The Lower River

1

ELLIS HOCK’S WIFE gave him a new phone for his birthday. A smart phone, she said. “And guess what?” She had a coy, ham-actress way of offering presents, often pausing with a needy wink to get his full attention. “It’s going to change your life.” Hock smiled because he was turning sixty-two, not an age of life-altering shocks but only of subtle diminishments. “It’s got a whole bunch of functions,” Deena said. It looked frivolous to him, like a costly fragile toy. “And it’ll be useful at the store”—Hock’s Menswear in Medford Square. His own phone was fine, he said. It was an efficient little fist, with a flip-up lid and one function. “You’re going to thank me.” He thanked her, but weighed his old phone in his hand, as a contradiction, showing her that his life wasn’t changing.

To make her point (her gift-giving could be hostile at times, and this seemed like one of them), Deena kept the new phone but registered it in his name, using his personal email account. After she was signed up, she received his entire year’s mail up to that day, all the messages that Hock had received and sent, thousands of them, even the ones he had thought he’d deleted, many of them from women, many of those affectionate, so complete a revelation of his private life that he felt he’d been scalped — worse than scalped, subjected to the dark magic of the sort of mganga he had known long ago in Africa, a witch doctor — diviner turning him inside out, the slippery spilled mess of his entrails stinking on the floor. Now he was a man with no secrets, or rather, all his secrets exposed to a woman he’d been married to for thirty-three years, for whom his secrets were painful news.

“Who are you?” Deena asked him, a ready-made question she must have heard somewhere — which movie? But it was she who seemed like a stranger, with mad gelatinous eyes, and furious clutching hands holding the new phone like a weapon, her bulgy features fixed on him in a purplish putty-like face of rage. “I’m hurt!” And she did look wounded. Her recklessness roused his pity and made him afraid, as though she’d been drinking.

Hock hesitated, the angry woman demanded to know everything, but really she already knew everything, his most intimate thoughts were all on that phone. She didn’t know why, but neither did he. She screamed for details and explanations. “Who is Tina? Who is Janey?” How could he deny what was plainly shown on the screen of his new phone, covert messages, sent and received, that she’d known nothing about? “You snake! You signed them ‘love’!”

He saw, first with relief, almost hilarity, then horror, and finally sadness, that nothing in his life was certain now except that his marriage was ending.

He put it down to solitude. He did not want to say loneliness. He owned a men’s clothing store, and business had been — you said slow, not bad — for years. The store was failing. The history of the store was the history of his family in Medford, their insertion in the town, their wish to belong. Ellis’s grandfather, an Italian immigrant, had been apprenticed to a tailor on his arrival in New York. His first paying job was with the man’s cousin, also a tailor, in rural Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he arrived on the train, knowing no English. He helped to make suits for the wealthy college students there. Though he was no older than they were, he knelt beside them, unspooling the tape against their bodies, and shyly spoke their measurements in Italian. Three years of this and then a job as a cutter in a tailor shop in Boston’s North End. On his marriage, striking out on his own, he borrowed money from his widowed mother-in-law (who was to live with them until she died) and rented space in Medford Square, opening his own tailor shop.

The move to Medford involved another move, more tidying: he became a new man, changing his name from Francesco Falcone to Frank Hock. He had asked a tailor in the North End to translate falcone, and the man had said “hawk,” in the local way, and the scarcely literate man had written it in tailor’s chalk on a remnant of cloth, spelling it as he heard it. This was announced on a sign: Hock’s Tailors. Frank became known as a master tailor, with bolts of fine-quality woolen cloth, and linen, and silk, and Egyptian cotton, stacked on his shelves. He smoked cigars as he sewed and, still only in his thirties, employed two assistants as cutters and for basting. His wife, Angelina, bore him three sons, the eldest baptized Andrea, called Andrew, whom he designated as his apprentice. Business was good, and Frank Hock so frugal he saved enough to buy his shop and eventually the whole building. He had income from the tenants on the upper floors and from the other shops, including a Chinese laundry, Yee’s, next door. Joe Yee pressed the finished suits and gave him a red box of dried lychees every Christmas.

When Andrew Hock returned from the Second World War, Medford Square began to modernize. Old Frank turned the business over to Andrew, who had worked alongside his father. But Andrew had no interest in the fussy drudgery of tailoring. Plagued with arthritis in his hands, the old man retired. Andrew sold the building and bought a premises in a newly built row of stores on Riverside Avenue — the Mystic River ran just behind it — and started Hock’s Menswear, as an improvement on Frank’s tailor shop on Salem Street.

Ellis was born the year after Hock’s Menswear opened, and later he, too, worked in the store throughout high school most afternoons, tramping the foot pedal and bringing down the lid of the pressing machine in the basement tailor shop, with the tailor Jack Azanow, a Russian immigrant. Ellis also buffed shoes and folded shirts and rearranged the jackets after customers fingered them, milking the sleeves — his father’s expression. Now and then he made a sale. Christmases were busy, and festive with the frantic pleasure of people looking for presents, spending more money than usual, asking for the item to be gift-wrapped, another of Ellis’s jobs. The activity of the store at this season, and Easter, and Father’s Day — the vitality of it, the obvious profit — almost convinced him that he might make a career of the business. But the certainty of it alarmed him like a life sentence. He hated the notion of confinement in the store, but what was the alternative?

On graduation from Boston University, a biology major, facing the draft — Vietnam — he applied to join the Peace Corps and was accepted. He was sent to a country he’d never heard of, Nyasaland, soon to be the independent Republic of Malawi, and became a teacher at a bush school in a district known as the Lower River. There was something mystical in the name, as though it was an underworld tributary of the River Styx — distant and dark. But “lower” meant only south, and the river was obscured by two great swamps, one called the Elephant Marsh, the other one the Dinde.

He was happy in the Lower River, utterly disconnected from home, and even from the country’s capital, on this unknown and unregarded riverbank, where he lived in the village of Malabo on his own as a schoolteacher, the only foreigner; supremely happy.

After two years, he re-upped for another two years, and one afternoon toward the end of his fourth year, a message was delivered to him by a consular driver in a Land Rover, a telegram that had been received by the U.S. consulate: For Ellis Hock at Malabo. Dad very ill. Please call. There was no phone in the village, and the trunk line at the boma, the district’s headquarters, was not working. Hock rode back to Blantyre in the Land Rover, and there, on the consul’s own phone, he spoke to his tearful mother.

He had been so content he had never grappled with the detail of leaving the Lower River, and yet, two days after receiving the message he was on a plane to Rhodesia, and by separate laborious legs, to Nairobi, London, New York, and Boston. Finally back in Medford, he was seated at his father’s hospital bedside.

His father beamed with surprise when he saw him, as though Ellis’s return was a coincidence, nothing to do with his failing health. They kissed, they held hands, and less than two weeks later, struggling to breathe, Ellis hugging the old man’s limp body, his father died. It was three in the morning; his mother had gone home to sleep.

“Are you all right?” the night nurse asked, after she confirmed that his father had drawn his last breath.

“Yes,” Ellis said, and mocked himself for the lie. But he was too fearful of telling the truth, because he was himself dying from misery.

He went home, and when she woke at seven he told his mother, who wailed. He could not stop weeping. An old friend, Roy Junkins, hearing that he was home from Africa, called the next day. Ellis sobbed as he spoke to him, unable to control himself, but finding no more shame in his tears than if he had been bleeding. And something about that moment — the phone call, the tears — made a greater bond between the two men.

After the funeral, the reading of the will: Hock’s Menswear was his. His mother was apportioned a sum of money and the family house.

“Papa wanted you to have the store.”

He’d left Africa suddenly — so suddenly it was as if he’d abandoned an irretrievable part of himself there. He’d actually left a whole household: his cook and all his belongings, clothes, binoculars, shortwave radio, his pet snakes in baskets and cages. What he’d brought home was what had fitted in one suitcase.

He was now, aged twenty-six, the sole owner of Hock’s Menswear. He had employees — salesmen, the tailor Azanow, a woman who kept the books — and loyal customers. Within a few years he married Deena, and not much more than a year later Deena gave birth to a daughter, Claudia, whom they called Chicky.

The life sentence he had once feared, he was now serving: the family business, his wife, his child, his house in the Lawrence Estates, inherited from his mother after she died. Every day except Sunday he drove to the store at eight, parked behind it, facing the Mystic River, checked the inventory and deliveries with Les Armstrong and Mike Corbett, and opened at nine. At noon, a sandwich at Savage’s, the deli across Riverside Avenue; after lunch, the store. Sometimes Les or Mike reminisced about their years in the army, in dreamy voices, but they were always talking about war. Ellis knew how they felt, but didn’t mention Africa except to his friend Roy, who sometimes dropped in. At five-thirty, when Les and the others left, he locked the front door and went home to dinner.

It was the life that many people led, and luckier than most. Having a men’s store in Medford Square made his work also social, and selling expensive clothes meant he dressed well.

Over thirty years of this. He rarely took a vacation, though Deena rented a cottage at the Cape in the summer. He drove down on Saturday evenings to spend Sunday with her and Chicky. And after her parents moved to Florida, Deena spent weeks with them. Chicky grew up, graduated from Emerson College, got married, and bought a condo in Belmont.

Nothing would ever change, he felt. Yet changes came, first as whispers, then as facts. Business slackened, Medford Square changed, its texture fraying, a Vietnamese restaurant displacing Savage’s Deli, then the closing of Woolworth’s and Thom McAn. The shoe menders and the laundry and the TV repairers vanished, and the worst sign of all, some storefronts were empty, some windows broken. The old bakery that had sold fresh bread was now a donut shop, another chain. A new mall at Wellington Circle with large department stores and many smaller stores was now the place to shop. Hock’s Menswear was quieter, but still dignified, which made it seem sadder, like the relic the tailor shop had been — a men’s clothing store in a city center that was shrunken and obsolete.

But the building — the real estate — was his equity. Ellis saw a time, not far off, when he would sell the premises and live in retirement on the proceeds. In the meantime, he kept to his hours, eight to five-thirty. He waited on customers himself, as he had always done, to set an example, simply to talk, to listen, to hear about other people’s lives, their experiences in the world beyond the front door of Hock’s. With only one other salesman these days he did this more often, and liked it, in fact looked forward to talking with customers, whose experiences became his.

He knew the business was doomed, but talk kept it alive, as conversation with a bedridden invalid offers the illusion of hope. The malls and the big chain stores, blessed with space and inventory, prospered because they employed few clerks, or sales associates as they were now called. Hock’s was the sort of store where clerk and customer discussed the color of a tie, the style of a suit, the drape of a coat, the fit of a sweater. “It’s meant to be a bit roomy” and “This topcoat isn’t as dressy as that one.” Nor did the newer stores offer Hock’s quality — Scottish tweeds, English shirts, argyle socks, Irish knitwear, Italian leather goods, even Italian fedoras, and shoes from the last great shoemakers in the United States. Hock’s still sold vests, cravats, and Tyrolean hats in velour, with a twist of feathers in the hatband. Quality was suggested in the very words for the merchandise — the apparel, rather: hosiery, slacks, knitwear; a vest was a weskit.

Every transaction was a conversation, sometimes lengthy, about the finish of the fabric, the weather, the state of the world. This human touch, the talk, relieved the gloom of the empty store and took the curse off it. The customer was usually an older man in search of a tie or a good shirt or a sport coat. But often a woman was looking for a present for her husband, or her father or brother. Ellis detained them with his talk, explaining the possible choices. “These socks wear like iron” and “This shirt is Sea Island cotton — the best” and “This camel’s hair will actually get more comfortable with age, softer with each dry cleaning.”

