The Lower River

21

THEIR OWN LONG late-afternoon shadows floated on the path in front of them, leggy torsos in the red dust. They tramped this lengthening darkness to the whine of cicadas, and before they reached the lip of the valley the sun had dropped beneath the level of the trees, and flights of mouse-faced bats filled the air, darting like swallows. While it was light enough to gather firewood, Manyenga parked the motorbike under a tree and they went in search of dry sticks. They piled the wood but waited until dark before they lit it, because the fire was to keep animals away, hyenas or baboons or biting lizards, and to repel ants and flying insects.

“Where’s the food bag?” Hock asked, because he knew Manyenga had snatched one at the field.

“It is for my family,” Manyenga said. He had found three green coconuts in his foraging. By the light of the fire he hacked off the tops, sawing at the sinews with his pocketknife, and they took turns drinking the coconut water and eating the gelatinous flesh. Until this moment they had only muttered. “Wood” and “matches” and “You take.”

But as Hock lay near the fire on a pile of dead crackly leaves he had scraped together, his animal feeling rose up in him. He remembered the way he had looked in the shiny tank. He was not saddened by the memory of the filthy face and matted hair and stubble on his cheeks. If anything, he was encouraged now. The image of that dirty, defiant monkey face strengthened him as he lay, his head propped up by one hand so he could feel the heat of the fire.

“I hate them,” he said, suddenly aloud.

“And myself, I hate them, too much,” Manyenga said.

“Festus,” Hock said, smiling, almost with affection.

He slept with the dust of the forest in his nostrils, hearing the chirp and snapping of nighttime insects and the odd bird squawk. Once he thought he heard the whoo of a giant eagle owl, or the crack of a branch, undramatic, no louder than a matchstick snapped in half.

At first light, in a racket of insects and birdcalls, with the heat beginning to rise, Manyenga rolled over and grunted. His face was a dark medallion in the sharpness of the sun. They set off through the bush, taking a new direction — north, Hock could tell; the sun was on their right. Manyenga knew the way, and after about an hour they began to see signs of disorder, the first village, hardly a village, one of those static settlements of the bush, a few huts, a wide-eyed boy, a woman fanning a fire with a pot lid, a yapping dog. And they kept going, on a proper footpath now, with the dampness of the river seeping into it, and the elephant grass too high for them to see over it.

Then a road. It had once been a road; it was lumpy with tussocks of rough grass. Vehicles had passed here long ago; the parallel tire tracks, mostly overgrown, were still visible. Manyenga settled the motorbike into one of the ruts but traveled slowly. Hock hung on, and the morning passed, the motorbike rocking him.

At noon a familiar odor of risen dust and stagnant water and wood smoke, and a familiar glare, the heavy light pressing on his eyes, combined with heat. All that and the toasted smell of burned grass, the sight of solitary trees, most of them dead, stripped of their smaller limbs for firewood, some of them no more than crooked posts. Malabo was not far: they were approaching the back road from the south, a new direction for Hock.

When they arrived at the village, Manyenga rode in a wide circle, as though performing a victory lap to show that he’d brought Hock back. Some small boys yelled, some women yodeled. And then he rode straight to Hock’s hut.

“She will bring you tea.”

A small slight figure was seated, in a posture of resignation or fatigue, at the edge of the veranda. It was Zizi, her head on her knees. Hearing the motorbike, she looked up, and when she saw who it was she burst into tears.

She gazed at Hock with a mixture of fear and ecstasy. Her tormented face, sick with grief, was thinner. She looked haggard, her cheeks already wet with tears, and yet she was smiling. But it was also a smile of agony, as though she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing, Hock getting off the bike, slapping the dust from his bag, considering Manyenga and deciding not to thank him. Zizi put her fingers into her mouth, perhaps to stifle her sobs.

“Falling tears! That is a good sign,” Manyenga cried out.

“What are you saying?” Hock asked.

“That it will rain,” Manyenga said, then, “She was missing you,” and he laughed at the absurdity of it. He kicked the bike into gear and gunned it across the clearing to his compound.

Zizi dropped to her knees and held Hock’s legs, pressing her head against his trousers and weeping. The whir of emotion in her body penetrated his as she clung to him.

She exhausted herself with tears, then used her wraparound cloth to wipe her face, lifting it, revealing her legs as sticks. When Hock sat in the shade of the veranda in his old chair and watched her stumble away, to bring him tea and something to eat, her big feet and stiff skinny legs giving her an odd clockwork gait, he thought with wonderment how Zizi had looked, so relieved at his return, perhaps having believed that he had gone for good, or been killed.

The thought in his mind, not words but a breaking wave of warmth, was the rapture of being missed, having made someone happy with his presence. No one had ever missed him before, no one in his life. He had mentioned to Roy Junkins that he could write him in care of the U.S. consulate in Blantyre. But nothing had come. The man was silent, no letters — and a letter, delivered by the consulate, might have helped save him from Malabo. Nothing from the consulate, nothing from Fogwill. Yet Zizi was glad to see him, more than glad. For the first time, someone was grateful for his very presence.

She was smiling when she came back to the veranda with the tea and a basket holding a hunk of buttered bread, a hard-boiled egg, and a steamed sweet potato. He ate slowly while she sat at his feet, hugging his knees, not smiling anymore but looking contented.

“Jinny,” she said, with effort, her tongue against her teeth.

Hock shook his head, squinting at the word.

“Ulendo.”

“Yes, journey,” he said. “Big journey.”

A reddened welt on her bare arm caught his eye. He touched his own arm on the same place to draw her attention to it.

“Chironda,” she said, meaning bruise, and explaining it, she made a whipping gesture.

“Who did that?”

“The big man.”

“Manyenga?”

She blinked and sniffed, to acknowledge it.

“They wanted to know where you were. They said I must tell them.”

“What did you tell them?”

Zizi shook her head and smiled softly and averted her eyes. When she stepped off the veranda into the dusk, Hock knew there was something she didn’t want to say. She was silent for a while, and Hock finished the bread and the egg and drank another cup of tea. He had thought he would be hungrier, but he was tired and dirty and wanted only to crawl beneath his mosquito net and sleep for two days.

Zizi was digging her toe shyly into the dust. He knew she wanted to say something more. He smiled to encourage her. He said, “Speak.”

“I told them,” she said in a hoarse voice, “that I also wanted to know where you were.”

He had begun to think of himself, in his flight down the river and through the bush, as a desperate, slowly shredding escapee, coming apart as he fled, growing insubstantial, fraying into a ghost. And even after Manyenga had snared him and carried him through the scrubby trees of no man’s land, he’d felt diminished, a stick figure, a wraith — a mere symbol of a mzungu, not a man with a name but a fugitive flickering past, someone whose only importance was that he might have money.

