The Lower River

7

SUMMONED AT SIX from the parking lot to the travel desk in the lobby, the hotel driver laughed when Hock said that he wanted to be dropped at Nsanje. The driver wore a blue baseball cap and sunglasses, and the top buttons of his shirt were undone, a gold neck chain showing; his shoes were narrow and stylish, with thin soles. He was a city man, who would never have heard of Malabo village.

“Muli bwanji, bambo?” Hock asked. “Dzina lanu ndani?”

The man said in English, “My name is Chuma.”

The sunglasses over his smooth jut-jawed face gave him a cricket’s profile. He smiled greedily at Hock’s watch. Hock knew that lingering gaze of admiration was like a request, but Chuma had a watch of his own.

“Let’s leave at seven.”

“Eight will be best. African time. No worry, be happy.”

“Seven,” Hock said without a smile, and the man turned deferential — respectful, with a slight jerkiness in his face of fear. All that happened quickly. Hock could see that the time Chuma had spent with other foreigners as a driver had made him overconfident. Something showy about his clothes, his ease, his laugh, his knowingness; but the correction had reduced him, moving him from familiarity to subservience. It happened again on the road: “This is the best way,” he said leaving the city, to “Anything you say,” when Hock told him he wanted to pass through Chikwawa. Chikwawa was a place he’d remembered well, and he wanted to see how it had changed.

Chuma lit a cigarette.

“Don’t smoke,” Hock said.

Squeezing the lighted tip with his bare fingers, Chuma took a deep resentful breath.

The road south out of Blantyre was paved, but it was so broken, the potholes so numerous, it did not seem modern at all, but rather like another old set of obstacles; and the holes, deep enough to trap a wheel, required Chuma to make detours through the grass and mud at the edge of the road.

The farther they got from town, the flimsier and more temporary the houses, from the solid terraces of shops fronting onto storm drains, to the tile-roofed bungalows, to the tin-roofed shacks, to the mud huts thatched with straw and the skeletal sticks of the frame showing through the crumbled mud plastering. And then the road grew worse, in some places just a strip of broken paving in a gully between two slopes, and on the slopes the stumps of trees that had been cut down, the forests stripped by people foraging for fuel.

Far ahead, toward the escarpment, the whitewashed houses of Chikwawa looked like sugar cubes, filling the valley in neat rows. But up close those same houses were stained shacks, made of painted wood and patched with plastic sheeting.

“Don’t stop,” Hock said.

Chuma said, “This must look different from before. How many years?”

“Za kale,” Hock said, because “long ago” in English didn’t adequately describe the length of time.

None of what he saw from the car was lovely: the Africa of people, not of animals. And that was its oddity, because it looked chewed, bitten, burned, deforested, and dug up. A herd of elephants could eat an acre of trees in a day, leaving behind a mass of trampled and splintered limbs, yet that acre stayed green and grew back. But this human settlement was befouled, the greenery slashed and burned, or dragged away until only dirt and stones remained — a blight, a permanent disfigurement.

At the end of the badly paved road the car shuddered, slid on the loose rocks, and bumped in the deep ruts. At the margin, the tall thickened blades of elephant grass blocked the view. When they came to a bridge over a stream, or a roadside village, or a cluster of shops, Chuma said, “So many changes.”

Hock said “Yes,” because the man was young and proud. But the answer was no, and he was glad.

Out here the bush was still a semi-ruin, a landscape coarsening, losing its softness. He would have been happier to find that nothing had changed, because it was a place he had loved for its being itself, in spite of the aid workers and the charities and the missionaries. Now they were beyond Chiromo, in the southern province, nearing the Lower River. He recognized the flattened landscape at once, a kind of disorder even in the trees and the tall grass, and an odor of dust and smoke. It had been different from anything he’d known, not beautiful, too flat and featureless to photograph, but powerful, his first experience of the world, ancient in its simplicities.

“You like,” the driver said, seeing that Hock had begun to smile.

It all came back to him again. As a volunteer teacher, in this district of small huts and half-naked people and unpaved roads — a world made out of mud — he had been content. The Lower River became the measure of his happiness; he was happiest most of all because he’d been cut off. No telephone, only the weekly mail delivery, and sometimes an out-of-date newspaper, already yellow from age, the news irrelevant, overtaken by newer, greater trivia. There was nothing to fear. No one had money. He’d hated to leave; he’d longed to return. And here he was, back again — amazing.

“Mwabvi Game Park,” Chuma said. “You want to stop?”

Hock saw the entrance, the turnoff — just a barrier, an iron pipe resting across two steel oil drums, and a shed farther on.

“Njobvu,” Hock said. “Chipembere.”

“None of those, eh. But just monkeys,” Chuma said.

“I said, don’t stop,” Hock said.

The car was slowing down and seemed to be sliding sideways on the heavy gravel at the edge of the road, Chuma yanking on the steering wheel as if trying to avoid a skid. Hock sat forward, bracing himself against the dashboard with outstretched hands, and as he did, the car came to a stop on the slant of the roadside.

“Puncture,” Chuma said.

From his tilted seat, Hock said, “Fix it. You have a spare tire, right?”

Chuma did not reply. He pushed his door open in a sulky gesture and went to the back of the car to open the trunk lid. Hock watched him lifting out his big duffel bag and flipping up the carpet to get at the spare.

“Tsoka,” Chuma said.

Hock said, “What do you mean ‘bad luck’? You have a spare tire.”

“Palibe ujeni,” Chuma said.

“What ujeni?” The word meant whatsit.

“Jack. I am not having.”

“We’ll stop a car. We’ll borrow one.”

Chuma looked into Hock’s face, seeming to defy him. He said, “Are you noticing any cars?”

They were standing in the sun, breathing hard, their heads pounded by the heat, knowing they were helpless. And the whine of the locusts made it worse, reminding them they were alone. Chuma’s forehead was beaded with sweat. He took off his sunglasses. Unmasked, his face was weak and damp. He dug out his shirttail and lifted the whole front of his shirt to wipe his face. Hock walked a few steps, and when he looked back Chuma was unbolting the spare tire from the trunk. He set it against the car with care, and stared at it, and with sudden fury kicked it.

The only shade was a low thorn tree just down the road. Hock walked to it, but when he prepared to sit he saw a smooth termite mound caked against the lower trunk. He stood for a while, then wandered back to the car, where Chuma was scowling at the tire.

Hearing the roar of an engine, Hock looked up to see a new white van with a gold logo on its side speeding toward them in the center of the road, like a locomotive on a track. Hock waved his arms but to no effect — the vehicle tore past them, its tires chewing at the road dirt, throwing up stones and leaving them shrouded in dust.

Chuma said, “The Agency. They are giving to the people here,” and in a mocking voice, “They are mzungus from your country!”

“They didn’t stop!” Hock cursed and batted at the dust the vehicle had left. “So what’s the plan?”

Because of Chuma’s big sunglasses, all that Hock saw was the lower portion of his face, seemingly impassive.

Hock stood apart from him, watching the dust settle. An hour passed. He kept checking his watch, dreading that they would be stuck there in the night. Looking up from his watch, he saw a boy approach on an old bike. As the boy wobbled by, Chuma spoke to him sharply, not like someone in trouble, but in a domineering way, making the boy wince.

“What are you saying to him?”

“He must get some men and boys from the village. He must help us.”

The boy looked stricken and confused. Hock showed him some money. He said, “Ndikufuna thandiza. We need help. You understand?”

“Sah,” the boy said in a hoarse voice. He mounted his bike and rode away.

“He won’t come back,” Chuma said.

And for another hour and a half, under the tree, Hock believed Chuma was right. But the boy did come back, with four laughing men, who laughed harder when they saw the car, lopsided on the gravel at the sloping roadside. One of them was carrying a crowbar, holding it less like a tool than a weapon.

They spoke to Chuma. Hock heard the words “jack” and “palibe”—none — and more laughter. Without hesitating, the men walked into the bush and came out hugging big rocks, one apiece, which they piled near the flat tire. They repeated this, bringing boulders from the bush and adding them to the pile of football-sized boulders. When they had enough, they pushed some under the axle and the others against the wheels to prevent the car from rolling back.

Using the biggest boulder as a fulcrum, and the crowbar as a lever, they lifted the car, three of the men snatching at the bumper to raise it as the boy added smaller boulders under the axle. This took almost half an hour, the men resting between thrusts of the crowbar, examining the height of the flat tire. They asked for a spanner — they used that word — and loosened the nuts. At last the tire was off the ground and able to turn. They removed the nuts, and when the wheel was off, Hock could see the way the axle rested on a pile of boulders and fitted-in rocks, an ancient but indestructible arrangement, as neatly made and as symmetrical as a stone altar.

One man bounced and rolled the spare tire from the place where it had fallen after Chuma had kicked it. They fitted it, tightening the nuts. And when they were done they removed the boulders from in front of the wheels and pushed the car off its pillar of rocks, rolling it forward.

Hock gave them money, each man a thickness of kwacha notes. They touched the notes to their foreheads and laughed some more and bade Hock a safe journey.

In the car, Chuma said, “You gave them too much money.”

“They saved our lives,” Hock said, suddenly angry, because Chuma hadn’t helped or so much as spoken to the men. Hock felt a pent-up anxiety from watching the primitive display, the laborious work of levering and carrying and piling boulders.

“They are just village farmers,” Chuma said.

“They know more than you.”

Chuma did not reply, but Hock could see that he had stung him.

Hock calculated that they had four hours of daylight left. Then they were passing the road junction at Bengula, and were following the course of the river, on the west bank, throwing up whitish dust and heading straight into the sun, toward the Lower River. By late afternoon they were in Nsanje.

“Keep going,” Hock said.

“You said Nsanje. This is the boma.”

The district commissioner’s house was a ruin, Bhagat’s General Store was boarded up, the railway station had been abandoned, but the greeny-black river brimmed at the embankment, and at this hour of the day the pelicans still roosted on the dock posts at the landing. Hock raised his eyes, looking for the bats, and was heartened to see the sky thick with them, fluttering and swooping from the riverside trees.

“The village I want is farther on.”

“That is extra charge.”

“It’s twenty miles,” Hock said.

“More money,” Chuma said, with menace in the words.

“Stop the car,” Hock said. The driver was so rattled he kept going. “Stop the car — I’ll walk.”

“It is far, sir,” Chuma said, with that same jerkiness of fear in his face.

“It’s not far. I know where we are.” The driver glanced at him. Hock said, “No extra charge.”

And down the road two miles, at Marka, Hock signaled for him to stop, and the driver said, “Iwe,” in the familiar form—“You!” But it was an anxious appeal, like a cry of help. Then he saw the men sitting under the tree and said, “They are waiting for you.”

“Yes,” Hock said, but he knew better. Even in his time, it had been the usual place in Marka for men to sit, a log under a mango tree. The logs were never moved, the mango trees never cut down for firewood. Yet the men murmured when they saw Hock, and they shouted a greeting.

Chuma got out of the car but stayed back, smoking a cigarette, watching with fascinated distaste — these yokels at the edge of this ramshackle village, tearing the fiber from sugar cane stalks with their teeth. Chuma seemed uneasy, eager to leave.

“What time you coming back, bwana?”

The air was so still, his cigarette smoke clung to his face. He slapped the smoke but kept puffing on the cigarette.

“You can go,” Hock said.

Chuma relaxed. He was released. The sun slanted into his face. The bush pressed up against the road, and some of it flopped over the tire tracks. The river was not visible, but its smell was in the air: the stagnation, the mud glow, the bittersweet decay of crushed hyacinths, and — strongly, part of the same heaviness, like hot damp fur — a human smell.

“I’m not coming back today,” Hock said.

The great soft cloud of white dust raised by the departing car closed over it as it rocked in the wheel ruts of the narrow road, going much too fast, north toward the boma, the horn blaring at something unseen. Even Hock found the departure a strange breach of etiquette. The man should have lingered a little, eaten something, accepted some bananas or a cup of tea, handed out a cigarette or two.

“Welcome, father,” one of the old men said, rising from the log.

This man gave his name as Maso, and introduced the man next to him as Nyachikadza. Hock said that he knew both their fathers, from long ago.

Hock greeted the men formally, holding his elbow as he shook each hand, then said to Maso, “I’m going to Malabo. I used to live there. Can you send a message? I’m looking for the headman.”

“Festus Manyenga,” Maso said. He called to a boy sitting against a bicycle, holding Hock’s duffel bag, and told him to go to Malabo. “Tell Manyenga the American is here.”

They knew of the mzungu at Malabo, they said. They had heard stories about him.

Hock said, “Maybe it was someone else.”

“There was only one mzungu at Malabo!” the man Nyachikadza said.

And he explained: Hock was famous; he had attained the status of an almost mythical figure. He had built the school, which also served as the clinic for the monthly visits of the doctor. He had served as go-between for the White Father and the member of parliament, all those years ago. He’d presented them, at independence, with a dugout canoe, called a bwato, that could hold eight paddlers.

“Come,” Nyachikadza said, and led them all through the low spreading trees and across the hard-packed dirt of a courtyard, which was being swept by a woman. This was Marka village, almost unchanged from what Hock had remembered, an important village for being near the edge of the landing stage into the channel of the great marsh.

They sat before a hut and drank tea, Hock in the place of honor, on a low stool, next to a woven mat. Hock asked about the harvest and the weather and the fishing. To each question he got the same reply, not words; the men made regretful noises, clicking their tongues, meaning, Not good, but they were too superstitious to form words for their bad fortune.

As they talked of other things — the rains, the height of the river, their children — Hock looked around and marveled at the compact village and the sheltering trees, the cooling shade, the way the sunlight speckled the ground, the children playing, kicking a knotted ball of rags. The men sat on simple benches, a woman refilling their cups from a fire-blackened kettle.

The comfort Hock felt was the comfort of a homecoming — a friendliness, the gratitude of the old men, and the dignity of a ritual welcome. He felt important, even powerful, because they knew who he was — all that had been apparent from the outset. Hock wished that someone he had known back in the States — Deena, or Roy — could witness him here, the tableau of his calmly sitting among the elders in the remote village on the Lower River. At first he’d wondered if he’d been too hasty in dismissing the driver. Now he knew it had been right.

He slipped to the mat and fell asleep. Hearing voices, Hock saw three men entering the clearing from the road. The sun was lower, the air cooler.

“Manyenga?”

“Not Manyenga.”

The men were carrying a pole, holding it horizontally. A crocodile was slung beneath it — not a big one, hardly three feet long from snout to tail tip. The creature sagged on the binding, obviously dead, swollen from decomposition, its legs swinging limp, its jaw hanging open. It looked like a child’s toy, but an old one, from an attic.

“Nyama,” Hock said — meat. A croc’s tail was eaten in the Lower River.

But the men didn’t answer. Maso was giving them orders, obviously contradicting them, setting them straight, in an I-know-better voice.

“It was found dead in the marsh,” Nyachikadza said. “Just here. Too near.”

Now all the men became serious, eyeing the dead croc as though it was not merely an interloper but a menace that had been sneaked into the village.

“They are wanting to bury it,” Maso said, laughing in mockery. And to the young men he said in Sena, “Don’t bury.”

“Bunning is better,” Nyachikadza said in English.

“If you are burying,” Maso said, “anyone at all can dig it out of the ground and cut its liver, and poison us.”

