The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  He did not know whether this trackless bush was in Malawi or Mozambique, only that if he were abandoned by Manyenga, he’d never find his way out or he’d be caught by the children again. And reflecting on Manyenga’s sudden showing up in the field, he had to admit he was glad. The children had frightened him for being hungry and ruthless and fickle and unreasonable—for being children. They resented Hock, but Manyenga needed him, and that need could work to Hock’s advantage. The children lived sparely, like animals, and they were especially dangerous because they had nothing to lose.

  Hunched over the front of the motorbike like a workman digging a street, the bike itself resembling a jackhammer in the pounding of its front fork, and jumping in the ruts, Manyenga sped through the bush, Hock clinging to his doggy shirt. They came to a dry streambed, a bouldery trench lined with sand and stones, just a rough sluice that showed the disfigurement of rushing water and exposed rocks.

  Hock got off and helped guide the bike over the big rocks.

  “Is this Malawi or Mozambique?” Hock asked.

  “It is having shrines there—sacred groves—and fugitives, and fruit trees. There used to be a mission on the Matundu Hills side, but they ran away. Maybe you can say it is Zambesia. But this is no country at all.”

  “No man’s land.”

  “No man’s land! Ah-hah!” Manyenga roared. “No man’s land!”

  Hock remembered that he’d always seemed like a witty genius to his students in Malabo when they heard him utter a cliché for the first time.

  After the streambed they entered higher ground, where the mopane trees were fuller of leaves—greener and taller, and their shade gave the impression of coolness. Sausage trees, too, stood with their bulbous fruit suspended. The birds were bigger and more numerous here, keeping to the upper branches of the trees. Hock knew the starling from its purple feathers, and the gray lourie from its cry: go-away, go-away. In one thicket of yellow-striped bamboo he saw the hanging nests of weaver birds. The leaf mulch crackled under the wheels of the bike; the earth was denser and kept moist by the shade. No dust cloud followed them now, only the blue fumes of the engine.

  A small impala bounded away from them, and soon after, at the base of a tamarind tree, a troop of baboons backed away and fled on all fours like dogs, faces forward, using their knuckles for propulsion. Some of his anxiety left him, and Hock was reassured by this more orderly and fertile green Africa of shadows and animals.

  Deeper in the bush a dampness softened the air, the whiff of stagnation that was a suggestion of life. A dark green moss like a scouring pad coated some of the big boulders in the shade, and in places boulders blocked the path. They pushed the bike awhile, Manyenga panting, and Hock wondered if this higher ground was part of the Matundu Hills that Manyenga had mentioned.

  “So what—?” Hock began.

  “The answer is no,” Manyenga said. He laughed, his usual cackle. “What’s the question?”

  Who taught him that rude reply? What bullying foreigner said that to him, to sour him and show him how to be mean?

  In this higher ground of ridges and sheltering trees, with a film of dampness clinging to the dark overhangs of the empty creekbed, Hock felt he was in another country—at least nowhere near the Lower River; far from Malabo, another zone altogether. He could breathe the air without snorting a hum of dust in his nostrils, and none of the trees looked as if they’d been interfered with—no paths either, not even the tracks of motorcycles. It was odd to see a sunny slope of sand without footprints on it, though in one corner he caught a glimpse of a fat furtive monitor lizard. The land was too stony and steep for a garden, too far from the river or any well to support a village. The heat and mud and scrubby bush and accessible water of the Lower River made it habitable, but these slopes of thick trees and toppled rocks and shade kept people away.

  Gaining the top of a ridge, Hock felt the breeze on his sweaty face, as though he’d stuck his head above a fence into a wind. He looked across at what must have been the Matundu Hills, a silhouette of rounded peaks in blue haze. Below was a circular valley, a green bowl of foliage. Behind him, Manyenga was pushing the motorcycle slowly, bumping over tree roots and the protruding knuckles at the base of thick-stemmed bushes.

  “Do you see it?” Manyenga asked.