They thought of him that way. He thought of himself that way. And he was resigned to being hunted down. So he had gotten on Manyenga’s bike and hung on, and let himself be carried through the bush to the L’Agence Anonyme compound and finally back to Malabo.

And there, seeing how Zizi had missed him, he became whole again. He slept, and when he woke up he believed in himself anew. He’d failed in his second attempt to escape, in this exhausting experience of snakes and ladders. But the cruel game was not over, and he’d recaptured his sense of life, as though Zizi’s sorrow at his disappearance had proven to him that he was real, that he mattered, that it was not so bad slipping down the snake to Malabo as long as one person was loyal to him. Someday, he vowed, he would reward her.

He heard her singing. He had heard it before, her habit of singing when she was afraid, when she was anxious, but now he saw that she was singing softly in contentment, releasing her emotion in a muffled melody.

And when the dwarf Snowdon saw him, he chattered and smiled, drooling, pointing at Hock and at last bowing to him on his bandy legs, touching Hock’s feet as Zizi had done, but the dwarf performed it with respect so exaggerated it seemed a form of clowning.

“Fee-dee-dom,” the dwarf said.

Manyenga had not seen that — a good thing — but he saw how Zizi and the dwarf attended to him.

He said, “They treat you like a big man.”

“Aren’t I a big man?”

“At the Agency compound they sent you away with nothing.”

“What did you want?”

“Food and medicine. And what, and what. They are supposed to help us, but they cheat us. They give food to those devil children, and themselves, those azungu, they live like chiefs. Send them away!”

“Why don’t you send me away?”

Manyenga was stung. He’d come to Hock’s hut to offer a few mild insults and to remind Hock of the ineffectual power of someone looked after by a skinny girl and a dwarf — what sort of chief could this be?

“Not at all,” Manyenga said. “I have come for kusonka.”

It was one of those euphemistic words that meant to start a fire, but also to hand over a sum of money.

Hock said, “You’ve already got a fire.”

“Give money,” Manyenga said, licking his lips—geev mahnie. The crude demand made all of Manyenga’s replies like the grunts of a brute.

“Who am I?”

“Chiff.”

“What do you say to the chief?”

“Puddon?”

Hock repeated his question.

“Pliss.”

“I’ll give it to you later, when you have food for me.”

Neither Zizi nor the dwarf understood, yet they looked on with admiration, smirking at Manyenga, believing that Hock had defied the big man.

He knew he had failed, had allowed himself to be abandoned, and captured, and threatened, and rejected, and seized again — snakes and ladders. He had been starved and out of desperation had drunk swamp water. In the shiny tank at the Agency compound his face, burned by the sun, looked scorched, and he was unshaven and dirty. He had sorrowed at that face of desperation.

The one constant in his life as a shop owner in Medford had been his appearance. He was aware all those years, standing in his clothing store, that he had to dress well, dress better than anyone who entered, because he was advertising his own goods — the blazer, or the tweed vest he wore when in shirtsleeves, the cravat with the blue shirt, the dark dress suit with chalk stripes. He dressed for his store, where he could never be overdressed, knowing that a customer might say, “I want something like that,” meaning his tie or vest, since men were inarticulate, or at least self-conscious, when talking about new clothes. And Hock enjoyed dressing well; it was a way of armoring himself against the world. He hid himself in beautifully made clothes that were full of distractions — cuff links, tie pin, watch fob, belt buckle. He was reassured by the order, the sense of wearing a uniform. Decades of dressing well.

Now he was naked, or as naked as any man could be in the Lower River. Even the poorest man wore trousers and a shirt — ragged-assed long trousers, a shirt in ribbons. A woman might go bare-breasted — Zizi’s aunt’s floppy breasts had been uncovered the day Hock had visited Gala. But a man could not bare his chest, and only small boys wore shorts.

Still, he was naked — badly sunburned, and his skin was crusted with dirt. The cuffs of his trousers were in shreds, his sleeves were torn. His hands were clean, because Zizi had brought water in a basin for him to wash before eating, but his clean hands contrasted absurdly with his ragged clothes and dirty face. He was all the more touched that Zizi should care for him in this condition, was almost tearful that she accepted him.

More than that, she brought him soap and a cloth, so that he could go to the stream and bathe. She did not follow him. Such a thing was not allowed in the Lower River, a woman or girl lurking anywhere near a man washing himself. But when he set off for the stream, thinking of her kindness, he remembered his first sight of her at the small lagoon beside the stream, when she had crossed, going deeper, lifting her wrap higher up her legs, and higher to her thighs, until the water brimmed against the secret of her nakedness.

Hock washed himself, soaping his head, splashing like a dog and spewing. Then he wrapped the cloth around his body and walked back to the hut. The heat was so great, he was dry before he’d taken many steps. He rummaged in the bag he’d left behind, found the razor and his spare clothes, which Zizi had washed, and he shaved. After he changed into clean clothes, he sat in the shade, watched by Zizi and the dwarf. He was content for the moment; he had survived his escape attempt. It was better to be here than on the river alone, or in the village of children, or contending with the hostile men at the Agency depot.

Having survived, he was wiser if not stronger. And the order of his life here helped. He wasn’t alone. Sitting there, flicking at flies — they were tsetses, small and quick, biting flies that left a pinch on his skin — staring into open space, he tried to work out how long he had been in Malabo. He had believed it to be six weeks. But was it? The arrival week was vivid in its reminders, because it was all he had planned to spend there. The second week was emphatic with disappointment — the ruined school, his pointless labor. After that, an effort to get away. The dance. The visit to Gala and finally his fleeing downriver, now over a week ago. More than six weeks, now into the seventh, maybe two months. He was mocked by this passage of time in which he had accomplished nothing, made more futile by the thought that he was not sure exactly how much time had passed — he who had measured every hour of every day he’d spent at his store in Medford.

He could not find the confidence to think about leaving now. He was physically well, but his mind was too battered to have answers, and it took him a long time to concentrate. He was content to sit, to do nothing, to contemplate his small shady courtyard. He was oddly reassured by the girl Zizi, waiting for him to ask something, and by the dwarf Snowdon, who sat blinking at the flies gathered and hurrying around his eyes.

The next day, Manyenga was back. Hock had seen him crossing the clearing from his cluster of huts, and he could tell from the way Manyenga walked — determined, forcing himself to march — that he had a favor to ask or a demand to make. It was an importuning walk, elbows out, head forward. He wanted something.