“But the badness is,” one of the other older men said, and finished the sentence in Sena, which Hock believed he understood: The crocodile has to be completely destroyed.

The men spoke in a sagacious-sounding way when they used English. Hock complimented them on their fluency. Maso said that the older people spoke English because they’d had American-trained teachers, but the younger ones didn’t go to school.

“Paraffin,” Maso said to Hock.

That made sense: douse the croc in paraffin, reduce it to ashes.

They muttered a little more while Hock listened, and as he did, he realized they were being circumspect, talking about money. They needed money to buy some paraffin at the village shop, where there was a drum of it. Still, they were murmuring, discussing the problem softly. Hock sat at the edge of this talk, listening to the repeated word, ndalama—money.

“How much do you need?”

Maso looked up and said promptly, “Five hundred kwacha.”

“Okay,” Hock said. It was about three dollars.

“Or one thousand,” another man said. “Crocodile must be bunned.”

Hock called for his duffel bag. He took it aside and unzipped it so that no one could see what it contained — the fat envelopes of money. He extracted two five-hundred-kwacha notes and zipped the bag shut. Maso took the money with both hands, bowing as he did so, whispering, “Mastah.”

8

THE MOSQUITOES WERE humming in his dreams, torturing his head, whining in his ears, tickling his eyelids, inescapable. He woke clawing his hair and slapping at his eyes, and only then, just before dawn, in the thickened air like a suspension of ashes, breathing the mud walls of the hut, the dampness of the dusty floor, did he remember where he was. To keep the mosquitoes away he wrapped his head in the dirty sheet and lay back and laughed.

Someone had heard him wake. Someone was snapping twigs for kindling, a cooking fire began to crackle, a kettle lid was clapped down, and soon the clatter of enamel cups. A shy “Odi?” A small boy, moving forward on his knees, bowed his head and presented a cup of sweet milky tea. Hock gave thanks for his good luck.

At sunup he joined the men, sitting on a stool, eating a banana. The men were discussing yesterday’s crocodile, the sequence of particular events — the talk of evisceration, mention of the liver, and instead of a burial a cremation, conducted by Maso — as though to reassure themselves that they were safe. They were speaking so quickly, Hock found the argument hard to follow, but listening closely he heard above the words the blatting of a motorbike, growing louder. He looked up as it roared into the clearing.

“Manyenga,” one of the boys said softly.

The man parked his motorbike and approached Hock, saying, “The boy on the cycle said, ‘The American is here,’ and I said, ‘I am knowing him. My grandfather was his friend.’ Welcome, welcome. I am Festus Manyenga.”

“Hello, Festus.”

And there raced through Hock that feeling again, a lightness, a slackening in his flesh, of gratitude. He’d known the Manyenga family as important in Malabo. One of the older Manyengas, perhaps this one’s grandfather, wore a pith helmet, and pinned to his long-sleeved shirt was a brass badge, lettered Headman.

Now the ritual of hospitality was extended to Festus Manyenga: tea, some dry crackers, the offer of bananas, and friendly talk: about the harvest, the condition of the road, the shortage of cooking oil, and the news that Hock had come — what they had heard about him, speaking of him as the long-ago figure of their elders’ stories.

“I was a small boy when I first saw you,” one of the men said. He was old, toothless, in a tattered shirt, with reddened eyes, his skin shiny and loose like a reptile’s. “My father said, ‘That man comes from America.’”

“We thought America was in Europe,” Maso said.

“I never saw this man before. My ancestors, they were the friends,” Manyenga said.

They talked in this congenial way, in English, praising Hock, and finally Manyenga got up and began to thank the men elaborately, taking their hands in his, repeating his gratitude, and Hock knew it was time to go.

“What do you have in the pipeline?” Manyenga asked.

Hock smiled at the expression. “Nothing special. Just to see Malabo.”

“I can arrange, father.”

His duffel bag was tied to the rear carrier of the motorbike, and he swung his leg over and sat behind Manyenga. They traveled under the shade trees the short distance to the main road and, after riding a few miles south, raising dust, turned onto the back road to Lutwe, which ran parallel to the Mozambique border. In Hock’s time it had been a path; it was wider now but harder going. Manyenga settled the bike into one tire track and gunned it along the deep groove. After half a hour — twenty miles or so — Manyenga slowed the bike and plunged into the bush, not a road, hardly a track, just an opening in the high grass that led through the yellow bush to a clearing, a scattering of huts, the big upright baskets on legs that were granaries, the crisscrossed paths that marked the edge of Malabo.

Where the trees were greenest, on the banks of Nyamihutu Creek, a woman was beating a blue quilt suspended on a line. Near her a small girl was sweeping the smooth earth with a straw broom.

Though Manyenga had been shouting the whole way from Marka village, the engine of the motorbike kept him from being understood. Now that he pulled up at the hut, he said, “This is your home, father.”

“I can only stay a few days,” Hock said.

“You are welcome, father.”

The woman and the girl fell to their knees and called out their greetings, and children and older boys from the other huts came running. The village gathered, hanging back. He saw that they were afraid of him — some of the older ones were terrified. Their anxious faces made him self-conscious. He wanted to reassure them. He would have handed out money, but he knew it would have created a mob scene.

“My other wife,” Manyenga said of a scared-looking woman. “She was married to my brother.”

“And who’s this?” Hock asked.

The girl, too shy to speak, twisted her wraparound cloth in her fingers.

“Zizi,” Manyenga said, and hearing her name, the girl covered her face. “My cousin’s child. He died some two years ago. She was raised by her grandmother.”

Seeing that the girl had gone shy, one of the small boys ambled near her, seeming to limp, and chattered at her. The boy had twisted fingers and sores on his legs and a battered face, flaky patches where hair was missing from his head. He could have been the victim of a fight, but Hock guessed he was epileptic, with head wounds from continually falling to the ground — and now Hock saw that he was not a boy at all, but a disfigured dwarf, boy-sized, in rags, who could have been any age.

“Moni, moni,” Hock said, greeting the dwarf and cajoling him, to distract him from teasing the girl. And rummaging in his duffel he found some candy that he’d bought at the hotel. “Mankhwala,” he said — medicine.

The dwarf laughed and ate it, drooling, licking his fingers, then walked unsteadily on stumpy feet, giggling because the others were laughing at him and calling out an English word.

“What are they saying?”

“His name, Snowdon.”

Hearing his name, the dwarf said, “Fee-dee-dom!”

“What is that?”

“Freedom,” Manyenga said in his own way, friddom.

“You speak English,” Hock said to the dwarf, who made a face at him, then stuck out the quivering plug of his greenish tongue. He had the license of the fool, but the candy worked. “Medicine!” they cried. And though the girl did not look up again, Hock could see she was relieved that the dwarf was hobbling away.

“You can stay here, father,” Manyenga said. “The roof is bad”—it was thatch, the bundles loose—“because we had so many challenges. But it’s clean enough. Rest your body. My wife will bring water for your bath. Tonight we will have some chicken and rice. We can discuss your program.”

Another of those words. “I don’t have a program.”

“Your agenda, father.” Manyenga gestured, touching his ear. “Where is your mobile?”

“Cell phone? I don’t have one.”

“Not having?” Manyenga frowned, then drew his lips in a smile, as though expressing disbelief.

“Don’t want one.”

“Everyone wants a mobile.”

“Maybe that’s why I don’t,” Hock said, and saw that Manyenga was smiling broadly.

“Indeed, you are knowing what is best. You are a good example for partnering.”

Partnering — yet another. It was Zizi who brought the water in a basin, with a small chip of soap, and after Hock had washed, he lay on the string bed and let down the mosquito net that hung like a bridal veil, and he dozed, hearing the boys’ raised voices in the clearing, the sound of a ball being kicked. Where else in the world could you arrive unannounced and be welcomed on sight and given a bed? But Hock was still smiling at Manyenga’s choice of words — pipeline, challenges, program, agenda.

Seeing that it was growing dark in the hut, he got up and went to the door, where it was lighter. The sky exploded over Mozambique in a fiery sunset. He searched his duffel for the bag of gifts, then walked toward the rising smoke across the clearing where Manyenga was sitting in a chair. Another chair stood empty beside him.

Hock distributed the presents he’d brought. The ballpoint pen he gave to Manyenga, a shawl he gave to the senior wife, a pocketknife to the junior wife, some books for the children. And he set down a large can of powdered coffee.

“America,” the senior wife said, fingering the cloth.

Then the women served the food — slices from the goat leg that had been grilling on the fire, roasted corncobs, a bowl of nsima and stewed greens, plates of chicken and dried fish. Manyenga poured Hock a glass of nipa, and they toasted each other and drank.

The children sat a little distance away, and some other women were standing, holding babies in cloth slings.

Manyenga was talking, in English and Sena, and Hock nodding in agreement, though he slipped to the ground and rested his head against his chair.

He must have dozed, because he heard someone say, “Tired.”

He found himself on all fours, and then was helped to his feet. Accompanied by someone with a lantern, walking beside him but saying nothing, he tottered to his hut and crawled under the mosquito net into his string bed, his flesh inert, like clay.

He woke before sunrise, as a cockcrow tore at the silence and the darkness. He could not remember ever having slept so soundly: no dreams, a whole night with his mouth open, drawing shallow breaths. They had given him a good meal, killed a chicken for him, brought him smoked fish. He had been almost tearful, thinking, Suppose it had all changed and modernized? He’d have been devastated. But the place was still simple and still smelled of the marsh and the river and wood smoke. He had dreamed of this for many years, awakening in Malabo, his real life, the only one that had ever mattered.

He listened to his compact shortwave radio until it was light, and then he walked the length of the village through the scrub. In the courtyard of most of the huts, crouching women fanned the glowing embers of cooking fires. Hock looked into the woven barrels of the granaries propped near the huts, and was glad to see they were full of dried corncobs. He saw the schoolhouse in the distance — he would save it for the afternoon. It was like seeing an old flame, the thirty-year-old now seventy-odd, thin, pinched, gone in the teeth, with a wan smile. He continued walking to the road, and past it, to the creek.

The water of the pool beside the stream, perhaps a hollowed-out part of the embankment that served as a landing place, was perfectly still, reflecting the far bank, the few palm trees, a scrap of cloud in the sky, and after a moment a slim girl stepping into it. She kept her chitenje cloth wrapped around her skinny legs, tugging it up a few inches so it wouldn’t get wet.

As she stepped farther into the pool she kept raising the cloth, hitching it up against her legs. Now the hem was at her knees, now above her knees, still rising as she made her way into the deeper water.

She had a bundle on her head — laundry, he supposed. Maybe she intended to wash it at the nearby reach of the river, where there were rocks to lash it clean and the current was swifter and clearer, not the scummy green of this pool.

The solitary girl hiked her cloth up her bare thighs as she waded, the level of the water rising. Now the loose wrap was bunched in her fists, which held it at either side of her hips, the morning sun shining through her legs, flashing on the water as the cloth went higher.

The whole luminous process of the girl slowly lifting her chitenje wrap as she waded deeper into the still pool was one of the most teasing, heart-stirring visions he’d ever had. Yet she wasn’t a tease. The cloth inched up with the rising water, and when it exposed the small honey-colored globes of her buttocks and she half turned to steady herself, the surface of the green pool brimmed against the patch of darkness at the narrowness of her body, a glint of gold, the skirt-cloth twisted just above it, Hock felt a hunger he had not known for forty years. He stared at the spangled sunlight in the gap between her legs.

He must have sighed, his desire was that strong, because the girl glanced over and bowed and clutched herself in a reflex of modesty. Then she turned away and was soon waist-deep in the pool, her cloth sodden, spread and floating around her like the blossom of a long-stemmed flower, as she waded away, seeming to float like a dark aquatic plant. It was the dead cousin’s girl, Zizi.

Hock sat on a log watching fish nip at flies, disturbing the blur of scum in the stream. Then he returned to his hut. He shaved, wrote some notes in his journal. He unpacked his duffel bag, sorted his clothes, and hung up the empty duffel to keep it away from rats — he saw droppings on the floor, from rats nesting in the thatched roof.

All this, and it was not yet seven-thirty.

Announcing himself, calling out, “Odi, odi,” Manyenga visited after eight and invited Hock to breakfast. Now Hock saw how young he was, probably in his twenties, jaunty in a baseball cap and blue shirt.

“You were going about early,” Manyenga said.

Someone had seen him. Now, an hour later, everyone knew.

“I slept so well,” Hock said. “I hate to leave.”

“So don’t leave,” Manyenga said.

They were standing before the hut, Manyenga frowning at the roof.

“But the roof must be replaced. I want to get an iron roof for you, but — eh! eh!”

Hock knew that grunting meant money.

“What about fixing the thatch? There’s plenty of grass.”

“The people who make the thatch are all dead. Even the women. Even myself I am not knowing. We are needing an intervention.”

Hock knew he was asking for money for the roof, and what made him smile was the clumsiness of it — his first morning. Usually such a request came later. But Hock was not dismayed; he was more at ease knowing that Manyenga was unsubtle, and easier to watch. But he was surprised, too — it had all happened so fast.

He said, “We can talk about it.”

“I’m going to the boma today. It is so far, but maybe they are having some iron sheets.” He mumbled, seeming to search for more words. “It’s a big priority.”

Hock knew that Manyenga, in his mind, had already received the money, and bought the iron sheets for the roof, and kept the change, and perhaps put aside the scraps to sell or trade. It only remained for the transaction to take place, for Hock to hand over the money.

“I have provided this table for your projects.” It was at the corner of the veranda; Hock hadn’t noticed it. “You can take your breakfast here. I will find you later, father.”

The girl Zizi brought the basin again and watched him as he washed his face and brushed his teeth. She returned with a plate of nsima, a puddle of oil in the center, and a bowl of vegetables in gravy and some tea. She stood in the shade. He spoke to her but she averted her eyes, perhaps ashamed from his having seen her hitching up her cloth in the stream.

As he was eating, Hock saw a creeping shadow come to rest: the little man, the bruised dwarf Snowdon, hunkered down by the veranda, rocking on his stumpy feet. Neglect and probably fits gave him the look of someone who’d been badly beaten. He was sad, his ugly face lopsided as if in pain, helplessly small, his wounds bright with infection.

Hock beckoned him over and gave him a lump of nsima. He crammed the whole lump into his mouth, crumbs on his fingers and cheeks, and chewed it with his mouth open.

“Snowdon,” Hock said.

Hearing his name, the dwarf opened his mouth wide in satisfaction, showing Hock the half-chewed food on his greenish pitted tongue.

Hock leaned toward him and said, “Rubber buggy bumpers.”

The dwarf hugged himself and gabbled and, sitting down and smiling, seemed to understand it as a phrase of welcome.

It was only nine o’clock. Hock smiled, thinking of the day that stretched ahead — the long overbright day of village somnolence, supine in its stillness, under trails of wood smoke and the confident boasting of the strutting crows and the why-why-why of the nagging shrikes.

9

HOCK SAT OVER his notebook, smoothed it with the flat of his hand, poised his pen, tried to remember the date. What to say? Two lines, one about food, one about sleep; day and night. Superstitiously he avoided writing anything negative. He’d asked for this, and yet he pondered the clean pages of the notebook and his only thought was that he’d brought it from Medford, to record his memories. So far, there was nothing in Malabo he wanted to remember.