  “The valley?”

  “The compound.”

  “What compound?

  All that Hock saw were the smooth sides of the valley and a profusion of bushy treetops, and the word that came to him, because he was so unused to seeing such a lush unspoiled valley, was “uneaten.” He could not see any road in or out, no gardens, no cultivation, nothing dead or burned, only the great bowl of green trees.

  “There,” Manyenga said, “that side.”

  A glint of silver metal, a glimpse of geometry, a fence; and then he saw it, an enclosure, perfectly square, though some of it was hidden, two of its corners. At this distance it looked like a cage in the form of a playpen, a high fence with some buildings inside it, painted green, blending with the green of the valley, easily mistaken for a symmetrical hillock. But they were houses, and studying them he saw the people, more easily visible than the houses because the people were white.

  “Mzungu,” Hock said.

  “Azungu,” Manyenga gasped, correcting him with the plural. He had lit a cigarette and coughed, and panted from having pushed the motorbike up the slope.

  “What are they doing there?”

  He sucked in smoke and coughed again and bared his teeth for air. He said, “You can ask them, father.”

  No road led to the fenced enclosure; the path they used was probably a game trail. Apart from this sturdy camp, no sign of any other human structure was visible—odd in a place that was so fertile-looking, but perhaps not so odd considering how far this valley was from the river and how hard this rocky soil would have been to break with a plow.

  “There, that side,” Manyenga said, dropping his voice while pushing the bike, guiding it along the narrow track that was damp enough to keep the prints of animals that had used it: the monkey feet—narrow, with long toes—here and there the hooves of dik-diks, an oblong that might have been a hare’s paw, and clusters of dark grape-sized scat.

  Hock had seen Manyenga only as bossy or smilingly manipulative, the brute or the calculator, not as he was now, cautious, stealthy, shy, almost intimidated as he approached the looming chain-link fence that surrounded the three flat-roofed buildings—prefab bungalows, painted green. A garden of purpley-pink bougainvillea near one bungalow was contained in a circle of whitewashed rocks, giving a suburban touch to this forest compound. Beyond the buildings was an open area marked with a large white-painted X on the bare ground, obviously a helipad.

  “The helicopter must have come from here.”

  “Of course,” Manyenga said. “What do you think?”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “I tell you, my friend, I am knowing these people. And they are knowing Festus.”

  He was peering through the last of the bush cover, where it had been cleared for the high fence. He was peering through the fence too, which seemed absurdly strong, overbuilt, the sort of fence you’d see at a national frontier, Hock thought, something to keep undesirables out, a steel barrier topped with coils of razor wire.

  “They are stupid,” Manyenga said, still studying the fence. “Look at this.”

  “What is it, anyway?”

  “They are calling it the depot.”

  “Where’s the chopper?”

  “Maybe making another food drop in the bush somewhere, isn’t it? Because they are having a visit from the big people.”

  “That man and woman on the chopper?”

  “Famous, I tell you! Big people. Pop stars! You are knowing them.”

  “I don’t know them,” Hock said, thinking of the man in the cowboy hat, the blond woman in the catsuit. “My daughter might know them.”

  “You can ask her. She will be so happy. Eh! Eh! �
�You have seen the big people in Malawi!’”

  As though talking to himself, rehearsing the improbable notion, Hock said, “When I go home, maybe I’ll call my daughter. I’ll tell her where I was. I’ll tell her what I saw.”

  “Famous pop stars in the bush!”

  But Hock was looking at the compound. It was like a fortress, a prison, or perhaps, given its remoteness in this empty valley, a space station—all the steel and the compact buildings, a detached and singular platform in this hidden place. On top of the buildings solar panels were propped at an angle, black squares on gleaming brackets, with a white satellite dish and a tall radio antenna. What held Hock’s attention and consoled him was the neatness of the place, the idea that such order was possible. His eye had become accustomed to dirty huts and windows, the filthy underworld of the Lower River. This sight of a cared-for place was bittersweet; it lifted his spirits and saddened him, too—the clean symmetry was an aspect of his own world that he had forgotten. Encountering this compound unexpectedly gave him hope.

