The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  Later, at the hut he had been assigned, the girl who brought him the tin plate of roasted cassava and the few bananas was one he recognized as being part of the jeering mob at the riverbank. That she was subdued, almost deferential, kneeling as she served the dish, made her seem more defiant and untrustworthy.

  “Chai,” Hock said.

  She sniffed to show she understood, rocked to her feet, and was away for a few minutes, returning with an enamel mug of hot water into which some tea leaves had been scattered. That it was hot satisfied Hock, who feared the foul water of the Lower River.

  After he finished his meal he sat in the open doorway of the hut, and when darkness fell he listened to the sounds of the children playing discontentedly, or mildly quarreling, screeching now and then, the shouts of boys, the protests of girls. And later, in the silence of the night, afraid to sleep in the doorless hut, he sat, grieving for himself. He remembered slights that had been inflicted on him—not here or in Malabo, but in his marriage, in Medford, in his business, as he had the previous night.

  Instead of brooding about Malabo, his sudden escape, the theft of his radio by Simon, or about the treachery of the boy paddlers who had delivered him here to the village of teasing children and hostile bug-eyed boys, and the heat, the dirt, his hunger and thirst—instead of this, he thought only of the injustices he had suffered in his life.

  The trickery of his wife, who had foisted that expensive phone on him and used it to pry into his privacies. And then, after more than thirty years, she had demanded the family house, his father’s house in the Lawrence Estates, forcing him into a condo in the old high school. And her repeated messages on his answering machine: “You shit.” Chicky demanding that he hand over her inheritance: “I want my cut now.” When he gave her the check he said, “I doubt that I’ll be seeing much of you from now on.”

  As those bad memories coursed through his mind, keeping him awake, grinding his teeth, slighter ones intruded—hurts, insults, snubs. “Four eyes,” “Fairy,” “You suck,” at school. The guidance counselor saying, “Maybe your father will give you a job, because if not, you’re not going anywhere.” A woman in college English tittering because he’d mispronounced the word “posthumous.” One of his customers saying, “You’re rounder now,” meaning that he’d put on weight—and the man who said it was fat. The new salesman who’d gotten a salary advance (“My rent’s due”) saying, “You can take it out of my first paycheck,” but he never showed up to work again. Not villains, but deadbeats, mockers, smirkers. “You’re still working for a living?” Teachers in grade school who’d singled him out—“See me after school”—and all the women who’d rejected him, batting his hands away. The lies he’d been told now came back to him, little twisted evasions that remained unresolved and niggling at him. Like his father, he’d been a trusting soul. He believed “I’ll definitely come tomorrow” and “I’ll fix it” and “That’s the best price I can offer you.” The pretty clerk who blocked the employee toilet with her sanitary pad, then denied it. The shoddy batch of socks from China, the repeated telephone message on the answering machine of the men who owed him money, or a delivery, until he called and got “This number has been disconnected and is no longer in use.”

  And there was his incriminating phone, the one he’d thrown into the Mystic River because it was full of compromising emails. The thought of those emails shamed him, those whispers, those confidences, flirting and foolish. He had betrayed himself with people he’d trusted with his inner thoughts, people to whom he had confided his love of Africa. “The best years of my life,” he’d said, and they’d responded, “Cannibals and communists” or “Human life means nothing there,” in an echo of doom-doom-doom, and he’d lectured them on their peculiar folkways and pieties. “I was in Malabo, on the Lower River . . .”

  All of this, and more, all night.

  19

  HE WAS CLINGING to a steep black mountainside that resembled Morrumbala. Gripping the seams of crumbling rock with his fingertips, his arms extended in an attitude of crucifixion, he had hoisted himself up the cliff face to a narrow ledge, no more than a toehold, hugging a plastic bag that bulged with a yellowish drinkable liquid, and the fat-bellied bag swelled so tight it might burst at any second. He wore boots and a harness. He pushed open a steel door in the granite wall but saw that the space was not wide enough for him and the bag to fit through. Someone was with him, a hovering figure who looked like Roy Junkins, but he was dressed in a three-piece suit and seemed doubtful, canted sideways in an ironic posture on the ledge.