Around noon, he walked to the maize patch, picked up a hoe, stepped into the dimba, and began chopping the dry earth with it, scraping the weeds away. Two older boys saw him and laughed. He knew why: it was women’s work. One of the boys held a rhino beetle on a length of thread; he had pierced the beetle with a needle. The beetle rose, trying to fly away, and fell heavily as the boy tugged it toward him.

Hoeing and hacking at a patch of dry shucks, Hock startled a snake. Deftly, he pinned its head down with the hoe blade, pressing it, then picked it up, and as he pinched it just behind its head, its long whipping tail caught his arm and wrapped it with the whole coil of its body.

“Kalikukuti,” he said. A twig snake, a juvenile, hardly two feet long.

The two boys stepped back, murmuring “Njoka,” snake. The one with the beetle let go of the insect, which dropped to the scattered trash of the corn shucks and scrabbled away, dragging its thread. Hock stepped out of the maize patch and the boys ran, stamping in the dust. Hock peered at the snake’s odd horizontal pupil. He brought the snake back to his hut and put it into a basket on his veranda and covered it. Sitting near it, he felt less alone.

He slept through lunch. In the afternoon, he walked again to the stream, retracing his steps of the morning — perhaps this was the beginning of a routine? All the while he was followed by children, some of whom carried homemade toys of wire twisted into the shapes of cars and wagons.

They were small skinny children, all smiles — it seemed a village of children, like a settlement in a folktale. One said “Mankhwala”—medicine — and the rest chimed in. Hock knew they were asking for candy.

“Tomorrow,” Hock said. He repeated it in Sena: “Mawa.” Seeing them laughing, he asked them if they knew English.

They shyly admitted no.

“Do you go to school?

“No school!”

He had intended to see the school that afternoon, but now the light was fading. Night came quickly: he’d see it tomorrow — something to do. As he watched the last long orangey tatters of the sunset, Manyenga called out, “Father!” for the evening meal. They ate as they had the previous night: the basin, the ceremony of being served by Zizi and the elder Mrs. Manyenga: nsima, stew, a portion of dried fish, a stinging swig of nipa.

Manyenga sat with him and in a tone meant to reassure him, said, “I have ordered the iron roof for your hut.”

“How much?”

“Very cheap. I am knowing this man. I told him about you. His father remembers you too much. Maybe he was your student. He gave me a good price. He knows we are partnering.”

Partnering? Hock said in Sena, “Lots of money”—ndalama zambiri.

“No, father. Not at all. One sheet for six thousand kwacha only.” That was forty dollars.

“How many sheets do you need?”

Manyenga didn’t answer. Hock knew the man was making a complex calculation, thinking of numbers and discarding them. At last he said, “Six,” in the local way, sick-ees.

“Say five.”

“Can manage five,” Manyenga said readily.

After the meal, when Hock walked across the clearing to his hut, he saw a shadow on the veranda and turned his flashlight toward it — Zizi, her hand shielding her face, yellow palm showing. She knelt in the light, keeping her hand up, and he moved the beam away from her.

“What are you doing?”

“Ujeni.” She faltered in the half word, whatsit.

“Did Manyenga send you here?”

She didn’t reply. Hock knew the answer. He said, “There’s a snake in that basket,” and hearing that, she stood and backed away. When she was gone he went inside and lay in the darkness, slightly drunk and levitated from the nipa.

The next day was the same: the walk, the dwarf at breakfast, the riverbank, a nap, another walk, writing notes; then dinner at Manyenga’s, more talk of money, and bed. He wondered if time spent in such a random, unprofitable way could count as a routine. And he remembered his first weeks here — the full days of work, the hot nights by lantern light grading students’ exercise books. He grew sad, admiring his younger, hopeful self.

“I want to see the school,” he said to Manyenga on the third day, seeing him straddling his motorbike.

“It is finished, father.”

“Maybe I could get it fixed up.”

Manyenga considered this, chewing his lips, his face twisting in thought.

“Some boys are there.”

In Hock’s day, the school had been three buildings: a pair of classrooms joined by a veranda, an office block standing on its own, and a long brick privy, a chimbudzi that was also a wash house, boys at one end, girls at the other. These structures were roofed with a kind of plastic composite popular in the sixties. The cement floors were polished and buffed with oxblood-colored wax from a five-pound can.

Manyenga propped his motorbike on its kickstand and walked with Hock beyond the clearing, through the tall grass, to the school. Head-high bushes had grown up around the buildings. The roof of the classrooms was mostly gone, only brittle pieces remaining. Weeds grew in the eaves. All the furniture had been removed. The table at his hut had been one of these. The windows were broken. The office was just a shell, though it showed signs that it had been lived in, mats and quilts twisted on the floor, scorch marks on the wall.

“Watch for snakes,” Manyenga said.

Hock had supervised a renovation of the store in Medford. He knew a little about construction. He studied this ruin and tried to imagine how to put it back together. It was like the remains of an old civilization, more plausible as a ruin, more coherent, more venerable as wreckage.

A lovely tree dominated the scene of decrepitude, a tree Hock himself had planted, all those years ago, when the minister of education had visited to open the school — the minister had supervised the planting, but Hock had bought the sapling, dug the hole, and set the circle of bricks around it. The minister, fat in his suit, perspiring, had watched Hock slip the root ball into the hole and had lobbed a spadeful of earth into it as the children sang. Manyenga’s grandfather had been one of those children, in the school uniform, khaki shorts and a gray shirt. The tree was now forty feet high, swelling over a pool of shade. Why hadn’t they cut it down?

Beyond the tree lay the battered classrooms, the skeleton of the office, the vandalized latrine. Graffiti on the latrine walls was crude, but it was graffiti all the same, stick figures in unmistakable postures of copulation.

“How long has it been like this?”

“I am not knowing,” Manyenga said, truly bewildered, which surprised Hock.

“We could fix it.”

The windows gaped, the roof was gone, the doors were splintered but still attached to hinges. Hock mentally scythed the grass, roofed the school, imagined it with a coat of paint, laid out gravel pathways. And he put himself in the picture: he was standing on the veranda, as the minister had stood long ago, leading the students in the national anthem and giving them a pep talk.

“Didn’t you go to school here?”

“I was schooling at Chimombo, near the boma. I completed my school certificate in Blantyre.”

“You’ve done well. And you’re still young.”

“Yes, father.”

Hock was thinking of the compound, the four huts, the motorbike, the two wives, the many children.

“I was a driver for the Agency some few years,” Manyenga said. “They were bringing food and whatnot.”

Now Hock understood Manyenga’s buzzwords. “Why didn’t you keep working for them?”

“They were cheeky. They were falsely accusing me. They couldn’t cope up at all with our customs. Not like you, father.”

Hock said, “Will you help fix the school?”

“I can send some chaps. They can help.”

This wasn’t the answer Hock was looking for, but he said, “Okay,” and looking again at the ruin, he quoted a Sena proverb: “Slowly, slowly makes a bundle.”

He was slashing at the weeds with a hacker the next day when the four boys arrived, creeping through the tall grass, parting the blades with their outstretched hands. None was older than fifteen or so. One said he’d just come from the creek, where he’d been fishing. They were like the young boys he’d known in the past, hungry, very thin, wearing rags for shirts and tattered trousers. They had been speaking in Sena.

“Speak English,” Hock said.

“Ah!” And they laughed and covered their faces.

“The mfumu sent us.”

So Manyenga was a chief?

“This was a school long ago,” Hock said.

“It is nothing now,” one of the boys said.

“But we can fix it. Then Malabo will have a school.”

They were watching shyly, making sounds of breathing, not saying anything more, but the little breaths meant they were paying attention and seemed to understand.

“Who are your parents? Maybe I knew them.”

They didn’t reply. They seemed to grow shyer.

“No father, no mother,” one said.

“They were sick,” another, the tallest boy, said, drawing out the Sena word. He chopped with the flat of his hand. “They died.”

“What about relatives?”

“We live down there”—and the boy squinted into the sun.

“How many altogether?”

The boy flashed ten fingers at Hock. “Small and big.”

Hock was still holding the hacker, standing among the tall weeds and the overhanging bushes he had slashed. The cuttings on the ground were already withered, going pale in the strong sunshine and the heat.

“Help me,” Hock said.

“We can try,” the tall boy said. He took the knife from Hock. Another boy grasped the spare machete from a stump. They whacked at the weeds while Hock went through the classrooms to examine the wreckage. He heard the boys muttering and was gladdened by the sound of slashing. The blue sky showed through the smashed roof. The trusses were still sound — usable, anyway. The rooms were hot, sunlit, cluttered with dead leaves that had blown through the roof. Hock stepped carefully. He smelled snakes — it was an oiliness, a hanging odor of a decaying nest, the hot eggy stink.

He found a narrow tree limb and stripped it of its twigs and then poked with it and startled the snake he knew was there, a black-lipped mamba. He prodded it, let it whip and coil, and pressed its head with the end of the stick, quickly snatched it, keeping its frothy mouth just above his fist. Then he brought it outside to show the boys, a trophy they’d remember.

“Mamba,” he said. “Mbadza.”

But the boys were gone, and not only that, they’d taken the two knives.

“They are useless,” Manyenga said later. He thought a moment. “Did you give them money?”

Hock said no.

Manyenga relaxed and smiled. “Ah,” he said, as though to say, What did you expect?

They didn’t discuss it further. Hock was not sure how to proceed. Perhaps it was all a mistake, perhaps this noncooperation meant it was time to go. All he had to do was ask Manyenga to take him to the boma, thirty-odd miles away, and catch the bus to Blantyre. But that would be so final, such a resignation, no hope of coming back. He’d put it off for a little while.

This thought induced him to distribute some small amounts of money to the women he encountered in his walks through the village. And one morning a few days later, he told Manyenga that it was time to leave.

With a pleading face, Manyenga said to him, “We need you, father.”

Manyenga appeared disturbed by the suddenness. Hock had seemed at home, and now his abrupt announcement that he was leaving. Perhaps they feared his assertiveness. But he was affected by Manyenga’s simple statement.

That same day the corrugated sheets of roofing were delivered, dumped at the roadside by an old van. Manyenga said they would put them on the house soon. “Tsopano, tsopano,” he insisted, slipping into Sena, then, “Now, now.” When he spoke English, Hock felt the man was being untruthful.

Even without the boys’ help, Hock went back to the school, and he slashed at the weeds and tried to tidy the classrooms and found the same black-lipped mamba in a corner of one of the rooms. Rather than disturb it, he swept the veranda, and Zizi helped with her straw broom. The dwarf Snowdon watched, flicking at the flies that settled on his sores.

Hock gave Zizi a handful of kwacha notes for helping him — just a dollar. He knew that Manyenga had sent her to stay by him, to sleep with him, and that all he needed to say was “Go inside,” and she would have obeyed. She was thin, tall for a Sena woman, with a shaven head and skinny fingers, bony wrists, almost shapeless, small breasts, long legs, with wide feet. Those feet and the way she sometimes stood reminded him of a water bird, a heron perhaps. With a bath and stylish clothes she could have passed for the sort of model he’d seen in magazines — bald, with the starved angularity of high fashion. But she was hungry and hollow-eyed. She shadowed him, never coming too near, never quite sure what he wanted, yet eager to please him.

Snowdon just watched, and sometimes giggled, or held tight to a knife and wouldn’t hand it over, jabbing at Hock, teasing him.

Hock kept working at the margins of the school, conspicuously, to attract attention or curiosity, perhaps shame the villagers into helping. No one helped, though sometimes a woman came looking for firewood, taking the splinters he chopped, or boys who scrawled with charcoal on the walls of the office, where they might have slept some nights.

It was as though he’d arrived and was living without being seen: an invisible mzungu.

10

THE NIGHT SKY was different from any other, a cloudless dome of bright blobs and pinpricks, and around a bald pitted moon were star clusters bright enough to read by. Every waking hour he was reminded that the world he knew was distant and inaccessible, so remote as to seem like another planet. He was immobilized in a vegetating settlement on a distant moon of that planet. In Medford, at the store, he’d often thought of the Lower River as a place he could easily travel to, if he’d only had the time. It was a matter of buying a ticket, making a few arrangements, withdrawing money from the bank, and setting off — a taxi to the airport, a blur of flights in a narrow seat, and then Malawi — Blantyre, Nsanje, Malabo. A jump across the world.

But here was a paradox: the way home from here was so hard it was nearly impossible to visualize from the depths of this place. He could imagine the narrow path out of the village, and the stony Lutwe road, but after that his imagination failed him. He had put himself into Manyenga’s hands; Manyenga had guided him here. He had surrendered to the gravitational pull of the Lower River, and from here the whole world was hidden, as though he were not just on a faraway moon but trapped on its dark side, in an underworld. He’d arrived as if having squirmed through a thicket of baffles and finally the funnel that was the bad road, depositing him in a narrowness of bush and dust. He had no idea how to get out. A clear way was not apparent. No electricity meant early nights and twelve hours of equatorial darkness, no computer access, no Internet, no fax machine. He had asked to be disconnected, but that had been before he’d arrived. Now he was buried in utter silence, or else the mumble of “not possible.” At first the disconnection had been an amusement. He’d even rehearsed his telling the tale to Roy or Jerry or Teya — how cut off he’d been, how remote, “another world,” “lower depths.” It astonished him to think that there was still a place on earth that lay outside the great transit of information or international chat. Long ago, much of Malawi had been like this — much of the world lay in darkness. Then, it had not been so remarkable to be isolated. He’d accepted it as normal.

Nowadays, such isolation was a novelty, and that was how he regarded it, as news to bring home — no phone, no mail, no juice at all. The separate villages in the Lower River were cut off from each other, the boma seemed as far away as Blantyre, and not only far but forbidden, the haunt of predators — tax collectors, party officials, thuggish boys — from whom villagers hid as from snakes. The stone under which they lay never moved.

Hock had taught English in Malabo, and though he was no reader, he’d boned up on the set books: Great Expectations had been one, and an African novel about independence, Wordsworth’s poems, an abridged and simplified Julius Caesar. It now seemed extraordinary that he’d talked about them so earnestly in that ruined, roofless school. Only one other person had been able to teach them, Gala, and she’d gone off to a teachers’ college in the hills outside Blantyre and earned a higher grade of teaching certificate.

Hock’s own reading was, as he called it, “mind rot.” He read detective stories, thrillers, “trash,” he said, dismissing it all. Yet he persisted. He read science fiction and consoled himself with the thought that even though it might be regarded as trash, its redeeming feature was that it was based on a sort of speculative science. Science fiction spoke of the world of perhapses: perhaps we would find another habitable planet, perhaps we were not alone in the universe, perhaps on another orbiting rock elsewhere in darkest space lived loping plant-like creatures awaiting contact over great intergalactic distances…

Such reading was futile, frivolous, self-deceiving. You didn’t need to devise a rocket journey to another galaxy to find alien life forms, for while the science-fiction writers were squinting into space, imagining insectile creatures and sentient sticks of matter and crystal cities and greenish almond-eyed mutants in boots — all of this fantasy — there were people in Malabo who were more remote, more cut off, less accessible than Martians or moon creatures.

