The Lower River

16

THE TEN-DRUM NGOMA that Manyenga promised was announced by boys wagging torches of oil-soaked rags flaming on poles, and the boys, Hock saw, were two of the orphans who’d abandoned the work at the school. They’d scuttled away then; they were marching in a stately procession now. They beckoned, then turned to lead him, and with the torches held high, preceded him across the field to Manyenga’s, Zizi and the dwarf following.

“Welcome, father,” Manyenga said, showing him to a chair and offering him a glass of nipa. The rest, all men and boys, were seated on the ground, a few cross-legged on woven mats. A piece of meat, an angular blackened leg, was dripping on a spit, and Manyenga’s elder wife was stirring a sludge of sodden, dark green leaves in a large tin pot. Several of the men were very old, staring into the fire, their eyes wild with the glow of the cooking fire, sputtering under the meat.

“Goat,” Hock said. “Mutton.”

“It is an impala for you,” Manyenga said.

“You poached it.”

“God provided this bush meat to us because we are hungry.”

Manyenga introduced the men as chiefs from nearby villages, and Hock recognized them as some of the men he had met on his first day at Nyachikadza’s hut, when they had decided to cremate the small dead crocodile with the poisonous liver. He remembered his excitement at arriving at the Lower River; he was ashamed at the memory of his innocence.

“And those boys,” Manyenga said.

As he was waited on by women and small boys, the conceit he’d had the previous day of being like a chief returned to him. He sat contented, picking at the shreds of meat on his plate, hearing Manyenga praise him.

“Now, father”—and Manyenga called one of the boys over. “This young chap is needing something to go to South Africa for work.”

“Salani bwino,” Hock said, as a formal farewell.

“But he is needing ndalama,” Manyenga said. He used a Sena word as a euphemism, because “money” was too blunt.

The boy stood straight, bug-eyed with fear in the firelight, a scarecrow in his too big shirt and torn trousers, his bony wrists pressed against his sides. A yellow pencil stub stuck into his dense hair, the pink eraser protruding, was like a badge of scholarly seriousness.

“What’s his name?”

“Name of Simon.”

“How will he go? Bus from Blantyre?”

Manyenga rocked a little on his heels and grunted at the idea of such a straightforward way of traveling. The others shook their heads and clucked.

“Down the river, father. From Magwero. Through the Dinde Marsh to Morrumbala. To Mozambique. Zambezi River. Then Beira side, if he is finding a lorry. Then catching a bus — and what, and what — to Maputo. Then—” Manyenga shrugged, hinting at much more. “A jinny, father. A challenge.”

“How will he get to Magwero?”

“Marsden will lift him on my motorbike tomorrow.”

The very thought of such a trip, trespassing over borders, saddened Hock, as the thought of humble, perhaps hopeless struggle always did. He’d expected such struggle, but he hadn’t imagined so much would be expended in the effort of leaving Malabo and the Lower River. It made Malabo so remote. He was part of that remoteness.

“How much?”

“What you are willing, father.”

Hock nodded, hoping to appear noncommittal, but he knew that they had read his mind. They were masterly at discerning the nuances of gesture, a mere eye blink or a way of breathing revealed a state of mind. It was not sorcery; they were illiterate, and so they could read perfectly with every other sense. Hock thought that anyone who said literacy made a person brighter was wrong. Being illiterate, not speaking a language well, out of your element and perhaps feeling insecure, unnerved, and suspicious — all these made a person much more observant.

Because they saw that he had been moved by the boy standing there, and knew what he would do, they filled his glass again with kachasu and toasted him. They sent the unmarried girls, among them Zizi, to serve him more food, a cut of the impala meat, platters of grilled fish, and roasted slices of cassava.

The older girls, including Zizi, were bare-breasted tonight. Hock felt that they somehow knew this nakedness meant more to a mzungu, that they were appealing to his foreigner’s weakness, teasing him and looking for a reaction.

After the girls served him, the women sang, clapping their hands, and the girls sang with them, and danced before him, standing in a line. He knew some of the words: “Our father, our chief, our mzungu in Malabo.” Their skin shone with perspiration, and dust clung to it, creating a weird plastery cosmetic. Their growly harmonizing resonated in the pit of his stomach. He could separate Zizi’s voice from the others; it stirred something in him — a purring within him that answered her.

On any other night he would have excused himself and crept across the clearing to his hut, flashing his torch. But he was the guest of honor — Manyenga kept calling him nduna, minister— and could not leave, could not rise from his chair, was not allowed to choose his own food. They insisted upon waiting on him, the eager men, the solemn girls, the skinny boys, the cackling women, filling his plate, topping up his glass.

At last he called to the boy Simon, motioning him to his side. He gave the boy some money, folded under his fingers.

Everyone saw. Manyenga said, “You are our nduna, dear father.”

During the night, under the folds of his mosquito net, he conceived his plan. Then he dozed, and when he woke he thought it through again. It was so simple and spontaneous and seemingly foolproof he could not add to it or find a flaw. All he needed was an accomplice, and he knew he had one. After that, in his excitement, he could not sleep.

Or perhaps he had fallen asleep. The bump and scrape of bare feet on the veranda planks startled him, made him remember his plan. He got up quickly, pushed the curtains of the netting aside, and whispered to the figure at the window.

“Sister, come here. Inside.”

But Zizi froze at the words, which she’d never before heard from him. He cracked the door open, reached for her wrist, and she allowed herself to be drawn into the room. Her hard fingers tightened in his as he tugged further.

“Quick, get into the bed.”

Her face swelled with thought and became expressionless. She drew in her lips and pressed down, and she wrapped herself in her skinny arms, confused but stubborn.

Hock took her by her shoulders. Her skin was cool; she must have been crouching by the door awhile in the darkness. She dug her big toe against the floor. She was not resisting, she was bewildered. Quick, get into the bed!

She allowed herself to be helped beneath the mosquito net, and she sat and drew her long legs under the damp sheet that served as a coverlet. It all happened so fast that in spite of himself Hock was aroused — there she lay, the skinny shaven-headed girl in his bed, her fists jammed under her chin, her eyes wide open, looking anxious but not fearful. But Hock felt less like a lover than a father, tucking his daughter into bed. She seemed fragile on her back, her head on the crushed pillow, so dark against the sheets.

“Don’t be afraid,” Hock said. “Just stay here. If anyone knocks on the door, don’t say anything. Turn over, don’t let them see your face. Keep the net closed.”

She raised her head a little. “You are coming back?”

“Yes. I’m coming back to get you.”

He kissed her lightly, and tasting the warmth on her lips, kissed her again, bumping her teeth in his eagerness. And for the first time in the course of making his plan he hesitated, considered abandoning it, to stay beside this pretty girl. She would have allowed him.

“Don’t move,” he said.

Zizi began to sing in her throat, a frantic murmuring, as she did when she was anxious.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

He hated his lie, but it was the only way to get her to stay in the bed, under the mosquito net. And he hated his lie, too, because he was tempted to change his plan. In a crowded vision, standing in the hut, he was confronted by images of his life with her, the flight to Boston, his proud explanations to his friends: I’m her guardian. She deserves a better life. I knew her family. The clothes he’d buy — he saw her wearing them. He saw her sitting at his kitchen table drinking a glass of milk, saw her with an armful of books on the steps of a college. A good daughter. Smiling, because she seldom smiled here.

Those thoughts made him grim as he picked up his bag and slipped into the darkness, locking the door behind him, passing behind the house, cutting through the maize patch, a roundabout way to the road. And then he walked fast, trying to make time before the sun rose.

He reached the six-hut settlement of Lutwe as the sun, just bulging at the horizon, rinsed the darkness from the sky, and the day grew light, a pinky glow behind the trees, the sky going bluer. And before the sun blazed at the level of the low bushes Hock was at the crossroads. There he waited until he heard the rapping of the motorbike, and the warble of its rise and fall on the uneven road.

Seeing him, the driver of the motorbike slowed and came clumsily to a skidding stop. The boy Simon was seated on the back.