“Yes, father,” he said, and uttered all the formulaic Sena greetings — that too indicated that he’d be demanding. At last he said, “You instructed me to come back, and myself here I am.”

“With your hand out.”

Instead of standing, out of respect, or asking Manyenga to sit, he remained on his creaky chair, enjoying the man’s discomfort as he rocked on his heels.

“Because you are owing us too much of money.”

“Why do I owe you?” Hock said. “I came here many weeks ago to visit you. I was going to leave, but somehow I am still here.”

“As our honored guest. As minister. As our friend.”

“Is that why I owe you?”

“No, my friend,” Manyenga said, and looked fixedly at him. “At the Agency you came away with nothing at all. They didn’t respect you — no.”

The truth of this was hurtful. He remembered the sneering man, the African servant offering him a drink of warm water, his being threatened and sent away, and his turning and walking into the bush, on a muddy game trail, tramping the leaf litter.

“And myself I rescued you.”

The memory of all that was so painful that Hock cut him short, saying, “How much do you want?”

“Petrol, food, transport,” Manyenga said, beginning to itemize, his way of nagging.

“Let me go,” Hock said. “I’ll send you money.”

“You never will.”

“I promise.”

“Just words. How will we know?”

Manyenga wasn’t sentimental; he wasn’t even pretending to like Hock. He was fierce and toothy, with cold eyes, and he seemed to enjoy reminding Hock that he was a hostage by telling him he was a guest.

“How much?” Hock repeated in a lower voice.

“What is the price of one human life?” Manyenga asked.

What Agency hack had taught him that sentence? Hock had kept some money in his pocket for just such an occasion, so he wouldn’t have to rummage for it in Manyenga’s presence. He took out some folded-over bills and handed them over.

Manyenga did not close his fingers around the money. He let it rest on his open palm.

“See? We are worth nothing,” he said.

As though suspecting that Hock had the advantage, the dwarf crept over to Manyenga and clawed at his trouser leg, setting his head to the side as if he was going to bite him.

Manyenga kicked out at him, and the dwarf tumbled into the dust, honking in protest.

But already Hock was on his feet. He stepped off the veranda and stood so close to Manyenga that his chin was in the man’s face. He was at least six inches taller than Manyenga.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” Hock said, and nudged the man back, bumping him with his chest. At this the dwarf looked up and smiled, showing his broken teeth. “Say sorry.”

Manyenga faced him with reddened eyes.

“Say pepani.”

Now Snowdon understood and looked pleased.

“Pepani to you.”

“Now leave us alone,” Hock said.

“Not until I say one thing more, father. Remember this. When your rival stands on an anthill, never say ‘I have caught you’ until you are up there yourself.”

With that, he left, the same determination in his stride that he had on his arrival. And Hock remained among the screaming cicadas in the thin hot air and the dusty trees and the gray sun in a sagging spider web of sky, and the dwarf mewling, all of it like aspects of his futility. He was miserable, but there was grim precision to it, and he took comfort in his condition, knowing that it was true, that it was exact, that he was not being fooled in his suffering.

22

HE RESENTED BEING captive in this flattened vegetating place, and he had come to hate the idiot wisdom of the proverbs these ragged people subjected him to. I never want to hear another proverb, he thought, or another opinion from someone so obviously doomed. If there was anything true or lasting in the village, it was in their dancing, but like so much else, this authentic expression of the past had become flat-footed. Instead of grieving for himself, he lamented the village that had disappeared utterly, its school buildings fallen, its well gone dry, its spirit vanished; lamented the evaporated essence of a place that he knew from its bitter residue of dust, like the skid of a footprint of someone who had fled for good. Malabo had become an earlier, whittled-down version of itself, recalling a simpler, crueler time, of fetishes and snake doctors and chicken-blood rituals.

The Lower River he’d dreamed of as a happy refuge for almost forty years; the embankment of beached canoes that had been hewn from ancient fat trees; the shaded village of dried mud, of thick-walled huts with cool interiors, and of smooth swept courtyards of strutting cockerels and plump chickens; the dense foliage of low trees like parasols of green; the narrow footpaths, the half-naked women and the men in neatly patched shirts, the coherence of the tidy weeded gardens of millet and sorghum and pumpkins, and the veiled drapery of strung-up fishing nets; and most of all the welcome, the warm greeting that was without suspicion or threat; something golden in the greenery lighted by the river, the warmth that kept him hopeful for all those years — gone, gone.

What he recalled now on these days of recovery after his thwarted escape was his reluctance to leave, all those years ago, the sadness he felt, not because he was going home to be with his ailing father, but at having to uproot himself from a life he had come to love, the school flourishing, the diligent hopeful students, the self-sufficiency of the people in the village. Back in Medford, among the shelves and glass display cases of expensive clothes, he remembered how in Malabo they mended their shirts, the small picked-out stitches, the sewn-up slashes, the new knees on trousers, the thick thready darns on elbows. Nothing was thrown away, nothing wasted. He had smoked a pipe then. The flat empty tobacco cans of the Player’s Navy Cut he bought at Bhagat’s were coveted in the village and became utensils, along with his occasional cup-like cans emptied of Springbok cigarettes. He too wore patched clothes. “My grandfather was a tailor,” he told the man who worked the treadle-powered Singer sewing machine on the veranda of the Malabo grocery shop. He was proud of his patches. People stood straight, worked hard, and were grateful for the smallest kindness. They asked for nothing.

All that had vanished, and what was worse, not even a memory of it remained. The villagers hadn’t been innocent before — there’d been petty thieves in Malabo, and he’d been robbed of a knife, a pen, books, money, an alarm clock, all stolen from his hut or the school. And there had been some bad feeling over his dalliance with Gala, but nothing audible. Now the big trees had been cut down for firewood, and there was no shade in the glary place. The baobab was a stump and a snake nest. The people had seemed unusual to him before, in their gentleness, in the way they had managed the land, their obvious attachment to it. The earth is our mother, a man might say, standing in a furrow with a mattock. They weren’t corrupt now; they were changed, disillusioned, shabby, lazy, dependent, blaming, selfish; they were like most people. You didn’t have to come all this way to be maddened by them. You could meet them almost anywhere.

He could not tell how this had come about. He hardly asked, he didn’t care, and he was disappointed in himself for his indifference. Yet he did not want to care more than they themselves did. He hated their extracting the trickle of money from him, hated the lies they told him, the lies he was telling them.