Scientists had dreamed or imagined outer space into being and made a reality of space travel. But no one else on earth ever thought of the Lower River. Malabo was more distant than Mars. It was perhaps not all that remote in miles, but it was unknown, so it was at the limit of the world. Because of its isolation it was absurd, fantastic, unreal, a place of the naked and the misshapen. Alone in Malabo, Hock concluded that the villagers were unlike anyone he knew — they were different, too, from the people he’d lived among here years ago. They had changed, regressed drastically in their small subterranean hole in the world through which a river ran as dark as any in classical myth. The villagers on this riverbank did not look like other people, they did not think about the wider world, they did not talk like anyone else — and when they did speak, they didn’t make sense. They didn’t walk like other people, or eat or drink like anyone he’d ever known. And so from the beginning he saw that they were different, and what was more disturbing, they saw that he was different — utterly unlike themselves, a visitor from a distant place that was unknown but whispered about, impossibly far, unreachable from here, where they lay buried in their belowground river world.

At night, looking up, he was dazzled by the masses of stars and the winking planets and the streaking long-tailed comets, the big moon that at times looked as though it was made of bleached coral; and it seemed that those bright stars and that crusted moon were nearer than Medford.

Time, too, was retarded — or else crazed, circular, inverted, as it might be in deep space, one of those black holes into which the science-fiction writers tucked their voyagers. Hock could not remember when he’d arrived. He could not count the days that had passed, even the names of days had lost their significance, since they were indistinguishable. Market day was no longer observed, because there was nothing to sell. Sunday didn’t exist in a place where no one went to church, and the church itself had fallen into ruins. He remembered the progression of his first day — his nap, the meal, the sound sleep. He remembered his first glimpse of Zizi, of the dwarf, of Manyenga’s initial demand for money. After that it was sunrise, heat, sunset, the night sky, the stars, the suggestion that he was on another planet — that he was lost.

Some days he’d forgotten why he’d come, and Manyenga would show up for money, and only then would he think, I must get away.

Manyenga said after breakfast one day, following Hock so that no one would hear, “What are you looking at, father?”

“Nothing,” Hock said, bewildered by the ambiguous question.

“In the night, father. Looking with your eyes.”

How had they spotted him at midnight in the grove behind his hut, his arms crossed, his face upraised? Hock was reminded that he was happier in Malabo at night. He’d never used a flashlight, because any other light would have dimmed the stars. Standing in the darkness, he had not moved, only gaped at the sky. Yet they knew — they knew everything. Someone had seen, and here “someone” meant everyone.

“Mphanda,” Hock said. “I like to look at it.”

Instead of placating Manyenga, the answer seemed to disturb him. Hock had given the Sena name for the Southern Cross, their word for the ridgepole of a house, which is how it looked to them. He realized, too late, that he should have said, “Not looking at anything special.” But he had been specific in identifying the stars, and he knew such a reply was suspect, witch-like, as though the murmur of an element in a spell that might relate to a person’s house.

“Some people think the stars can control us,” Manyenga said.

“Which people?”

“Many people. Even those people at the Agency where I worked. One mzungu lady with much schooling, she herself said so.”

“Do you think so?”

“I am a simple man,” Manyenga said, and saying this, he had never sounded more complicated or crafty. “Myself I don’t know these things. But you, father, you are the expert.”

He said exputt, which could have been “expat” or “expert.”

“I was just thinking how far away we are,” Hock said.

Manyenga laughed, whinnying Eh-eh-eh in his throat, genuinely amused.

“Far away from what, father? We are here, right here in the middle of the world on our great river. We are having — what? We have food, we have water, we have ujeni, the river. I have my big wife and my little wife and my children.” Manyenga stamped his foot in the dust and said again, “We are here!”

“At the center of the universe,” Hock said.

“Yes. In the middle. We are having everything.”

With a thin querying smile, Hock said, “You have everything?”

“We have much,” Manyenga said, and he was returning that thin smile. “And you have much.”

Hock didn’t reply to this. He knew what Manyenga was saying: You belong to us.

Manyenga was hesitating. Finally he said, “You tell me you are observing the ridgepole. So what are the stars saying to you?” And he laughed. “That is what the people are asking. Not me. I know you are just taking refreshment in the cool air. But they are asking, ‘What are the stars saying to the father?’”

Hock couldn’t say “nothing.” No one would believe him. Nothing was a concept no one understood. Every act, every word, every event had a something to it, a direct cause. The fall of a branch was motivated by someone; a dead animal was always an omen; a person’s illness or bad luck was caused by someone who not only had a grudge but had the power to bring illness down upon that victim, or sour the person’s luck.

Someone staring at the night sky was studying the heavens, monitoring the approach of events, conspiring with the stars to bring misfortune upon an enemy, wishing to visit destruction on someone.

“They are fearing,” Manyenga said.

Hock said, “Fearing what?”

“The mzungu. The father.”

Hock said, “Sometimes I can’t sleep.”

“And they are saying that, too. The mzungu is awake when we are sleeping. He is like the fisi.”

Hock laughed at the word. “They think I’m a hyena?”

“The fisi is awake at night. They are fearing for that reason, too. A sorcerer can be any animal. And they presume you are looking for a lightning bolt in the sky.”

“Why would I look for a lightning bolt?”

“Because you are a friend of the snakes, and the lightning is a snake from the sky, as the rainbow is a snake from the earth. A sorcerer can be able to join them, heaven and earth. You think we are stupid?”

It was impossible for Hock to tell whether Manyenga was teasing. Hock had heard of the rainbow as a snake, rising from the river or a pool, but the lightning as a snake from the sky? Was that something new, or a resurrected belief of a people who felt they had been bypassed? He was from another world, and knew he needed to be careful: he was ignorant here. The remote village had strict rules and fixed beliefs and many suspicions. In the forty years that had passed since he’d last been here the villagers had drifted farther off, they were more distant, the shadows deeper. Or was it all, he sometimes wondered, a shakedown?

“What was this Agency, the charity you worked for?” Hock asked.

He was merely trying to change the subject, but Manyenga was silenced by the question; he stared at Hock as if this question was somehow related to his inquiries about the stars, the suspicions that Manyenga had voiced.

“They were from Europe,” Manyenga said. “And some people from America.”

“The Agency was the name of their charity?”

“Why are you wanting to know?”

“I have friends who give money to these people. I can tell them their money is useful.”

“The money is rubbish,” Manyenga said. “They don’t give it the right way. They were cheating me.”

“I’m just asking what the organization was called.”

“And they were false witnesses,” Manyenga said.

“Did they come here to Malabo?”

“That was the badness. They promised to deliver us. But they were telling blue lies.”

Manyenga had grown angry, and looked sullen as he spoke. Hock was reminded again of how this simple conversation about the stars had veered off course.

“Never mind,” Hock said, and began to walk away.

Following him, toeing the dusty path with aggrieved steps, Manyenga said, “And they were causing trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“And bringing deadly diseases,” Manyenga said, still treading angrily. “They were false friends.” He tugged the loose sleeve of the khaki shirt that Hock wore as protection from the sun and the insects. “But you yourself are not like that, father. No, indeed, you are being a true friend.”

In spite of trying to keep a straight face, Hock found himself smiling, with a slight heave of laughter in his throat, because he knew what was coming next.

“And those people who were whispering when they saw you at night observing the stars of the mphanda in the dark sky — no!” Manyenga, overdoing it as usual when he pretended to be indignant, worked himself into a fury, popeyed, clawing the air with his fingers. “I told them, eh! He is our father and our friend. He will never make magic against you. Don’t! I am telling them”—he made a chopping gesture with his big square hand as a froth of spittle flecked the corners of his mouth—“don’t be fearing.”

“Thanks, Festus,” Hock said, but no more than that.

“Please, father. Do not thank me for saying the truth. How can I lie? It is not natural for me.”

“People here used to know me,” Hock said. “No one knows me now.”

“I am knowing you, father.” Manyenga whipped his hand, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “I am knowing you too much.”

“But if the people I’d known before, long ago, were still alive, you wouldn’t have to tell people about me.”

“Some are alive.”

“Who?”

“Elders.” He named a few families, mentioned people whom Hock didn’t know. He listed the men in the riverside villages of Marka and Magwero, whom Hock had met that first day — children, grandchildren of men he’d known.

“And the teacher, that old woman.”

Hock shook his head and squinted for more.

“Gala Mphiri.”

Hock regretted his show of surprise, the “What?” that escaped him as a grunt. But he couldn’t help it — the name was an echo of the name in his mind.

Manyenga didn’t smile. He held the smile back, kept it in his mouth. He knew he had made his point. And it was then that he asked for money.

11

AS A YOUNG TEACHER in Malabo, stricken with a love hunger he had never known before, he had desired Gala, had to have her or he would be ill. She was aware of his hot gaze, often turning her head to look aside and smile at him, sensing his eyes on her. It was also a measure of his happiness in Malabo that he wanted her. She was slender and strong, she was aloof, striding alone from her hut to the school — white blouse, long dark skirt, red sandals. What would I give up to have her? he sometimes thought, answering himself, Everything. He would stay there, become a Malawi citizen, live in the bush, raise children, never return home. Some people did that, Fogwill for one, which was why it had been such a shock to see toothless Fogwill in Blantyre: the man he might have been.

But Norman Fogwill had married a village girl who wanted brighter lights, and Mrs. Fogwill, a Yao villager from the lakeshore, had left the country to live in England. Gala was a different sort. Hock guessed that she would never leave, but it surprised him to know that she was still alive.

She was not more than twenty at the time of independence. She had the flattish, vaguely Asian face that some Sena people had, the high cheekbones, the slanted hooded eyes. Her shaven head revealed its sculptural symmetries, her neck was slender and fragile-seeming. She was very thin, with tight muscles in her arms and legs that gave her a loose springy walk, her small high buttocks beating against her swinging skirt or her wraparound, the red chitenje she sometimes wore.

Hock had hesitated, but he had been confident that he would persuade her to marry him. He hoped she would sleep with him first, but so what? He could offer her everything. It was only a matter of time. How could she refuse? He knew the power a mzungu had in the Lower River — something magical, almost godlike. He didn’t want to think how he’d overwhelm her with his aura of being a white man in a remote place that had seen so few of them — always armed, in Land Rovers, wearing boots and shouting, sturdy, pink, and indifferent among the naked skinny Sena people. Some of them, the toughest, were Portuguese planters who had wandered over the border at Villa Nova, or crossed the river looking for animals to shoot. None had been teachers, like Hock. They had never seen anyone like him.

“We need to discuss the syllabus,” he’d said.

“I am ready.”

“Come to my house.”

“Yes, I will pop in.”

The day she dropped by his house, he sent his cook to the market. The cook was so surprised that in the midst of his sweeping he left his broom in the bucket. Hock made tea, he talked, he offered her cookies, he procrastinated, he knew night was falling but did not light his lamp. He tuned his shortwave radio and got music from Rhodesia Radio.

“Beatriss,” Gala said.

The word was unpronounceable on the Lower River. The Beatles had just reached southern Africa. Hock poured the only alcohol he had, two glasses of warm vermouth from a dusty sticky bottle.

“What is this?” She sipped and made a face.

Behind her head, out the window, across the clearing, the sky was alight in the thickened flames of sunset, and a lamp was glowing on the veranda of a hut, the orange flare in a glass chimney. Night thickened around it. Hock wanted darkness, his face hidden, his jittery fingers unseen.

In the darkness of his own house, so far from home, among people he liked and trusted, he was surprised at his eagerness, even more surprised by how he seemed — single-minded, slightly breathless, all his attention fixed on Gala. She sat on the creaking rattan sofa opposite, her small rounded head framed by the window and the glow from the distant lantern, her face in shadow. He knew she was smiling by the way she asked about the vermouth, sipping it, the smile an indication of her uncertainty, the sweetish medicinal taste.

“It is wine?”

“A kind of wine.”

“From Portuguese East?”

All the wine they knew there came as contraband from Mozambique, and the empty bottles were coveted as containers, used as lamps or as water bottles in canoes.

“From Italy. You like it?”

She shuddered, she laughed — a new taste in a culture where all tastes were age-old.

“It is alcoholic, like kachasu.” It was the polite word for nipa.

“You drink kachasu?”

“Myself I never take.”

She wasn’t drinking, only sipping. Hock thought, If she drinks a glass or two, she might get woozy enough to listen. But the vermouth was warm, syrupy even to him. She was politely pretending not to dislike it, to accommodate him. For months she had been a friend, a fellow teacher, but this was the first time he’d been alone with her in the dark.

“If only we had ice,” he said.

“Ha! Ice in Malabo, a miracle,” she said. “Even the word we are not having.”

“Next time, I’ll get some ice from Blantyre,” he said, standing up, delivering the statement like a piece of news, using it as an occasion to take three steps to the sofa, to sit next to her.

The crackling of the brittle rattan seat under him, the shiver of the frame as she moved aside, stirred him, as he draped his arm across her shoulder, stroking the white blouse.

“Put the light, please,” she said.

“I like it like this.”

She held herself and said, “I always imagine snakes coming in the dark.”

“The snakes are afraid of me,” he said.

“But not of me.” And she sniffed for emphasis. She was quick like that; no one else in Malabo would have had that answer.

“I’ll protect you.” He hitched nearer and settled his arm on her. She shrank, even under his light touch.

In that moment he became aware that she was humming the music that was playing on the radio, the song a throbbing murmur in her throat: She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. She didn’t know any of the verses but she had the rhythm perfectly, and now it was rising in her throat, ringing softly in her head.

He touched one of her breasts, shaping its softness through the cloth of her blouse. Breasts had no magic in Malabo — most of the women went bare-breasted. Gala didn’t object. She patted his hand as though in chaste friendship.

“I like you so much,” Hock said.

“Alice,” she said, her version of Ellis, but nothing more. She held her face away, as if anticipating that he’d kiss her. But though her body was turned to the opposite wall, she held his thigh, seeming to steady herself. And she was canted against him, in his arms, as he stroked her breast. It fitted his hand and the underside had a softness. Her breast was as firm as fruit under her modest buttoned blouse.

He moved to touch her between her legs, but she resisted with such sudden force it was as though he’d pinched her.

When he had soothed her, she resumed crooning, a new song now, the Beatles again, he didn’t know the name. As she sang in her throat and her nose, groaning, moving just perceptibly to the music, she steadied herself, slipped her hand between his legs and pressed, and he almost fainted with pleasure. He let go of her breast, put his mouth on her neck, and was glad for the darkness.

The Sena had a peculiar way of eating, not just gathering the lump of steamed dough and splashing it into the stew, as other Malawians did. Instead — perhaps to prolong the anticipation of eating, they were always so hungry, and food was so scarce — they broke off a corner of the hot dough, held it in their fingers, and kneaded it like a pellet, using the heel of the hand, smoothing it, making it into a small ball, then flattening it again, working it more with the fingers and palm, savoring it, sharpening their appetite in the delay, bringing it to perfection, breaking it down. The act, like mastication, was done without hurry, using only that one clean hand, continually pressing and squeezing, massaging the lump.

He had seen Gala eat this way. And this was what Gala was doing now, working her skinny fingers and her hard palm on him. What would have seemed gross and obvious in daylight was, in darkness, a bewitchment. He let her continue, saying nothing, then held his breath, and when the quickening pain of the release was too great, he caught her hand and held it and sighed.

She was listening, looking away, her head erect, alert. She had stopped humming, though the music still played.

“What is that?” Her fingers were inquiring on his lap.

He didn’t want to say, and his deeper silence seemed to animate her. She laughed softly. She tapped and traced the way she did with her fingers on food.

“Wet,” she said. “Is wet.”