In the past eight or ten years he’d asked the likelier ones, women mostly, “Do we have your email address on file?” As a result he found himself in occasional touch, clarifying, offering suggestions for a new purchase, describing sale items, often adding a personal note, a line or two, mildly flirtatious. They had bought clothes for trips; he asked about those trips. This was his early-morning activity, on his office computer, when he was alone, feeling small in his solitude, to lift his spirits, so he could face the banality of the day. The harmless whispers soothed him, eased some hunger in his heart, not sex but an obscure yearning. Many women responded in the same spirit: a cheerful word was welcome to them.

Over the past few years these email messages had come to represent a constant in his life, a narrative of friendships, glowing in warmth, inspiring confidences, private allusions, requests for help or advice. But since he met the women only when they came into the store, which was rare, these were safe, no more than inconclusive whispers in the dark, though compared to the monotony of his storekeeper’s day, they were like the breath of rapture.

There were about twenty or thirty such women whom he’d befriended this way, various ages, near and far, and these included old friends, his high school sweetheart and senior prom date. Still living in the town where he’d been born, he was saturated with the place. He’d been away for only those four years in Africa, as a young teacher in the district of the Lower River.

When Deena showed him the full year of his email he was more shocked by its density than by the warmth of his confidences — though he was taken aback by glimpses of what he’d written. Writing was a way of forgetting, yet now it was all returned to him and he was reminded of everything he’d said. He did not know that a phone, even a high-tech computer-like device like that, could access so many messages, ones that he’d sent and received, twelve months of them, including ones that he’d deleted (which was most of them), that he’d believed, having dragged them to the trash-basket icon, were gone forever.

But they reappeared, arriving in a long unsorted list, a chronicle of his unerasable past, much of which he’d forgotten. And so the interrogation began, Deena saying, “I want to know everything”—another movie line? She held his entire memory in her hand, his secret history of the past year, and so, “Who is Rosie?” and “Tell me about Vickie.”

He was mute with embarrassment and anger. Ashamed, appalled, he could not account for the number of messages or explain his tone of flirtatious encouragement, his intimacies to strangers, all the irrelevant detail. He talked to them about his day, about their travel, about books, about his childhood; and they did the same, relating their own stories.

“What is your problem, Ellis!”

He didn’t know. He bowed his head, more to protect himself from her hitting him than in atonement. From the moment he got home from work, for a month or more, he and Deena argued. Her last words to him in bed at night were hisses of recrimination. And when he woke, yawning, slipping from a precarious farcical dream, but before he could recall the email crisis, she began again, clanging at him, her tongue like the clapper of a bell, her finger in his face, shrieking that she’d been betrayed. Some mornings, after a night of furious arguing, the back-and-forth of pleading and abuse, he woke half demented, his head hurting as though with an acute alcoholic hangover, and couldn’t work.

Deena demanded detail, but the few scraps he offered only angered her more; and she was unforgiving, so what was the point? It all seemed useless, a howl of pain. She was a yelling policeman who’d caught him red-handed in a crime, not yelling for the truth — she knew it all — but because she was in the right, wishing only to hurt and humiliate him, to see him squirm, to make him suffer.

He did suffer, and he saw that she was suffering too, in greater pain than he was, because she was the injured party. But he knew what was at the end of it. It really was like theater; she needed to inhabit every aspect of her role, to weary herself and him with the sorting of this trash heap of teasing confidences, and when he was sufficiently punished, the ending was inevitable.

They began sessions with a marriage counselor, who called himself Doctor Bob, a pleasant middle-aged man with a psychology degree, a professorial manner, and conventional college clothes — tweed jacket, button-down shirt, khaki pants, and loafers, probably bought at one of the mall outlets, Ellis thought. What bothered Ellis and Deena as much as the actual sessions were the chance encounters with one or another of Doctor Bob’s clients, someone troubled — drugs? alcohol? — leaving the office as they arrived, or someone similarly anguished, head bowed, on the couch in the waiting room as they left.

Doctor Bob listened carefully in the first session and said that such a discovery of compromising emails was not unusual. “I’m seeing three other couples in your position. In each case, the man is the collector.” He didn’t assign blame, he was sympathetic to both Ellis and Deena, and at one point near the end of the first hour, as Deena sat tearful with her hands on her lap and Ellis wondered why he had sent so many emails, Doctor Bob could be heard puzzling, saying softly, “How does it go? That old song, ‘strumming my pain with his fingers’—something about being flushed with fever, something-something by the crowd,” then raising his voice, but still in a confiding, lounge-singer croon, “‘I felt he found my letters, and read each one out loud…’”

“Please,” Deena said, “this isn’t funny.”

“I’m trying to put your situation into context,” Doctor Bob said. “There are other precedents. After his wife poked into his private letters, Tolstoy ran away from home. And died in a railway station. He was eighty-two.”

In the next session Doctor Bob asked blunt questions and acted, it seemed to Ellis, like a referee. He did not sing again. They returned for more sessions.

But instead of repairing the marriage or calming Deena, the counseling made matters worse by offering an occasion to air old grievances, conflicts that, before starting the sessions, Ellis had decided to live with. But why not mention them, the disappointments, the lapses, the rough patches that had remained unresolved? Long-buried resentments were disinterred and argued over. With a referee, a witness, they could be blunt.

Doctor Bob nodded and smiled gently, like the friendly old-fashioned priest at Saint Ray’s, Father Furty — reformed drinker, always sympathetic. He let Deena talk, then Ellis, both of them pleading with him to see their point of view, the validity of their claim, as though deciding “whose ball?” in a significant fumble.

He said, “What I’m hearing is…”

Letdowns they’d never mentioned were now mentioned, and the sessions became acrimonious: Deena’s friends, her absences; Ellis’s coldness, his absences.

“You’ve been leading separate lives…”

Ellis thought, Yes, maybe that’s why my life has been bearable. It was not a pleasure but a relief to go to work in the morning. Monotony was a harmless friend. He dreaded Sundays at home; most of all he hated vacations. Ellis had never met anyone who hated vacations, so he kept this feeling to himself.

Though Deena had that one issue on her mind — the business about the numerous and overfond emails — this dispute stirred Ellis into defending himself with memories of other disputes.

“I want to know why you were emailing those women,” Deena said.

Doctor Bob smiled at Ellis, who said, “I’d like to know that myself.”

“My name is nowhere in those emails. You never mention you’re married. I don’t exist. Why?”

Ellis said in a wondering tone that he didn’t know.

Pleading with Doctor Bob, Deena said, “He tells them what he’s reading! He tells them what he has for lunch!”

By then, about a month into counseling (and the store suffered by his absences), all contact with the women in the emails had been broken off. Deena still had possession of the phone, monitoring it every day. She clutched it in disgust, as though it was Ellis himself she was holding, her hatred apparent; and Ellis hated the sight of the thing too.

Ellis, at Deena’s insistence, got a new email address, and used it only for business. Without his contact with those women, he was numb, mute, friendless, but still could not explain the emails he’d sent, his befriending the many women, the strange amorous inquiring tone. To one he had said, “You are the sort of woman I’d take into the African bush,” and squirmed at the memory.

“I guess I was interested in their lives,” he said. “I was curious. There was a story line to the way they lived, an unfolding narrative. I’ve always liked hearing people’s stories.”

With a pocket-stuffing gesture, Doctor Bob asked, “But were you keeping them in your back pocket for later, something to act on?”

Ellis said no, but he was not sure. The solitude of the store, the uncertainty of the business, had set him dreaming. He did not know how to say that to his wife — no longer grief-stricken but enraged — and the nodding counselor. Doctor Bob would have said, “Dreaming of what?” And Ellis had no answer.

“Is there something you want to tell your wife?” Doctor Bob said.

Ellis fixed his eyes on Deena’s furious face. He said, “You’re overplaying your hand.”

Shushing her — Deena had begun to object — Doctor Bob spoke to Ellis. “I see you as untethered,” and he explained what he meant.

Ellis nodded. The word was perfect for how he felt, unattached, not belonging, drifting in a job he’d taken as a dying wish of his father’s, maintaining the family business. But his heart wasn’t in it — had never been in it.

When, Doctor Bob asked, had he been happy?

Ellis said, “I used to live in Africa.”

“Oh, God,” Deena said.

“I meant in your marriage,” Doctor Bob said.

Hands together under his chin, prayer-like, Ellis became thoughtful, and tried to recall a distinct time, an event, something joyous, a little glowing tableau of pride and pleasure. But nothing came. It was thirty-three years of ups and downs, too much time to summarize. They were married: years to share, to endure, to negotiate, to overcome. Yes, plenty of happiness — he just could not think of anything specific. Marriage was a journey without an arrival.

Seeing Deena slumped in her chair, waiting out his silence, Ellis grew sad again. Just the way they were sitting apart, burdened by a kind of grief, with the doctor between them, made him miserable. It was as though they were in the presence of a terminal patient, their marriage dying, and it seemed that these last few weeks had been like that, either a deathwatch — this gloom — or a danse macabre, the hysteria at the prospect of the thing ending.

Nor could they hold any kind of coherent conversation without Doctor Bob being present. Ellis saw himself at sixty-two, Deena at sixty, as two old people who’d now, with the death of their marriage, be going their separate ways, pitiable figures bent against a headwind, or worse, with ghastly jollity, talking about “new challenges” and starting again, joining support groups, taking up yoga, gardening, volunteering, charity work, or worse, golf.

The counseling sessions continued, more rancorous, provoking new grievances, driving them further apart. But along with that melancholy vision of separation Ellis saw relief, too, the peacefulness of being alone. He guessed that Deena was feeling the same, because one day after a session, driving home, she seemed to come awake and said, “I want the house. I’m not giving up that house. My kitchen, my closets.”

“I could get a condo,” Ellis said. “But the business is mine.”

“I’ll need some money,” Deena said, and noticing that Ellis did not react, she added, “A lot of it.”

And like that, snatching, each staked a claim. At the suggestion of Doctor Bob they saw a lawyer and divided their assets.

Hearing of this, Chicky said, “What about me?”

“You’ll be all right,” Ellis said.

“But what if you guys remarry?”

Deena looked at Ellis and laughed, and he responded, laughing too, the first time in months they had shared such a moment of mirth. They stopped, not because they were saddened by the outburst but because the love in their laughter shamed them, reminding them that in their marriage they had known many happy moments like this.

Chicky, bewildered, and made stern by her bewilderment, said, “Dougie’s probably going to get laid off. We could use the money. I want my cut now.”

“‘Cut,’” Ellis said, echoing her word, “of what?”

“Your will,” Chicky said.

“I am alive,” Ellis said, wide-eyed in indignation.

“But what about when you pass? If you remarry, your new family will get it and I won’t get diddly. If I don’t get it now, I’ll never see it. And look at Ma. She got hers.”

Had this conversation not taken place in a sushi bar in Medford Square — another example of the changes in the town — Ellis would have screamed at his daughter and hammered the table with his fist. Later, he was glad that he had remained calm and had only shaken his head at the sullen young woman chewing disgustedly at him. He replayed the conversation that night, at first bitterly, then in a mood of resignation. Let it all end, he thought; let a great whirlwind drive it all away. Then he offered Chicky a lump sum. She asked for more, as he guessed she would, and he gave her the amount he had already decided upon.

Chicky’s husband was with her when he handed over the check. Dougie was merely a spectator to the family negotiation — Chicky had always been annoyed that Ellis, refusing to hire him at the store, had said, “What is he good at?”

“I doubt that I’ll be seeing much of you from now on,” Ellis said, with the solemn resignation of his new role. “I don’t think I want to.”

“Okay by me,” Chicky said.