And now that he’d traveled partway down the river toward Morrumbala, the humpy, steep-sided rock pile of a mountain, and seen the smaller villages and the settlements on the embankment of the wide river, the strange hideout of children, the free-for-all in the open field, the militaristic depot of the charity, L’Agence Anonyme — after this failed escape, an exposure to the hinterland around Malabo, he was more disillusioned than ever. The flourishing Lower River was gone, its very greenness faded like a plucked leaf. He was trapped in a rotting province that he had once known as promising and self-sufficient and proud. He wanted to forget it all, to leave, but they frustrated every attempt he’d made. No one had hurt him, but their sullen stares suggested to him a greater menace. He simply did not know what to do and where to go. He was broken; he was part of the chaos.

Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. Now he remembered a particular day when Roy Junkins came to the store. Roy was thinner, not pale but sallow, yellowish even, his eyes set deeper in loose ashen sockets, as though he’d been ill and was still recovering. When he smiled, Hock saw missing teeth.

Hock was straightening jackets on a display rack, shaking them to free their sleeves. “Royal — haven’t seen you for a while.”

“Been away,” the man said, and looked sheepish, because it seemed there was no more to say. And there was a gentle laugh he had, of self-deprecation.

“You feeling all right?”

“I’m Kool Moe Dee,” Roy said, one of his formulas. “I am back in the world. Heh.”

A note in his voice, of relief, suggested that a story of struggle lay behind his sudden good humor.

“You been far?”

“Very far, Ellis.” That laugh again. “Concord.”

Hock smiled at the absurdity of it — Concord wasn’t far. And then it hit him: Concord Prison.

“Why didn’t you get in touch?”

“I needed time to think about how I ended up there,” Roy said. “Not a thing you coulda done to help me. My sister visited. But the headline about being inside is, you are on your own.”

And then, in a matter-of-fact way, Roy told Hock the details, how from the first he had been picked on in prison, his dinner plate snatched from in front of him, and he’d had to fight to defend himself. He’d been hit in the face by a man (“white dude”) swinging a sock with a lump of metal inside, a steel padlock perhaps. “And that’s how I lost my grille”—his teeth missing. He’d been intermittently bullied after that, but in time had found a degree of protection with a black faction in the prison. “Imagine — me!”—because Roy had always taken pride in distancing himself from any cause, rejoicing in being a loner. “But the brothers helped me,” he said, shaking his head at the memory of it. “They were good.”

His stories were of confinement, insecurity, threat, and intimidation. He’d been hurt, he’d been robbed, his cell ransacked. Younger, weaker, fearful inmates were raped.

“You couldn’t tell the guards or — what? — the warden?”

“Guards don’t run prisons,” he said in his growly comic voice. “Prisoners run prisons. They make the rules. And they got some hard rules. If you snitch, you die. And you learn a few other things.”

“Like what?”

“Learn to say ‘sir.’ Heh.”

“How long were you inside?”

“Almost a year.” Then, rubbing his hands and moving sideways to a display case, he said, in a subject-changing tone, “Show me some shirts, man. Something fine.”

He never told Hock what the conviction was for: a year — probably drugs, a small amount. But the details stayed with Hock, the stories of being bullied, the extortion, the threats, his being alone, confined, under siege.

Malabo was a prison now, and the only strength that Hock had was bluff. Why did he not feel self-pity? He grieved for the vanished village, as Gala had done, and he thought of Chicky, but not as the selfish young woman who had demanded her share of his settlement, on the granting of his divorce, saying, “If I don’t get it now, I’ll never see it.”

Chicky at her smallest and sweetest was the face he saw: at her most unsuspecting, the way she laughed, her chattering in a big chair, her bluish lighted face in front of the TV set, laughing at something silly. And to please him once — because he’d begun to smile — she lip-synched to a reggae song, hunched her shoulders and mouthed the words to “Dem Get Me Mad,” and told him the singer was someone called Yellow Man. One day, missing her, he’d leafed through her school notebook and found, in her scrawl, I want to be cool, and had to fight back tears. Another time, he watched her through a crack in the door to her room, putting on lipstick — she couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. The little neat bundle of bus tickets, held by a rubber band — what urgency in her heart had made her save them? On a walk in the Fells, she was probably twelve, she saw a robin and said, “Turdus migratorius,” and blinked and pressed her lips in a kind of mild pedantry. On the same walk, pleased with herself, she took his hand and said, “When I grow up I want to live in a little cottage.”

She hadn’t been a lonely child. She’d been confident enough. But he’d seen her in the purity and blindness of her innocence. She did not know what was coming, the blight, the cynicism, the disappointment, and then her marriage, which was for him a sorry giveaway; and at last as a young woman she demanded money from him, and that poisoned everything. He needed to remember that she had once been blameless. He grieved for that child.

There was no consolation for him in the thought “Everything happens for the best,” because that was general and his misery was particular. Hock did not dare to consider his own plight. The thing was to become strong again. Oppressed by the heat, the bad food, and his futile escape attempt, he was dazed, sensing that he might be dehydrated. He knew the symptoms, and he had them — headaches, lassitude, muscle aches, and sometimes he could barely speak.

Zizi was unchanged. She was like Gala, whom he had known all those years ago: uneducated, but just as strong, like the original women of the Sena. She gave him hope. In his weakened condition, Zizi acted for him, brought him the hot kettle for tea, and filled the basin so he could wash. Since arriving back from his weeklong escape, he’d stopped eating at Manyenga’s, or even visiting, as an act of rebellion. Zizi brought him food. Though he offered to share it, she refused. She squatted with the dwarf, watching him eat, waiting for another order. She saw to the washing and ironing of his clothes, and the ironing was something he insisted on, because of the eggs of the putzi flies. He’d been through that before. Zizi was patient, obedient, observing him with large dark eyes, her knees drawn up, her chin resting on them, and wrapped in her purple chitenje cloth. While he’d been away, thinking he’d gone for good, she had mourned him in the traditional way, by letting her hair grow — only a week, but it showed. On his return, she shaved her head and held it proudly erect.

A few days after he returned, Hock woke at first light to hear a familiar thumping outside his hut, the thud-thud of a pestle dropped into a wooden mortar. He saw that Zizi was crushing maize into flour, standing under the tree, the air heavy with the static heat of morning stillness. She hugged the heavy pestle, lifted it, and let it drop, and as it did, her head jerked from the effort, her whole body falling back. Her face and head gleamed; she was never blacker than when she was sweating. She lifted her shoulders and, taking a deep breath, saw Hock at the window and smiled, then shyly covered her mouth.

Later that day, he saw that Zizi had spread a large mat on the ground in the sunniest part of the courtyard and scattered the newly pounded flour on it, to bleach in the bright light. In Malabo there was an informal competition among the women to make the whitest flour. From the veranda, he saw Zizi on her hands and knees sweeping the flour, turning it on the mat with a paddle, and his heart ached.