“Father,” said the driver — Marsden, Manyenga’s nephew, who’d been at the ceremony — and then he corrected himself, “Nduna,” and, correcting further, attempted “Meeneestah.”

“I’ll take this boy to Magwero,” Hock said.

Marsden said nothing but was clearly baffled. The engine was idling. He brushed at the flies settling on his face.

“It’s all right,” Hock said. “You can walk to Magwero. Or you can wait here and I’ll pick you up on the way back.”

“Chief Manyenga said to me—”

“This is the revised plan,” Hock said. “The new plan.” His words made the boy blink, and he was still batting the flies.

“The chief said—”

“I’m the chief.”

Marsden cut the engine, and both boys got off the bike, Marsden propping it on its kickstand as he swung his leg over. When Hock mounted it and stamped on the lever to start the engine again, the boys seemed bewildered. They backed away as though in fear from a thief, their thin bodies tensed in their loose clothes, on the point of fleeing.

Hock said, “Get on, Simon, you have to catch your boat.”

The boy got onto the back seat and steadied himself by holding Hock’s hips.

“Luggages,” Marsden said, handing Hock his bag.

“Thanks — almost forgot,” Hock said, and smiled. He’d begun to believe the lie he’d told them about coming back.

“Maybe they’ll miss you at Malabo,” Marsden said. He knew it was forbidden for Hock to leave the village without supervision. Hock was theirs. The whole village knew that.

“It’s all right,” Hock said. “They won’t miss me.”

They’ll go to my house — and with this thought he saw them at the door, gingerly knocking — then see the lumped-up body under the mosquito net. They would whisper, “Sleeping,” and would go away. And not until midmorning, when Zizi got tired of lying with the sheet over her head and might be looking for Hock, would they realize that Hock had gone. By then he would be in the dugout, and the motorbike would be parked at Magwero, and the boy Marsden would be waiting under this tree at Lutwe, and in all this confusion Hock would be well into the marsh, headed downriver, passing Morrumbala into Mozambique. That was the plan.

He forgave himself for not having tried to escape before this when he saw (struggling with the bike, pulling it again and again into the deep dust of the wheel ruts) the distance to the main road and the — what? — twenty miles to Magwero, twenty sweltering miles even at seven in the morning, for as soon as the sun was up, the heat gagged him and his face was pelted by insects.

Still, the road was free of traffic, and the only people he saw were women walking to market with big cloth bundles on their heads, and men with sacks of flour or rice flopped over the crossbar of their bikes, not riding the bikes but pushing them.

He had not forgotten the mango tree and the plump smooth log under it at Magwero, and when he saw it ahead he was excited. Some men were sitting under the tree, two of whom he recognized from his first day. He called out to them as he rode past, steering the bike to the village, and beyond it to the landing.

In the morning sun, the gnat-flecked rays diffused by the tall marsh grass, eight-man canoes — wide hollow logs — were drawn up on the embankment, and the smaller dugouts and fishing canoes bobbed in the scummy water on mooring lines. At one large canoe that lay partly in the water, men were arranging sacks of meal and crates of mangoes.

Hock greeted the men and said, “This is the boy who is going downriver.”

The men loading the canoe did not react. They were already perspiring from their work, their sweat-darkened shirts clinging to their bodies. One of them glanced at Simon, but without interest.

“What time are you leaving?”

“Later.”

Hock said, “We have to go now.”

It was a meaningless sentence, because “now” never meant now. It meant soon, it meant sometime, it meant whenever. It wasn’t an urgent word; it also meant never.

Hearing it, one of the men bent over and, sweaty-faced under a dusty sack, spat onto the slimy mud of the embankment.

Hock said sharply, “Who’s the owner of this bwato?”

A man in a crushed straw hat, wearing thick-lensed glasses, peered at Hock and said in English, “It is my.”

“You know me?” Hock asked.

The old man shook his head. “But my father, he was knowing.”

Hock drew the man aside. He said, “The boy has to go right now,” and tapped his watch. “And I’m going with him. How much do you want?”

“But the cargo,” the old man said. He scratched at his knuckles, loosening skin.

“How much?” Hock could see through the trees to the nearby village, where women were ghostly in the smoke of cooking fires. Men and small children had gathered on the embankment to watch. They must have followed the motorbike, which leaned on its kickstand near the canoes.

“We were expecting the boy, but not you, father.” The old man was peeling dead skin from his knuckles.

“Five hundred,” Hock said.

The old man had two yellow upper teeth. As he worked his jaw his tongue floated around them, seeming to tickle them. His thought process was visible in his chewing. He said, “Seven hundred.”

“Tell the men to cast off,” Hock said. He handed the old man the fat sandwich of folded-over money, all small bills. And he called to Simon to get into the big canoe.

It worried Hock that too much time had passed in the palaver, but once he and the boy were on board, and the two paddlers were beating it backward from the bank into the bobbing density of water hyacinths — the boy, feet apart, poling — he saw that he’d gotten away quickly. The village watched them go, the ghostly women at the smoky edge of the trees, the men standing near the unloaded piles of grain sacks and the crates of fruit. And there was the parked motorbike, the guarantee that no one from Malabo would arrive here anytime soon; it was the only vehicle in Malabo. And so he’d stranded Zizi in his bed, Manyenga in the village, Marsden at the Lutwe crossroads — and he was away, cheered by the men digging their paddles into the water, pushing the canoe through the narrow channel between the glistening water hyacinths, a profusion of stems and leaves and blossoms so tangled it seemed you could step out of the canoe and walk across this floating platform of green marsh weeds.

Confident that he was safe, Hock leaned against the blunt bow of the canoe, resting on a sack of flour, and fell asleep, lulled by the rocking of the boat, the regular splash of the paddles. It was as though he had at last freed himself from the pull of gravity, not just escaped from Malabo but twisted away from the clinging people, the reaching hands, everything represented by the muddy embankment, which seemed like the edge of an alien planet, and was now bobbing through the sickly light in the soup of its atmosphere.

Exhausted by the early start and the effort in all his harangues — Zizi, the motorcyclist Marsden, the boy Simon, the elderly canoe owner — he lay in the boat asleep for over an hour. He woke with the sun full on his face, and gazing up he saw the long spikes of marsh reeds overhanging the bow as the big dugout glided past.

The two paddlers were angled against the gunwales of the boat, one on either side, the boy Simon thrusting with his pole. Hock peeled an orange and, throwing the scraps of skin into the channel, saw they were being sucked toward the stern.

“We’re going upstream,” he called out. “No — that way!”

The men kept their rhythm of paddling, chopping the water, their cheeks streaming with sweat.

“This is the channel,” one of them said in Sena. “We have to pass through the marsh to get to the river.”

In his second year in Malabo, he’d been taken fishing for tilapia in the river. They’d crossed the Dinde Marsh and entered the fast-flowing stream of the Shire River in less than thirty minutes. He explained this in a halting way to the paddlers, who listened while shoveling water with their paddle blades. Speaking about the past here was like speaking about a foreign land — happier, simpler, much bigger and highly colored, seemingly aboveground.

The man who had spoken before said, “That was years and years,” and he gestured to mean the years were gone.

“So the river changed?”

The man who had been silent said, “The river is a snake.”

The great marsh and its wall of reeds was an obstacle, or rather, a set of obstacles, the channel zigzagging through it without any logic or pattern, a maze in which they were pushing themselves, always upstream, slipping through narrow openings and up the widening channel, against the current. The grunts of the men and the smack of the paddles kept him awake as he peered ahead for the opening of the marsh into the river. Here and there, men in small canoes were surprised, as they fished, to see the big canoe and the red-faced man in it. And as they bobbed in its wake, staring at the mzungu, he noted the few possessions they had on board: the water bottle, the torn net, the dish of bait, the pathetic catch — a basket of small shiny fish.

He was fleeing, he knew. He could have ridden the motorbike to the boma, but he would have been seen and probably detained. The river was better — he could lose himself in the bush. He wanted to get away, to vanish across the Mozambique border. The thought of distancing himself from Malabo excited him; the idea that he was breaking free of Malawi made him joyous. He had a change of clothes, his little radio, his passport, his money: everything he needed.