He clapped his knees together like a startled girl, and placing his damp hand on her much cooler one, he lifted it away.

“I want to see,” she said, turning to him. She was whispering. “What is it?”

“You know.”

“I have never.”

In the darkness she was not the bright schoolteacher with copybooks under her arm, but an African of wondering bluntness: What ees eet? And Ees wait and I hev nayvah.

She searched in her carrying basket, and the next thing Hock knew she was laughing, softly waving the beam of her old chrome flashlight around the room and into his eyes and onto his pants. She let out a sound that was not a scream but much worse, a low agonic moan, as if expelling her last breath: a terror of dying where she sat.

The yellow light had fallen across the room in the crease between the wall and the floor where a puff adder lay like a strange misshapen hose, tensed and swelling, its blunt flat head lifted from the gritty floor, its eyes glinting at them.

“Don’t move,” Hock whispered. “Keep the flashlight on him.”

The wide froth-flecked mouth of the snake was slightly parted, spittle coating its narrow lips. Its shadow gave it extra coils, so it seemed a great knotted thing fattening against the far wall.

“He can’t see us behind the light.”

But Gala’s shoulders were narrowed in fear, and her hand shook so violently that Hock was afraid she’d drop the flashlight. The flickering beam seemed to disturb the snake. The wedge of its head lifted to sample the air with its darting tongue.

Taking the pillow from behind Gala on the sofa, Hock hitched forward, and when the rattan squeaked, the snake tensed again. Hock tossed the pillow in front of it, and the snake sprang at it, leaping full length from the last coil of its tail, and striking it, imprinting a clean parenthesis in spittle of its mouth shape on the cloth.

Gala yelped in terror as Hock snatched the flashlight from her. He kicked the lengthened snake across the room, where it gathered itself again and made for the open door, thrashing back and forth, its mouth still gaping for air.

“It’s okay,” Hock said. “It wasn’t a big one. And not poisonous, though they bite.”

“All snakes are poisonous,” Gala said.

“It’s a puff adder, not deadly. And it’s gone.”

“I should never have come to this house.” Gala fretted breathlessly, reproaching herself.

Hock walked her back to her hut, which she shared with another teacher, since it was, like his, a hut provided by the school. Her home was in an adjacent village, nearer the river, where her father had a fishing canoe in a small compound on high ground in the marsh.

Too upset to speak, she turned away from him at her hut and uttered a formula of words in Sena, which could have been a curse or a prayer.

Yet it had all excited him. After that, Hock could not think of her visit, and her embrace, without thinking of the snake — the desperate bright-eyed thing coiled in the room all the while they’d spent body-to-body, her hand moving on him.

He did not mention any of it again. She was oblique with him, but still friendly, more familiar, as though strengthened by the episode. Hock guessed that she was so sure she’d made a mistake, she was confident she’d never do it again, and her resolve made her franker with him.

One day he said, “I need some help with the report cards.”

“But I am busy.” She laughed. She would never have said that before.

It was odd for him to think that he had no power over her, no influence at all; even odder that she giggled at him instead of offering to help. And yet — in her eyes, anyway — hadn’t he saved her from being bitten by a snake?

A month or more went by before he risked inviting her again. In the meantime, he bought her some ointment at Bhagat’s General Store for a wound on her leg. When she accepted the tube of medicine, he concluded that all was well. He’d asked her to his house. But when she was with her friends, or the other woman teacher, Grace, she mocked him gently or pretended not to hear him, twisted away from him in a dance step that only aroused him more.

In time, he thought, she’ll give in, she’ll listen. What else was there for her on the Lower River? Her father was a fisherman, her brother helped him mend his nets; only Gala had an education, because she had no practical skills that would be of use on the river.

Surprising her one day in the classroom after the students had left, he shut the door and leaned against it and said, “I want to talk to you.”

She said nothing at first, keeping her gaze on the copybooks she was stacking.

“You can talk,” she finally said, though she didn’t look up.

“I want to see you.”

“Aren’t you seeing me now?”

“In my house.”

“Sorry. I cannot.”

“Tell me why.”

Adding another copybook to the stack, she said, “I am betrothed.”

“To be married?” He was stunned.

She said primly, “What else?”

“Who’s the lucky man?”

“Mr. Kalonda. I think you are not knowing him. He has an official post at the boma.”

“Married,” he said, fixing the word on her. “How long have you known him?”

“For some two years, but he was in discussion with my father about the lobola.”

The issue was always the dowry, the bride price, never love. Among the Sena it was the man who had to come up with money or a cow to compensate the parents for the loss of their daughter.

“Do you want to marry him?”

“A girl must marry,” Gala said. She sighed and slipped the copybooks into her basket. “That way her parents can earn. If she has a man without being married, the parents will not get any money.”

“Was he your fiancé when you visited me that day?”

“You tricked me,” Gala said. “And your snake threatened me.” Now she was her mocking self, and seemed even more confident having told him of her betrothal. But he wanted her. Her eyelashes were long and black and glossy, her skinny fingers clutched at the basket, chips of pink on her fingernails, the wound healing on her leg.

“What will I do without you?”

She saw that he was teasing — what else could he do? He was sorrowful, having heard her news. He could not show her his sorrow. Anyway, she seemed to know, but there was nothing to be done.

“You have your snakes,” she said. She stood up. “Please open the door. I have to go to my home.”

Hock hesitated, then opened it. But she did not leave. She walked toward him and onto the veranda, where she turned.

“I like you, Ellis,” she said. “I know you like me. But nothing can happen now. I have a fiancé. If he suspects that I am not true to him, he can refuse me. My parents will get nothing. And they are needing.”

She did not wait for a reply — he didn’t have one, in any case. She hurried away, and he told himself that in these determined strides, and all this talk of money, she was less desirable. He knew she was unattainable, and still virginal, strong, certain, unsentimental, doing her duty as a daughter and a village girl, following protocol and marrying the civil servant. Her parents would get a cow, and some money. Her whole life lay ahead of her.

Gala’s rejection of Hock made his leaving easier, and when the message came that his father was ill, he swept away without looking back. Burdened by the family business, he was sure that phase of his life was over, his four years in Africa under the starry sky. But as the years passed, he often thought of Gala on the sofa, her head at the height of the window, the daylight waning, and the fiery sunset giving way to darkness; the whispers in the dark, the radio music, her touch, unmistakable — squeezing the life out of him; and the snake, dazzled in its darkness, frantic, rising to strike.

In his life as a man it was perhaps the sharpest desire he’d ever felt. Even the memory of it years and years later was capable of arousing him. And what was it? Just a touch, no more, but unforgettable, unrepeatable, magic.

12

THE SOURCE OF Hock’s contentment, years ago, had been his trust in their innocence. He had been happy when he had never suspected anyone in Malabo of having a darker motive. Grateful, he’d felt blessed. Now it was a struggle that made his head hurt. Hock was so suspicious of Manyenga and those he influenced that he was wary of announcing his intentions, or so much as speaking casually. The consequences were obvious. If you know what’s in a man’s mind, you have power over him.

The other side to this was their obliqueness — the villagers in Malabo never said anything that might reveal how they really felt. This trait made them seem mild, but they were deeply suspicious of him now, too, nor were they innocent. And he had come with the best intentions, had handed out money, had shown that he wanted to help. He even picked up a shovel and a slasher and cleared the schoolyard for the restoration of the Malabo school. But in their general glum strangeness they didn’t trust him.

What does he want? they seemed to think. He saw the question in their guarded smiles, their sidelong looks, their narrowed eyes, the way they floated a suggestion—“We can manage better if we have a new well”—and glanced to see whether he’d bite. He could no longer be truthful; they would mistake the truth for a ruse.

He didn’t want anything from them, but he knew what they wanted from him. Simple enough: an unending supply of kwacha notes. Because the money was so devalued, the denominations of bills so small, even a modest sum, fifty dollars’ worth, was a whole big bag full of paper. And along with the need for money was the need for him to be a witness to their distress, or so he thought. They seemed to want to prove to him that they were worthy of this charity. Yes, it was a shakedown.

When he had nothing left, he’d go. But he resisted telling them anything of his plans, and he was sorry he’d shown so much emotion when Manyenga had told him that Gala was alive. Manyenga had uncovered one of his secrets, that he still had a feeling for the woman he’d known so long ago, a memory he had not shared with Deena in the many years of their marriage.

“You want me to take you to her?” Manyenga said a day or two later, tossing his head. “I can arrange it.”

He didn’t need to say Gala’s name. He knew what Hock was thinking, and was exploiting it. Hock reminded himself that Manyenga had lived among the aid workers for whom he’d been a driver. He had learned to read the gestures and expressions of Europeans; he knew all about mzungu reactions. He knew when to be silent and when to intervene. It was his mode of survival. Europeans could be obvious when they were anxious. He had been their fixer. Festus, see what those people want — Ask them the price — Find us a place to stay — Get us some food here — Talk to the chief — Meet us with the van — Deliver that message.

Manyenga had been their man. The relationship had gone wrong in the end, Hock was sure of that, because in his greed and laziness Manyenga had gone too far. Believing he knew them, he became overconfident, incautious, reckless. They had misjudged him, and he hadn’t known when to stop. Even in his dealings with Hock he didn’t realize how obvious he was.

That was a lesson to Hock, who did not want to be obvious either, who had always hoped he’d be able to slip back into the village, hardly noticed, to pick up where he’d left off.

So to Manyenga’s presumptuous question he replied, “Take me where?”

“To the woman — Gala.”

“No,” Hock said. “It’s not important.”

That baffled Manyenga. He had a habit of picking his nose when he was especially reflective. He scrunched his face, his thumb in one nostril, and his bafflement gave Hock time to think.

Hock was not alone. The skinny girl Zizi still brought him hot water in the black kettle for tea in the morning. She carried his laundry away, the bunched pile in her thin arms. Whether she washed the clothes herself he wasn’t sure, but it all came back to him folded, ironed as he instructed, with the clumsy hot-coal iron. It wasn’t the crease that mattered; what was important was that they had been heated. The whole of the Lower River was buzzing with blowflies. These putzi flies laid eggs on damp clothes on the line. Ironing killed the flies’ eggs and the possibility that they’d hatch from the warmth of his wearing the clothes and burrow into his skin, the maggots in his flesh that had become boils he’d suffered in his first year with unironed clothes at Malabo.

Zizi knelt and swept with the twig broom, she dusted and fussed, and she clucked when she knocked things over. But he loved to see her happy, stretching in the heat, muttering “Pepani!”—Sorry! — as she brushed past him. Although he did not tell her what he wanted, he trusted Zizi. Her large dark eyes and long lashes spoke of innocence, and he could see that she looked to him as a protector. When the bratty boys in the village teased her for being a virgin, she sidled nearer to Hock and the boys were silenced, abashed, because while they were suspicious of his intentions, he knew they feared him, understood that as a stranger he was strong. Zizi knew that he didn’t despise her.

And Snowdon, with his scabby face and twisted fingers and clumsy feet, he too looked to Hock for protection, since dwarfs were often murdered and their bodies used to make medicine. Snowdon could see that Hock was taken by Zizi — in a way that surprised and embarrassed Hock. He guessed it one late afternoon as Hock sat on his veranda watching Zizi crouching, sweeping the dust and leaves from the courtyard, cleaning it the way Malabo women did, claiming the shady front of the house by tidying the ground. Snowdon toiled over to her on his damaged feet and pinched her shoulder.

Zizi twisted inside her chitenje wrap, loosening it, then stopped to adjust the cloth, drawing it closer and retying it, edging away from the dwarf.

“She is beautiful,” Snowdon said in his screechy voice, glancing slyly at Hock. “She is”—and here he twisted his mouth and spoke his one English word—“fee-dee-dom.”

Another one who had had a clear glimpse of what lay in Hock’s heart.

Wide-eyed, her lips pressed together as though for balance, breathing anxiously through her nose, Zizi stood, presenting him with a tin bowl of chicken and rice. She was black and slender and emphatic, like an exclamation mark in flesh, upright before him, her wrap slightly slack at her small breasts, standing on large feet, bobbing slightly as a clumsy courtesy and a show of respect when she handed over the hot bowl of food.

Hock loved being barefoot on his wood plank veranda, drinking warm orange squash, sitting in his shorts, eating the tough chicken and sticky rice, peeling a juicy mango, treating himself to one of the last chocolates in his stash, while Zizi watched him from the edge of the veranda, the dwarf gnawed his fingers, and mourning doves moaned in the twisted thorn tree. He felt like an animal then, a happy animal, with food in his paw, his face smeared.

But he was alone. And on hot afternoons like this it was easy for him to believe he was the only foreigner on the Lower River, the last living mzungu on this hot dusty planet, with his retinue, the skinny girl, the dwarf, and his snakes. He was so content in this role as the last man, he had stopped tuning his radio and ceased to take an interest in the news. He rediscovered what he’d forgotten from before: stop listening to the news, and let two weeks go by; tune in again, and you realize you’ve missed nothing, and so you were cured of the delusion that you needed to stay current. The news didn’t matter, because nothing was news. Nothing mattered. No one was interested in Malabo — this was why the people in the village must have suspected him of having a deeper motive for visiting. He wanted something from them — why else would he come all this way to live in a hut? Altruism was unknown. Forty years of aid and charities and NGOs had taught them that. Only self-interested outsiders trifled with Africa, so Africa punished them for it.

He was much harder to read than any of the other outsiders because he was alone — there was an implicit boldness in that. He had no context, no vehicle, no way out. He was a stranger, a solitary, and the only way to his heart was to confront him with a skinny girl, like the traveler to whom they would offer a bowl of food or a drink from a green coconut, as though to test him, to see if he was really a man, and also to disarm him, to delay him, to confine him, to obligate him.

Did Zizi know she was being used? At times he stared at her with an old hunger — he could not help himself. She set the food on the wobbly table and he reached for it and snagged her fingers and held on, tugging a little. He watched her anxious eyes widening, her pressed-together lips, her nostrils opening for air, and it sometimes seemed to him that her ears moved, twitching to hear a danger signal. She stood, her feet together and overlapping slightly, one big toe clamped on the other.

Her hands were marked with her history. Her fingers, though slender and delicate-looking, were like twigs to the touch, callused and rough at the tips from handling firewood and heated pots. The backs of her hands were scaly, slick, and with her hard palms seemed almost reptilian. She was not old — sixteen? — but she’d been working since the age of six or so, carrying wood, picking maize, thumping the corn with the heavy pestle pole. Like any old woman she could carry the hottest tin container in her bare hands. The work had hardened her hands, and though they were graceful from a distance, holding her hands in his, Hock could feel only the thickened and dead skin that made him think he was holding a claw. And he knew that her fingers were so desensitized by heavy work, she could hardly feel warmth from his. Still, he held on to her hand, and knew her life better. He wanted her to know that he cared for her.

A choking sound from the doorway made him turn. Snowdon was gagging on a clot of mucus in his damaged nose, watching them with his whole ruined face.

Zizi’s wordless way of responding to the intrusion was a sudden eyebrow flash and the scratch of a quite audible sniffing.

“Send Snowdon to get some water,” Hock said, because he did not want a witness to this, not even the dwarf, who was despised by the village.

Zizi was loud, heckling the dwarf with instructions and smacking the bucket for effect and chasing him down. And after the dwarf had tottered away on his almost toeless blunted feet, Zizi returned, her arms at her sides, twisting her chitenje wrap in her fingers.