He could have said, he knew, “Go into the hut. Take your chitenje off. Get into the bed and wait for me.” She had obeyed him without a word the morning of his escape, crawling into the bed. He could have summoned her into the hut at any hour of the day or night.

But because of this power and of her obedience, because he could demand and receive anything from her, whatever he wanted, he didn’t ask. He only watched: Zizi’s bones, her skinny legs, her big feet, her full lips and shining eyes, the glimpses of her small breasts, the way she stood at times like a heron, on one leg. His wish was to see her crossing the stream to bathe, as he’d done on his first day, the way she danced, stepping deeper and deeper into the water, lifting her cloth higher against her legs. He wanted to stand behind the mango tree at the embankment and watch her strip naked, soaping herself, her black skin gleaming with creamy bubbles. But someone would see him.

Go into the hut and wash, he could have said. She would have done it. She would have turned away and allowed him to see her. She was shy, but she was willing — too willing; he couldn’t ask.

Yet she always seemed to be obliquely testing him with questions, even asking, “Is there anything else you want?” or in a single word, “Mbiri?”—More?

Hock shook his head and wondered if perhaps he was saying no because there was more power in his resisting her, that his rebuffing her gave him greater authority. But it was simpler than that, and obvious. He was a man in his sixties, a very old man for Malabo. He wanted only to be her benefactor, but the Lower River was a district without remedies.

“She respects you, father,” Manyenga said when he wandered over one day and saw Hock seated between Zizi kneeling and the dwarf squatting in the shade.

Manyenga knew Hock was being uncooperative. As a pretext for the visit — so it seemed — he had brought an old stumbling man, whom he led by one arm. The man held his face upturned in an attitude of listening. He stroked the air with his free hand.

“He is blind,” Manyenga said. “He said he wanted to meet our guest. He has heard about Mister Ellis.”

Hock asked the man his name, but it was Manyenga who answered, “He is Wellington Mwali, from an important family. But he cannot see, so he has no big position.”

The man mumbled to Manyenga.

“He wants to shake your hand.”

Hock reached for the man’s inquiring hand, and shook it, but the man did not let go. He spoke again to Manyenga.

“He says that he knows you are a friend to the snakes. He wants to tell you a story about them.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

“He is a storyteller,” Manyenga said. “That is his position.”

The man seemed to understand what was being said. He smiled with pride and spoke again in his feeble voice.

“He is tired now. He says some other time. But he is clever”—the old man was still speaking softly in a language or a dialect that Hock could not understand—“he knows there are other people, this little man, and this lovely lady.”

“She’s just a girl,” Hock said.

“Girls are better. You can take her as a wife. You can have any woman in this village. You can have anything.”

“No lobola,” Hock said, meaning bride price, because it was the man who paid the dowry in the Lower River.

“You have plenty.”

“I’ve given most of it to you,” Hock said. “And I don’t eat children.”

But Manyenga wasn’t rebuffed. He said, “She is old enough. She can bear you a child. She is making white flour for you!”

Zizi knew she was the subject of this talk. She raised her head, narrowed her eyes, and breathed deeply, and hearing her, the old blind man reached to touch her. She pushed his hand away, and he laughed. He kept laughing softly as Manyenga led him across the clearing.

Zizi still brought news to Hock — talk, the rumors of illness, the whisper that Manyenga’s motorbike was broken, or that a dance would be held. Hock asked about Gala. Zizi said she didn’t know anything, but later she had a story.

Gala was so sad, maybe disappointed. She had been happy to hear through a rumor that Hock had gotten away on the river, even if her heart was sore. But the news that he had been captured made her sad again. The reason was that she had warned him of dangers. And someone — maybe the laundry woman was to blame — had heard and told Festus Manyenga. They went to her house, some boys. They scolded Gala for warning him. They said they would beat her if she was cheeky again. She must not speak to Hock, ever. That was the story, much as she told it.

“I can talk to her,” Hock said. “They can’t hurt me.”

“But Gala, they can hurt her,” Zizi said. “She is very old.”

Younger than me, he thought. But he stayed away. And in her role as his protector, Zizi seemed unusually responsive; resourceful, too, revealing an intelligence and subtlety he had not seen before.

A few days after this conversation, she brought him news that a boy had returned to the village from Blantyre, where he lived, one of Manyenga’s family, a brother — but everyone was a brother.

“What is he doing in Blantyre?”

“Schooling,” Zizi said in English, and again, “Or wucking.”

“I want to see him.”

Zizi took the message to Manyenga — it would have been against protocol for her to go to the boy directly. And it was an indication of how eager Manyenga was to please Hock that the boy visited within a few hours. It seemed that he was prepared to agree with anything that Hock asked, except the only important one, his release. Let me go, he wanted to say again, but he knew what the answer would be. He would not sit and be defied, or lied to, or jeered at, so he didn’t ask. In everything else, he was obeyed. Manyenga had said, You can have any woman in this village.

His name was Aubrey, and he was not a boy — twenty or so — but had the thin careworn face of someone even older. Although it was nearing dusk when he arrived at Hock’s hut, he wore sunglasses. They were new, and there was something menacing in their stylishness. His short-sleeved shirt was new, not one from the secondhand pile at the market, the castoffs from America they called salaula, their word for rummaging. His trousers, too, looked new, and when he saw that Hock was studying them, he offered the information that they were from Europe, a present. He had the slight build and small head and short legs that Hock was used to seeing in the Sena, but he was more confident, somewhat restless, shifting on the stool that Hock offered him, the bamboo one with squeaky legs.

Aubrey had a way of holding his head down at an odd butting angle, with his mouth half open, as though anticipating combat. Just behind his lips, the inside of his mouth was pink. The parted mouth made him seem both hungry and impatient, breathing hard, and for a reason Hock could not explain, the open mouth seemed satirical, too, as if Aubrey was on the point of laughing.

“How old are you?”

“Funny question,” Aubrey said.

“Just a normal question.”

“Twenty-two,” he said, and jerked in his chair, revealing a cell phone in a holster at his belt.

“I want to make a call on your phone,” Hock said.

Now the mouth parted a bit more as Aubrey laughed. “No coverage here. This is the boonies.”

From the first he seemed to have an American accent, an affected one, something slurring and nasal in his delivery, a deliberate carelessness, a gratuitous rapidity. And boonies?

“Where’d you pick that up?”

“My English teacher was an American guy. Malawi’s full of Americans. Look at you. What are you doing here?”

“Funny question,” Hock said.