In the stern the boy Simon was asking a question. Hock didn’t hear the question, but he heard the answer.

“It is there.”

The boy said in English to Hock, “Reevah.”

Sunlight spanked the water ahead with such brilliance the current showed as muscles beneath bright scales on the turbulent surface. The boat nosed through the last thinning wall of reeds and shot out of the mouth of the channel, where it was caught and tipped by the wide flow of the river. The bow was yanked into the current and then the whole dugout was carried sideways along the stream. One of the paddlers wiped his face on his shirt as the other used his paddle blade as a rudder, steering the boat away from the tall bank of reeds. And just then, in a scoop in the reeds, a little bay, a hippo raised its blotchy head and was so startled by the boat he opened his jaws wide. Hock could see the reddish flesh of the mouth and the blunt pegs of its thick round teeth and the raw mottled skin of its fat body. He yelped — his first cry of joy in many weeks — and he pointed.

“You!”

Paddling more easily now, the men kept the boat in the current, sliding its beam crossways in the stream from reach to reach.

“We eat them,” the first paddler said in Sena.

“People here never ate them before,” Hock said, and again in speaking of the past he seemed to be referring not to another time but to a distant country. “What is your name?”

“Lovemore.”

“Why do you eat hippos, Lovemore?”

“Because we are hungry.”

The other paddler gave his name as Dalitso — blessings — and it was he, not Lovemore, who spoke a little English. Hock offered some of his oranges and tangerines to them, but they refused all food. Simon ate an orange, removing the peel in fastidious pinchings, such delicacy in a dugout on a river flowing through the bush.

The paddlers drank water from their plastic jug, and they rolled cigarettes and smoked. Hock knew from their glassy eyes and their concentration that they were smoking weed.

“Chamba,” he said.

“Mbanje!” one said, using the slang word.

Even in the hottest hours of the day, as Hock dozed under the shirt he spread across the gunwales for shade, the paddlers kept on, fueled by the weed smoke. The banks of the river were more clearly defined now, steep and sculpted flat, like the walls of a ditch. They could not see beyond them — no trees were visible, no high ground, only now and then a break in the bank where a green stream leaked out, or a sandbar at the edge where a small bumpy green croc was sleeping.

“Where is Mozambique?” Hock asked.

No one spoke, though one man jabbed his paddle at the opposite bank.

Toward midafternoon Hock saw an island of low huts, thatched with black decaying bundles of straw. Wondering whether it was a Sena settlement, he asked idly, “Who lives there?”

“Dead people,” one of the paddlers whispered.

Hock blinked and an ache of fear tugged at his throat.

A mile or so below that island — of graves, of ghosts? — they came to a wide muddy embankment where the broken hull, bare ribs, and rusty ironwork of a large wooden boat had been pushed onto the foreshore to rot. It was the only sign of habitation he’d seen since leaving Magwero. As they drew closer, he could see a shed, a sloping landing, and a man at a table under a mango tree. The man wore the khaki shirt of officialdom, including a brass badge on his pocket.

“Mozambique,” the paddler Dalitso said, easing the dugout against the landing.

Hock climbed out, glad for the chance to walk, relieved that the day had gotten him this far from Malabo. He helped them haul the boat onto the landing, then climbed the embankment and walked toward the man at the table.

“Passport,” the man said.

Hock took it from his pocket, smiling at the frontier — the man in his clean shirt, the table, the stamp and ink pad.

“You speak English?”

“No any Englis.” He examined the passport, moving the pages with his thumb. “Visa — forty dollar.”

“So you do speak English.”

“Visa,” the man said. He held up four fingers. “Forty dollar.”

Why am I happy? Hock asked himself. I am happy because no one knows me here.

At the small shed beyond the frontier post, Hock bought a box of salted crackers, a can of beans, some bottles of beer. He saw that the paddlers were building a fire, preparing a meal of nsima and stew, fussing with tin pots, scraping at the thick water-and-flour mixture.

He offered Simon a bottle of beer and sat with him on the embankment, on plastic beer crates, facing the river and the reddening sun. Already the day was cooler, and the slanting sunlight gilded the swarms of insects that streamed over the river like flakes of gold.

“Thank you,” the boy said, swigging beer.

“Tomorrow where do we go?”

“To Caya, on the Zambezi.”

“And then?”

“Find a lorry to Beira. Or maybe a bus.”

“How far to Beira?”

“One overnight. Then a bus to Maputo. Maputo, it is the capital city. Then Jo’burg.”

“I want to go.”

“It is your decision, father.”

“I helped you with money.”

“Yes, father.” Simon drank his beer slowly, a small mouthful at a time, as though rationing himself. He said, “I want a bright future for myself. I want to help my family with money. They are suffering too much. Maybe I can help my country, too. I can work, sure. I am willing and able, that is the goodness.”

“Did you learn English at the school in Malabo?”

“No, in Chikwawa. We have no school in Malabo. We have nothing in Malabo.”

Hock was about to lecture him, to tell him that once, many years ago, there was a school in Malabo, which had a library and teachers. There was a clinic, a monthly visit from a missionary, a plan for digging a well, and another plan for electricity. There was a church that was sometimes used as a village hall. But he said nothing, only smiled, and when he finished his bottle of beer he said, “Ask these people if they have a bed for me.”

“I will ask.”

Hock tuned his little radio, found some faint music, and listened, growing sad. The sound of the radio made him feel more remote, as though he was listening to the earth from distant space.

“They have a bed for you, father.” He led Hock to one of the nearby sheds. Seeing Hock with the radio to his ear he asked, “How many kwacha does that wireless cost for buying?”

“I don’t know,” Hock said. “Here, you can listen. You might learn something. You sound like a self-improver. Give it back to me tomorrow.”

A woman opening the door of the shed said, “Ndalama.”

Hock gave her five dollars. She tucked it into the fastening across her breasts and handed him a small towel. This he spread across the hard pillow on the shelf that served as a bunk, two planks that had been fixed from one wall to the other.

He lay in the hot stifling darkness. The small room stank of kerosene and dirt, and it was airless, the door closed, the bolt shot. It had no windows. It was obviously for storage, not a bedroom. Yet he was tired, and he slept, and when he woke and walked into the freshness of the morning, the river sparkling, he was happy again.

But the dugout was gone, the boy was gone, the man in the khaki shirt at the small table under the tree, gone. It was just another riverbank. Hock hurried to the landing and saw at the foot of it a woman washing clothes, slapping them, twisting the muddy water from them.

“Where are they?”

Even without English, the woman, seeing his confusion, knew what he was saying.

She pointed downriver and laughed and went on slapping the clothes against a large stone.

17

THE MUD AT the embankment was thick and dark, a slippery mass of insubstantial fudge, crawling with beetles and littered with chewed fish bones and fruit peels. For most of the morning Hock squatted there, slapping at the tsetse flies biting his ankles and watching for a boat, any boat, to take him away from the landing. The sky was cloudless, and empty except for the black profile of a gliding fish eagle, and nearer, the lovely trilling of a swamp warbler swaying on a reed. Yellow butterflies fluttered to the garbage heaps on the mud bank, settled on the rusted cans and the foul mass of plastic and sodden paper and broken bottles. He was not dismayed, but he felt the fatigue of being dirty and yearned to wash his face.

Though just yesterday Zizi had willingly crept into his bed, he was saddened by the thought of her, yet relieved to be here and not there. He’d crossed a border. This looked like a dump, and the settlement was just a camp, a portrait of abandonment in the bush, but it was a frontier, and he was on the right side of it, on his way home. With this thought at the front of his mind, he looked around at the placid river, the garbage, the wooden windowless shed where he’d slept, the hulk of the large wrecked boat with its still intact wheelhouse — the stink and decrepitude of it all — and he laughed. He was in the middle of nowhere, but he was free.