Hock said, “Tell me, do you know a woman named Gala?”

Zizi’s yes was a lifting of her eyebrows and an intake of air at her nose.

“Does she live in Malabo?”

Zizi frowned, half closed her eyes, and allowed her head to tilt once, sideways just a little, as though reacting to an odor on a rising breeze.

“You know where she lives?”

The eyebrows again, and the widening eyes that made the face lovely and innocent. All this time she had not opened her mouth.

“Nearby?” The Sena word was one of Hock’s favorites, pafoopy.

A scarcely perceptible nod that was unmistakable, and she drew in her chin for emphasis.

“How do you know her?”

Zizi went shy and knotted her fingers. She swung around as if to see whether anyone was listening, and then in a croaky voice she said, “My gogo,” and then, unexpectedly in English, “My granny.”

After she’d gone, Hock realized that she had taken him into her confidence. She hadn’t wanted anyone to hear her. Perhaps she was the one person he could trust.

The presence of this tall skinny girl relieved his days, and when he considered that she was the granddaughter of Gala, he thought, Of course. “Auntie” meant many things, but “granny” meant only one: they were directly related. He could now discern a strong resemblance between Zizi and the Gala he had known as a young woman in Malabo, when he’d been a young man — two people in their twenties in a country that had just awakened from more than half a century of colonization. It had been a drama in Blantyre, a big event that Fogwill clearly recalled, the Duke of Edinburgh present as the Union Jack had been lowered. In Malabo it had been a party, schoolchildren dancing, villagers singing, and two days of drunkenness.

“But we are the same,” an old man had said to Hock then. “Maybe wuss.”

“No more British,” Hock said.

“In the Lower River nothing change.”

The man who had said that was Gala’s father, whom Hock had met at the dance performance.

“Gala’s not coming?”

“We are Christians. Myself, I was baptized at Chididi Mission,” the old man said, frowning at the bare-breasted girls, the sweaty stamping boys in the likuba dance, the spectators with fire-brightened eyes. The celebration had been a shock in the Lower River. It was not a patriotic display, with banners, parades, or the pious speeches of the large towns. It was two days of debauchery, a feast of smoked fish and rice, jerry cans of home brew — the frothy porridgey beer that women made of fermented corn — the riotous boys, the shrieking girls. Hock had been startled by the sudden eruption of hilarity, and he’d been afraid, too, because it was his first experience of Sena recklessness, a wild streak, and the binge drinking that had tipped into brawling and rape. Some boys had howled at him for being a mzungu.

Then it was over. No one spoke about how the independence celebration had gotten out of hand.

All that was in the distant past. He remembered the old man saying We are the same and Maybe wuss. But it didn’t matter. They were themselves. In most respects the Lower River had not changed. Perhaps they had never wanted to change and, in helping him put up the schoolhouse, they were merely humoring him.

That seemed to be a feature of life in the country: to welcome strangers, let them live out their fantasy of philanthropy — a school, an orphanage, a clinic, a welfare center, a malaria eradication program, or a church; and then determine if in any of this effort and expense there was a side benefit — a kickback, a bribe, an easy job, a free vehicle. If the scheme didn’t work — and few of them did work — whose fault was that? Whose idea was it in the first place?

That was probably Manyenga’s complaint: not that he’d cheated the charity he’d worked for, but by their very presence they’d taken advantage of him.

He could make the same objection to Hock, who (Hock argued) had arrived and tempted them with his wealth. Manyenga wasn’t at fault. Hock had asked to be fleeced by simply showing up, with his implausible story of how he’d once been happy there.

So he had to leave, there was no point in staying, but he could not leave until he had visited Gala. He needed to satisfy himself that he’d seen one person he’d known before, who would recognize him — especially Gala, someone he had loved.

13

IN THE TALL, fixed, vigilant way she stood when she was idle, Zizi reminded him of a water bird, head erect, her arms tucked like wings, one skinny leg lifted and crooked against the other, like the elder sister of those stately herons at the edge of the Dinde Marsh, the thin upright birds planted in the mud on big feet. Zizi’s feet were much larger than those of other girls in the village. She was perhaps only sixteen, but for her whole life she’d gone barefoot. Her splayed feet and thin shanks made her seem even more a water bird.

She blinked the flies away and sniffed, a slender sentinel, solitary, looking unloved. When Hock appeared on the veranda in the morning, she flew across the village clearing for the kettle of hot water, the dwarf chasing her with his hopping puppy-like gait.

Just a few days had gone by since Zizi had told him who she was. In those days, though, knowing he had to see Gala, he’d decided to leave Malabo for good and put the Lower River behind him. His decision to go made him impatient with the place; he was unforgiving. It was all hotter, dustier, more ramshackle than he remembered. No one was sentimental about the old days — few people were alive to recall them, and the elders were all dead. These days, an elder was a thirty-five-year-old, like Manyenga, still a youth in Hock’s opinion, though a chief. And Manyenga ruled a decaying village.

Memory mattered, and it demoralized Hock to think that there was no one alive who knew the vigorous village that Malabo had been, and if the unashamed booze-up at independence had scandalized Hock, it at least had shown the vitality of the place. Hock wanted to meet someone who remembered him. In a significant way he was (as he saw it) seeking permission to go home.

But he needed to be covert. If word got out that he was seeing Gala, the villagers would look for a reason why. They might guess correctly that he was making his farewells, and if they knew he was leaving, they’d fuss, they’d make excuses for him to stay. He knew that he was not welcome, merely tolerated, and yet the paradox was that they did not want him to leave. He was a nuisance in the village, as all guests and strangers were, because they were parasitical and had to be catered to. Meager and hostile meals usually drove them away. But Hock had money. If he left, they’d lose it. He was like a valuable animal that needed special attention, a creature prized for its plumage, resented for its upkeep, even as its gorgeous feathers were plucked out for their adornment.

He watched for a chance, and one morning, three or four days after Zizi’s revelation (“My granny”), she had returned with the kettle, and he saw the dwarf in the distance, out of earshot. He said hurriedly to Zizi, “I want to see your granny.”

Zizi showed no surprise; she did not react. Had she heard him?

“Can you take me to her hut?”

She faced him, flashed her eyebrows, sniffed, and continued to pour the hot water into the teapot.

“Today?”

She clicked her tongue against her teeth, a yes.

Only after she’d gone to pick up the bowl of porridge from Manyenga’s fire did Hock consider that Zizi had never said no to him, never refused him anything, never asked for anything, had always submitted — silently, waiting for him at the edge of the veranda like a shadow, anticipating that he’d want tea, bringing him food, dealing with the laundry. And she seemed to imply, by the way she shadowed him, that she needed him for protection from the noisy boys in the village, those turbulent orphans; protection from the dwarf and from Manyenga, who acted like a tyrant toward all the children and the women, too.

I’ll find a way of giving her money, he thought. I’ll take care of her. She’ll be my project. Perhaps she was justification enough for his trip back to Malabo. Finding that the place was uninhabitable for him, he’d encountered someone worthy, to whom he could be a benefactor.

Like the crooked shadow of a bat in flight, a dark thought fluttered through his mind that he could ask more from her. But reminding himself that she was barely sixteen — that his daughter was thirty-two — he only smiled, and the next time he passed the mirror in his hut, he peered into it and laughed at the pink sweaty face, the damp hair, and the bright exhausted eyes.

That day Zizi stayed close to the hut, and when the sun was high at noon and the dwarf was dozing under the maize basket of the granary, Hock said, “Let’s go.”

She knew immediately what he meant. Alert and attentive, she anticipated his movements, and she set off ahead of him, crossing behind the hut and through the maize patch in the somnolence of the hot noontime when nothing in Malabo stirred and the parched leaves of the mopane trees hung like rags.

The bush at the edge of the village was low and thin, offering no shade. Between the spindly shrubs and stunted trees, the narrow path was littered with corn shucks and twists of trampled fruit peels that monkeys had gnawed. Hock knew from the noon heat, the packed earth, and the withered layers of leaf trash that it was a snakey neighborhood. When Zizi hesitated, muttering “Njoka,” he was not surprised.

He stepped around her, broke a branch from an overhanging tree, and prodded the snake, which glided away beneath the dry litter.

“Mamba,” she said.

“Not a mamba.” He hadn’t had a good look, but he wanted to seem knowledgeable to this young girl — wanted to impress her! He laughed and said, “Wolf snake.”

She put her fingers to her mouth and giggled in fear. “You go first!”

The path was distinct enough, but he could not see ahead. The bush obscured the distance in a twiggy web, and the land was so flat he had no idea where he was going. But it had always been like this — the same bush, the same snakes, the same heat, the biting tsetse flies leaving itchy sores all over his ankles. Away from the river and the marsh the soil was crumbly, dry, and stony. Dust coated the leaves, and the sun knifed through the scrubby trees. Hock stopped to get his breath, to lift his shirt against his sweaty face.

“Not far,” Zizi said.

He was looking at her bare feet, her skinny legs, her flimsy chitenje cloth wrapped around her body. Apart from the dew on her upper lip and a kind of frost-textured sweat streaking her neck, she did not seem in the least fatigued or overheated. And there he stood in heavy shoes, khaki shorts, a drenched shirt, and his red baseball cap. They were alone, and the veiled bush made it seem that there might not be anyone for miles. And the bush itself, the solitude, roused him. Even the way Zizi stood, twisting her fingers and breathing, excited him. The heat most of all, the glare, the baking in sensuality — and the glimpse of the snake that had sped his pulse made her more watchful, keeping close to him.

His hand trembled as he touched her bare shoulder. She said nothing. He draped his arm so that his hand was slung over her breast. His dangling fingers grazed her cloth, the nipple poking beneath it. There was no softness; her shoulder was a polished knob, her small breast like a compact muscle.

With a feline expression, Zizi turned away, half smiling, half fearful, listening, her head slightly raised, as if to protect him from being seen holding her. And then, almost overcome with desire, Hock released her, and she sighed.

“How far?” he asked.

“Near. I can hear.”

What she heard — what he saw, forty yards down the track at the opening of the clearing, another village — was a woman pounding maize, the slow thud thud thud of a heavy pestle pole clouting maize in a wooden mortar.

The working woman was not old. She was bare-breasted, shapeless in her cloth, which was flapping loosely from the effort of lifting and dropping the thick pole into the mouth of the mortar. She was facing away from them, toward a large cottage-like hut — a tin roof, a veranda, curtained windows, a number painted in white on the smooth mud wall, the pale twig framework showing through a fallen-away patch of plastered earth, like bones revealed in a starved carcass.

Before Hock could call out, Zizi cried “Odi!” as an announcement.

Deafened by the butting thud of her own pounding, the woman did not react, but a shadowy figure on the veranda greeted them and stood, clapping her dry hands in welcome.

The woman standing over the mortar caught the four-foot-high pestle pole in the angle of her bent arm and wiped her brow with the back of her hand. Seeing Zizi, she smiled, and Zizi in return jerked her body in a low genuflection.

“My auntie,” Zizi said, and as she was saying “My granny,” there was a barking sound from above, laughter like the clack of wood.

An enormous swirl of cloth rose from the veranda, a woman inside it, heaving herself from an armchair, and she swung around to face Hock. She wore a shallow green turban, and her dress fluttered over her bulky body, but even so, Hock could see her great stretched breasts flopping beneath the folds. She was dressed in the old style, the hem of her smock-like dress reaching to her ankles. Her face was puffy and dull, like scuffed shoe leather, the skin around her eyes purplish from age, her bare arms blotchy, and when she opened her mouth wide — laughing in satisfaction — Hock could see that several lower teeth and at least one upper tooth were missing.

Gala, grown old, was monumental but battered, heavy-breasted, plodding toward him on the boards of the veranda on thick fat feet, showing him her yellow palms in greeting.

She shook his hand in both of hers and kept laughing, saying, “Ellis, Ellis,” the name that sounded like Alice.

“Remember me?”

“Yes, I do indeed!”

From that big, coarse, and aged body, from the cracked lips, a voice of refinement — astonishing, correct English.

“Come sit here,” she said, indicating a plank bench on the veranda, and she ordered Zizi and the other woman to bring drinks. “What will you have? Water? Tea? We have orange squash as well.”

“Tea,” Hock said, fearing the water.

Gala dropped herself heavily into the armchair and took up a fly whisk. She batted a brush of horsehair around her head and smiled at Hock and peered with watery eyes. Her eye shape had not changed, still hooded and Asiatic, but apart from her eyes he could not find anything else of Gala in this fleshy old woman.

“Now tell me about your journey,” she said, lapsing into the local approximation, jinny.

“You’re surprised to see me?”

“To see you, yes,” Gala said carefully. “But I heard you were at Malabo.”

“You knew I was there?”

“You arrived on the fifteenth, not so?”

Hock had lost track of time, yet she was precise.

“I didn’t know you would come here to pay a call and reacquaint yourself.”

He was baffled by the sensible and fluent voice in that big battered body. Pay a call sounded so formal, involving doorbells and visiting cards and teacups and overstuffed chairs with doilies, and here they were on the rough plank porch of a mud hut.

Gala looked like a market mammy, someone he might find behind a table heaped with bananas and mangoes, or eggs in a basket, fanning herself with a palm leaf, feet wide apart, her cloth wrap drooping.

Yet she said, “It is rare that we get visitors here, except the tax collector, or the boys from the ruling party soliciting donations.” Then she laughed, with a slight choking sound, kek-kek-kek. “You look fit.”

“I’m okay.”

“My granddaughter is looking after you.”

“You know that too?”

“Her mother has passed on from the scourge of eddsi”—AIDS was a word that no one could pronounce. “The Lower River has suffered. Even Malabo has suffered.”

But Hock saw a different connection — a revelation. He said, “So it’s not a coincidence. They knew about you and me?”

“We are part of the local legend,” Gala said, laughing again, kek-kek. “It was a source of pain for my late husband. I was a marked woman because of my friendship with the mzungu.”

“And that’s why they chose Zizi?”

“Some people might think so,” Gala said, and screwed up one eye against the sun.

So it was a setup. He should have known. They had assessed his weakness, his sentimentality, and he reflected on how shrewd they were, how predictable he was: just minutes ago he had embraced Zizi with hot hands on the bush track.

With exaggerated dignity he said, “I might not be staying much longer in Malabo.”

Gala flicked at her head with the fly whisk, then said, “So— hah! — what do you think of your village?”

“It’s changed,” he said.

“Maybe it hasn’t changed,” Gala said. “Maybe it was always like this.”

“Forty years ago it seemed like home to me.”

“That was a special period,” she said. “Maybe you could call it an era. People were hopeful in a way they hadn’t been before. After some few years the hope was gone. You had left by then, back to your people.”

“I thought of the Sena as my people,” Hock said. “What happened?”

“Nothing happened. That was the badness. People expected a miracle, and when the miracle didn’t come they were angry. You see these young people in Malabo — all over the Lower River. They are so angry. What do you think?”

Hock, staring at her, was thinking that he was about her age, and yet, for all her fluency, she was a physical wreck, decrepit in spite of her wisdom. What he could see of her eyes was clouded, not blind but dim-sighted and milky from her hard life in this sunlight.

“Zizi isn’t angry,” he said.

“I raised Zizi,” Gala said. “My children were not angry. I sent them away for their own good. My firstborn is in the UK, a pharmacist. Another is married, in South Africa.”