With her share of the will in her hand, and her back turned, he felt that he was already dead. He was sorry to think that she did not see the pity in this.

Although he moved into a condo on Forest Street — the old high school — he and Deena still saw each other. Formally, sometimes shyly, they went on dates. They were not quite ready to see other people, and even the sessions with Doctor Bob had not affected their fundamental liking for each other. The dates ended with a chaste and usually fumbled kiss, and Ellis was always sad afterward, lonely in his car. He knew that he had caused Deena pain, destroyed her love for him, made her untrusting — perhaps untrusting of all other men. In the secrecy and confidences of his messages, he had betrayed her. He could be kind to her now, but there was no way to amend the past. On some of their dates she sat numb and silent, suffering like a wounded, bewildered animal. He could not think of himself, because he knew the hurt he’d inflicted on her would never heal.

Ellis dreaded the day when Deena would say to him, “I’m seeing someone.” He told her how bad business was, and she tried to console him, urging him to sell the building, that the real estate was worth something, that it was an ideal location.

On one of these dates, she gave him the phone — the instrument of their undoing, which now seemed to him like something diabolical. Or had it been a great purifying instrument? Anyway, it had uncovered his entire private life, shown him as sentimental, flirtatious, dreamy, romantic, unfulfilled, yearning. But for what? What did all those emails mean? What in all this emotion was the thing he wanted?

He did not know. He might never know. He was too old to hope for anything more. No momentous thing would ever happen to him. No passion, no great love, no new landscape, no more children, no risk, no drama. The rest of his life would be a withdrawal, a growing smaller, until finally he would be forgotten. The name on his store would be replaced by another. His marriage was over, his daughter was gone. He could not remember much of the marriage, and yet he missed the eventlessness of it, his old routines, the monotony that had seemed like a friend. There was a certainty in routine; the torpor it induced in him was a comfort.

The day after Hock got the phone back he went to the store, keeping the thing in his pocket the whole day. After he locked up for the night (he observed himself doing this, as if in a ritual), he walked to the edge of the parking lot, where beyond a fence the Mystic River brimmed, and flung the phone and watched it plop and sink and drown in the water that was moody under the dark sky.

2

TO RELIEVE HIS EYES, to clear his head, Hock was standing in the open doorway at the back of his store, facing the Mystic River flowing past the parking lot, the water dark under the drizzly clouds, lumpy with debris from upstream. A week of heavy rain had filled the lakes and sent a torrent down — the river swelled at its banks, rippling like the muscles of a hungry snake. The river that had always consoled him with its movement was a special comfort now that he was in greater need of consolation; the water and that debris swept past the back of the store and poured into the harbor, into the ocean, into the world, reminding him that his phone was gone, the corpse of it, sluiced into the sea.

Today he saw Jerry Frezza sidling between parked cars, wiping droplets from his face. Jerry had a tight smile and a jaunty upright stride; even in the rain Hock could tell that his friend had something on his mind.

Jerry saw him and said, “I’ve been trying to call you on your cell. What’s with your phone?”

“I don’t have one anymore.”

“How do you keep in touch?”

“I don’t,” Hock said. “You can call the store number, though.” He was going to tell him that in another month the store would be closing, but he resisted. He didn’t want to discuss it, he didn’t want sympathy, he hated the thought of the obvious question, What will you do now? So he smiled and said, “What’s up?”

Jerry said, “You know snakes, right? From when you were in Africa?”

On the Lower River, at Malabo, Hock had been the mzungu from America; in the Medford store, he was the man who’d lived in Africa. The sunny word “Africa,” spoken on a wet November day in Medford Square, seemed almost blasphemous and made him rueful again.

The Lower River in his time had been a nest of snakes. He was known for not fearing them; he was feared for daring to catch them. One of Hock’s long-ago names in the village was Mwamuna wa Njoka, Snake Man. So he said, “What’s the problem?”

“This crazy mama I know, Teya, over in Somerville, has a humongous snake she keeps as a pet, python or something. Get this, she actually sleeps with it.”

Hock considered the stupidity of this, and then said, “They like the warmth. How big?”

“Yay big,” Jerry said, flinging out his arms. “Almost as big as she is. What do you think?”

“I think, don’t be cute. Put it into a cage. But it should really be in an equatorial forest. Ask her if it makes any noise — like a blowing sound.”

Not long after that, nearer Thanksgiving, Jerry stopped in again and said to Hock, “You were right. It sucks in air and goofs it out.”

“If it’s vocalizing, it’s a python. Other snakes don’t make any sounds.”

“Whatever. I told her what you said, but she feels sorry for the snake. The thing’s not eating. She gave it food, but it won’t touch it.”

“Probably it would eat if it was left alone. But they can go months without eating.” Hock was folding sweaters that a man had decided not to buy. “She still sleeping with the snake?”

Jerry nodded. “Whack job, right?”

But standing at the store counter on this November day of denuded trees under a brown sky, Hock thought of Malabo, of the snakes he’d collected: green mambas, black mambas, spitting cobras, the swimming sun snake, the egg-eating wolf snake, the boomslang mbobo, the puff adder, and the nsato, the rock python, which could have been the woman’s pet snake. The villagers feared them and would kill a snake on sight. If a traveler encountered a snake at the start of a journey, he would return home. Because of these fears Hock developed an interest and made a study, to set himself apart, so he would be known as something more than a mzungu. One of the derivations of mzungu was “spirit,” but the word meant “white man.” He kept some snakes in baskets, and fed them lizards and grasshoppers and mice, and he released them in places where they’d be safe to breed.

Jerry called the store the next day. He did not offer a preamble because their only subject lately had been the woman with the pet snake. He said, “She wants to know why the snake is acting weird. It still isn’t eating. It lies beside her, flattening itself.”

“Did you say flattening itself?” Hock said. “Listen, get her on the phone. Tell her to put the snake in a cage immediately.”

“Why are you shouting?”

Only then had Hock realized that his voice had risen almost to a scream. In this same shrill pitch he said, “The snake is measuring her. It’s getting ready to eat her!”

He knew snakes. Jerry’s story of the woman made him miss Africa — not the continent, which was vast and unfinished and unfathomable, but his hut in Malabo, on the Lower River in Malawi.

After he hung up, he called Jerry back and said, “Where is she? That woman’s in trouble.”

The house was a wood-frame three-decker on a side street in Somerville, from the outside like every other house on the block, from the inside a tangle of drapes and silken gold-fringed banners, highly colored, smelling of a sickly fragrance, perhaps incense, or from the candles flickering like vigil lights, their fumes the pulpy flavor of fruit, the plush bite of spices. The place was shadowy, as though furnished for some sort of ritual, a séance or spiritual exercise. A small cluttered bulb-lit shrine was fixed to one wall — a dark idol, a dish of grapes and plums before it. The rooms were warm with the aroma of sweet cake crumbs on this raw day.

A white-faced woman opened the door, holding it ajar just a few inches, looking afraid, until she recognized Jerry, and then she smiled and let them in. Her dark hair was uncombed and looked clawed and nagged at.

“Where is it?” Hock asked.

“Is this your friend?” the woman said, peering with her flat smile.

“Teya — this is Ellis,” Jerry said.

She spelled her name and said, “American Indian. I wish I would have known you were coming.”

Hock said, “The snake — did you secure it?”

“Mind taking your shoes off?” the woman said.

She herself was wearing sandals, with silver rings on her toes, and over her shoulders a robe that Hock knew to be polyester and not silk. She was older and slightly plumper than he expected. “Spaced out” and “hippie” had made him imagine someone girlish, but the woman was perhaps fifty. Her left wrist (upright, she was clutching a hank of her hair) was tattooed with a pattern of small dots.

When Hock put his mesh box down, she said, “Like I need another pet.” But she was pleased and smiled at the small sniffing guinea pig.

Stepping inside, barefoot, his foot-sole cushioned by carpets, he could not see much in the candlelit room. Yet through the furry fruitiness of incense and hot wax he could smell the snake — a distinct tang of flaking scales, the sourness of urine and smashed eggshells, a rank odor of earth and warmth.

“I’ve been doing a ton of washing,” the woman said. “Just back from Vermont.”

“The snake’s in a cage, right?”

“Witch Camp,” the woman said. She bent down and put her face against the mesh of the box and clucked loudly at the guinea pig.

“Witch Camp. What did I tell you?” Jerry said, pleased with himself.

“Am I wasting my time?” Hock said. “Where is this bad boy?”

“I was just going to say, the Mud Ritual,” the woman said. “It was insane.”

She had turned and was shuffling in her sandals across the room, to an adjoining room, where parasols hung upside down from the ceiling, the walls draped with scarves and gilt-edged banners and more votive lights.

“In here,” she said.

He saw a glass-sided fish tank against a wall, some sawdust and wood shavings heaped against one end, and a snake inside that he immediately recognized as a rock python. A heavy board served as the lid of the tank. And because this room was not as warm as the first one, the snake lay coiled like a rope on the deck of a ship, its head tucked under its thickest coil.

“Nsato — Python sebae,” Hock said.

Jerry said to the woman, “What did I tell you?”

“Jerry told me about him being dangerous. I put him in here just before I went to Vermont.”

“You didn’t leave him any food?”

“He wasn’t interested.” She had taken possession of the mesh box, and now she lifted it and smiled at the guinea pig. “But this little guy looks hungry.”

Hock unhooked the small door of the box and reached in. He held the squirming guinea pig, which was kicking its short legs. In one motion he lifted the lid of the fish tank and dropped in the guinea pig. The small creature scampered to a corner, darting against the glass, skidding in the thickness of wood shavings, awkwardly tugging its body as though too fat and top-heavy for its short legs.

The snake did not move — that is, it remained coiled. But then its pear-shaped head tilted, its yellow eyes flickered and widened, and it seemed almost imperceptibly to swell, like an inner tube inflated by a hand pump, fattening, tightening, filling its scaly thickness, as though it was visibly thinking.

“I had him drinking milk,” the woman said, looking closer at the panicky guinea pig, the enlarging snake.

“They like their food a little more animated than that,” Hock said.

She was peering in, blinking, her nose almost touching the glass. “Maybe they’ll be friends.”

“How long have you had him?”

“Couple of months.”

“They can go months without eating.”

“After the milk, he wasn’t interested. He let me hold him. He’s bigger than he looks.”

“They can grow to twenty-four feet.”

“He just — like Jerry told you — flattened himself next to me.”

“Because he was planning to eat you,” Hock said. “Seeing if you’d fit.”

“Me?” The woman laughed, moving her body heavily, as if to show her plumpness, to emphasize the absurdity of what Hock had just said.

“You’d be surprised at what a snake like that can fit into its mouth.”

The woman was smiling anxiously at the twitching guinea pig, the staring snake. She said, “You actually think they’re going to get along together in that cage?”

Hock frowned and said, “Let’s leave them to make friends. Okay?”

“Want some herbal tea?”

“Tell us about Witch Camp,” Jerry said.

She led them through the room with the incense and the drapes and the shrine to a small kitchen, and they sat at a table while she heated a kettle of water and made tea, crumbling some tiny black twigs into the pot.

“This is very cleansing. It sort of scours the toxins out of your system and heals your linings.”

And as she went on describing the purifying powers of the tea, Hock reflected on the untidiness of the room, the pots and dishes in the sink, the crumbs on the table, the dull gleam of the sticky toaster imprinted with a film of grease. And the woman herself, dark hair, pale skin, her heavily made-up eyes — blue eye shadow — squinting from her puffy face. She smiled wearily and shook her head.

“The Mud Ritual, like I was saying — insane. People were copulating. I got mud in my hair and my clothes were filthy. I’ve been doing laundry for two days.”