Just then he saw a dugout bobbing in the stream at the far bank. He stood up and whistled, with his fingers in his mouth. For a moment he thought the paddlers on board hadn’t heard, or that they were afraid. But like a compass needle swiveling in liquid, the narrow canoe turned to point at him, and it slid toward where he stood on the bank.

The paddlers were children, hardly more than ten or eleven.

He greeted them, and when they remained stony-faced, either afraid or unfriendly, he asked whether they could speak Sena.

They nodded yes, they could speak the language.

Hock said in Sena that he wanted to go to the far bank, and the boys’ reaction was expressionless again, implacable, and so he explained, “To your village.”

They seemed to understand the word for village, but did not reply to it, or say that he would be either welcome or unwelcome there. Still, they floated nearer, and that encouraged Hock to step to the river’s edge.

He threw his bag into the dugout and, up to his ankles in mud, he stepped in and held on. The boat rode lower in the water with him in it, was more stable with his weight holding it deeper.

The skinny boys thrashed with their paddles, one of the paddles merely the splintered portion of a short water-blackened board. Hock asked them their names, and they grunted some words he did not understand. But random incoherence seemed to be the theme of his escape. No record had been made of his passport details by the man in khaki. The washerwoman had laughed as she told him that his friends had left without him. The boy Simon and the other canoe were gone. He was in a small dugout in the middle of the river, still the Lower River, miles above the Zambezi, into which it flowed, the two small boys steering and slapping with their clumsy paddles on this hot morning.

I don’t exist, Hock thought. No one knows I’m here, no one knows me, no one cares, and were this flimsy canoe to turn over, or be flipped by a hippo, no one would ever find me; no one would know I died. The world would continue to turn without me, my death would be unnoticed, would make no difference, because I am no one, no more than meat.

He saw himself with the eyes of a hawk that was passing high above, soaring without moving its wings, looking imperturbable, graceful in its effortless gliding. I am a speck, no more than that, Hock thought. I am a bug on a twig floating down a dark river. Less than a bug.

A basket at his feet held three tiny fish: not bait, though they were small enough for that. It was perhaps the day’s catch, a peeled stick inserted through their gills, holding them together like a kebab. The boys would have started fishing before dawn. This was all they had to show for those five hours or so.

The river narrowed. It had been fifty yards wide at the border post; now it was less than forty, and swifter because of that, rushing past sandbanks on which Hock saw the unmistakable signs of large crocodiles, the parallel paw prints and claw marks, the groove of the dragging tail between them.

Hock pointed to an overhanging mud cliff that had been hollowed out beneath by the rushing river, using it as a landmark. He said, “Malawi?”

“Nuh,” the boy said, jerking his head, but still stroking with his paddle.

“Mozambique?”

The boy clicked his teeth, but that didn’t mean yes; it meant the question was annoying and perhaps meaningless.

The reeds, the marsh grass, the greasy weeds, the sandbanks, the blackish water — none of it was different from what he’d seen upstream. No high ground was visible beyond the steep riverbanks. But he was moving, and no one knew him. He had escaped Malabo, and he was watchful for whatever might come next.

The pull of the current consoled him with the notion that he was being drawn to safety. All he had to do was surrender to the flow of the river, the Lower River, bearing him southward through the bush.

After about an hour he saw in the distance downriver a single straight-sided humped-up mountain, solitary, like a granite monument, headless shoulders risen in the marshy plain. As they drew closer in the canoe it seemed like a citadel of tree-clad stone, its steep sides and cliffs formed in the shape of fortifications. It was such an oddity — its great size, its unusual shape — he asked its name.

“Morrumbala,” the boy in the stern said.

Hock knew the name but had never seen it. The war against the Portuguese had prevented him from traveling this far into Mozambique, so it was all new to him, a strangely hopeful sign. It lay in the distance, beyond the far bank.

As Hock stared at it, the sun striking the trees on its sheer sides, the sunlit green as luminous as fresh lettuce, pulpous and pale yellow in patches, he did not notice the canoe drawing away from Morrumbala, closer to the near riverbank. Only when the canoe bumped did he look up and see that they’d been pushed by the current against a pair of poles sticking out of the mud. Lashed to the poles was a water-soaked board that served as a crude pier, and another board, a walkway to the high grass at the bank.

A boy of four or five, wearing just a shirt — his bottom bare — saw Hock and began screaming in fear. He ran from Hock as from a demon, as the paddlers laughed — their first full-throated cry — and the small boy screamed out, “Mzungu!”

His fright seemed to relax them, and they were still laughing as they tied the dugout to the poles and led Hock onto the bank and up a path to a clearing.

He had seen many villages like this, the squat square huts arranged around the perimeter of an open space of smooth packed-down earth. From the condition of the fraying thatch on the hut roofs, and the exposed framework on the mud walls, and the rags hanging on clotheslines — from the sharp stink of smoke and dirt — he knew it was a poor village. Yet it was orderly, and there was something else — unusual, even remarkable — for though it was full of people, they were all very small, all of them, he saw, children in tattered clothes, the sort of T-shirts and shorts and trousers that were sold cheaply at the used-clothing markets, the shirts with American names on them, schools, the logos of well-known companies, names of cities, too, and famous universities.

The small boy who had been screaming was scooped up by a girl of ten or so — she could barely lift him. He buried his face in her shoulder.

“Where’s your father, your mother?” Hock asked the paddlers.

One boy turned away in alarm, his rags making his fear pathetic. The other boy faced Hock and scowled, saying nothing, either insulted or afraid.

“The chief,” Hock said. “Mfumu. Where is your bwana?”

The boy made an even sourer face, thrusting out his lower lip, showing a kind of threat with its inner pinkness, and began to speak fast, turning his back to Hock as he talked. Finally he walked away on his toes, in disdain, holding upright like a symbol of prestige the stick with the three small stiff fish that he’d taken from the canoe.

Hock sat on a discarded plank in the shade of a tree and watched a small girl poking a fire under a blackened pot, perhaps cooking, perhaps playing; another small girl holding a baby at her hip; infants crawling in the dust, picking at dry tufts of grass. More children were occupied stacking firewood, most of them boys, but the pile they made was so random — no more than a scattered heap — that looked like play, too, a game of tossed and broken branches. Some other, bigger boys sat under a tree on the far side of the clearing. Children and more children. They all wore faded T-shirts of various colors, much too big for them, some serving the smaller girls as dresses — T-shirts as shapeless frocks, one saying Niagara Falls, another Yale. They were dusty-faced and their hair was clotted with white bits of lint, and many of the children were unnaturally skinny, the infants potbellied with spindly arms and legs.

They seemed indifferent to Hock, and they were silent, going about their chores or absorbed in repetitious play. When Hock got up from his plank and walked through the village, they took no notice of him.

The border post on the river now seemed to him something defined and certain: the table, the sullen official with the stamp and ink pad, the battered sheds, the broken boat, the muddy embankment, the rapacious shopkeeper. It was on the map, or at least seemed so, an entry point. It was a ruin but it was not a horror, only futile-looking, decaying with the accumulation of garbage, and the rise and fall of the river, not maintained, conventionally ugly, as most of the depots on the Lower River looked, including the boma at Nsanje and the landings at Magwero and Marka. People congregated at the landings, but few people lived at them.

Compared to the border post, even to Magwero, this village of children was whole, coherent, and some of it was swept clean — Hock could see small girls with twig brooms pushing the litter of leaves and peels to the side of the courtyard in front of the huts. None of the huts was in good shape — the usual bruised walls, the skeletal frame of branches showing through — and yet the village was inhabited, strangely so. Everyone he’d seen so far was young, some very young, mostly small children, the little girls holding infants, small boys playing together, the older boys watchful. And because most were so young there was a buzz of vitality in the village, a hurrying; running boys, skipping girls. Some played with crudely made toys, formed of twisted wire, or hanks of knotted rags that served as balls to kick, and some limbless dolls, plastic torsos with cracked heads — white dolls.