“Hey, just a normal question. But I know the answer. Americans like coming to the bush. Even big celebrities and rich people. They’re in Monkey Bay, Mzuzu, on the lake. Karonga, and up on the plateau.”

“How do you know that?”

“I see them. My job takes me around.”

“I thought you were a student.”

“I dropped out. It was a waste of time. And it’s a laugh what teachers earn here. I’m in community relations for the Agency.”

“L’Agence Anonyme, that one?”

“Yeah. The chief got me the job. He was a driver for them.”

“But he quit — or was he fired?”

“You have to ask him, bwana.”

Aubrey was quick, his English excellent, yet he seemed winded by the back-and-forth. As if from the effort of his replies, he perspired heavily, rare for a Sena man under a tree at dusk.

“How long are you going to be here in Malabo?”

“I’m day-to-day,” Aubrey said.

No one spoke English well in Malabo. Manyenga’s was generally correct and idiomatic, but his accent made it hard for Hock to understand him at times. This fellow Aubrey spoke English in a way that made him hard to fathom. He was a little too well spoken, evasive, quick to deflect, so fluent as to sound glib.

“Maybe I’ll see a bit more of you.”

Aubrey said, “Whatever.”

“Community relations sounds important.”

“Not really. Mzungus get afraid in the villages. I run interference,” Aubrey said. “Sometimes damage control.”

Hock nodded, at first impressed by the deft replies, then put on guard by the casual jargon that had worried him with Manyenga.

“The Agency is mostly Europeans. They think we are dirty and dangerous.” Aubrey laughed. “Some of the villages are dirty, but they’re not dangerous. They love the food drops.”

“What’s a food drop?”

“Chopper flies into a prearranged site and unloads.”

“On the Lower River?” Hock asked, pretending ignorance.

“All over.”

“I’d like to see it sometime.”

“It’s usually a zoo.”

“Why is that?”

“Free food. Hungry people. Do the math.” Now Hock began to hate him, but before he could say anything more, Aubrey looked at his watch, which hung loosely, like a roomy bracelet, on his thin wrist, and said, “I gotta go. Maybe catch you later.”

23

THE DAYS BURNED BY, and on some smoldering late afternoons of suffocating aimlessness he felt that if he had a gun, he’d march Festus Manyenga to the creek and, in front of the whole gaping village, riddle him with bullets, then kick his bleeding corpse into the water. He sat on his slanting veranda, imagining this horror, sometimes smiling. Even in the times when they were talking — friendly enough, “We are liking you, father,” “I’m glad I came back,” all that — he wanted to twist a viper around the man’s neck and watch the hammer stroke of the fanged mouth against his terrified face.

Hock had, as well, an image of himself holding a cloth bag, like one of the food bags from the Agency that bulged with rice or flour, saying, “Money, take it,” and watching Manyenga reach into the bag that held — money, yes, but also a knot of venomous snakes. See how their wrist scars of snake medicine worked then.

He was ashamed of his smile and tried to stifle these thoughts — they were desperate, unworthy of him. But not having the strength to attempt another escape made him feel feeble. And though he tried to consider the villagers indulgently, he didn’t trust them. None had helped him; they knew he was helpless, and they were especially cruel to the weak.

Yet Aubrey, fresh from Blantyre, connected to the Agency, was someone from the outer world, moving easily in his new shoes from that world to the village and back; someone who might help him. Manyenga could be enigmatic in his demands — he was superstitious, irrational, excitable, oblique, a villager — but Aubrey, with his smart-guy English and his worldly sarcasm, was different. He was greedy, he was knowable.

“The boy who came yesterday,” Hock said to Zizi the next afternoon as she raked the flour into soft, salt-white heaps on the mat.

“With the shoes, with the watch, with the red eyes”—she had seen him clearly.

“Tell him I want to talk to him.”

Zizi flashed a twitch of understanding with her eyebrows. Adult and conspiratorial, this time she would not go to the chief first. She was Hock’s ally.

“But whisper.”

It was another of the English words she knew. “I weespa.”

Hock thought, I am going to miss you.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Better tonight.”

“He is not staying at Malabo.”

“Yes?”

“But at Lutwe. Pafoopi.”

“How near?”

Zizi twisted her lips in vexation, implying not near, an inexact immeasurable distance.

“Is this a problem?”

“Night,” she said.

Hock stared at her with the suggestion of a smile.

“Night is a problem,” she said, using another word for problem, mabvuto, serious trouble.

Now Hock was frankly smiling, challenging her.

“Night is dangerous,” and she used a more severe word, kufa, which meant death.

“Because of”—Hock tried to think of the word for monsters; all he could remember was large beasts. “Zirombo,” he said. “Zirombo zambiri”—lots of beasts.

Zizi frowned, suspecting she was being teased, but she didn’t relent, because she was certain.

“Man,” she said, another English word she knew. She made a face and clutched her body. “And boy.”

“Beasts with two legs,” Hock said in Sena, to lighten the mood. She seemed so glum, and was probably tired, too, from raking and piling the new flour.

“Men,” she said, “wanting women.”

“You could take a torch with you. My big torch.”

“That is worse,” she said in her own language. “With a torch I would be seen.”

He was fascinated by her disclosing her fears, she who never hesitated to help him. He was touched by her seriousness, standing before him, shaven-headed, in her flimsy cloth and bare feet. She was actually resisting him for the first time, trying to explain something to him that mattered to her. The instinctive reluctance of Sena people to go out at night was something he’d always known. Animals prowled at night: crocs crept out of the shallows onto the embankments and into the nearby bush, looking for the carcasses of abandoned kills; hippos browsed in the tall grass after dark; hyenas loped along in packs and grunted and dug in the garbage piles at the edge of Malabo, fighting over bones. Some people spoke of snakes at night, though Hock knew that snakes seldom lurked in the dark, never hunted at that time, even the boomslangs remained in tree branches, never dropping at night.

“Hippos. Hyenas.”

Zizi clicked her tongue against her teeth, emphatically no.

“Mfiti.” Spirits.

Zizi wrinkled her nose in annoyance.

“Just men?”

“Man.” She said the word without any lightness, and showed her teeth, as though she was naming a species of vicious animal.

“What do they want?” he asked.

She stared at him, impatient, as though thinking, Why these ignorant questions?

“They want,” she said, “what all men want.”

But he said, “You can ask the boy in the day. Tell him I want to see him at night.”

So it was another day before Zizi set out for Lutwe, going a roundabout way so she would not be seen, to find Aubrey, to whisper to him that the mzungu wanted to see him in the dark.