“Copulating?” Jerry was beaming at her.

“In the mud,” she said. “Big turn-on. But not for me. Some of these people just take advantage. The things they put in their bodies! One of them tosses a beer can onto the ground and I goes, ‘This is the earth. It’s your mother!’”

“Maybe a little chilly up in Vermont for getting tagged in the mud?” Jerry said, and he nodded at Hock.

“We’d just done a sweat,” she said. “Sweat lodge?”

“That’s some crazy stuff.”

“A few got wacky-vaced.”

Jerry said, “Excuse me?”

“Like medevaced. But they were toasted, I think on mushrooms.”

Hock was thinking of the snake, the poor thing captive in her apartment, just another artifact, part of the scene. Yet it was a great coiled cable of muscle, glittering, black and yellowish on its dorsum, with a glossy iridescent bluey sheen all over its upper scales, the pupil of its eye vertically elliptical. It simply did not belong here in a suburb of Boston.

The woman was telling Jerry about the Mud Ritual — Jerry giggling. Hock said, “I want to have another look.”

“At Naga?”

“That what you call him?”

“It’s Hindu. Naga the snake.”

“Naga’s the cobra,” Hock said. “This is nsato. That’s what he’s called in the Lower River.”

“Your friend’s kind of interesting,” the woman was saying, as Hock left the kitchen and walked through the shrine room to the back room where the snake lay coiled in the fish tank. Now the python was only partly coiled. Its sculpted head was upraised, its neck looped in a tight and thickened S.

In a whisper behind him, the woman said, “How’s my baby?”

Hock lifted his hand to quiet her. He knew that the snake’s posture, the drawn-back S, meant it was preparing to strike. The small guinea pig had flattened itself into a corner, where it was twitching miserably.

“Are you sure you want to see this?” Hock said in a low voice.

Before the woman could reply, the snake flung its head forward, jaws agape, and crushed the guinea pig against the glass wall of the tank. The jaws closed, but only slightly, and a pale froth brimmed at the edges of its mouth.

The woman was whimpering, Jerry behind her, softly cursing in awe.

“Can you get him out?”

“It’s caught, like a fish on a hook — the teeth are recurved, slanted back. The more the thing struggles, the more he’s pinned. Shall we give them a little privacy?”

“I didn’t need to see that,” the woman said.

“That was awesome,” Jerry said. “Snake was hungry.”

“Do you mind if I come back sometime?” Hock asked.

“Give me your cell-phone number. I might be doing my puja. Like praying.”

“No cell phone,” Jerry said.

The woman said, “That’s nice. That’s righteous.”

Back at the store, Hock thought only of the snake, especially its uncoiling and lengthening across the fish tank to strike at the guinea pig — the woman’s gasp, Jerry’s curses.

He called her a few days later. When he visited again he brought a mouse in a small box, which he kept in his pocket. The rooms were tidier, even neat in places, more candles had been lit. Teya — he remembered the name — was dressed in a dark smock-like dress, her hair drawn back, fixed with an ornate comb, gold hoops on her ears, bangles on her wrists.

Hock wanted to see the snake, but she insisted on serving him tea first. She was more relaxed, kinder-seeming, and yet was watching him closely.

“Hock — like the store?”

“You know the place?”

“I used to get the bus from there,” she said. “My father wore clothes like that. Overcoats with velvet collars.”

“Chesterfield.”

“Yeah. And always a hat. He’d wear a cravat sometimes. I mean, lace-curtain Irish, but he knew how to dress. He was a comptroller over at Raytheon, terrific with figures. He’s retired but he still does consulting. Maybe you could use him.”

Hock said, “I’m selling the business.”

“Bummer.”

“It’s served its purpose. It’s over now. It’s dated, like chesterfields and cravats.” When the woman said nothing, he went on, “Things change, things end, things die. Even love.”

“What are you going to do with all that money?”

“Ask my ex-wife.”

“Money is trouble,” she said. “Are you dating?”

The word had always made him smile. “My ex-wife and I go out now and then.”

“You should consider massages, maybe detoxing.”

“I might take a trip,” Hock said, but until he spoke the words, the whole thought had never entered his head. He was giving voice to the shred of a feeling he had, a buried sense that he should go away. “You notice the snake’s been sleeping more?”

“Definitely. No funny business.”

“Digesting,” Hock said. “You like it here?”

“Comme çi, comme ça. All the colleges in the area. Kids everywhere — Tufts, Harvard, MIT, kids, grad students, foreigners.”

“It makes for variety.”

“Know what? I really don’t think so.”

Hock gestured, turning his hands, encouraging her to explain.

“Whenever you’re near a college, there’s always this smell of pizza. It’s the students. And coffee shops with kids and their laptops. And their bad skin. And the way they walk. There’s a typical student walk, because their parents give them money to let them go on being kids and having bad posture. I should move. Maybe move to Medford.”

Hock visited more frequently, and the woman who seemed at first so easy to mock, so easy to dismiss for her robe and her rings and her New Age jargon, became a whole person. It turned out that she had an ex-husband, and a daughter of twenty-something. “She doesn’t want to be my friend,” Teya said, smiling sadly.

“I’ve got one of those,” Hock said.

“I was giving her money and she used it to self-medicate. For drugs.”

Teya worked part-time as a massage therapist — she gently corrected Hock when he used the term “masseuse”—and she was a volunteer at a hospice near Davis Square, doing physiotherapy, “to remind them that they’re alive.”

Hock, alert for decades to the way people dressed, sizing up customers who wandered into the store, guessing at what they might buy — always attentive to details of clothing — noticed that Teya was making an effort for him. And it was odd, because he couldn’t tell her that he was visiting not to see her and listen to her stories of her daughter, or the hospice, or her plans to travel, but only because he wanted to see the rock python.

He always brought something the python might eat, a pale pop-eyed mouse, a wobbly frog, a pair of baby guinea pigs — hairless, pink, mottled skin. Sometimes the snake pounced, its jaws wide open, but one mouse survived in the glass tank for a week or more, burrowing in the wood shavings, believing it was hidden.

Teya cooked meals for Hock, always vegetarian, dishes of lentils, curried cauliflower, a stir-fry, and she used these meals as an occasion to tell stories, speaking softly in a monotone, deaf to any interruption, oblivious to his reaction or any comment. Hock would have found her maddening, except the stories were unusual.

In one she’d broken her toe (“I hit it on the stone lingam in the puja room”) and was prescribed Vicodin as a painkiller. She found that her daughter was secretly stealing her pills — so many that Teya still had pain but no medicine, and the added pain of her daughter’s betrayal. Hock mentioned his daughter again, but Teya spoke over him, not hearing, changing the subject to folk dancing — Thai dancing — saying she had learned to bend her fingers back, Siamese-style. And there was an African student down the street who wore a skullcap and blue shawl and was stalking her. He was from Sudan, with teeth missing and ornamental scars on his face, and one day he left a pair of red shoes for her at her doorway upstairs — how had he gotten in? The police didn’t take it seriously, though the African was tall and very scary. She grew herbs, she grew marijuana plants, and explained that some weed was male and some female.

Hock was grateful; her stories were a helpful distraction to him in the last weeks of his business, which would close after Christmas. He even mentioned that. She didn’t listen. Jerry didn’t listen either. But Teya wanted to see him; she smiled gratefully when he showed up. She needed him as a listener. Customers at the store needed him as a listener. All you had to do to be a friend was show up and listen. He found that Teya could go on and on, and the more he listened and said nothing, the more she depended on him. She said he was a good conversationalist and that she liked talking with him, and he said nothing.

Her stories could be alarming. The Sudanese boy who brought her the red shoes was eventually arrested and charged with harassment. “I took out a restraining order on him.” But all her sadness was apparent in the stories, and since Hock remained silent, just nodded and encouraged her to continue, he seemed powerful to her, and supportive, not sad at all. He was touched by her telling him how she gave money to charities that worked with orphans in Africa.

Now and then he excused himself and went to the ripe-smelling back room that held the tank with the python. He sat before it in silence, waiting for its eye to open, its tongue to flick, admiring the gleam on its body, its complex coloring, the patterns straggling down its dorsum. And he reflected again on how the poor creature was trapped in a small space — this six-foot python that could move with such sinuous grace across stony ground could not stretch to even half its length in the tank, but lay coiled, half asleep in the wood shavings.

One Saturday morning Hock brought a kitten with him. He had not intended to feed it to the python, though seeing it, Teya said, “Oh, God, no,” and snatched the kitten from him and cuddled it, pressing it to her cheek. “Please don’t.”

He had guessed what her reaction might be, as he watched her nuzzling the small mewling creature.

He said, “I think our friend needs a new home.”

Holding the kitten, Teya watched as he shifted the heavy lid of the tank, and he lifted the long tangled snake, one hand pressed behind its head. Then he shook its thick coils into a burlap bag that he’d brought.

That same day he took the python to the Stoneham Zoo, on the far side of Spot Pond from Medford, where he had often gone as a child to see the caged bear and the mountain goat and the coatimundi. He had called in advance to say that he had a python, and he was told that one of the resident pythons had recently died, so this one was welcome.

“Regular meals, a nice clean cage, plenty of water and light,” the zookeeper said. “It’s why their life span is so short in captivity.”

“Python sebae,” Hock said.

“You’re a herpetologist?”

“I know a little. I’m in the clothing business, but before that I was in Africa.”

“That’s where this guy belongs. Out of his element here.”

From that day, instead of visiting Teya, Hock visited the zoo. Teya called the store a few times, and reminded him that she was a licensed massage therapist. But by then the sale of it was final, the new buyer a computer chain. When the Christmas blowout was over, the unsold clothing and all the fixtures were warehoused, the phone disconnected. Now no one could find him, not even Deena.

He spent much of his time at the zoo’s Snake House, always on weekdays so he could be alone — no families, no schoolchildren, no one tapping the glass of the snake cages.

The Snake House also contained some loud screeching birds; it was warm, damp most days, the air ripe with the scaly stink of snake and the tang of their piss, of the fat coiled bodies of the snakes in the cages, and the ancient reptilian odors that seemed like the emanations from an old tomb. On these December days in the overheated Snake House, the sun shining through the skylights, seeing a thick snake slipping from beneath a boulder to bask on the heated gravel of its cage, Hock would often close his eyes and listen to the birds and inhale the snakes’ sharp odors and imagine he was back in Malabo.

3

ON THOSE DAYS at the zoo, in his reverie, Hock remembered the Lower River, the southernmost part of the southern province, the poorest part of a poor country, home of the Sena people. The Sena, a neglected tribe, despised by those who didn’t know them, were associated with squalor, cruelty, and incompetence. And his village, Malabo, was so small, just a cluster of huts, a tiny chapel, and a primary school that he’d helped build, that on the rare occasions when he was buying supplies in Zomba or Blantyre, he’d say, “I live in Port Herald,” because no one would know his village. In his time, Port Herald was renamed Nsanje, but Malabo remained Malabo, unknown to anyone outside the district.

From Blantyre to Chikwawa, the road south, below the escarpment, was a sliding surface of loose rocks and deep sand, slow in any season and sometimes impassable in the rains. And bypassing Malabo it narrowed to a dead end, at the pinched-off frontier of Mozambique, then known as Portuguese East. Beyond the frontier lay the Zambezi, one of its obscurest reaches, wide and shallow: no bridge, hardly any villages, only dugout canoes piled with contraband that bumped among the sandbanks. The Shire River at Port Herald was a feeder to the Zambezi, thick with goggling hippos and the snouts of crocodiles, and not navigable higher up except by canoe, because of the Elephant Marsh. The marsh had defeated David Livingstone, who famously dismantled his steamer on the riverbank and sent it north in pieces on the heads of his porters.