This village made sense because it was full of lives being lived outdoors; it was visible and vital. Pots simmered over fires, and oddly, some small girls were taking turns with oversized mortars and pestles — the pestles much taller than they were and so heavy that some of them had to be hoisted and dropped by pairs of girls.

It could have been a summer camp or a school; it had that look of monotony and order, all the children occupied. But most were working, even those he had taken to be playing. The girls wore large T-shirts to their knees, some were cinched with rope at the waist to make a dress, others draped over them like nightshirts, or like smocks. Many of the small children wore a T-shirt and nothing else, and though the boys’ T-shirts fitted them better, all were faded and worn—Westfield High School and UConn and Bob’s Bluegrass Bar and UCLA and more. Once-white ones were gray with dirt, many had chewed collars and slashes, and some were shredded to rags.

Taller, much bigger than any of these skinny kids, Hock felt a sense of safety, the instinctive confidence of the tall man, a giant among dwarfs, reassured by his size and the fact that he’d escaped from Malabo, and gotten away from the border post, and was now six or seven miles downstream, probably in Mozambique but on the west bank of the Lower River. There had to be a path that would lead to a wider road and a truck route and a town.

It was just after four. He’d eaten the last of his crackers and beans in the morning, waiting on the riverbank, and nothing since. His hunger sharpened with the odor of cassava roasting on a grill over a fire, tended by a small girl on her knees. She turned the dark, roughly carved root slices with a forked stick. After watching her for a while, Hock got up and walked over to the fire. The girl shrank from him, though stayed kneeling, fanning smoke from her eyes, rearranging the slices, moving them to the side of the grill farthest from Hock.

Instinctively, as he reached, Hock looked for an adult, anyone his size, who might object, and seeing only children, he picked up one of the pieces of cooked cassava. It was hot, he bobbled it in his palm, then blew on it and took a bite. He had not realized how hungry he was until he ate the thing, stringy, dense, tasting of wood smoke. He wolfed it down and wanted another.

The girl tending the fire (her T-shirt was lettered Colby Chess Club) had turned toward him but with averted eyes, gazing past him. Hock looked around and saw, on a log in front of a hut, three big boys staring at him. He was surprised and disconcerted to see that they were wearing sunglasses, three bug-eyed boys in T-shirts and trousers. Something in their posture gave them an air of authority, even hauteur, and the sunglasses seemed, if not menacing, then unfriendly, intentionally ambiguous. Their clothes were clean, and that unusual fact made them seem stronger and put Hock on his guard. One of them wore a black baseball cap with the words Dynamo Dresden stitched in yellow on the front.

He’d been dazed and dulled by the effort of getting away from Malabo, and the canoe trip to the frontier had tired him. He hadn’t expected to be abandoned by Simon — after giving him money and sermonizing about his future, the ungrateful rat — hadn’t expected this, a village of children.

Hock was still hungry but, sensing disapproval from the watching boys, instead of taking any more food from the fire, he walked up the slight incline of sloping earth and dead grass to where the boys sat in the afternoon sun.

“Hello, how are you?” he asked in Sena, certain they would understand; the language was spoken all over the Lower River.

They simply stared, or seemed to, in the stylish unrevealing goggles, as though they hadn’t heard or didn’t know the words.

“Where is your chief?” Hock used all the words for “big man” he knew, not only mfumu and nduna, but also nkhoswe, the elder who traditionally looked after all the smaller siblings — nephews and dependents.

“No chief,” the boy in the middle said in English. He was a skinny sharp-faced boy with wet insolent lips and he sounded triumphant. “No nkhoswe.”

“No bwana?”

“You are the only bwana.”

Hock felt a thrill at the idea of a village in the bush with no one in charge.

“What is the name of this village?” he asked.

The boy wearing the black cap lettered Dynamo Dresden said, “It is Mtayira.”

“I don’t know that word.”

“It is The Place of the Thrown-Aways.”

So precise, the sad name.

“Where is the road?” Hock asked. He spoke in Sena, to be sure, for the word njira meant any road, big or small, even a footpath.

“No road,” the sharp-faced boy said, crowing in English.

“You speak English. Did you learn it at school?”

“Not at school, never.”

The truculent and unwilling tone and the sulky nayvah in the boy’s response annoyed Hock, who said, “I haven’t eaten anything all day. I need some food.”

“We have no food for you.”

The three pairs of sunglasses were pitiless. And none of the boys had risen, in itself an act of defiance, for on the Lower River, even in the disgrace that was Malabo, the children stood up in the presence of adults. Hock turned toward the cooking fire and saw that the girl had gathered all the cassava and was carrying it away in a tin bowl, moving quickly on short legs across the clearing with the head-bobbing walk of a child.

“I’m hungry,” Hock said in a mildly protesting way.

“We are more hungry,” the same boy said.

“If you help me, I’ll give you money,” Hock said, and was at once uncomfortably aware of the pleading note in his voice.

“We want dollars,” one of the other boys said, a new voice that was a growl.

Hock laughed at the idea that he was negotiating with a boy in a baseball cap who was no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, in a bush village on the river, a sullen boy in sunglasses.

“Twenty dollars,” the boy said.

Hock felt pressure on his legs, a rubbing and pushing, and saw that a crowd of children had gathered around him. Instead of standing at a distance, as children always did by tradition, out of respect, these children stood close to him, chafing him, hemming him in, preventing him from moving. It was as though he was standing in thick bush grass up to his waist. He could sway, but he could not lift his legs. He’d put his bag between his feet and could feel it against his calves but was unable to reach it.

“What do I get for twenty dollars?”

“Some food to eat.”

“Is that all?”

“Some tea to drink.”

“I need a place to sleep,” Hock said.

The children jostling at his legs made him totter and almost lose his balance. He lifted his arms and waved them to steady himself, feeling foolish.

“Maybe we have a space.”

“I want to be your friend,” Hock said.

“We do not know you at all.” It was the growly voiced boy.

“Please tell these children to move away.”

The boy spoke to them sharply, but they responded by chattering, laughing, gesturing.

“They say that you must go, not them,” the boy said, and the children laughed again, as if guessing what was being said. And when they laughed, jeering, careless, Hock became worried.

He reached through the tangle of small bodies and found the strap of his bag and lifted it, hugging it, protecting it with his arm. Everything he owned was in it — not much now, he’d left most of his clothes in Malabo, and Simon had stolen his radio. But he had the essentials — medicine and money and a change of clothes.

The worst thing you could do in these circumstances, he knew, was to pull out an envelope and show money to such a crowd of rude catcalling children. He said only, “See? I have it.”

The middle boy gestured, and the boys on either side of him snarled what sounded like an order, or abuse. But the crowd of children did not disperse at once. They chattered some more, they made insolent noises, they poked and pinched at Hock’s legs and tugged at his bag to taunt him. And only then did they move away, at first slowly, then running, chasing each other, leaving Hock short of breath, his heart beating fast.

Hock knew from his Medford store that there is a way a person handles money that shows familiarity, not just the deftness of a clerk at the cash drawer, but also in a bush village like this, in the practiced movements of someone’s fingers — a response of hands more than eyes. The boy had taken the twenty-dollar bill, had smoothed it and folded it in half, hardly looking at it, and Hock knew that the boy had experienced American money, handled it easily, his pinching fingers testing the paper, making it speak.

In return for the money, Hock was given a mat in a dirty hut at the edge of the village. He sat before it in shadows, eating a plate of roasted cassava, some bananas, and peanuts boiled in their shells, glad for the cup of boiled water into which he had swirled some tea leaves. He ate slowly, to prolong the pleasure.

The sunset was a syrup of golden red dissolving the clouds in the pools of its light, lovely over his squalid hut, lending the mud walls a pinkish glow.

18

SITTING CROSS-LEGGED in the broken wattle-and-daub hut that had no door, Hock remembered an incident from his second year in Malabo. One of his students, a girl sleeping in a doorless hut like this, was attacked by a hyena that had padded in and begun to eat her face. Her struggling did not deter the creature, though an ember from the dying fire, thrown by the girl’s mother at the hyena, the sparks setting its fur alight, repelled him. Two days later, at the filthy clinic where her severe wounds had gone septic, her head yellow and swollen tight with infection, the girl died.