Aubrey returned after nightfall the day that Zizi delivered the message. He arrived suddenly, stepping into Hock’s compound with another boy — younger, who didn’t appear to speak any English, who knelt before Hock’s hut near the dwarf, looking nervous, the dwarf grinning at him, mouthing in spittle his mutter, “Fee-dee-dom.”

Aubrey stood aside, just out of the lantern light, scarcely visible.

Two things disturbed Hock about this second visit. One was the way Aubrey sauntered across the clearing, his hands in his pants pockets. He did not observe the customary greeting, calling out, “Odi, odi,” and clapping his hands as an announcement, asking permission to enter the compound. This was rude, and uncommon — Manyenga himself usually said “Odi,” though often in a satirical tone. Hock was keenly aware of the niceties, wary when they were flouted, like the boys in the village of children who had called him mzungu to his face. “Hey, white man” was pure insolence.

The other disturbance was different but just as troubling. Meeting Aubrey for the first time, Hock had taken him to be lean but healthy, certainly healthier and better dressed than anyone else in Malabo. But in the uneven fire of the lantern light Aubrey’s skin was gray, his eyes bloodshot, his face gaunt. He was not lean but thin, and with his sleeves rolled up the skin of his arms was dry, crusted with whitened flakes of scurf. Aware that he was being scrutinized, he removed the sunglasses from his pocket and put them on, to cover his reddened eyes.

Or was this all an effect of the slippery light from the smoky orange lantern flame with an untrimmed wick? Hock was uncertain, and suspicious. He had lived too much on his nerves.

“You want to see me?”

Aubrey spoke in a low voice. He knew the meeting was secret. And his direct question was so strange to Hock, who was accustomed to the canny obliqueness of Manyenga and the others.

“Have a seat,” Hock said.

Aubrey motioned to Zizi, a two-part hand gesture that indicated “chair”—he pointed to the stool — and “bring it,” a beckoning with a stab of his skinny finger.

“No,” Hock said when Zizi moved toward the stool.

This surprised Aubrey, and the sudden expression revealed a slackness in his face to Hock, who saw how a person’s health is more obvious when making a physical effort.

“She’s not your servant.”

Smiling, Aubrey muttered in Sena to the young man who’d accompanied him. Just a few words, and the boy snatched the stool and moved it to a shadowy spot near Hock. As he sat, Aubrey glanced over at Zizi.

“She is proud,” he said in a tone of resentment, because Zizi had smiled when Hock had intervened.

“She’s got manners.”

“Because she works for the mzungu.”

“I’ve got a name,” Hock said, but before Aubrey could speak again, he said, “You can call me nduna.”

“Okay, chief.”

The boy was quick, in a manner he’d learned from foreigners, as Manyenga had. A sly alertness, not deftness but a slick evasion, and he had the words, too.

“She doesn’t work for me.”

“Whatever,” Aubrey said, tilting his head.

“I’m her guardian.”

Aubrey raised his head, facing Hock, but the sunglasses masked his expression. Was he looking at him in mockery?

“And I don’t want anyone to touch her.”

Aubrey tilted his head again, as though he was silently indicating “Whatever.”

“You understand?”

“I hear you.”

Hock felt himself growing angry. He had not realized until now how strongly he felt about Zizi’s virginity. He was certain she was a virgin — Gala herself had said so.

“I know she is still a girl,” Aubrey said. “She has not had her initiation. People call her kaloka, the little lock.”

Zizi frowned, hearing the word.

“Who’s got the key? Maybe you, bwana.”

“No one has the key,” Hock said with force.

“I hear you,” Aubrey said, suddenly contrite. That was his manner — a boast, a wisecrack, and then a retreat when he saw he’d gone too far. “It’s special, you know. Most of the girls her age are”—he shrugged—“unlocked. They even have kids. But not her. We say of such a girl that she has all her cattle.”

Zizi said something under her breath, hissing at Aubrey.

And after her sharp reaction, Aubrey gave a tight smile, as though he’d just been slapped. He said, “She’s being rude to me,” and laughed, because the young boy with him had also reacted. “A wet snake, that’s what she said.”

“Maybe that’s what you are.”

“In our language it means something else.” He became angry again and sat more stiffly, keeping his face out of the light. “Did you want something?”

Hock stared at Aubrey’s gray twitching hands before replying. Finally he said, “I’ve got a job for you.”

“Some kind of favor?”

“A job.”

“It’ll cost you,” Aubrey said without hesitating.

But Hock was glad. That’s what he wanted, not friendliness, not a favor, which always carried a penalty with it, but a paid-for job. Aubrey, in his crass knowing way, was the man he needed.

Hock said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”

The smile on Aubrey’s thin face was sly, snake-like, ingratiating. He jerked his head to indicate, “Go on.”

“You’re going back to Blantyre soon?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“If you want me to go.”

“What if I do?”

Aubrey agitated his fingers, but subtly, touching his fingertips, his city gesture for money.

“I’ll give you two payments — one now, the other when you come back.”

“Who says I’m coming back?”

“You’ll be coming back with my friend, to show him the way.”

Now Aubrey smiled, and nodded almost imperceptibly, a tremor of his head, seeing another opportunity.

“You’re going to take something to Blantyre for me.”

“Like what?”

“A message.”

“That’s easy,” Aubrey said, and as though he’d regretted saying it, he corrected himself. “I can do it. But you’ll have to pay me in dollars.”

“I’ll give you fifty.”

Aubrey shrugged. “A couple of hundred at least.”

Although Hock had pretended to be relaxed, defying him, Aubrey seemed to understand that Hock was desperate, seemed able to smell it, the hopelessness, the anxiety. And Hock knew that Aubrey could not have seen any other mzungu in a hut like this, sitting in ragged clothes, with the skinny girl and the dwarf and the mat of pounded flour in the courtyard.

Tapping his finger on the arm of his chair and leaning close, Hock said, “You get a hundred now and a hundred when you show up with my friend. That’s a lot of money.”

“I need bus fare. And my small brother”—he indicated the staring boy—“he is needing too.”

“You know the American consulate in Blantyre?”

“Everyone knows it,” Aubrey said. “There’s always a long queue of people wanting visas.”

“That’s the place. I want you to go tomorrow.”

Aubrey said, “What’s the hurry?”

“No hurry. If you want to do it, you go tomorrow. That way I know you’re serious.”

Nodding, Aubrey said, “Okay, bwana.” And then, “Where’s the message?”

“When you’re ready to go, I’ll give you the message, and the money.”