The floods in the wet season isolated the villages on the Lower River; the hot season brought temperatures of well over a hundred in the shade. Records were so dire they weren’t worth keeping. October the settlers at the boma called the Suicide Month, because of the heat, but November could be even hotter. The land was low-lying and malarial, the Sena people mocked for holding to their traditions of child marriage, polygamy, and witchcraft. The boma at Port Herald had a generator, the district commissioner’s house was lit; but two hundred yards away the light faltered against a wall of darkness. One school served the district, yet the fees kept most students away, and the children were needed in the fields. Cotton was one of the crops, rice another, and maize and vegetables were tended in the low-lying dimbas, which were always full of snakes. Small girls looked after infants, and small boys helped their fathers fish from the canoes.

Mud huts, thatched roofs, the hot dust holding footprints in powder on narrow paths; and the silence of the solemn sun-baked bush was broken only by the wolf whistles of certain birds and the screech of insects like the howl of one untuned violin string under a dragging bow. In the mornings he was woken by the shapely notes of birdsong.

One of the first sights he’d beheld as a young teacher was a pair of naked children, the smaller one with his head bowed, the girl child delousing his hair, picking through his scalp, an elemental image of intimacy.

The heat meant that the Sena people wore few clothes, the men tattered trousers rolled to their knees, and a ragged shirt was more symbolic than useful. The women, bare-breasted, wore a wraparound, an nsalu or a chitenje cloth. Showing your legs was considered immodest; even the men unrolled their trousers whenever they were away from the river. But they wore only scraps of clothing in the Nyau dance, sometimes a monthly event, which went on all night, the mganga wearing a grotesque mask, the drumming growing more frenzied as dawn approached. That ceremony was a way of easing bewitchments. Initiations were another thing. The Sena men initiated the young girls, and in a hyena’s pelt, a man would engage in an elaborate defloration. When a man died, his earthly goods were dispersed — plucked from his hut by neighbors — and within a day or two the widow had sex with her brother-in-law beside her husband’s corpse, and thus became his junior wife. Women were forbidden from whistling, from drinking beer, from eating eggs, from owning a dugout. The Lower River was populous, but beyond the boma no building was more than six feet high, and so the bush seemed uninhabited, or just more mud; many of the termite mounds were taller and more symmetrical. A shoe was a novelty; even the word for shoe, nsopato, came from the Portuguese, as nsalu was derived from sari.

The Sena people were small, slender, delicate, and violent only when they were bingeing. They did not seem strong, yet they could paddle all day against the current of the river, especially when they were fortified by puffs of chamba, the local form of marijuana.

Most meals were the same: porridge of nsima, steamed white corn flour, or rice; greens stewed to a sliminess; and sometimes a small river fish or a segment of roasted eel. Chicken was served on feast days, but there were few feasts.

The Sena lived in a web of beliefs. The Lower River was thick with spirits, mfiti, most of them vindictive specters of the dead, restless in their malevolence. Nothing happened without a reason. A tree fell because someone wished it down, a thatched roof caught fire because someone prayed for the flames. Disease, disfigurement, a bad harvest, a broken bone, a stillborn infant — all were caused by human agency, the witch in the next hut or the next village, or the mfiti representing an avenging soul. Now and then a Belgian priest visited, a White Father from the mission at Thyolo, and said Mass in starched magnificence. He had a little medical skill and jars of pills that he distributed as though giving communion. “L’Afrique profonde,” he once confided to Hock, then left on his motorcycle.

The year turned on two parallel activities: for the men, the rising of the river and their opportunities to fish; for the women, the sequence of planting the garden dimbas, rice and maize and cotton — preparing the land in October, putting the seeds in before the rains, weeding for months, and the harvest in June. Then the grinding of the maize in the hand-cranked mills, and later the slashing and burning of the fields, so dramatic inland, the low hills alight, the snakes of flame thrashing on the slopes.

In his first year, village life had seemed a struggle to Hock. But the effort had a point; and for periods, sometimes a month or more, especially after the harvest, there was nothing for the men to do but drink the yeasty village beer they called mowa, or nipa, the gin distilled from sprouted maize or banana peels. In those quieter months, the women brought their corn to be milled into flour and gathered firewood. The children looked after each other, and older girls carried the babies.

Bhagat’s General Store at the boma stocked Sunlight soap, Koo ketchup, cooking oil, bottles of Lion Lager, cigarettes sold singly, and loose tobacco and tea. But few people had more than a few tickeys, the thin gray threepence pieces that bought two cigarettes. The market stalls sold vegetables and rice, smoked fish and cassava. Not much of anything, but in all the time he’d lived there, Hock decided that you didn’t need any more than that.

At first glance, the Lower River seemed to have no population, because people stayed out of the sun. They crept in the shadows, in the sheltered courtyards of their huts, under the trees, in the elephant grass, on the riverbank.

After a year, Hock understood the inflections of the weather. It was not the stifling, squalid place of its reputation; it was dense and subtle. The heat enlivened him. The smells were of wood smoke and stagnation and the perfume of the water hyacinths in the river, sweetish with decay; the sun-heated dust was like talcum.

Hidden in the high grass was Malabo, inland from the river in Ndamera District, on the road to Lutwe. To the south, the tall trees in the distance were the mopane forests in Mozambique. By tradition, the people of Malabo were allowed to keep boats on the landing near Marka — one of them, a large hollowed-out log, could hold six paddlers. It was a day’s paddle through the Dinde Marsh to the main channel of the Shire, and three days to the Zambezi.

Teaching at the primary school he’d helped to build at Malabo, Hock had become popular in the district, and when the local member of parliament paid a visit to Nsanje, he’d asked to meet Hock, to verify what the villagers had told him — their requests for a clinic and road mending and a new roof for the market. The MP had a second family in Zomba, so he seldom visited the district.

Hock served as a counselor, wrote letters for the villagers, sent messages, and read letters for those villagers who couldn’t read, whispering the words for the sake of privacy. All the languages in the region were written phonetically, so he could convey the meaning even when he didn’t have any idea of what was written on the torn-out copybook page.

In the first year, he improved the existing school building, bought sheets of corrugated pressed fiberglass for the roof, and put up a new brick latrine they called the chimbudzi. In his second year, he organized brickmaking and built a second block of classrooms, with a wide veranda that served as a stage where he conducted morning assembly.

The villagers had pitched in. His fellow American teacher hated the Lower River, and Malabo particularly, but got no sympathy from Hock and begged to be transferred. So Hock was alone, out of touch; he seldom left the district, and the telephone at the boma was unreliable. By the light of a Tilley lamp Hock corrected copybooks and sometimes read. He had never forgotten reading The Death of Ivan Ilych, especially the death scene, because of the fizzing and flickering of the lamp. Hock learned the Sena language and was one of those volunteer teachers about whom the other Americans talked with respect tinged with satire, because they never saw him, and no one wanted to go to the Lower River.

For the Sena he was the mzungu, then the American, and at last Snake Man. He fell in love with a Sena woman who was a student teacher in Port Herald. Her name was Gala. She had dark, slanted, almost Asiatic eyes, suggesting Zulu ancestry, a thin face, a perpetual frown that showed she was trying not to laugh, and usually a head wrap that contrasted in color with her long gown-like dress. He invited her for tea, welcomed her into his house, and urged her to sit on his bed, where he joined her. But when he embraced her, she resisted him so strenuously he knew she was not a coquette but was defending her virtue, and he was ashamed. She explained that she had been promised to a man from her village near the boma, and that if it became known that she slept with Hock, the man would reject her and not hand over the bride price of three cows her father had demanded. Her fiancé was a party official, and she suggested that he was well connected.

Still, Hock had considered wooing her, persuading her father that he was worthy, and perhaps marrying her, becoming a resident, staying in the country, raising a family, spending his life there.

The term was two years. Hock stayed almost four — later judged to be a record for any foreigner in the hot, miserable, bug-ridden, swampy Lower River, among the half-naked Sena people and their procrastinations.

The happiest years of his life.

4

THE LOWER RIVER remained in his mind in the way that the notion of home might persist in someone else’s. When all hope is lost and everything is up the wall, he thought, reassuring himself, I can always go back there. As for Gala, because he’d loved her and been denied sex with her, he’d never stopped thinking about her — perhaps his desire persisted as a yearning through all those years because fulfillment had been thwarted.

What was it about having lived in Africa that made him so certain of it as a refuge? Africa cast a green glow in his memory, and its capacity for happiness occupied his mind. He had been much more than a mere visitor or resident. He had worked there, he was invested there, he felt proudly proprietary about Africa, though it was something he believed so strongly he never spoke about it. He was obscurely offended when he read of a celebrity who’d started a school in Africa, or a billionaire who’d funded a medical intervention, or an actress adopting an African child, or an actor involving himself in a pacification effort among warring tribes. That was the effect of Africa, of the people and the great spaces, and its simplicity. Maybe outsiders felt that in this green preindustrial continent it might still be possible to avoid the horrors that had come to Europe — war, machines, materialism, frozen food — to develop a happier place. He often felt that, as well as a sense of responsibility, almost the conceit of ownership. As long as Africa remained unfinished, there was hope. But the name Africa — grand and meaningless — was just his code word for the Lower River.

He was alone again after almost thirty-five years.

He’d made an early success of the business; he’d been happy as a father and husband. But the business was destroyed by imports and cheap competition, and his family had fallen apart. These weren’t failures. You had to adapt and go on living. He had enough money to see himself into his old age, yet he wanted more than that: the joy he’d known as a young man in Africa. Nothing he’d gained in his life had matched the pleasure he’d known then. Even at the time he’d thought, I have everything I want.

Looking back, he saw that it had all been a digression — business, marriage, children. Now, at sixty-two, he had money, he had all the time in the world. Apart from reading — travel, some natural history, snakes — he had no recreations. His family had been fractured, the parts dispersed. No one needed him.

For years he’d thought of going away, but he never had. A vacation was a burden, idleness was a burden, and he had a store to look after. But when he found a buyer — the electronics chain, specializing in cell-phone technology, which saw potential in the location — he had no excuse for procrastinating.

Now he had a plan. He had a destination — Malabo. He even had a departure date, yet he was uneasy about leaving, uneasy just thinking about it. Something important remained to be done, but what? He could not imagine what it might be, yet it mattered — one of those anxious thoughts that troubled his mind when he woke in the old Medford High condo he’d begun to hate. Was it a debt he’d incurred, a promise he’d made, a threat against him in the dream he’d interrupted by waking from it?

He had never stopped thinking about Africa, yet he hadn’t dared to let it preoccupy and possess him, because he’d felt it would remain unrealized, a torment. But the woman’s snake had brought it all back, given his reverie a distinctive smell, the odor of earth and straw, the rich vegetable aroma of snake flesh, the crackly hum of old snake skin that had been shed and that lay like a white ghost-husk of the snake itself.

The experience of the snake had directed him, and without any help or consultation he had gone online, found a flight to Malawi and a good fare, found a connecting flight to Blantyre, a hotel there, conducted the whole business without speaking to a single soul. Using his computer, paying by credit card, he felt self-consciously secretive, as if he was planning something illicit, sneaking away, escaping to Africa.

Yet he’d wanted to share his excitement with at least one person. Not sharing it made him feel covert in a way that suffocated him and made him superstitious. He wished that Teya had been a listener, that she’d known him better, so he could startle her by saying out of the blue, “By the way, I’m leaving. Going to Africa.”

I’m clearing out, he wanted to say, even if, as he knew, it was only for a few weeks.

He wanted someone to know he was going. Without a cell phone, he began to send Deena an email from his computer. He had rehearsed what he was going to tell her.