From that day, Hock could not sleep in Malabo without barricading his door. For decades in Medford he’d hardly thought of that event, but this night in the village of children he sat in the doorway of the hut, heavy with fatigue and a sense of grievance, feeling wronged, not by the imposters in Malabo but by his divorce, thinking angrily of Deena’s demanding the house, his daughter’s abusing him and then wanting her cut of her inheritance in advance, believing that he would marry again and have more children — and here he was, indignant, sitting on the dirt floor of a filthy hut alone in this underworld, on an obscure reach of the Lower River.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Please,” he said in their language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The boy had started down the path, Hock following.

“Why did they want to hurt me?”

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

“But I can help them.”

“How can you help them?”

“Food,” Hock said. “Money.”

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

“Water,” Hock said. “A well.”

“We have the river.”

“What does the government give you?”

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

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

“I could arrange for a school here.”

“They hate school.”

“They could learn English, like you.”

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

The two other boys sniggered, hearing this.

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

“Dead. All dead.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Your friends are coming, this boy says.”

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

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

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

“Your people.”

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

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

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

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

“Don’t call me mzungu.”

“I will call you Old Man.”

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

“They want you to go.”

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

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

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

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

“From your people.”

“I don’t have any people.”

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

“They’re coming here?”

“We will see.”

“When are they coming?”

“We will see.”

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

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

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

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

“I don’t want your money.”

“I must have some food,” Hock said.

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

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

“I don’t have a knife.”

“The knife from last night.”

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

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

“The food,” Hock said.

“They will bring.”

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

“Chai,” Hock said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of this, and more, all night.

19

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

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

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

“The bud.”

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

“What are you saying?”

“Ndege.”

“Bird,” Hock said.

“Bard,” the boy said.

“What about it?”

“Is coming.”

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

“Mzungu,” the boy said.

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

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

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

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

“Bring me food,” Hock said.

“The ndege will bring food.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We are going,” the boy said.

“Where?”

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

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

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

“What friend are you talking?”

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

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

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

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

“The football pitch.”

“Call me bambo.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are we?”

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

“What do you do here?”

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

“Whose field is this?”

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

“On what?”

“On who wins.”

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

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

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

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

“What’s hard, then?”

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

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

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

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

“From the big marsh,” the boy said.

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

“What do we do now?”

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

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

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

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

The boy he had spoken to was now standing in front of the seated children from the village, his back to the field. He seemed to be leading the children in prayer, or at least eliciting responses, the big boy reciting a line, the children repeating it. A prayer, a promise, a war chant, a threat, a lament — it could have been anything.

The children at the far side of the field simply watched, and the ones who had just arrived were settling into postures of waiting. Dressed the same, in old American T-shirts and ragged shorts and trousers — facing the empty field — all the children looked like members of a cargo cult.

Their patience was like indifference, like a form of despair, not anticipation of an event but hopelessness. When the children on Hock’s side of the field were finished chanting they lapsed into silence, blinking at the flies that were settling around their eyes. None of them sat near Hock. Because of the snake, they kept away from him.

Then the snake’s body contracted on his arm, its throat swelling again, and this made Hock more watchful, as though by its flicking tongue it had smelled a rising emotion in the children. Certainly the children were more tense, seeming to contract themselves, resolving themselves into more compact postures of listening. The snake too seemed hyperalert, its muscles pulsing and pinching against Hock’s hot arm.

Nothing was in the sky, and yet a far-off sound, a yak-yak-yak, became audible and grew louder, until, like a giant insect, a helicopter burst from the dusty haze and hovered over the field, high up.

So this was the bird. The helicopter was blue and white, with a logo, a shield in gold on its side, and under it the words L’Agence Anonyme. And it was growing larger. What had seemed a small bulbous chopper, flying in and circling, grew as it descended, became elongated, and the updraft of its whirling rotor blades sucked a dense column of dust from the ground that became a wide brown cloud.

Even before it landed, while it was settling lower, the double doors on its side slid open, revealing its interior. Then two things happened, surprising things. First, music began to play — rock music, very loud, a pounding rhythm, yada-boom, yada-boom, yada-boom. And then, while it played, growing even louder, a group of people appeared at the opening. The two in front, flanked by Africans, were a white man in a cowboy hat and a woman in high boots — a blonde, chalky-faced, in a black skintight suit. Both of them were gesturing to the children, looking jubilant.

Yada-boom, yada-boom—where were the loudspeakers?

The children, most of them, kept their places at the edge of the field, though a handful of excited, much younger ones ran into the thickening dust cloud, staggering, seeming to choke, many of them retreating as the helicopter came to rest, its long skids sinking into the rough grass and loose dirt of the field. The two white people standing in the cabin hatchway waved, still jubilant. Just behind them was an imposing-looking African man in a spotless safari suit, taller than the white man and woman; from his assertive gestures he seemed to be issuing orders.

Before the children sitting and kneeling at the margin of the field stood up, preparing to run to the helicopter, the boy in the black Dynamo cap appeared next to Hock and said, “Tell the Agency to help us.” He held his body away, his arms behind his back, his head to the side, as though he expected the snake to uncoil itself and strike him.

Hock said, “Help me get near — keep the children away,” and he snatched up his bag and headed toward the helicopter, which had become a blur in the rising dust cloud.

Hock saw his chance to save himself, to get close enough to appeal for help. He was sure he was visible from the helicopter — how hard was it to pick out a tall white man in a bush shirt and tattered trousers, a bag in one hand, a fat snake wrapped around his right arm, which he held forward like a weapon?

The boy in the baseball cap pushed ahead of him, elbowing his way through the mass of children. Now that the rotor blades had stopped and the engine was silenced, only the music played — thumping joyous music — and the children who had been hanging back rushed toward the chopper, into the risen dust, making more dust, crowding Hock and nearly knocking him down.

“Over here!” he called to the man and woman in the open doorway. How clean they looked, how outlandish in their dress, the man in the cowboy hat and boots, the blond woman in her skintight suit. “Help me!”

They began tossing boxes and bags to the children who were nearest to them. At first they handed them over, but within seconds the children were fighting over them, and the man in the cowboy hat became frantic, flinging the bags, kicking the boxes out of the helicopter door, as though to distract the frenzied children.

The children, maddened by the sight of the bags, tore at each other.

“Please — help me,” Hock cried out, waving his bag. He relaxed his other arm, and the children near him, reaching for the bags, jostled his arm, bumping the snake. Feeling its coils loosen — the snake was blinded by the dust — Hock let go of its head and allowed it to drop into the dust. The snake’s whipping back and forth on the ground panicked a small knot of children, who kicked at it and stamped on it, crushing its head.

Even pushing as hard as he could, Hock made little progress against the small bodies so tightly packed ahead of him. Some children nearer the helicopter had begun to climb aboard, bracing themselves on the skids and clinging to the struts, attempting to crawl through the legs of the man and woman at the door.

Hock was shouting but could not hear his voice over the loud yada-boom, yada-boom. Tripped by the small battering bodies, he fell to his knees among the struggling children with dust on their sweat-smeared faces. Now kneeling, he was the height of a child himself.

He could see the man and woman clearly: the man’s expensive sunglasses and clean cowboy hat, the woman’s red lips, gleaming makeup, and unusually white teeth. Another man stood beside them with a video camera, shooting them, shooting out the door. Now the man in the cowboy hat was kicking at the children, fending them off with bags of food, and the woman was trying to keep her balance. She was open-mouthed, perhaps shrieking in fear, but all Hock could hear was the yada-boom. She looked clownish, costumed, like the man, dressed as though for a party or a concert, in great contrast to the mass of small children in dirty T-shirts, clawing at one another.

All this time the music played, energetic pumping rhythms that drowned out the children’s shouts and the woman’s shriek and the voices of the men at the helicopter door who seemed to be yelling at each other. No voices were audible, but the open mouths and wild eyes made it a scene of pure panic in the growing dust cloud.