“How many children do you have.”

“I have borne a total of eight, but two died in infancy. One more from dysentery, another succumbed to malaria. I myself am troubled by malaria. I hope you are taking precautions.”

“I take a pill every day.”

“The headman, Festus Manyenga, he was with the Agency in a malaria eradication program. Also some food delivery.”

Her mention of the man gave him an opportunity to ask, “What do you think of him?”

Laughing, she said, “Festus was so puffed up when he worked for the Agency. He was the driver — not a very elevated position, you might say. But he had a smart uniform. He took advantage. His vehicle was so big and expensive. He treated it as his own. He pinched from them. Have some tea.”

Zizi held a tin tray, a cup trembling on it, as her aunt poured tea for Hock.

“I think we have some biscuits,” Gala said. She was making queenly gestures from her armchair. At last, with a frown and a dismissing hand she indicated that Zizi and the aunt should leave. In a low serious voice she said to Hock, “I hope you are being careful in Malabo.”

“Doing my best,” Hock said.

“Please take care.”

“You sound worried.”

“I know those people.” She leaned forward. “They are different from any people here that you knew before. We were quite cheerful. Independence was a joyful occasion for us. The school was new and it was something wonderful.”

“When did it fall apart?”

“Some few years after you left.”

“I used to think how happy I’d be living here,” he said in a soft speculating voice that implied, With you.

“You made the right decision by going home. You have a family?”

“A wife, a child,” he said. “An ex-wife. An angry child.”

“Angry or not, your child is forever your child.”

He could not explain why he felt differently, and that when he had left home he had said goodbye to his friend Roy and not to his ex-wife or his daughter. He said, “Are you warning me about the people in Malabo?”

“You are wiser than me,” she said. “But this is my home. These people know you only by name and reputation. They know you don’t fear snakes. Apart from that, you are a stranger here.”

She seemed so ominous, saying it in her deep voice, he laughed to lighten the moment. But she kept her head lowered in that confiding posture.

“They will eat your money,” she said. “When your money is gone, they will eat you.”

He flinched at this, and was sorry he showed his surprise. It was a far cry from the homecoming he’d expected, and a shock coming from this articulate old woman, who clearly had suffered. She was ill and overweight and short of breath, and having gasped that warning, she’d exhausted herself and was panting.

“So I can’t trust anyone?”

“You can trust me,” she said. “You can trust Zizi.”

“She’s, what, sixteen?”

“More than that. Soon to be seventeen, but still a girl, still mtsikana.” It was a village distinction, a girl who had not been initiated — a virgin.

“No chinamwali for her?”

“I didn’t agree to the initiation. Festus was so angry!”

Hock glanced at the girl. “Pretty young.”

“I was not much older when I met you. Eighteen.”

“I had no idea. You were a teacher.”

“Anyone could be a teacher in those days,” Gala said. “But as you found out, I was promised to Mr. Kalonda. Zizi is not promised.”

Hearing her name, Zizi became watchful and solemn. She knelt with her auntie at the edge of the veranda, as though awaiting instructions. Zizi seemed anxious, hopeful, her dark, white-rimmed eyes lighting her smooth face. Her shaven head gave her a distinct nobility as well as an air of ambiguity, an apparent androgyny, the slender boy-girl with breasts and big feet. Hock was glad that Gala had praised her, and even seemed to encourage him, because he had already come to depend on Zizi with mingled helplessness and desire, feeling more like a lost boy than a man, as he sometimes said, on the shady side of middle age.

“My friend,” Gala said, “I am so glad to see you. But I will also be glad when I hear you are safely far away from the Lower River…”

She hadn’t finished. She had lifted her arm to make a point — to give him another warning, perhaps. He could see it in the way she took a deep breath to sustain her through a serious utterance. She had begun to say, “Do not believe…”

Then the bap-bap-bap and the shimmy of a loose muffler of a motorbike rattled into the stillness, waking a terrified dog and throwing up gouts of white dust, Manyenga skidding to a halt in front of Gala’s hut.

“I was getting worried,” Manyenga said, wrestling with the handlebars and killing the engine. “But here you are, seeing your friend.”

Lifting herself from her posture of warning, Gala relaxed and clapped her hands to welcome him. She spoke all the formulas of ritual greeting, the repetitions, too, in a mild submissive voice, calling him Festus, ending by offering him a cup of tea.

“I can’t stay. I must help this big man,” Manyenga said. Then with his teeth clamped together he hissed at Zizi in Sena. Without a word, she slipped off the veranda and turned to head down the path. She lifted her knees when she walked, seeming to march.

Manyenga climbed onto his motorbike and kicked the starting lever. His voice rose as the engine revved, but still it was inaudible. Hock had begun to follow Zizi, but Manyenga gestured for him to ride behind him.

Hock waved to Gala and was sped down the path, past the marching girl, to Malabo.

At his hut, dismounting, Hock hated that he’d been spirited away. Manyenga didn’t shut off the engine. He tossed his head as a casual acknowledgment. But before he rode away he shouted at Hock.

“What did you give her? A present, eh?” In the risen dust he’d thrown up, he pushed at his nose with the back of his hand, and it seemed a hostile gesture. “What have you got for me?”

Hock fumbled in his pocket and found a broken peanut shell and gave it to him, holding it over the man’s open palm.

“Eh!” he grunted when he saw it. “Groundnuts! You are so funny, father.”

After he’d gone, Hock waited in the shade for Zizi to return. Idle there, he replayed the visit and remembered seeing a book on the floor beneath Gala’s armchair, a book of frayed pages, fat with mildew, the cracked spine looking chewed, like a relic from another age. He wished he had looked more closely. It was probably a Bible.

When Zizi slipped from amid the tangle of bushes at the margin of the maize patch, Hock was glad. But the day had disturbed him. Now he knew the limits of his world here, how narrow they were.

14

HE DID NOT want to think that Africa was hopeless. Anyway, Africa didn’t exist except as a metaphor for trouble in the minds of complacent busybodies elsewhere. Only the villages existed, and he was now convinced that there was something final about Malabo. He had believed it to be static and inert. But the village, all of it, seemed to be sinking, the thirty or so huts, the low bush and splintered stumps, the withered mopane trees and their twitching leaves, the smoke smell, the smoothed and swept portions in front of the huts, the dusty tussocks of weeds. The place was flattening, soon to be a ruin, like the failed schoolhouse, the fallen church, none of the ruins or huts, even now, higher than Hock’s head. The whole of the village was like a rubble of foundations suggesting the settlement it had once been. Or maybe it wasn’t final but would just go sprawling on like a termite mound, mimicking its stick-like people.

Waves of sadness weakened him as he blinked in the heat shimmer of the small dusty village that had once been his greatest hope. It was not a mistake to have come, but it was a mistake to remain. Gala was right, he had overstayed his visit — time to go. He tore a page from his journal and wrote a message to the consulate in Blantyre, saying that he was unwell and needed to talk to the consul. He found an envelope. Stepping off the veranda of his hut with the letter in his hand, he heard a whistle.

The clean white paper, so rare in Malabo, brilliant in the sunlight, had been spotted from fifty yards away.

“Kalata,” Manyenga said, materializing on the path, as always trying to push him back with the force of his voice. And when he put his hand out, palm up, Hock imagined that at one time a cheeky mzungu at the Agency had done that to him. Manyenga must have been working on his motorbike — his hands were smeared with black grease. “We will post the kalata for you.”

“I can do it, Festus.”

“The big man does not post letters. His people carry out the workload. They brush the glue on the stamps. His people post the letters. Give it, my friend!”

Too feeble to protest, Hock handed it over. Finger streaks of grease imprinted the pure white envelope, which he knew would never be sent.

Hock had abandoned any idea of improving the village. The school would remain a roofless shell, a nest of snakes, the office a hideout for the orphan boys, the clinic a ruin. The side road would grow narrower from the dense encroaching elephant grass that flopped over at its edges. The villagers would subsist, the weaker ones would die. The river was invisible, and all he had seen of it was the heaviness of the marsh and the water hyacinths that piled up in a mass of leaves and flowers that filled its channels. The nearer creek was stagnant, a constant whiff in the air of decay. The boma seemed as distant as Blantyre, an unwalkable distance.

The next day at breakfast he said, “I’m going to pick some bananas,” using that as an excuse to take a stroll, to feel less trapped.

Though he had not spoken to anyone in particular, his words reached Manyenga, who confronted him, speaking as though to a child.

“The big man cannot pick bananas!” Manyenga said. “You must not do, father. The kids will fetch them.” And he called to a small boy, saying, “Ntochi!” He never spoke to the dwarf Snowdon.

Hock’s running an errand or going for a walk were indignities, not befitting a chief. So they waited on him, the whole village enlisted as his helpers, and they kept him captive. They were no longer afraid of him. He would rise from his chair on the veranda and as soon as he stepped into the clearing he’d hear a sharp whistle that signaled, He’s moving.

The earth, his life, his brain, had slowed in the humid heat of the Lower River. Half cooked, drowsing during the day, he was more wakeful at night. He came to understand the sharp squawks and chirps, the warbling and whickering of some birds and the bub-bubbling of the mourning doves at sundown. These noises gave way to the raw coughing of dogs, or the untuned string of a locust at dusk, until in the pitch black of his hut at midnight when he was wakeful all sounds ceased except the most disturbing one, the gabble of a human voice, five or six muttered words, the more alarming for being flat and unintelligible, always like a command. He found no reassurance in the voices of Malabo, only warning, as though they were always speaking about him.

He became accustomed to Zizi bringing him news, or sometimes warnings. Boys in ragged shirts would wander past his hut, going slowly, tilting their heads, giving him sidelong glances. Before he asked who they were, Zizi would hiss through her teeth, “Bad boys. They are wanting.” One day, hearing a commotion, Zizi squinted into the emptiness of the village, as though conjuring a vision. “They are killing a goat, but he is not dying.” She might mention that someone was brewing beer, or that visitors had come to Manyenga’s compound — the delivery of medicine, the arrival of a relative. Another day, she reported a death, but it was not the death of the man that she described; rather, she told how Manyenga’s family had gone to the dead man’s hut, at the far side of the village, and they had stripped it of all the pots and knives, taken his hoe and his ax, his mirror, his mats and baskets, then set the house on fire, something that Hock had once witnessed, the ritual raid the Sena called “erasing the death.”

“What will Festus do with the hoe and the ax?” Hock asked, to see what Zizi would say.

“They will sell them, because they are lazy.”

No government officials ever visited the village, no missionaries, no aid people, no foreigners, no health workers. Hock inquired. Zizi shook her head.

“But the Agency,” she said, “they have food for Festus.”

“What’s the Agency?” It was a recurring name. Gala had also mentioned it.

She couldn’t say; it seemed she didn’t know. She shrugged and pointed to the sky.

Sorting papers early one morning, still in his hut, disconsolate that he had stopped his diary, because every day’s entry was the same two lines, he heard Zizi calling to him, clucking through the window.

“A doctor has come.”

It seemed a blessing, it gave him hope. “Where is he?”

“At the clinic.”

Like the school, the two-room clinic was a ruin — no roof, the doors and window frames torn out and used for firewood. What remained was a set of brick walls that dated from Hock’s time as a teacher in Malabo, one of the buildings put up at independence. Every month, a doctor or a medical missionary would arrive in a Land Rover from the boma, or Chikwawa, or farther afield; word spread and within the hour a line of people formed to be treated or to ask for medicine. Hock always went to the clinic to hand over letters to be posted, or to obtain chloroquine for students who were down with malaria. He’d been treated, too, for tonsillitis, for an infected knee, and once he’d had a chigger dug from beneath the nail of his big toe, a fat leggy flea that had writhed and kicked on the blade of the doctor’s lancet. “Cheeky bugger,” the doctor had said, smiling at the flea, wiping it away.

That a doctor had come to the ruins of the clinic today seemed an unexpected miracle, but for Hock — usually to his sorrow — Malabo was a place where the unexpected often occurred. Yet this was news. No matter who it was, a doctor would have come from afar, and would have a vehicle. There was no other way for such a person to reach the village.

So Hock flung his papers aside and left his hut, walking quickly, overeager, finding himself gasping in the heat — he was not used to hurrying, and the sunlight slashed at him. Zizi stepped ahead of him, taking long strides, seeming to dance. She wore her purple wrap, and the turban wound round her head against the sun gave her stature, made her seem exotic and stylish, as Hock followed.

The sight at the clinic was old and familiar, even uplifting: hopeful villagers waiting at the open doorway, a long line of them, forty or more, women carrying infants in cloth slings, men squatting, some boys, their hands on their brows to shield their faces from the sunlight — all gathered here to see the doctor, as in years past.

“Where’s his vehicle?”

“He has no vehicle,” Zizi said.

When the people in line saw Hock, they seemed to recoil, looking away, as though self-conscious or fearful. He was cautioned by their apparent fear, so he kept apart from them and walked slowly to the gaping window — no glass, no frame — at the back of the derelict building.

Stretched out, in the surrendering posture of a patient, a man in shirtsleeves and brown trousers lay on a straw mat, half in shadow, half in bright sunlight, in the roofless room. With his hands clutching his face, he looked as if he was grieving.

Kneeling beside him, a smaller man attended to him, working closely on his ankle. He was no doctor. On his head was a grubby fur hat, over his shoulders a stiff cloak of animal skin that might have been a leopard; he wore old black track-suit trousers as well, and what looked like a woman’s satin slippers. He held a knife at the patient’s leg, and Hock saw that he was making a continuous cut in the man’s ankle, jabbing from time to time to go deeper, until he sighed and rocked back on his heels, revealing the wound he had made, an open anklet of bright blood.

He set his knife down and adjusted his hat with wet fingers, leaving a gluey bloodstain on the fur. He reached into a bucket by his side and pinched out some dark ashes — the dust of powdered charcoal — and after wiping the ankle he rubbed the ashes into the groove of the wound. Almost without pausing, he took up his knife and cut the man’s other ankle, encircling it, pushing the blood flow aside with his thumb, finally plunging his hand in the bucket and, his sticky fingers blackened, pressing the ashes into the wound. He shuffled forward on his knees and began again: tugged at the man’s right arm, flourished his bloody knife, cut into the wrist.

“Doctor,” Zizi said, giving the word three syllables.

Hock leaned toward her and whispered, “Ask someone what he is doing.”

She slipped away, and before the man had finished the wrist, Zizi was beside him, her head lowered.

“Snake doctor,” she said in her language.

Without thinking, Hock groaned — too loud — and the little man in the fur hat drew back, his face upturned, scowling at the window. Startled by the sight of the mzungu and the turbaned girl, he made a scouring sound in his toothless open mouth, a harsh cat-like hiss.

At dusk the next day, framed by a volcanic sunset, Manyenga visited Hock at his hut to announce that he had been seen with Zizi at the clinic. And why?

Hock said, “I thought he was a doctor. I needed some aspirin.”

“I enjoy your sense of humor, father! Sure, he is a doctor. Better than a European doctor. After he does his work, a person is protected for life.”

“Protected from what?”

“From the bite of a snake,” Manyenga said, and he raised his fists to his face so that Hock could see the old raised scars that circled his wrists. “You see, we are not fearing you!”