  “Won’t work,” Hock said to the skeptical man standing beside him.

  “The bud.” That word woke him. The sun burned against his aching eyes, the light that had colored his desperate dream.

  “The bud.”

  No sooner had he heard the word than he saw on the hot branch behind the boy’s big shadowy head the budded protrusions, some like dark spear points and some plump swollen ones, seeming on the verge of bursting.

  “What are you saying?”

  “Ndege.”

  “Bird,” Hock said.

  “Bard,” the boy said.

  “What about it?”

  “Is coming.”

  In Hock’s sleepy blur of confusion the words made no sense to him. He rolled over and the mat crunched with a chewing sound. He had been more content in his dark mountainside dream than here in the corrosive sunlight and damp earth of this hut in the village of children. He yearned to sleep again, to return to his dream.

  “Mzungu,” the boy said.

  “Don’t call me mzungu!” His own shriek startled him and made him angrier. In his rage he was also objecting to the hut, which stank of mice and sour fermented straw and spilled beer suds.

  The boy stepped back, shocked by Hock’s loud shout of protest. He was not the biggest boy, but one of the three leaders, who usually sulked behind his sunglasses.

  “Ndiri ndi njala!” Hock shouted, louder than the first time, encouraged by the boy’s apparent fear. Hock pounded his stomach and made an animal noise of complaint.

  “And me myself I am hungry,” the boy said in a low voice.

  “Bring me food,” Hock said.

  “The ndege will bring food.”

  Hock smiled at the word. He said, “Mbalame,” because that was the proper Sena word for bird, and ndege was—what?—Swahili?

  “Tea—hot water,” Hock said, still angry at having been woken from his dream. Dreams were a refuge, and though you might be afraid, you never died or felt pain. But this village was a problem, with no path and no way out. “Don’t tell me you have no water,” Hock said to the hesitating boy. “You drink the river!”

  Without saying more, the boy walked away, and after ten minutes or so a small girl brought a tin cup of hot water with a residue of broken tea leaves at the bottom.

  As Hock drank he could see at the center of the clearing the biggest boy hectoring a group of children, more children than Hock had seen before, gathered together—more than had hounded him at the riverbank. And some stragglers were still joining this group that sprawled like a church congregation. It seemed a suggestion of order in a place that Hock associated with disorder and incompleteness: idle vindictive children living like bush mutts in the ruins of an adult village, where none of the basket granaries contained maize cobs and the gardens were merely wild untended clumps of cassava. The children stood in their dirty T-shirts and ragged shorts, some of them older girls wearing chitenje wraps, all of them listening impassively to the vehement speech.

  In his earlier years on the Lower River, such a large gathering of children would have filled him with hope—for their attentiveness, their solemnity, and what he knew to be their strength; even hungry and tired, they worked and could be joyous. Now he saw the children as dangerous, defiant, without sympathy or sentiment or any memory. The previous day they had been on the point of pushing him into the river with the force of their small skinny bodies, laughing at his plight. T
hey would have screamed in delight to see him thrashing in the green water.

  He was still bitter but would not allow himself to hate them anymore, and only thought, Let them squirm, and wished to be away, anywhere but here.

  The tall sharp-faced boy went on speaking to them in a fierce formal manner, gesturing with his fist. Hock wondered whether he was the subject of the speech—he listened for the word mzungu but did not hear it. The word ndege was repeated: bird, but what bird? He could only think that it was something to eat.

  A girl in a torn T-shirt walked past Hock’s hut carrying a basket of bananas. Hock snapped his fingers and, surprised, the girl stopped and knelt in an obedient genuflection and handed him two bananas. Alone, she seemed frightened, though he recognized her—her T-shirt, rather, Minnesota Vikings—from the previous day, when she had been one of the jeering pack of children at the riverbank.