Still trying to make himself heard, Hock got to his feet and fought on, stepping over the children, pushing others aside. His effort had the absurd indignity of a dream, all irrational and unreal, and what made it more dream-like was his slowness, his pathetic helplessness, and that he was ignored, humiliated, unable to call attention to himself.

The man in the cowboy hat met Hock’s eyes and lifted his sunglasses to verify with his own surprised gaze the sight of this frantic white man. He seemed to lean over, as though what he was seeing was not quite believable. He said something to the man behind him. But he had a pale debauched face, and there was no sympathy in the set of his jaw, and when he let his sunglasses slip down over his eyes and turned to throw more bags from the helicopter, at the same time kicking out at the climbing children, Hock flung himself forward.

“Help!” Hock screamed. He felt the strain in his throat without hearing the word, because now the music was overwhelmed by the roar of the engine, the chatter of the rotor blades as they began to turn. Turning faster, they stirred more dust, and the dust engulfed the children and the field while Hock hugged his bag to his chest. Two children dropped from the skids where they had been hanging. Yak-yak-yak-yak-yak, the helicopter rose into the sun, which cast an eerie glow through the dust; it was like a beetle swallowed by a storm cloud.

The rotor’s yakking diminished, the music grew softer, and the yelps of the children grew louder as they fought over the bags and boxes strewn on the ground. Seeing that they were occupied in this free-for-all, Hock turned to go, intending to run away from the choking dust, to the margin of the field, to take his chances in the bush.

But just as he turned, he saw, emerging from the trees, fifteen or twenty motorcycles rushing toward the center of the field like a pack of one-eyed animals. Side by side, the motorcycles converged as they came closer, heading into the mass of children.

Half an hour before, Hock had been sitting cross-legged in the shade of the tall grass and shrubs at the edge of the field, the snake coiled on his arm, feeling powerful. Then the confusion — the helicopter, the loud music, the strangers at the door, the dumped boxes and bags of food, the crazed children, his own desperation. The swelling uprush of dust had slowed him, and the eruption of children quarreling over the bags and boxes, tearing them to pieces, had shocked him. The helicopter taking off had made more dust, but no sooner had its noisy rotors disappeared than the blatting of the motorcycles began.

He was in danger of being trapped by the motorcycles. Some of them were knocking children down as the riders snatched at the bags, stacking them on their handlebars, shoving the children out of the way, chasing children who were tottering with bags in their arms. He dodged a skidding bike and headed toward the emptier part of the field, and on the way managed to pick up a bag, a bulging cloth sack of what he imagined to be rice or flour or millet.

He could not run. After sprinting a few steps, he stopped, gasped for breath, then walked, his face grimy from the sweat-smeared dirt, still breathing hard in the dust cloud that hung over the field.

He half turned to see how far he had come when the boys, flailing their arms, rushed at him, shouting. Resisting, Hock felt old and feeble, unable to repel them, and afraid of the very sight of them, their angry faces, their bared teeth. One of the reaching boys grabbed at Hock’s sack of flour, another boy clung to his arm — the arm where the snake had been coiled.

“Wait — wait,” Hock said, trying to calm them, because he knew he lacked the strength to fight them off. “What do you want?”

They were two of the bigger boys from the village of children, the boys who had led him here, knowing in advance that a helicopter was going to arrive, carrying — who? celebrities? politicians? — to distribute food. One of them was the boy who had woken him that morning with the words “The bud.”

“Wait — you not go.”

“Let go of my arm,” Hock said, hating the boy’s dirty hand on him, his bony grip. “Take the bag of food — you can have it.”

“We want you,” the bigger boy said.

In spite of the long trek here, and the struggle in the field, and the confused chase, these boys were still wearing sunglasses, and one of them the black baseball hat he’d had on in the village.

“I have to go home now,” Hock said, and absurdly, with a screeching insistence and pompous formality, “Don’t you understand? I have appointments! I have issues to settle.”

“There is no need,” the boy said, holding on.

Now the other boy was clutching Hock’s shirt, his fingers hooked in the strap of Hock’s duffel bag. Although neither boy was as tall or as heavy as Hock, they hung on, dragging him back. The dust, dense and flecked with dirty sunlight, and the loud complaints and whines of the squabbling children in the middle of the field, made it all worse: the children’s protests, the braying of the motorcycles. Hock was weakened, unnerved by the shrieking, the heat, and now unable to speak, grit in his mouth, gagging on the dirty air.

Hock was pushed hard as the boy next to him was thumped aside, and in the same moment a motorcycle roared. The other boy let go of his arm and stumbled away.

“Get on, father,” the rider called out impatiently, then louder, “Get on!”

Hock swung his leg over and took hold of the man, who sped into the crowd. It was a full minute before he saw it was Manyenga, who seemed to laugh, but no, just teeth and lips set in an expression of fury, screaming for the children to back off.

20

THE MOTORCYCLE PASSED through the low wall of yellowing shrubs and parched trees on a path that was a groove hardly wider than its fat tires, but wide enough. There were no roads here, as the exultant boy had said in the children’s village, yet the stony crusted floor of this sun-heated bush was crisscrossed with tire tracks. And Hock was cooler on the speeding bike, the breeze in his face. He held on as Manyenga’s elbows slapped at the slender tree limbs and grubby leaves. He was grateful to be delivered from the chaos on the field and glad that he was with someone he knew, feeling like an impulsive runaway who’d been rescued from his foolishness by the intervention of an adult: saved. But as he sat on the motorcycle, which was rocking like a hobbyhorse on the straighter stretches and skidding on the sandy turns, this feeling of deliverance ebbed, and as his strength returned he was filled with apprehension: caught again.

His relief at being rescued turned to misery as he acknowledged that he had not been saved but snared, and by the very man he’d tried to escape from. Still, he hung on, and the awfulness of his situation did not hit him fully until they were well away from the children, who now seemed to him so skinny as to be half alive, desperate, improvisational, and reckless, living by their wits.

Manyenga meanwhile appeared to realize that he had traveled a safe enough distance and was not being followed. He slowed down, and seeing a baobab tree ahead, he stopped the bike under it and both men dismounted. Manyenga’s sweat of exertion hit him: he stank like a wet dog.

The bark of the baobab was torn, the white flesh of the wood exposed and splintered.

“Elephants like to eat this tree for its juicy wood. It has water!” Manyenga said, and he laughed. “They can destroy it!”

“There are elephants here?”

“Why not? This is bush, indeed!” Manyenga was friendly, oblique, teasing. Then he said, “What are you doing, playing with those silly children, isn’t it?”

“They gave me food,” Hock said.

“What food? They have nothing to eat, only what the ndege from the Agency brings them.”

“And you steal it from them.”

“We are hungry too.”

“They have cassava and bananas.”

“Rubbish food, famine food. Where are their chickens? They have no gardens. Are they making relish or stew? Not at all!”

“I was here only a few days,” Hock said, not knowing where this conversation was leading. He didn’t want to admit that he’d been trapped by the children.

Manyenga said, “You prefer to live there with those children, isn’t it?”

“I was just passing through.”

“I must inform you that one German mzungu on the river was captured by them and after some few weeks in captivity they sold him for money. They absconded with his money and food. I know these children. They make trouble on the river. That is why…”

Instead of saying more he sighed — whinnied — shook a cigarette from a pack, and lit it. He pursed his lips and directed a plume of smoke into the air. He looked around and laughed, as though at the strangeness of his being there, under the tree with Hock. He had Hock’s full attention now.

“That is why, my friend, the paddle boys and Simon left you at Megaza frontier station. They knew that if you were with them, the bad children would try to overturn their canoe and catch you.”

“How do you know that?”

“The paddlers dropped Simon at Caya on the Zambezi. They came back yesterday. And I was told.”

“So you went looking for me.”

“Not at all! I was with my friends, following the ndege. When it flies, we chase it — for goods! But God sent me to you. I knew you must be with the children, or maybe dead.”

“You know everything,” Hock said, testing him.