A thud like that of a woman bopping her pestle into a mortar woke him in the darkness one night some days later, pulsing under his hut, the very soil jarred by its steady beat. He felt the thud in his body, prodding him, and was then wide awake. He walked to the window and the thudding entered his feet. Seeing nothing, he went to the door and as always was amazed by the crystalline brightness of the stars, some blobby, some pinpricks, their milky light shimmering on the leaves of the trees, the starry glow on the bare ground coating it with fluorescence.

Still the thudding, a sickening repetition, pushing at him. And then he saw the fire jumping at the edge of the village, in the football field where the orphan boys sometimes kicked a ball between two overturned buckets that represented a goal mouth.

As soon as he stepped away from his hut, Hock became self-conscious in the bluish light of the stars. He looked for Zizi. But she seldom slept near his hut. She seemed to drift off after he’d gone to bed, showing up in the early morning, probably at a signal from Snowdon, who crept to the veranda before dawn.

Yet Hock was not alone. The football field glowed yellow in the firelight. The ta-dum ta-dum of the drum being slapped, the plink-plink of the plucked finger harp like the shrill notes of a xylophone made of glass, and the far-off yodeling of women mingled with the growls of men. It seemed the whole village was awake.

Had he been a first-timer on a bush walk, down here to look at hippos in the river or to go bird watching in the marsh, he might have seen this as a colorful nighttime get-together. He smiled briefly, the naïve thought of a party crossing his mind, and then he went grim again, picking his way to the fat baobab stump forty yards from his hut. He crouched at the stump. He knew what he was watching, and it was not a party.

In his day, this ceremony had been performed outside the village as an expression of the secret society of men, directed by the chief. It was so hidden that he’d only heard the drumming those nights and seen the exhausted faces the following morning. He’d inquired and been told it was “the Big Dance,” the Nyau or image dance — maybe a wedding, or a funeral, or an ujeni (“whatsit”), they said, meaning something forbidden or not to be spoken about to a mzungu, or an outsider, or an uninitiated girl.

He knew what he was hearing, and he could see the dancers gathering and stamping their feet in time to the drums and the tinkling finger harp, now tripping faster, plinka-plinka-plinka. He knelt and held on to the stump for balance and to ease the weight on his knees. He’d sometimes see a snake here at the stump, a puff adder that swelled to the thickness of his wrist, but snakes didn’t stir at night.

He was more concerned by the crowd gathering around the leaping fire, the sharp gunshot crack of the burning branches, the sparks flying up in clusters — some carried into the sky, borne by the uprush of heat and flames. He had never overcome his fear of an African crowd, how it might grow from a handful of people to a restless sweaty mob. He’d seen such mobs at political rallies in his first years, the crazy mass of yelling men and yodeling women. Once, on the bus to Chikwawa, he’d witnessed a group of men at a roadblock. Laughing with a superior-sounding anger, they boarded the bus and used thick clubs to beat the Sena men who were not wearing the party badge that showed the president’s face. He’d seen one man, begging for his life, kicked and trampled into silence.

The Big Dance, for all its apparent order, was no less menacingly mob-like. It seemed that every man and boy in Malabo was on the field. The women were audible in their ululation, but they were distant, unseen, nearer the huts. Even the orphan boys, in their rags and shaggy hair and torn T-shirts, were stamping to the drumbeat.

Yet just as all those men, sweaty in the firelight, seemed on the verge of rushing apart in a frenzy of aimless rage, a figure appeared before them — Manyenga, like a hectoring choirmaster. He was chanting a word, unintelligible to Hock, and the rest of the crowd took it up as a cry. As they repeated it, they seemed more unified and solemn.

Manyenga took his place on a chair at the edge of the stamping, chanting men, and a masked figure danced before them. The mask was not made of carved wood — the Sena seldom carved; they made wide dugout canoes and shovel-like paddles and sometimes house idols of wood, but not masks. For ceremonies they wove bamboo strips into a frame and covered it with bark and leaves, and that was their conception of a mask, a fluttering headdress of dead leaves.

This was just such a mask — twisted together and ragged, not a face but a deliberate fixture. Knotted to it were scraps of pale cloth and plastic, the flimsy rippings of a white garbage bag, a large swollen beast’s head with a gaping mouth. Hock could see the face of the dancer staring wildly out of the mask’s mouth.

Another dancer met this masked figure in the center of the dance area, brightly lit by the bonfire. This second, opposing figure was cloaked in a dark cape, and instead of a mask its head had been entirely wrapped in a ragged cloth, like a monster with a filthy bandage around its head.

The masks were the more hideous for being so crude. The wooden or dead-leaf masks Hock had been shown by Sena elders in the past had an aesthetic appeal, were well made and symmetrical. But these masks, one of shredded plastic, the other of rags, frightened him with their coarse construction, as though they’d been twisted together by angry men in a hurry, using the castoff scraps from a trash heap. They were clumsy, insulting, grotesque, and terrifying for being so badly made.

Snowdon grinned in the light of the fire, delighting in the noise and flames, as the two figures sparred in a mock struggle, the tall man in the ragged mask of white plastic, and the squirming figure in the cloak and faceless wrapped head. They were also dancing, obeying the rhythm thumped out on the drums.

After less than a minute of this, Snowdon waved a red object at the dancers, and seeing it they faltered, hesitated, disengaged. The dwarf was too small to do much more than gesture with the red object. At the urging of Manyenga, still in his armchair, a bystander took the thing from Snowdon and placed it on the head of the white-masked figure.

Hock recognized it as his own, the red baseball cap he sometimes wore. But if that was meant to be him, the white-masked mzungu figure in the baseball cap, who was that other cloaked, contending figure with its head wrapped in rags? When the dancers resumed, stamping in a circle, it occurred to him that the second figure had no arms and merely swayed, and he took it to represent a snake.

The snake seemed to be getting the better of the Hock figure, backing him up, making him dance in retreat, shuffling and leaning forward like a mamba intending to strike.

He was sure of this when he heard the word njoka—snake! — shrieked by some of the boys, and the drawn-out ’zoongoo mooed by the men. The snake advanced to the plinking of the finger harp. The white-masked figure retreated to the sound of drumbeats and then skipped past the snake, confronting it. The movement was too crude to be balletic, yet there were elements of subtler dance steps, as though with some refinements this could be staged as a drama — the struggle of two masked figures in the firelight, to the counterpoint of drum thumps and finger pluckings.

He was fascinated and appalled to see this battling creature with the horrible face in the ridiculous headdress fending off the snake. The snake Hock took to be sexual, though he knew he was noted for his fearlessness as a snake handler. The bystanders cheered the thrusting body of the snake, the evasions of the masked man.

Is that how I seem to them? Hock wondered — a cringing figure with a beaky nose and peeling skin, dancing away from the confrontation? Each time the snake pretended to strike, driving the mzungu figure backward, a cheer went up, the drums grew more insistent, and the mzungu spun around. But the snake had the advantage, moving smoothly, its whole head a ragged bandage; the mzungu stumbled on two uncoordinated feet.

And what did it mean when the snake twisted aside and a boy dressed as a girl — a rouged face and smeared lips, a tattered yellow dress — approached and these two caricatures began to dance as a pair, as the mzungu figure twitched behind them? Had they been clowning, Hock might have been reassured. But it was late, the fire was hot, the drums were loud, the plinking of the finger harp pierced his heart. This was not clowning.

All this talent, all this energy at night, from those who were so sleepy in the daytime. The spectators, men and boys, were emboldened by the music, perhaps, excited by the towering fire. Faces gleaming with sweat, golden-skinned in the light of the flames, they reached toward the dancing figures, shuffled forward, crowding them.

The boy in the yellow dress taunted both the masked figures. He was not masked, though he was luridly painted, his features exaggerated with the greasy makeup.

The sight triggered a memory. In his first year in the Lower River, just after the school at Malabo had been finished, Hock had gone back to school late after lunch. He’d been disturbed by a letter from home, a clingy letter that had made him furious. As he’d approached the classroom, he heard an unfamiliar voice, and laughter. He paused before entering, sidling up to the door, and saw one of the boys pacing at his desk and muttering in an imitation of him. A cruelly accurate imitation, approximating his stammering um-um-um in an explanation, his nodding head, his way of pacing, turned-in toes, knees lifted. And he’d been abashed. So as not to embarrass himself further, he made an announcing noise, waited for the scuffling to diminish, and entered the classroom to see that some students were solemn, some tittering. When he tried to resume the lesson, he found he did not have the heart to continue. Instead, he assigned them an essay topic and gave them the hour to complete it. Afterward he fled to his house and the letter from his father.

That was how he felt now, at the sight of a man in a mask that was meant to represent his face, a snake that he took to be an adversary, and a boy in a ragged dress, which baffled him.

Never mind what it meant to them. It horrified him in a way that was more alarming for being meaningless. His face reflected in a mirror had always disturbed him. As the subject of a Nyau dance he believed he was being ridiculed, and he remembered Gala’s warning. As for the boy he’d found mimicking him in the classroom, he’d never trusted him after that.

The drumming became a thunderous pounding of hand slaps. He backed away from the baobab stump, into the shadows, and withdrew to his hut.

15

HARDLY SEVEN, AND the morning sun slanting through the twiggy trees had filled the clearing at Malabo with stifling humidity, like an invisible smothering presence that bulked against his face, leaving his neck clammy and his body weak. The earth itself was baked dry and crisscrossed with paths pounded smooth by bare feet. The foliage of the mopane trees faded to yellow, the thorn acacias coated with dust.

Squinting into the distance, because a dog had begun an irritable bark, Hock saw a shimmering spectral blob in the heat, coming closer, resolving itself into two figures, large and small, Manyenga and a skinny burdened girl hurrying behind him.

“Morning, chief,” Hock said.

“But, eh, you are being a big man as well, father,” Manyenga said.

And he smiled seeing Hock sitting as usual at his table on the narrow veranda, Zizi squatting on her heels near him, the dwarf crouching a little distance away by a low bush, gnawing his fingers.

The way Manyenga stared put Hock on his guard. The anxiety, the calculation, something approaching fear, that he’d noticed in the young man on his arrival was gone. Now Manyenga gazed directly at him, looked him up and down, narrowing his eyes, without any hesitation. He was at ease, friendlier, more familiar, and less reliable.

Hock saw himself with Manyenga’s eyes, an old mzungu, attended by a skinny girl and a dwarf, a portrait of inaction, like a ruined chief on a rickety throne. He’d stopped shaving, his clothes were stained. The tableau somehow illustrated his life at Malabo — not at all what he had imagined, but tolerable because nothing was expected of him beyond greeting the villagers, and not complaining, and giving them money now and then. There was no point. He had to leave, to get away, if only to Blantyre, to collect his thoughts and decide his next move.

“You were seeing us at the dance,” Manyenga said, gesturing to the girl to set down the plate of porridge and the mug of milky tea.

“How do you know?”

It was a breach of etiquette for an outsider to observe the Nyau dance. In spite of himself, Hock could not be indignant at being questioned. He was abashed, as though he’d seen someone naked in the village; he’d had no right.

But Manyenga was nodding with a slyly satisfied face — a smile that was not a smile. “We were celebrating you,” he said. “We were thanking you, father. And you were there.”

Hock said in Sena, “A ghost doesn’t miss a funeral”—a proverb he’d learned long ago, one he’d often quoted in Medford.

“You are knowing so much, father.”

“But I have to leave today,” Hock said, and took another breath, because his chest was tight — the heat, the scrutiny of the strong younger man. “To go to Blantyre.”

All night he had been pondering this possibility, even practicing the form of words. Nothing had gone right. He knew he had been cheated out of the money for the roofing, he was being overcharged for room and board, the school would stay a ruin. The boys had abandoned him — but they were orphans, there was little hope for them. No, perhaps they were counting on him, but if so, it was all hopeless. His waiting to be fed, breathless in the morning heat, drawing shallow breaths, his face glowing with sweat so early in the morning, had shown him the futility of it all.

“I’ll need a lift to the boma.” His idea was to find the departure times of the buses to Blantyre, perhaps catch one that day, just to be away.

“As you are wishing, father,” Manyenga said, with another nod and that ambiguous half-smile. “But you were watching our dance without permission. That is a trespassing. According to custom you must pay a fine.”

“I understand.”

“A heavy fine. Sorry, father.”

“In that case, I need to get some money from the bank. I’m almost out of cash.”

Instead of looking greedy and grateful, Manyenga frowned, seeming bewildered, but he lifted his hands in an accommodating gesture, as if to say, Anything for you. Then he clicked his tongue at the serving girl.

“Bon appétit,” he said.

And again Hock remembered that the man had been a driver for a foreign agency.

“The boma is far. We must leave soon,” Manyenga said.

Hock was encouraged when the man kept his word. They left on the motorbike later in the morning, Manyenga driving. Hock, sitting behind him, had his passport and all his important papers. Revving the engine with twists of his hand, Manyenga told him to hold on, and he skidded away. But not fifty yards into the journey, even before they reached the road, Manyenga swerved and screamed, “Njoka!”

Hock twisted around, looking for the snake, and lost his balance and fell, bruising his side. Winded, he lay in the dust, wondering if he had broken any ribs.

“We cannot go,” Manyenga said, righting the motorbike, helping Hock up from the ground.

Manyenga’s brow was heavy, his face dark with fear. Hock knew of the prohibition against traveling onward after a snake has crossed your path. Manyenga’s mood had changed from agreeable to anxious. He seemed tense, nearly angry.

“I didn’t see a snake,” Hock said.

“It was so big! A green mamba — they match the leaves,” Manyenga said. “We must obey.”

Hock was too bruised to argue, yet annoyed that the man was describing a snake to him that he had not seen. He limped back in the sun to his hut, and there he sat, wondering how to overcome this man. He suspected it was a ruse. Yet he was hurt. And realizing that he’d been forced to lie to Manyenga to get to the boma made him uneasy. The lie indicated that he was afraid to tell the truth — that he simply wanted to go to Blantyre and plot his next move, to go home.

He went to his duffel bag and felt for his pouch of money. He found the fat envelopes and saw that some money was missing, and he laughed, mocking his own stupidity. That was why Manyenga had reacted that way. He knew that Hock was not going to the bank for money. Manyenga knew he had money, that he was lying.

Hock looked up and saw the dwarf staring at him with red-rimmed eyes, a wet finger in his mouth.

Aching after the fall from the bike, he rested. The following night the Nyau was danced again. Hock’s head throbbed. The very sound of the drums echoed in his skull, pained him physically, pounded inside him. He had a fever — he knew malaria, the flu-like symptoms, the headache. He found his bottle of chloroquine and, unable to locate his water jug, chewed three tablets and lay in his string bed, the drums beating against his eyes and ears, his sore body, his sore head. The mosquito net killed any movement of air and trapped the heat.

Then days and nights were one. He did not know how long he lay shivering with chills, gasping in the heat, his heart fluttering, his head like an echo chamber. He heard a wild commotion, screeching, insistent drumming, the ululating of frenzied women. His eyes seemed scorched, and his skin felt raw against the sheets. The slightest brush of the mosquito net caused him discomfort. It was not like skin at all, but like tissue that was easily torn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Eat, father,” Manyenga said.

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

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

“Really?”

“Too much.”

“Zizi should be in school.”

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

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

“You must rest, father.”

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

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

“You erased his death.”

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

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

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

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

“When did that come?”

“The Americans fetched it here in their vehicle.”

“Did you tell them I was here?”

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

“What did you tell them?”

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

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

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

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

“Go ahead,” Hock said, “ask me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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