As he typed his message to her, tapping the keys, no more than two sentences into it, he imagined her reply. After such a long marriage he knew exactly what she would say. She wouldn’t reply by email. She would find a way of calling him — he had a landline in his condo — saying, “That is so you, announcing what you’re going to do — no give-and-take, just a flat pronouncement, and what I want to know — let me finish — is what — I said let me finish — what on earth has this got to do with me?”

So he did not send the message. He deleted it, then considered one to Chicky, and heard in his mind, “Great, giving yourself a vacation while Dougie and I stay home. Ever occur to you that we could use a vacation? You never took one when Ma and I went to the Cape year after year. Ever occur to you…?”

He did not even start a message to Chicky.

He wanted someone to be interested. More than that, he wanted someone to know where he was going — someone who’d still be here when he returned, someone to tell his stories to, someone to look at his pictures. He could not go without someone knowing. Leaving without a farewell was too depressing, too spooky, like a ghost dissolving, vanishing into the woodwork. Who?

Royal Junkins — Roy — he had known since grade school. Not an intimate friend — he had none — but a close friend, a bright boy in elementary school, a standout runner in junior high, a track star in high school. He was someone who actually owned a car, at a time when Hock’s father said it was something they couldn’t afford to give him. And Roy Junkins had given Hock rides whenever he’d seen him waiting for the bus. Hock’s house in the Lawrence Estates was not far from Roy’s on Jerome Street, but it was years before they visited each other’s house. Anyone from Medford would have understood this immediately. Jerome Street was black, the Lawrence Estates white. It was not unthinkable, just awkward for a white person to stroll down Jerome, just as awkward and unlikely as a black face in the Lawrence Estates. But they were friends on the neutral ground of school, and it was Roy’s car they used for the senior prom.

Roy had gone to college on a track scholarship in Rhode Island, and after that he had disappeared, reemerging in the 1970s with stories of California and foreign travel and hints of having made and lost a lot of money on drugs. In the way that Roy had turned up at school, always with a good story, he then visited Hock at the store. He too had been to Africa, he said, purely on a whim, in one of his flush years; and he was one of the few people to whom Hock had confided his happiness on the Lower River.

After years of roaming in the wider world, of travel, of marriage, of fatherhood, Roy had returned to Jerome Street, where he lived with his sister. He was a teacher, a drug counselor, an adviser in agencies that dealt with at-risk youths — Roy’s description of the restless boys — and right up to the end he had stopped into the store, sometimes to buy a shirt or a sweater, but more often to while away the time, talking with Hock about high school, the countries he’d been to, whatever was on his mind. Roy could see that business was terrible, and it seemed to Hock that Roy was taking pity on him. Roy knew about failure — he could see that Hock was facing the end. But Roy had grace, and an easy, forgiving manner, and always a smile, and he’d never hid his admiration for Hock in having been a teacher in Africa, something Roy wished he’d done.

In the final weeks of the store, Roy Junkins was one of the more frequent visitors, though in that period, which was also the period of Teya and the snake, Hock never mentioned the python. The snake was his secret satisfaction. But casting his mind over people in Medford who might be interested in his going to Africa, Hock realized that Roy was perfect. Roy would listen to his plans, Roy would take an interest, Roy might even miss him a little — or, at least, Roy would welcome him back. Hock was able to picture that evening in the future, the dinner on his return from Africa, how Roy would sit and smile, hearing the stories.

Hock and Roy had no other friends in common, so each would give the other his full attention. In the chance encounters with Jerry Frezza, all Jerry wanted to talk about was Teya, speculating on her wild life: Witch Camp, the Mud Ritual, massages. Hock did not have the heart to tell Jerry that she was a rather sad, lonely person, with an angry daughter, struggling to make ends meet.

“Royal is watching the football game in the front room,” said the woman who answered — his sister Mae, Hock guessed. “I’ll bring him the phone.”

Then Hock heard rustling and Roy’s “Yuh?” and Hock greeted him. Roy said, “Hey, man, how you doing?” speaking very slowly and giving weight to each word with a breath of enthusiasm.

Hock was moved by the response. Here was a friendly voice, glad to hear his.

“I need to talk to you.” As soon as he spoke, Hock regretted his urgent tone.

“Go ahead, my brother. I’m listening.”

“It’s better if I see you.”

“That’s cool,” Roy said in his easygoing way, as though used to hearing desperate requests. His history of drug use, and his subsequent sobriety and study after that, had qualified him to become a drug counselor. And Hock had the feeling now that Roy, with his heightened sense, had him pegged as a person with a problem.

“Roy, I want to share some good news with you.”

“Man, that is just great.”

They agreed to meet the next day at the Chinese restaurant in West Medford. It had replaced the shoe repair shop that had stood on the corner since Hock and Roy had been in school. Roy remarked on this when they met, how he’d gotten his shoes resoled here.

“Suede shoes — very cool,” Roy said.

“Wingtips,” Hock said.

“You got it,” Roy said, agreeable as ever.

“Thanks for meeting me at short notice,” Hock said after they’d ordered their food — noodles for Hock, fried rice for Roy, some spring rolls to share.

“Ellis, I couldn’t wait. I want to hear this good news.”

Roy was smiling — the weary smile of someone who’d been through hard times, determined not to be brought low, a resolute smile that said, No matter what you say, you cannot bring me down. It was also a smile of encouragement and gratitude, and it had the effect of lighting Roy’s face with something like love — friendship, anyway, which seemed purer for being more passive.

“I’m going back to Africa.”

Roy turned his hand and tapped his knuckles on the table. “That’s great, Ellis.”

“I wanted to you to know.”

“I been there,” Roy said. “It was fine.”

“That’s why I knew you’d be interested.”

“I am beyond interested. I am down with it.” And Roy smiled again. “Ghana. I had some contacts there. I just went on an impulse — well, you know. I told you all about it. It was the 1970s. And I just”—Roy straightened, threw his head back, exaggerating a posture of confidence—“I walked tall. I had my head up. Looked people in the eye. It was so great. I had never done that here.”

“I always tell people, ‘Africa was my Eden,’” Hock said. “I was really happy there — young, in a country that was just becoming independent. I ran a school. Really good students. I had a girlfriend.”

Roy had begun to laugh. “Now you’re talking. Those women were so fine.”

The food was served and the two men continued to reminisce, Hock about Malawi, Roy about Ghana — though, as Roy said, he’d been there only three weeks. Yet those three weeks stood out in his mind as brighter and happier, more memorable and with more meaning, than years he’d spent elsewhere, years that had yielded no memories at all.

“I know what you’re saying. Ellis, my man.”

And Hock was relieved, because Roy’s smile spared him from going into further detail. This was the right man to share his secret with, someone who understood.

“You’re lucky,” Roy said, and continued to eat, but holding his head, cocking it slightly, in a manner that indicated he had something more to say. “Wish I could do it, but I’ve got—” He laughed, and his laugh indicated a weight of problems so enormous they could only be laughed at.

Hock said, “Someday you’ll go back.”

“That’s right. Some fine day,” Roy said assertively. “But you’re the man to go now. Hey, give me your cell-phone number. We can talk.”

“I don’t have a cell phone anymore. I’m not taking one.”

“That’s cool.” And perhaps suspecting there was a story behind it that Ellis was not telling, Roy praised him. “You done your work. You ran that store — for how long? Years, man. You put in the time when the rest of us was goofing off. You think I didn’t notice? But I did. You deserve it, Ellis. You showed up every day, and now you don’t have to show up no more. You can just—”

And Roy raised his hand and flicked it, a casual gesture that was like the wing flap of a bird in flight.

“Tell you something, though,” Roy said, hitching forward in the booth. “I’m going to miss you, man.”

It was exactly what Hock wanted to hear, what he’d hoped for, what he needed: someone to miss him. And when Roy said it, Hock felt liberated and ready to go.

“This is for you,” Hock said, outside the restaurant. He took off his cashmere scarf and flipped it over Roy’s head and tugged it. “I’m not going to need it where I’m going.”

The two men embraced, Roy with gusto, Hock feeling tearful.

5

ELLIS HOCK CRAVED that simpler, older world he’d known as a young teacher, which was also a place in which hope still existed, because it was a work in progress. In the years he’d been away he’d often dreamed of going back to the Lower River district of swamp and savanna, yet without any confidence that he could achieve it. The dream was important to him, though: it had quieted him through the enormous digression of marriage and business. And he had just about abandoned any thought that he would return.

But that was before the present of his new phone, and the avenging weeks of Deena’s anger, and the end of his business. Everything was changed, and the timing was perfect. The course of a life seems random, but all lives are shaken into a pattern that makes sense only in retrospect. Hock was a new man, or rather, the man he once was, on his way back to Malawi. Now the country was advertised as a place for holidays, with resort hotels at the lake, in the north, even some game parks. It seemed like many other travel destinations in the world, where many people starved and the tourists ate well and were fussed over.

Already, before his plane touched down, he knew his decision had been right. He relaxed, smiling out the window at the low treeless hills, the creases of green in the landscape that marked the foliage along rivers and creeks, the villages that were made visible by the smoke rising from cooking fires. From the air, the place looked just as he had left it almost forty years before. Where else could you go on earth and say that?

The immigration officer asked him his reason for being in the country.

Hock spoke the sentence he had rehearsed: “Ndi kupita ku Nsanje.”

The man said, “Eh! Eh! What am I hearing?” and reached across his desk to shake Hock’s hand. “And myself I have never been there, father.”

A domestic flight was leaving later in the day for Blantyre. Hock took it and stayed the night at the Mount Soche Hotel, marveling at the crowded dirty city. Loud music boomed from the cars of boys cruising, pulsing against the metal. It seemed to indicate a kind of thuggery. He saw men talking on cell phones and hoped that there were no cell phones on the Lower River.

Assuming he would be staying a few weeks, he visited Barclays Bank and used his credit card to make a cash withdrawal. The clerk, a young man in a shirt and tie, asked him if he was sure he meant to withdraw that much money, and when Hock said yes, he counted the notes twice and squared ten tall piles, tapping them, snapped a rubber band around each of them, then ducked into his cubicle, looking for a bag large enough to hold the money.

“Be careful, sir,” the clerk said, squeezing ten fat envelopes under the heavy glass window.

“I’ll be careful,” Hock said. “I used to live here. I was here at independence. The Lower River.”

“Oh, so long ago. But we have a branch at Nsanje. I think it was different then.”

“Maybe not.”

The clerk spoke again, but was barely audible behind the glass.

“Did you say they’re angry?”

“Hungry, sir,” the clerk said, motioning his fingers to his widened mouth.

In the evening, walking down the street that was still Victoria Avenue, Hock saw an American flag hanging from a steeply angled pole, and a plaque identifying the newish building as the United States Consulate. He made a note of it, and on his way back to his hotel he passed a nightclub, the Starlight. He smiled at the well-dressed men gathered at the entrance, the women in bright dresses and high heels, some of the men getting out of expensive-looking private cars, one a Mercedes, another a white Land Rover. In his time, the men would have worn plimsolls, as they called them, and the women would have been barefoot. And no African would have owned a car, much less a Mercedes.

In his hotel room that night, the music from the nightclub and the city lights disturbed his sleep. He comforted himself with the thought that he was traveling to the darkness and silence of the Lower River.

“I’d like to see the consul,” Hock said to the receptionist at the U.S. consulate the next morning.

“Is he expecting you?

“No,” Hock said. “But I’m an American on tour here, and I think I should see him.”

Hock was conscious of a roomful of people behind him, mostly men, probably applying for visas, and listening, perhaps resenting the access this mzungu had. He felt the pressure of their gaze against his back.

