide-winged dragonfly shot back and forth between the children and him, finally coming to rest at the top of one of the poles, where it became still and insubstantial. Then it flew off, and the sight of this insect floating freely through air, landing, then flitting away, gave Hock another pang and filled him with despair.

  Seeing that he had edged back, the children pushed forward as in a game, and now, standing at the bank, Hock’s heels were just above the water.

  He recognized some of the children—the girls he’d seen the day before tending the cooking fires; the small skeletal boy who’d mimicked his walk; the several girls carrying infants, drooling dirty-faced infants covered in brown flies; the small boys who’d been kicking the rag ball; the girl whom he encountered grilling the slices of cassava. He had spoken to some of them. None had been friendly, but neither had they been openly hostile. Where he was concerned, they had, it seemed, engaged in careless play. But now in a mass they were implacable, blocking the path, forcing him to inch backward, blank-faced in his helpless indecision. He hated them all, even the infants.

  He wished for a snake, any snake, big or small. Twig snakes and adders sometimes lurked at riverbanks, to pounce on mice or frogs. He would snatch up the snake and brandish it as a weapon. The children, who were not afraid of him, were terrified of snakes, and they’d run.

  They saw him searching the tufts at the embankment edge, and what he saw disgusted him: twists of their excrement and the crudded leaves, for this was also their latrine; they squatted here, too lazy to dig a pit near the village. And they were so small their bare bottoms did not extend far enough over the edge of the bank, so they fouled the edge where he was standing.

  “Enough,” he said, his voice an involuntary shriek, and raised his hand. “Go back.”

  He looked for pity in their hesitation, but soon they were laughing, and repeating, “Enough! Go back!”—Nuff! Go beck!—and thrusting their dirty hands at him, moving toward him, so near that he clung to the mooring posts while holding on to his bag.


  More children had gathered behind the ones in front, the first to arrive, and now there were thirty or forty in torn and dirty T-shirts—Las Vegas, Red Raiders, Willow Bend Fun Run, Rockland Lobster Festival. They were enjoying his fear, the sight of him growing frantic. They knew the river was deadly, filled with crocs and snakes and hippos, and if he fell, the steep side of the river would trap him.

  “Please,” he said in their language.

  Seeing his helplessness, his humiliation, they laughed, they screeched, they repeated the word, mimicking his nasal voice.

  He thought of lashing out, perhaps hurting one or two of them with a slap or a punch, but there were far too many of them, and if he injured anyone, he’d be in worse trouble. So far, all he had done was show up and be meek, but that had turned him into their victim.

  “I came to help you,” he said. “I want to give you something—anything. What do you want? I’m from America. I can get food, I can find money for you. A boat—I can get you a big boat. Or a well for water. I can bring a machine and drill a well for you. Lights, books, medicine, what do you want?”

  He had spoken slowly, ungrammatically, searching for the right words in their language. They recognized “food,” and “money,” and “boat,” and “medicine,” as he appealed to them in his begging voice. And for some seconds he believed he had them.

  The small boy who had mimicked him stood up and shrieked, “We want you to die!”

  “Yes, yes!” the chant went up. “Eenday! Eenday!”

  A clod of mud flew past him, and another hit his shoulder. He hoped it was only mud, though it stank like a turd and could easily have been one.

  They were all calling out now—“Die!” and “Yes!”—and delighting in the sight of the big unsteady mzungu, red-faced in dirty clothes, holding the tall mooring posts, gripping his bag, desperate before them. How many mzungus had they seen? Not many, perhaps none. And now, in a jeering crowd, they had no more fear than a dog pack and were prepared to push him over the edge and into the river.

  I’ll jump, Hock thought, not in those words but seeing the act, his frantic leap; I’ll take my chances in the river.

  He turned his back to position his feet, so he could brace and launch himself into the water. The current would take him quickly, and if he was lucky, he could climb the embankment farther downstream and hide from the children.

  Still he heard the shrieks and catcalls behind him, but there was another sort of shouting too, and when he glanced back he saw that the crowd of children was thinning out, and in the middle, on the path, the boys in sunglasses were kicking at them, scattering them, making room for Hock to move to a safer part of the embankment, away from the crumbling edge.

  For a panicky moment he feared they’d rush him, topple him into the river. It would have been so easy, but the tallest of the three, the sharp-faced boy in the Dynamo Dresden baseball cap, who had sold him his dinner the night before, stuck his hand out—in an unfriendly way, a perfunctory grip—yanking him forward onto the path.

  “Thank you,” Hock said with a sob, half grateful, half resentful that he was thanking them. In his heart he hated them, but he was so afraid his hatred would show, he approached them with exaggerated mildness.

  The boy had started down the path, Hock following.

  “Why did they want to hurt me?”

  “They are children. They don’t care about you.”

  “But I can help them.”

  “How can you help them?”

  “Food,” Hock said. “Money.”

  “They are having food. And there is nothing to buy.”

  “Water,” Hock said. “A well.”

  “We have the river.”

  “What does the government give you?”

  “There is no government here,” the boy said, and there was a malicious smile in his voice when he added, “We are the government.”