  To make the moment last, Hock peeled one banana slowly with his fingertips and nibbled it, eyeing the distant crowd of children from the shade of his hut. He was impressed by the silence and concentration of the children, and fearful, too, that such a large number could be controlled by the single older boy.

  And in the running commentary in his head, his narrative of the misery he’d put himself into, he thought how the worst of it was not the dirt or the heat or the thirst—though they wore him down; and not the insects or the bad-tempered children; but the uncertainty, not knowing at the beginning of each day how that day would end.

  This thought was cut off by movement at the periphery of his vision, a sliding line at ground level that bunched and swelled and grew longer, through the crackling dead leaves, a bluey-green snake, a spotted bush snake from the look of it.

  In the snake he saw a friend, a savior, a weapon, a creature that had come to protect him; something he could keep, something he could eat. And he smiled at the snake. He was not alone anymore.

  Yanking its tail, he shook it, snapped it hard enough to slacken its coil—though he could have whipped its head off with a violent jerk. And, allowing it to strike, he caught it behind its head as it leaped full length. Holding his arm up, he let the snake coil its body around his forearm. It was a juvenile bush snake, a meter long at most, the nub of its hard tail tickling his biceps.

  Finished with his harangue, the boy—still wearing his black Dynamo baseball cap and sunglasses—started toward Hock’s hut. Some children followed close behind him, walking with unusual solemnity. Seeing them approach, Hock held his snake- enclosed arm behind his back.

  “We are going,” the boy said.

  “Where?”

  “Never mind,” the boy said, and as he spoke, the children, sensing a confrontation, looked eagerly for Hock’s reaction.

  Hock said, “Because my friend wants to know,” and he repeated it in a nastier tone in Sena, so that the children could hear.

  Even in his sunglasses the boy showed that he was baffled, chewing his lips, flexing his fingers.

  “What friend are you talking?”

  When Hock swung his arm into view from behind his back, and lifted it, thickened with the snake, holding the snake’s head with his fingers so its pinkish-green tongue darted from between its fangs, the boy drew back and some of the children screamed—screams that silenced the rest of them. And then the snake’s pale throat swelled, because it was alarmed.

  Hock held the snake like a ferocious glove, a gauntlet, that was both armor and a weapon. Though the children were terrified into silence, their cries had attracted the attention of the others who had gathered to hear the speech. Soon Hock faced forty or more children, and the bigger boys. But all of them kept their distance.

  “Now we go,” the bigger boy said, controlling himself, backing up slightly.

  “Tell me where,” Hock said, and held out the snake’s head. “Tell him. Tell my friend. Tell the njoka.”

  “The football pitch.”

  “Call me bambo.”

  “Father,” the boy said, faltering with his tongue that was thickened from fear. He stepped aside, making room for Hock.

  None of them—neither the children nor the three leaders— came near him then. And he, the helpless victim, despising himself for being dirty, having put himself in this position, in an underworld of cruelty, was strengthened by clutching the snake’s head, loving its frothy jaws and its curved fangs and its flicking tongue. When he swung it around and reached with his free hand to pick up his bag, the children screamed again and fell against each other.

  They skipped past him, the jostling mob of them, and filtered through the thin bush of dusty yellowing acacia trees, the claws of their overhanging sticks and stems, all of the children barefoot. Ahead, the three leaders called out, “Msanga!”—Hurry!—so odd a command here in the stifling bush, under a hot sun. There was no clear path, but the thorn bushes and stunted mopane trees were sparse enough to allow them to pass through, creating a network of separate paths. And where the bush was dense the crowd of children narrowed into a single file, moving under the shallow canopy of brittle leaves, beating down a path in the whitened dust.

  The snake contracted in coils around Hock’s arm, keeping its throat inflated, because of the confusion. Hock kept to the rear, where some children muttered anxiously, frightened by the sight of Hock holding the snake.