As he was speaking, a white man in shirtsleeves passed by the desk and picked up a file folder from a tray.

Hock said, “Are you the consul?”

The man squinted, annoyed, interrupted in his errand. He said, “I’m the PAO. Public affairs officer.”

“Can I see you a minute?”

The man sighed in a way that was unambiguous — overdid the sigh, blinked in exasperation, and hesitated.

“Never mind,” Hock said, hating the rebuff.

The man said, “I’m just going to lunch. And I’m busy this afternoon.”

“Have lunch with me at my hotel,” Hock said. “And by the way, I’m not looking for a visa. I just want a little information.”

The man said, “Okay, I’ll see you here in a little while.”

“Ndikubwera posachedwa,” Hock said.

The man smiled, a wan smile, uncomprehending.

“‘I’m coming soon,’” Hock said. “I was here in the Peace Corps.”

“You people,” the man said, and smiled again, this time with warmth.

The public affairs officer’s name was Kent Gilroy, he had been in the country six months, and it was clear that he didn’t like the place. But with two years to go, as he said, it was too demoralizing for him to admit it. He was impatient with the waiter, repeating his order, a club sandwich. Hock ordered fish and chips, and remarked on how busy the café was.

“Tourists?”

“All aid people. NGOs,” Gilroy said. “A better class of tourist. They’d probably be more helpful to you than I could. I’m just finding my way.”

“I’m going to the Lower River,” Hock said. “Nsanje.”

“No one ever goes there,” Gilroy said. “It’s not a population center.”

“It never was.”

“And the Sena people,” Gilroy said, swallowing, instead of finishing his sentence.

“‘Backward.’”

“Not popular.”

“Off the map, the British say,” Hock said. “To me, that was always its virtue. Even in my day we didn’t have many visitors.”

“When was your day?”

“Almost forty years ago.”

Gilroy said, “God, I wasn’t even born then. I’m sorry. I don’t want to make you feel old.”

“I don’t feel old,” Hock said. “As soon as I arrived the other day, I felt rejuvenated, as I had when I first came here. It’s strange the power a white person feels in Africa. It should be the opposite, feeling like the odd man out. But no, a kind of strength is attributed to us.”

“Because you’re rich and successful and healthy,” Gilroy said. “You can grant favors. They give you the illusion of power. I’m the PAO, so I just deal with the media and schools, but even so, I’m associated with the consulate, and that means visas and work permits. Everyone wants a ticket out.”

“Years ago, no one wanted to leave. It was unthinkable.”

“You should see the lines we have to deal with — around the block, three deep. How long are you staying in Nsanje?”

“Beyond Nsanje — a village. A week or ten days. But I want every minute to count. I’d like to buy some books and teaching materials for the school there. If I had a few boxes sent to the consulate, could you have them shipped down?”

“Like I said, no one goes there,” Gilroy said. “I could put them on the night bus. Or bring them myself — maybe an excuse to visit.”

“There was a guy who worked at the consulate here, way back, who made trips to my school — Malabo, near Magwero. His name was Norman Fogwill.”

Gilroy, chewing, said, “English guy. Lives somewhere outside town.”

“Fogwill — still around?”

“Yeah, old guy. Turns up at the consulate when there’s a guest speaker or a movie. He introduced himself to me. I knew a guy just like him in my last post — Addis.”

“You were in Ethiopia?”

“For a year. They needed me here to run the program,” Gilroy said, his expression giving nothing away, and so what he said was all the more like satire.

“How was this guy like Fogwill?”

“One of those people that stays behind after everyone else has gone home.”

“I wonder if he’d remember me?”

In the way that he did not want to leave Medford until he’d found someone to say goodbye to — Roy Junkins — someone to miss him, he realized that he’d be happier here if he met someone who’d known him, who would see him on his way to the Lower River.

“I see him playing chess at Mario’s now and then,” Gilroy said. “The coffee shop. Next to Kandodo Supermarket.”

“On the far end of Victoria Street.”

Gilroy said, “I can’t get over the fact that these streets actually have names.”

Hock said, “Haile Selassie Road. I saw Haile Selassie coming down that road in 1964—a tiny man in a brown uniform with lots of medals. The whole country was given a holiday. I came up on the train from Nsanje to see him. People watching him said, ‘He’s not an African. He looks like a colored’—mixed race.”

“Ethiopians would agree. They’re down on Africans,” Gilroy said, and smirked. “The Lion of Judah in Blantyre. It’s hard to believe that anything ever happened here.”

“That’s why I like it,” Hock said. “I’m glad to be back.”

Gilroy sized him up, eyeing him, as if assessing the remark. “Great,” he said, and gave him a gold-embossed name card: Kent Gilroy, Consulate of the United States of America. “You can use this address.” He scribbled a street and number on the back of the card. “It’s a funny thing,” he said, writing. “Lots of Americans who come here buy schoolbooks and paper and pens and stuff like that. You’d be amazed at how many. I send the boxes out and that’s the last I hear of them.”

“What are you saying — that I’m wasting my time?”

“No. You’re doing a good thing. But it’s a bottomless pit. Money, medicine, books, pens, even computers. Where does it all end up?”

“Come down to Malabo. I’ll show you.” With that he wrote the name of the village on one of his own name cards.

“Will I find it?”

“Ask at the boma. Nsanje, it’s beyond Marka and Magwero. Near the river. Near the border.”

“The end of the line,” Gilroy said, and glanced at the card again. “Cell-phone number?”

“I don’t have one,” Hock said. “I don’t want one. I never had one down there.”

Hock walked him back to the consulate so he could sign the visitors’ book, and approaching the building, Gilroy said, “See what I mean?”

The line of people, men and women, some old, some like students, nearly all Africans, a few Indians.

“They’re all dying to leave.” He shrugged. “Because it’s a failed state. Whose fault is that?”

Afterward, Hock saw clearly what he had missed at lunch — that Gilroy, like the embassy people he’d known long ago, was downbeat about the country and didn’t know it well; that he felt he’d been posted to a hopeless place and had to make the best of it; that he would be gone in a year or so and in a new country. Gilroy was fragmentary in the way of lawyers and bureaucrats, and because of that he was impossible to pin down, evasive, a man of no fixed beliefs.

Hock felt nothing but gratitude for being in Malawi, thankful that the country still existed, was still sleepy and friendly and ramshackle, that it had welcomed him. That day, walking along the street, strangers meeting his gaze smiled and said hello, and when he spoke to them in their own language they shrieked with pleasure.

The air was dense and hot, woven of many odors, and just a whiff brought it all back. He was walking down Hanover to Henderson, to the corner of Laws, to the bookshop, where he’d caught a glimpse of the sign Office Supplies. The countryside, so close, penetrated the town. You could not see the bush from the main street, but you could smell it: the wood smoke floated past the shops and seeped into the brick and stucco, the peculiar hum of scorched eucalyptus, the dustiness of dead leaves, the fields chopped apart by rusty mattocks to release the sharpness of bruised roots and red earth, all of it stinking with ripeness and decay; and on every sidewalk the sweetish feety smell of the people, the sourness of their rags. He closed his eyes and inhaled and smiled and thought, I could not be anywhere else but here.

In the bookshop, Blantyre Printery and Office Supplies, he found a young clerk and asked for the manager.

“I am the manager”—a young man in a blue shirt, red necktie, a pencil tucked into the thickness of his bushy hair.

“I want to buy a couple of these cartons and fill them with school materials. Books and things.”

“This tub?”

It was a plastic container for storing files, with handles and a clip-on lid that would keep the dust out.

“This, yes, this tub,” Hock said.

He selected readers, forty of them, and forty copybooks, some dictionaries, some picture books, an assortment of pens and colored pencils and rulers, a large-format atlas of Africa, another of the world. He chose hurriedly, pointing to shelves, thinking that anything he bought would be welcome.

“How much?” he asked when the two containers were filled.

“I will tally up the docket,” the young man said, eyeing Hock sideways, and he made out the invoice. Though this was a lengthy process, involving several pads and the shuffling and interleaving of blue carbon paper, Hock sat and watched with contentment, liking the meticulous listing of each item, the digging of the ballpoint into the softness of the pad in triplicate, the exercise of an old skill.

After he paid, Hock wrote an address on a piece of paper, saying, “Here is where I want you to deliver this. The U.S. consulate, Mr. Gilroy.” And he scribbled a note to go with it, saying that he would be in touch on his return from Malabo.

The coffee shop that Gilroy had indicated, where Norman Fogwill might be, was closed when Hock passed by in the late afternoon. He drank a beer in the garden of the hotel, and as darkness fell he heard music from the nightclub adjacent to the hotel, its name picked out in lights, the Starlight.

Telling himself that he was merely taking a walk, he wandered over to the club and was at once greeted by taxi drivers, by touts, by shyly beckoning girls at the doorway. He went nearer to the entrance and looked inside — a crowd, a band, shadows, a few lights piercing webs of smoke — and a man in sunglasses said, “You’re welcome. Don’t be a stranger. Come inside, boss.”

Hock eased himself past the loitering men and boys, and once inside the dimly lit club, he made his way to an empty table by the wall. Colored lights flickered on the gleaming dance floor. The music was so loud he could scarcely hear the waitress ask what he wanted. He ordered a beer. Before it was brought, a girl asked with finger gestures if she could join him. Hock patted the chair seat next to him.

She was small, with a mass of tight shiny curls, a pretty, somewhat impish face, and wore a dark jacket over a white blouse. Her knees bumped his as she sat, squirming, smiling, being a coquette. When his bottle of beer arrived, Hock signaled — gestures again, the music was deafening — for the waitress to bring her a drink.

The girl leaned closer and shouted into his ear, “What country?”

“United States.”

“Big country,” she said, still shouting.

“Dzina lanu ndani?” Hock asked.

“Merry,” she said — at least that was how it sounded. Then, “You are knowing my language.”

“Kwambiri!”

She touched his leg. She leaned again, her mouth against his ear. “You want jig-jig?”

Hock was startled. The girl saw his reaction and looked gratified, even strengthened, taking her drink from the waitress’s tray and twirling her tongue on the straw. Hock took a breath and inclined his body toward hers and found himself shouting, “Not now!”

“Why not? We get taxi. My home is just near.”

Hock said, “I’m worried about kudwala.”

“I not sick.” She looked indignant, sitting back and staring at him with widened eyes.

“But maybe I’m sick,” Hock said.

“Okay.” That seemed to pacify her. “I give you — what? Massage, what you want.” And when Hock frowned she said, “Let we go.”

The music was so loud, Hock wondered whether he was hearing correctly. Was she really saying these things with such composure? At that moment, dizzy from the music and the cigarette smoke, Hock became aware of another girl pressing toward him from his other side.

The first girl, Merry, spoke harshly, and the girls quarreled for a moment, screeching at each other, until Hock, to quiet them, gestured to the waitress to serve the second one a beer.

“What country?” the new girl asked.

She was big, in a tight-fitting dress, with a fat face and spiky hair, and when she smiled, which she was doing now, she showed a gap in her front teeth that was as wide as a keyhole.

“Alessi,” she said, extending her hand.

Merry leaned toward Hock and said, “Let we go. Please. I need money. I got a little kid.”

“I have to make a phone call,” Hock said. “Here, take this, for the beer.” He gave each girl some money. “I’ll be right back.” They squawked as he left, and he realized that all he had given them was the Malawi equivalent of a dollar apiece.

He fled, feeling hot and desperate, hurrying to the safety of his hotel, where he locked himself in his room, sitting in the dark, breathing hard, hearing the music pulsing at the window, fearful of going out and perhaps meeting the girls.