  Now they were back at the clearing, and the children were watching Hock walking just behind the big boy, the two other boys walking casually to the side. Hock was looking for protection, hoping that the children would keep away. He was terrified of them, for their utter recklessness, and he rationalized his fear as no different from a fear of insects or vermin or the fatal bite of the smallest viper, a night adder.

  “I could arrange for a school here.”

  “They hate school.”

  “They could learn English, like you.”

  The boy turned his sharp-featured face on Hock and made a cruel mouth. “I don’t want them to learn English like me. I don’t want them to learn anything.”

  The two other boys sniggered, hearing this.

  “Where are their parents? Where are their elders?”

  “Dead. All dead.”

  There were orphans’ huts in Malabo. And Hock had heard of children’s villages, the result of the spread of AIDS in the country. He had imagined them structured and supported by the government, not wild and improvisational like this, reverted to semi-savagery, living hand to mouth, foraging, and yet defiant as some animal packs were defiant, and self-sufficient like those same packs.

  “Some of these children are having the eddsi disease as well. If they bite you, you will die.”

  This the boy said slowly, becoming amused, laughing as he finished the sentence, though Hock thought only of the fatal bite of the night adder.

  They left him alone the rest of the day, and the whole of the following day. He heard the children laughing—screeching. He sat in the space they had given him, hoping that they were ignoring him and not plotting against him. He had no way of telling. At intervals the children crept near to watch him. Hock took some consolation at the sight of fire finches in the branches near his hut and the metallic call of the tinkerbird, which he heard but could not see. As for the children, they were the youngest, the dirtiest, and they simply stared at him with hungry faces.

  In retrospect, he was afraid of the children, and when he saw two of the big boys approach him in the dusk he felt a fluttering of fright in his heart like a trapped bird.

  “Your friends are coming, this boy says.”

  “What do you mean?” He backed away. He didn’t want the boy near him.

  “This boy”—a lean, exhausted-looking boy in ragged shorts lurked behind him—“he says they are coming.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Who is coming?”

  “Your people.”

  The boy seemed at once milder, kinder, much less of a threat. He was holding bananas, a cluster of four. These he gave to Hock.

  “My people?” Hock took a breath but could not calm himself. “When?”

  “Just wait,” the boy said, and pointed casually at the last of the sunset—shreds of purple, layers of darkening velvet lit by glints of gold, sinking under the darkness, making Hock sadder. “We will see them.”

  On the third day, the boy wearing the Dynamo Dresden cap and sunglasses kicked through the small gathering of watching children and said, “You, mzungu.”

  “Don’t call me mzungu.”

  “I will call you Old Man.”

  Hock glared at him, then gestured to the children. “What do they want?”

  “They want you to go.”

  Hock took a stride to come abreast of him and said in a heated whisper, “I want to go. Let me go. You said you don’t want me here.”

  But the boy wouldn’t look at him, or if he was looking at him Hock couldn’t tell, because the sunglasses did not reveal his eyes. All he saw was the sour disapproving mouth.

  “That was the other day. That was previously.” He spoke the syllables separately like a whole sentence.

  “I’d like to know where you learned English,” Hock asked again.

  “From your people.”

  “I don’t have any people.”

  “Yes, yourself you are having. They are coming. That is why we want you to stay.”

  “They’re coming here?”

  “We will see.”

  “When are they comi
ng?”

  “We will see.”

  Hock had often been frustrated by Sena-speaking people, with all their euphemisms and evasions, but much worse was his trying to make sense of conversing with someone like this Sena boy, for the fact that the boy spoke English reasonably well was a barrier to any understanding and only maddened him more. There was a point where a reasonable command of English made someone like this punk in sunglasses incomprehensible.

  “I’m hungry,” Hock said. “I’ll need food.”

  The boy said nothing, only raised his face to the sky, seeming to listen, and in this posture, looking up, distracted, appeared disapproving of Hock, as though he were an annoyance, an inconvenient straggler, an adult alien in a village of children, on the Lower River, in the marshes that were neither Malawi nor Mozambique, without a road or a well or, as far as Hock could tell, any garden.

  Keeping his hand on the flap of his bag, Hock said, “But I can’t give you any more money.”

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “I must have some food,” Hock said.

  What was missing in this boy was any sympathy, none in his two companions, none in the children, in the entire village. Simple pity was something he had taken for granted in Malabo: the recognition that he was alone, stranded, far from home, in need of help. These children were feral and had no use for him, and that was worse than being exploited in Malabo. They were mind-blind and reckless.

  In a low pitiless voice, without turning, the boy said to him, “Give your knife.”

  “I don’t have a knife.”

  “The knife from last night.”

  Before his meal, in a feeble attempt to tidy himself, he’d sat cross-legged and clipped his fingernails, then carved the dirt from beneath what remained. He had no idea that anyone had seen him engaged in this sad little ritual of grooming with a chrome fingernail clipper.

  Careful to remove it from his bag without showing any of the contents, he slid out the clipper and handed it over.

  “The food,” Hock said.

  “They will bring.”