Manyenga squirted smoke through the gaps in his teeth, hissing, and said, “You should thank me, father.”

“Thank you,” Hock said.

“Because I saved your life, isn’t it?”

Hock wondered if this was so, and suspected it might be, but he wanted to deny the gloating Manyenga the satisfaction of it. He said, “They were afraid of me.”

Manyenga laughed, wagging his tongue, and then, his laughter faltering and growing harsh, he began to cough and, coughing, fighting for breath, stamped on the ground, raising dust.

In a choked voice he said, “They are afraid of nothing, my friend,” and to emphasize this he flicked his hand sharply, whipping his fingers together, making them snap. “That mzungu they sold, that German, was tough. But where is he now? Those children are devils. Maybe they took your things, too.”

Hock said nothing. Manyenga was studying him, the cigarette in his mouth giving him a look of insolence.

“What things?” Hock said at last.

“Maybe money.”

“Let’s go,” Hock said. “Where’s the road?”

Whenever he saw that he could contradict Hock, Manyenga put on a smug expression and became theatrical, hamming the moment, pausing before he delivered his putdown. Hock was not annoyed; it gave him hope when he saw that Manyenga was predictable.

“This is the country of no roads. No vehicles. Nothing. Only” —he indicated the wheel tracks, flourishing his cigarette—“paths for footing only. Or for motorbikes.”

“How far is the village — Malabo?”

“Too far.” Manyenga tossed the cigarette butt away. He mounted the bike and leaned and kicked the start lever. The engine gagged, gargled in complaint, then began rapping.

“Where are we going?”

Manyenga said, “You will see,” and when Hock hesitated, Manyenga’s face lost all its teasing mirth and became a mask sweating with impatience. “Do you want me to leave you here?”

Hock allowed himself to be scolded. He sulked as he got on the bike, moving slowly out of pride, like a child who’d been reprimanded. He thought: That’s how it is — I’ve been reduced to that, or less than a child, because even the children in the village were stronger than me. And now Manyenga had taken charge of him and was telling him what to do. He had no choice but to obey. He was lost here, disoriented by the river trip and the spell in the village and the hike to the open field. The appearance of the helicopter had been like a hideous dream of mockery. And now the motorcycle ride and the hostile You will see.

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

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

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

“Is this Malawi or Mozambique?” Hock asked.

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

“No man’s land.”

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

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

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

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

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

“So what—?” Hock began.

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

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

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

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

“Do you see it?” Manyenga asked.

“The valley?”

“The compound.”

“What compound?

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

“There,” Manyenga said, “that side.”

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

“Mzungu,” Hock said.

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

“What are they doing there?”

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

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

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

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

“The helicopter must have come from here.”

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

“You’ve been here before?”

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

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

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

“What is it, anyway?”

“They are calling it the depot.”

“Where’s the chopper?”

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

“That man and woman on the chopper?”

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

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

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

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

“Famous pop stars in the bush!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why me?”

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

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

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

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

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

“You didn’t trust me!”

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

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

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

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

“You scared him away,” Hock said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“With another guy, on a motorcycle.”

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

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

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

“Please help me.”

“You need permission to come here.”

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

“This isn’t Malawi.”

“Or Mozambique. Whatever.”

“It’s not Mozambique.”

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

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

“Can’t I just stay with you tonight?”

“We are not running a hotel.”

“I need a drink of water.”

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

“What’s the name of this outfit?”

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

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

“Who says we have the capability?”

“You’ve got a satellite dish.”

“It’s not operational.”

“Look, I’m an American, like you.”

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

“Where are you from?”

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

“I’m alone.”

“What agency?”

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

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

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

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

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

Yet he still had his good wristwatch, his small duffel bag, his medicine, his passport, his money, a change of clothes. The bag was filthy, too, but it was valuable, and he saw it as a friend.

“Bambo—father,” Hock called to the African in the uniform, raising his voice so he could be heard above the generator.

The man winced, pretended not to hear, and went on polishing the tank. Hock, unable to bear seeing his dirty face, had moved away from the tank.

“Water,” Hock said. Getting no response he said, “Madzi,” and repeated it.

He thought he saw the African’s lips form the word pepani— sorry — but he could not be sure. The man glanced back at the bungalow, and while buffing the tank he stooped and picked up the plastic bottle he had used to dampen the washcloth. He wiped the mouth of the bottle on his shirt and then stuck its short neck through the chain-link fence.

Hock crouched and drank, but clumsily: the water slopped at his mouth and ran down his chin. He was aware that, with the bottle tilted this way, and in his submissive posture, he was like a baby, or a zoo animal being fed through a fence. He had never felt so helpless, but he was grateful to the African, and when he finished, gagging from the greedy mouthful, he thanked the man.

Without acknowledging Hock, obviously afraid that the white man might have seen him from the bungalow, he put the water bottle aside and set to work again. He had polished enough of the tank now so that Hock could see his upper body — horrible, wild man, desperate man, crazy man. Nothing this dirty man said could possibly be true.

Back on the field, among the scavenging children, facing the helicopter, he had felt he was at a low point. In the days at the village of children, cowering in the abandoned hut, sleepless, watching for hyenas, he’d felt he was at his wits’ end. And on the riverbank at the frontier, looking for a passing canoe to take him downriver, he’d felt abandoned. At Malabo, too, on the night of his decision to leave, he’d felt full of despair.

But none of these episodes could compare with the way he felt now, crouching on the wrong side of this perimeter fence, filthier than he’d ever been in his life, saying thank you to the African in the uniform for a gulp of the cloudy wash water.

“It tasted like champagne,” people said at moments like this. But no, this mouthful of warm water tasted foul, and the sour aftertaste of failure lingered in Hock’s throat and nauseated him.

He knew then that he had come to the end of something. He was defeated. He could not imagine anything worse than the degradation he felt on this sunny late afternoon in no man’s land, his reflection in the shiny tank staring back at him.

Two white men walked quickly toward him on the gravel path. The slow walk of the man earlier had signaled unhelpfulness; this brisk stride indicated pure hostility.

“You’re still here?” the first one said — the man from before, in the Hawaiian shirt.

The other one wore a bush shirt, bush shorts, and heavy boots, and seemed military and almost familiar. Both men were so clean, so intimidating, their cleanliness like strength.

“I know you,” he said.

Hock said, “Please help me. Send a message.”

“You’re the guy from the field, from this morning, when we were making the drop.” He turned to the other man, saying, “He was with those kids from the villages. He was trying to score a bag for himself. It was chaos, all his fault. We had to scrub it. That’s why I came back early. He put us off schedule.” He snapped at Hock, “How’d you get here?”

“He wouldn’t tell me who he was with,” the other man said.

“I am warning you,” the man in khaki said. “Get out of here the way you came in. If we see you again, we’ll shoot.”

The African, listening, looked fearful, and when the man in khaki gestured, he went back to polishing the water tank, his eyes widened in terror.

That fear penetrated Hock. He picked up his bag, and for the sake of his dignity he said, “You’re going to hear about this from the authorities. You’ll be sorry. I’m going to report you when I get back.”

“Mister, the way you look, you’re not going to make it back.”

Hock straightened and slung the strap of his bag over his shoulder. He stepped into the bush — he was still less than six feet from the fence, staring at the men. It occurred to him from the way they watched him that these men were unfamiliar with the bush, perhaps afraid, that they traveled in and out in the helicopter and had no sense of the path. Hock looked around, wishing for a snake — a fat one, a viper — that he could seize and shake at them like a thunderbolt.

“I’ll make it,” Hock said.

But when he turned, and ducked into the bush, and saw nothing but the narrow track with the faint impression of the motorcycle’s tire marks, he felt tired; and dispirited, away from the men, he sat down on a boulder. Almost immediately he was stung by ants. He slapped at his legs, he rubbed his arms. He walked farther, crossing to the far side of the steep bowl-like valley, wondering which direction to take. Looking around, he saw movement, a human figure. Leaning forward to see better, he heard mocking laughter. He knew who it was.