6

HE WAS REMINDED on his third day of how time passed in Africa with no event to mark its passing — a meaningless slipping away of days. Once again, he woke in harsh early-morning light, thinking, I must leave. But he wondered at the urgency. After breakfast, he introduced himself to the clerk at the travel desk in the lobby and asked about a car and driver.

“You want to book now, Mr. Ellis?” the clerk asked.

“I want to know how much notice you need.”

“We have cars. We have drivers. We are ready to serve you, sir.”

“Good. I just have to run an errand first.”

“I will be waiting you just here, Mr. Ellis.”

Hock walked quickly down the hill toward Kandodo Supermarket, and approaching it he saw that the small coffee shop was open, a propped-up sign on the sidewalk lettered Coffee Cakes Sweets.

Inside, two old men faced each other across a chessboard. One was heavyset, with thick eyebrows, wide shoulders, his elbows on the table, hovering over the board, perhaps contemplating a move. The other man was thin, white-haired, with sunken cheeks, sitting sideways, his legs crossed, his hands in his lap. When the thin man smiled at the consternation of his opponent, Hock saw that he had one front tooth. This had to be Norman Fogwill. His narrow trousers emphasized his thin legs.

Hock entered the coffee shop. The man he took to be Norman Fogwill said to his chess opponent, “You got a customer, mate,” and to Hock, “He’s stumped. He has nowhere to go.”

“I have an answer,” the heavy man said, his accent like a morsel of unchewed food in his mouth. But he didn’t move a chess piece. “You want coffee?”

“Take your time,” Hock said.

The man roared and stood up, kicking his chair back, and stamped his feet.

“See?” Fogwill said, and laughed, showing his single tooth. He worked his tongue around the tooth, then coughed, shaking a cigarette out of a pack and lighting it.

“I used to smoke those,” Hock said. “Springboks. I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I was here in the sixties. Are you Norman Fogwill?”

“What’s left of him,” Fogwill said. “Have a seat. Make that two coffees, Mario.”

The other man was now behind the counter, locking a chrome handle into the underside of an espresso machine.

“I’m Ellis Hock. I was in the Lower River.”

“I know who you are,” Fogwill said in an awakening tone. He looked pleased, but his tight smile only made his face more skeletal. “You had snakes. Big ones in baskets. I used to hump copybooks and biros down from the office. And ink for your Gestetner. Lord, there’s a relic. A duplicator!”

“You remember?”

“How could I forget? It took me two days to get there in that motor, the Willys Jeep on that bloody awful road. Shaketty-boom, shaketty-shaketty boom.” He sucked at the cigarette and made his mouth square and shushed out blue smoke. “I had to stay overnight and leave the next day. One night was enough for me! How did you stand it for two years?”

“Almost four years,” Hock said.

“Good God. What was the name of that benighted village?”

“Malabo.”

“Right. Smack in the bush. They had teachers and health workers in Nsanje, but no one replaced you in Malabo. That’s a fact.”

“Because I phased myself out. I taught them how to run the show.”

“And a dog’s breakfast they made of it, I reckon.”

Hock said, “It was the best school in the district.”

“Oh, right, sorry. A proper little Eton College you had down there,” Fogwill said, still mocking and not seeming to notice Hock’s indignation.

Hock said, “So what have you been doing for the past forty years?”

“This,” he said, sitting upright, and he pulled a face, as though he’d just performed a successful trick. He called out to the man at the espresso machine. “Have I not, Mario?” But he become serious and said, “Remember my last duchess? That village beauty from Fort Johnson, Yao by tribe. We had three kids. She got fed up with the politics and swanned off to the UK. She’s still there, in a nice council flat in Bristol. My kids are married. I’m a grandfather, can you believe it?” He looked teasingly at Hock and said, “You never came to town. We had to hump all your katundu to you in the bush.”

Hock said, “I took the train up to see Haile Selassie. Ten hours in third class.”

Fogwill said, “The train’s not running anymore.”

“I was happy in the Lower River.”

Fogwill said, “Things are different now.”

“In what way?”

“I used to leave my house unlocked back then.”

“So you lock it now?”

“Not that it does a whit of good. I’ve been broken into so many times there’s nothing left to steal.”

“That’s life in the big city.”

“I live in the bundu,” Fogwill said. “Unlike our friend here.”

The man Mario had served the cups of coffee and was sitting, listening to Fogwill. Now Mario said, “Me, I’m no like the bush.”

“It’s a thirty-minute drive,” Fogwill said. “It suits me. Besides, I can’t afford anything else. The land belonged to my wife’s brother. He died of HIV. I’m educating his youngest son.” And as if seeing Hock for the first time, he smiled and said, “So, what brings you here?”

“Going to the Lower River.”

“No one goes there now. I haven’t been down there for yonks.” He sipped his cup of coffee, holding it daintily with tremulous fingers. He said, “Not much has changed here. Except we don’t have the old man anymore, and they kill albinos and make them into medicine, and they look for virgins to deflower — cures AIDS and the pox and heaven knows what, the dreaded lurgy, I fancy, though you’d be jolly lucky to find a virgin between here and Karonga.”

“I’m going south,” Hock said. The only way he had ever been able to deal with the teasing ironies of English people like Fogwill was to conceal himself in his stereotype and be as literal-minded as they believed Americans to be.

“Are you in possession of trade goods and shiny beads? Never mind, all they want is money. Or a mobile phone.”

“No cell phone,” Hock said.

“Astonishing.” Fogwill finished his coffee and smacked his lips and signaled for another. “You look smart. I once had a safari suit like that. Stout shoes. Bush hat. You look the part.”

“It’s just a short vacation.”

“I came for a short vacation forty years ago and I’m still here.” He looked through the café window into the street. “Buggered if I know why.”

He had the gargoyle features of a castaway, and the clothes too, his shirt faded and patched, his shoes torn and repaired with wide stitches on one toe, sutures of waxed twine in the leather, a specialty of the market cobbler.

As though to distract attention from his appearance, Fogwill began to tell a story about a recent night when he’d driven home drunk and fallen asleep in his car in the driveway of his house.

“The entire inside of the car was thick with masses of green beer bottles, curiously empty, and for my sins I had a whacking great bruise on my bonce. I woke to an impertinent whickering — my servant, cheeky bugger, wailing ‘Bwana! Bwana! Time for your tea!’ I was of course deliciously foxed…”

His houseboy, seeing him asleep in his car, pulled him out and dragged him to his bedroom, stripped off his clothes, and put him to bed.

That was the story in a sentence. But Norman told it as a lengthy, lisping farce, with digressions and humorous self-mockery. It was a good story, and in the time it took him to tell it, Mario served him his second cup of coffee and made his much-pondered chess move.

And Ellis thought: A story is a way of making life bearable. It was in general the English way, as he had experienced it among the expatriates. They would take a small disgraceful incident, remove the context, which was the great green frame of Africa, and make it a tale, choosing a few elements and adding droll phrases such as “curiously” and “for my sins” until it became a substitute for a stretch of monotony, or in Norman’s case, forty years of futility, living in a hut, abandoned by his African wife and children. He wanted to prove that he was not humiliated, not ignored, not counterfeit, not embittered, just killing time in this seedy town of ambiguous smells. He was a character in his own comedy. If you didn’t have a story, you hadn’t lived. The raggedness didn’t matter. What mattered was that Norman rescued a shred of dignity by relating the tale, depicting himself as a silly, forgivable drunk, tended to by a jungle Jeeves.

The manner of his telling it mattered too, in his plummy accent, made plummier by his living in the African bush. But Hock knew what those stories were worth. He could even translate them. “House” did not mean house; it meant a leaky hut. “Car” meant jalopy, “servant” meant skinny boy, and “tea” did not mean a meal but rather a crust of bread or a stale Kandodo cookie.

Hock was reminded why he had gone happily to the Lower River, why he had stayed there, why he was returning there now.

Fogwill said, “Know what you should do? Head up to the lake. A couple of nice hotels have opened up there — not the backpacker ones, but tourist lodges. You can swim, you can hire a fishing guide, you can just lie in a hammock all day and stay squiffy. You’ve got the money for it.”

Hock said, “But I’m going to the Lower River.”

“Then abandon all hope.” Fogwill smiled again, and gestured, as if to say, “What are we going to do with this bloke!” But his one tooth and his sunken cheeks and frailty only made him seem pathetic.

“Or you could sample the delights of Blantyre.”

“I did that last night. What’s it called — the Starlight?”

“Also the Izo Izo in Mbayani,” Mario said.

“Oh, come on, you’re past it, same as me,” Fogwill said, his eyes flashing in anger.

“What interested me,” Hock said, because he was embarrassed by Fogwill’s saying that, “what I couldn’t help noticing, was that the girls were so well dressed. And they were wearing shoes.”

“First time I ever went to the Flamingo — remember that bar, on the Chileka Road? I was courting my wife. Manager says, ‘Can’t bring her in here. No shoes.’ I gave him a right bollocking, but he wouldn’t budge. No one had shoes!”

“Was like that in Eritrea,” Mario said. “Assolutely.”

“He’s another refugee, by way of Nairobi,” Fogwill said.

Hock said, “What’s the road like to the Lower River?”

“Tarmac as far as Chikwawa and then you’re on your own. Shaketty-shaketty-boom. You should go up to the lake. Have a holiday.”

“I didn’t come here for a holiday,” Hock said.

This sharpness seemed to awaken something in Fogwill’s memory, because he smiled again and shifted in his chair and said, “Independence — it was the biggest day this country has ever seen. We had the mother and father of a party at the consul’s house and all you teachers were invited. The place was packed. Huge celebration. I says to one of your blokes, ‘Well, this is one way of getting you buggers out of the bush.’ He says to me — I’ll never forget this—‘There’s someone missing.’

“‘Probably living it up somewhere else,’ I says.

“He says — I can see his face now, ginger hair, freckles, those cretinous Bermuda shorts—‘He’s on the Lower River.’” Fogwill nodded and smiled and showed his tooth. “It was you.”

“We had a celebration there,” Hock said.

“Were you here in Batley’s time? He was the rugger player. Remember Ray Castle? We called him Castle Lager, after the beer.”

Mario tapped the chessboard and said, “Your move.”

“What about Worley-Dodd? He had the Land Rover dealership. Married an Ismaili bint. And Bill Fiddes? Nyasaland Trading Company? ‘This is my UK woolly,’ he’d say in his pullover on those cold days when the chiperoni came down like sleet. And Major Moxon at the Gymkhana Club. Fred Horridge and his horrible restaurant. No sense of smell — bit of a handicap in a chef, what?”

“Norman,” Mario said, making an impatient Italian gesture with cupped hands.

“Jumping Jimmy Jesus, he wants me to thrash him again,” Fogwill said, and then to Hock, “Go to the lake. It’s beautiful there, like it always was.” But he’d kept his head down as he was speaking, studying the board, and did not look up, just grunted, when Hock said goodbye and left.

At first Hock was sorry he’d spent the morning with this man. It had meant that leaving today was out of the question, that he’d have to leave in the morning. But he softened. It was a good thing that Fogwill knew he was going to the Lower River — someone else to say farewell to, someone else to have him in mind, like Gilroy at the consulate.

And that night, hearing the music from the Starlight, the drumbeats thumping at the walls of his room, he thought how, long ago, he had toyed with the notion of courting Gala in Malabo, wooing her away from the man she’d been promised. She was lovely. They would have children. They would live on the Lower River and Hock would go on teaching — running the school, turning out brilliant students. But no — and he smiled at this: in the course of time, Gala would leave him, the children too, and he would be skinny, toothless, reminiscing in a coffee shop, killing time. Fogwill was the man he’d have become if he had stayed.