  Hock clapped his hands to announce himself, and called out, “Odi! Odi!”

  Only then was he aware of the sound of an engine that had just started up, which he took to be a generator. The rattle was disturbing, a reminder of the harshness of that other world and its motors.

  He saw an African man in a clean uniform—green, like army fatigues or hospital scrubs, with a green baseball cap. The man, his back to the fence, was polishing a fat stainless-steel tank, a water tank most likely, about the size of a basement boiler and as tall as the man who was wiping it, with a cloth dampened with water from a plastic bottle. He then coated the tank with a whitish fluid, which quickly dried in the heat to a dusty film.

  “You talk to him,” Hock said, unable to get the man’s attention.

  “No. It is for you. Get some supplies. We are needing.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because it is your duty,” Manyenga said, and bared his teeth again, breathing hard.

  “What are you talking about? It’s not my duty!”

  Even as he spoke, he saw the absurdity of his arguing in this remote valley of the Matundu Hills, beside the chain-link fence and the big half-polished tank—no apparent door, only a seamless enclosure. Hock was screaming at Manyenga; Manyenga was screaming back at him.

  “I don’t have a duty!” Hock shouted. “Do I, Festus?”

  “You lied to me! You tricked Zizi into the hut! You stole my motorbike! You ran off down the river with those boys. You betrayed me when I trusted you.”

  “You didn’t trust me!”

  “I made you my chief minister. I respected you too much, but you did not respect me, not at all, isn’t it?”

  “I came in good faith,” Hock said, almost weeping at the memory of his arrival in Malabo. “I came to help.”

  “You are talking bloody rubbish,” Manyenga said, wrinkling his nose in disgust. “I saved you from these boys who capture Europeans and sell them.”

  Their shouting was loud enough for the man in uniform to hear over the rat-tatting of the generator. He turned from his polishing and, startled by the sight of the two quarreling strangers outside the fence, dropped his cloth and the bottle of polish and hurried across the compound to the largest of the green bungalows, losing one of his rubber flip-flops as he ran.

  “You scared him away,” Hock said.

  But when, hearing no reply, he glanced around, Manyenga was nowhere to be seen. Hock hooked his fingers on the fence and hung there, his head down, jarred by the chattering of the generator. The whole self-contained compound, with its lawn sprinklers and its bougainvillea and its gravel paths, so hopeful a little while ago, filled him with despair, because here he was, contemplating it from behind a ten-foot fence.

  The African in the green uniform reappeared at the far side of the compound, near a building, talking to a man in sunglasses. The man in sunglasses was white, the first mzungu Hock had seen in more than six weeks—since Norman Fogwill in Blantyre. This man wore a green baseball cap and a Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts and sandals, like someone on his way to the beach. Seeing the man, Hock became hopeful again, as when he’d first seen the compound. He felt like an earthling on a planet in deep space who’d just had a glimpse of another earthling—a brother, he thought, and he was almost overcome by a hatred for Manyenga. Seeing another white man inspired and allowed this feeling. He was stronger, not alone anymore, and, being stronger, he was able to admit this feeling of indignation.

  He waved to the man in the flower-patterned shirt, who was still talking to the African at his side—laboriously, perhaps because of the loud generator. Hock tried to call out, and his voice caught and failed him—he was too full of emotion, near tears in spite of himself. He snagged his fingers in his mouth and whistled sharply.

  The white man stared and then walked toward him, taking his time, kicking the gravel. Hock could see from the casual way he walked that he would be unhelpful. His cap visor was pulled low; his sunglasses were too dark for Hock to see his eyes. The double-A stitched on his cap Hock took to indicate the agency, L’Agence Anonyme.

  Before Hock could speak, the man said, “What are you doing here?”