  The land was so flat and obscured by the low bush it was impossible for Hock to see ahead. Because he was so much bigger than these children, who slipped under the stinging barbs on the skinny branches, he was forced to duck and sway and sidle along. His size, he now saw—his being an adult—was no help but only a great handicap among the children, who were numerous and ruthless, indifferent to his misery, and quick to take advantage of him.

  His only asset was the snake, though his arm was heavy and hot with its weight, and slimy from its closely clinging body. His bag, swinging in his free hand, bumped against his leg. Yet he had no choice but to follow, and he suspected that they were nearing their goal, because he heard more shouts from up ahead.

  Some children near him sang softly as they padded forward, and he thought of Zizi, how she sang in her throat when she was anxious. He grew sad and sentimental, hearing the humming, seeing the children’s dusty legs and torn shorts, and he reminded himself that these same children had wanted him drowned and dead.

  Just before noon, after almost two hours of walking, they came to a grove of trees that tickled and scratched his head, and he stepped past them into the margin of an open field, where the children had begun to gather.

  He saw that another group of children—from where?—had ranged themselves along the far side, in the ribbon of shade cast by protruding branches. These children crouched, they sat, they knelt; none was standing. The whole straight side of this extraordinary empty rectangle of parched grass in the bush, about the size of a football field, was dark with other waiting children.

  Approaching the boy in the black baseball cap, Hock was surprised when the boy touched his sunglasses nervously and stepped away. Hock smiled, holding the snake’s head, and lifted his arm with the coils that had tightened into bulgy armlets.

  “Where are we?”

  The boy crept backward as he spoke. “We are being in the bush.” It seemed in his fear that the boy’s assured command of English was diminished, as he spoke haltingly, with a stronger accent. “At the football pitch.”

  “What do you do here?”

  “Sometimes we are challenging them.” He nodded at the children seated and kneeling at the far side of the field. “We play football. We dance. We fight.”

  “Whose field is this?”

  The boy hesitated until Hock raised the snake at him, and then the boy shrugged and said, “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On who wins.”

  “So it’s a battlefield,” Hock said. “And you fight with fists?”

  “With hands. With sticks of wood. With weapons.” He said steeks, he said wee-pons.

  Hock said, “I rea
lly want to know where you learned English.” The boy was still stepping back, seemingly reluctant to answer. Hock said, “I used to teach English.”

  “It is not hard to know English,” the boy said, almost with contempt.

  “What’s hard, then?”

  “To have food is hard. To have medicine. To have a mobile phone. To have good weapons.”

  Saying this, he stared at the snake that Hock held before him, leveled at the boy’s face: the snake’s lipless mouth and dead unblinking eyes and flicking tongue.

  “You will die if he bites you,” the boy said.

  “Or you,” Hock said. He saw more children entering the field from one of the shorter sides. “Who are they?”

  “From the big marsh,” the boy said.

  And they too hugged the shade at the edge, for the sun was directly overhead and the flat dusty field of dry grass was so hot that the watery illusion of shimmering heat rose from the brownish bare patches at its center.

  “What do we do now?”

  “Just wait,” the boy said, almost meekly, backing up, and then he turned and walked quickly away.

  Hock felt he had lost all contact with his other life, or any other place, and he was reminded of his feeling that he now existed in another age, on another planet, as a despised fugitive, and not on the surface of that planet but on a river in an eerily lit underworld.

  And wait for what? Some sort of spectacle? A game, maybe, an event, because all the children had arrayed themselves like spectators—solemn, expectant, facing the open field. The field had no road leading into it, but merely lay, a great trampled expanse of sun-heated dust and tussocks of grass, a deliberately cleared acre that, in its symmetry and blight, was the work of human hands. He hoped they hadn’t come for a battle, yet their look of weariness and hunger made them seem desperate and unpredictable.

  Dizzy with hunger himself, Hock sat, easing his grip on the snake. Holding it gave him confidence; he could face the children without flinching; he could ask questions. Yet he feared the recklessness of children, and he knew in spite of the snake that he would be overwhelmed by their numbers.