  “I need help—please,” Hock said, clinging to the fence.

  “How did you get here?” The man stepped back as though from a bad smell.

  “With another guy, on a motorcycle.”

  “I don’t see anyone,” the man said. “And there’s no road.” The man was stern, and his sternness emphasized his accent, which Hock could not place.

  “We pushed the bike through the bush—does it matter? Listen, I need you to send a message for me to the consulate in Blantyre. It’s very urgent. I haven’t had a decent meal in a week. I’ve been sleeping in the bush. I’m thirsty—I need water. I need a lift out of here. All I’m asking . . .”

  The man set his face and his beaky cap at him and said, “You know this is a protected area?”

  “Please help me.”

  “You need permission to come here.”

  “I’ll get it. I have friends in Malawi.”

  “This isn’t Malawi.”

  “Or Mozambique. Whatever.”

  “It’s not Mozambique.”

  “What the hell is it then?” Hock said in a shriek, his voice breaking.

  “It’s the charity zone, between both countries, and it’s policed. So take my advice and go away.”

  “Can’t I just stay with you tonight?”

  “We are not running a hotel.”

  “I need a drink of water.”

  “This is one of our busiest days,” the man said, sighing in exasperation. Hock hated the man’s shirt, hated the flowers, hated its cleanness, the neat creases on the sleeves. “We’ve got VIPs in the field—I mean, serious people. Heavy security. And you expect me to drop everything because you show up at the fence? Do yourself a favor. Go away. That’s a polite warning.”

  “What’s the name of this outfit?”

  “That’s confidential. We’re contractors.”

  “I know. The agency—Agence Anonyme,” Hock said. “Okay, I’ll go. But just send an email for me. Please.”

  “Who says we have the capability?”

  “You’ve got a satellite dish.”

  “It’s not operational.”

  “Look, I’m an American, like you.”

  “I’m not an American”—and saying so, accenting the word “American,” Hock knew the man was telling the truth.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Who wants to know? Who are you with?”

  “I’m alone.”

  “What agency?”

  “No agency,” Hock said. “I’m a retired businessman. I came to Malawi over a month ago. Almost two months—I lost track of time. My clothes were stolen. My radio was stolen. I used to teach school here . . .”

  As he spoke, Hock could see the man backing away, and finally he turned and walked along the gravel path, snapping his fing
ers at the African in the uniform, beckoning him.

  For a moment Hock believed that the man was summoning the African to help him. But instead of approaching him, the African returned to the stainless-steel water tank next to the fence and resumed his work, using a rag to wipe off the dried polish and to buff it, shining it, so that a whole oval patch, head high, gleamed like a mirror.

  Watching him work, Hock saw his own face reflected in the metal of the shiny tank, distorted because of the curving cylinder but clear enough for him to be appalled, terrified, and now he knew what the man had seen. He had not looked at his face for a week, since leaving his hut in Malabo, where he had a small mirror on the wall.

  His first thought was, I am a monkey. His hair was wild, clawed to one side but stiff with caked dust and dried sweat. The grit in his eyebrows thickened them, made them seem hairier, and the bristles in his week-old beard were darkened with dirt and streaked with muddy sweat, still damp. His eyes were puffy, bloodshot, and miserable—the sad and scary eyes of a madman. Yet when he opened his mouth in horror, he saw that his teeth were white, and this whiteness made his face more monkey-like. The filthy face pushed against the fence, the dirty hands, the torn clothes, must have seemed so desperate to the agency man. The sight of himself devastated Hock. He had never imagined that he could have been so reduced, so degraded. He had become almost monstrous in his days as a fugitive on the river—or was it in Malabo he’d begun to degenerate? If so, it was no wonder they’d taken advantage of him. He looked as though he’d lost all self-respect. Judging from this wild face in the gleaming side of the tank, which the curve of the stainless steel distorted even more, he was an unwashed fugitive, the strangest sort of white man in the African bush—a dirty one, helpless and stinking and probably insane.