As they had talked, the moon had risen, a nibbled crescent in a sky of stars, with high thin veils of cloud. Shadows brimmed around them, and they sat in the small pool of light from the lantern. Normally, Zizi would set a row of lanterns along the veranda at this time, because it was too early to sleep, too hot to retreat inside. But tonight, as though understanding the secrecy of the meeting, she merely sat, her knees drawn up, her chin on her folded hands, her cloth wrap gathered for modesty.

Hock could see the whites of her eyes, the dull gleam of her shaved head in the moonlight. He was too moved to speak, because she was pure. The night sky gave him hope, the way it was dusted with streaks of gray and masses of stars, a great flawless capsule of light — hopeful because it represented a bigger world than the small flat shadow of Malabo, like a crater, in lamplight, the moths fluttering around the sooty chimney, bumping it and burning.

In the silence, Hock sensed that Aubrey was eager to help— greedy for money; impatient, too, for the trip to Blantyre. But out of pride, or to keep the upper hand, he didn’t show it.

“You were born here, eh?” Hock said.

“Yes, but…”

Hock could sense the young man recoil. He said, “But you don’t like it here.”

“Yes, I don’t like.”

“What is it about Blantyre you like?”

Taking a deep reflective breath, Aubrey sighed. He did not reply at once. Hock could see that he was trying to formulate an answer. They sat in the shadows thrown by the lamp, and in the silence some talk carried from across the clearing, and smoke from cooking fires filled the night air with buoyant sparks.

Finally Aubrey said, “The lights.”

He had to repeat it, he spoke so quickly. But later that night, after Aubrey and the boy had left, and Zizi had gone to her hut, and Snowdon had stowed himself away among the litter and the branches behind Zizi’s hut, Hock lay in his cot and said the words to himself, the simplicity, the truth of them, the lights.

Aubrey came before dawn, in the dim light of the thin fading moon. He knew the matter was serious, and he knew how to be covert. He had tapped softly on the screen door. Hock was reassured by Aubrey’s early arrival, by his obliqueness, and especially by his greed.

Hock had prepared his message — the photocopy of his passport page that he always kept handy, showing his picture, his details, with the message he had printed before going to bed: I am seriously compromised and possibly in danger. Please help. This man will lead you to me, and his signature under his printed name.

Folding it small, Hock handed it over with the hundred-dollar bill tucked into it. Aubrey pocketed the pieces of paper, and then he raised his face to Hock’s, looking defiant.

“This is going to cost you a little more,” he said.

Hock had been in the village long enough to expect that. He had the twenty-dollar bill handy, also folded.

As Aubrey palmed it, Hock said, “Don’t let anyone see you.”

24

UNTIL NOW HE had not dared to hope, because all he’d found here was failure. He’d known the Sena people before they’d become artful, and he wondered if their plotting against him now was something they’d learned from the mzungus at the Agency. Or had they always been artful, and he too beguiled to see it?

He hated to wake each morning in the heat and remember that he was trapped. Yet after all this time the idea of saving himself, being freed from the village, was a mental leap that left him saddened; the very thought made him gloomy, for its futility. In the dust of his confinement the prospect of freedom was so absurd that he seldom left his own courtyard. In the past he had wandered around the village, chatting to people, adding to his word list, looking for signs of snakes. Now he sat under his tree, inhabiting a mirage, blinking away the flies, like other old men in Malabo.

Like the children, too, who never strayed far from their huts and their mothers. In his captivity, his inability to get away from this insignificant village, Hock had become childlike. The feeling had stolen upon him, making him smaller, his avoidance of strangers amounting to a fear he hated to acknowledge. He had come here as a man, with willingness and money, assured of meeting friends and — knowing the people, speaking the language — with a confidence that amounted almost to a sense of superiority. Not racial, it was a complex sympathy, the suave generosity masked as the humility of a passerby pressing a fifty into the hand of a beggar at Christmas, knowing that it would make a difference, and pausing a moment to hear, “Bless you, sir.” He had meant well, but that conceit had made him the beggar. He had become reduced; he was a child now, sitting in the shade. And during that time, as he’d become smaller, Zizi had proven herself stronger, almost motherly, someone he trusted and needed, who looked after him, someone older, wiser. He wanted to thank her but could not find the words, and she would have been startled to hear I would be lost without you.

He stayed near his hut because lately, when he had taken a walk in the village or out to the road, small children — some skinny and potbellied, others cadaver thin, all wearing castoff T-shirts — had followed him and, laughing, had thrown small stones at him, or darting closer tried to hit him with dried maize cobs or the large blown-open fruit from the sausage tree. He tried not to be angry — anger was not a source of strength here but something that could be dangerous. He cautioned himself to take care.

After Aubrey had left, backing out of the hazy shadows of early-morning darkness, Zizi’s mood changed. She became unusually silent, which Hock took to be sullen resentment, seeing Aubrey pocketing the money. Hock approached her and put his arms around her, to comfort her.

“My friend,” he said.

She stiffened, her body like a bundle of sticks wrapped in loose cloth.

Instead of saying more, Hock let a day pass. Zizi brought him his meals as usual, with tea; she had her own cooking fire now, and no longer depended on food from Manyenga’s compound. She pounded maize, she spread the flour to bleach on the big mat, and by now she had several fat bags of flour she’d made, stored on the veranda of her small hut in the proud manner of Malabo women, visible proof of their hard work and their homemaking.

Seeing that she was unresponsive, Hock said, “That man Aubrey, do you like him?”

Zizi said nothing, but sniffed a little, which he took to mean no. She was holding a bucket of plates in soapy water, from the meal, which she intended to wash.

Assuming she had spoken the word, Hock said, “Why not?”

Zizi made her reluctant face, nibbling her lips, twisting her mouth, then said, “He is not afraid of you.”

Burdened by the heavy bucket, taking short steps, her shoulders wagging as she shuffled, she walked away, the plates knocking and gulping in the water. With the bucket bumping against her leg she seemed slow and careworn, like a little old woman — skinny body, big feet. But when she swung the bucket up and hoisted it on top of her head and she straightened, balancing it, she became tall, erect, poised, and Hock desired her again. But it was futile desire. She was the only friend he had; he couldn’t risk changing that friendship to anything else, nor did he have the right.

Normally, Snowdon would have chased her and watched her do the dishes. But he sat near Hock with his stumpy forefinger in his mouth, gaping at him, perhaps smiling, perhaps wincing because of the strong glare.

When Zizi returned, Hock said, “Maybe it’s true. Maybe he’s not afraid of me.”

“It is true,” she said.

“What about you?”

Zizi folded her arms as if to defy him, and seemed haughty with her head lifted.

“Are you afraid of me?”

She said, “Now I am.”

“Why?”

She mumbled some words. He heard the word for rat. He asked her to repeat it. She gave him part of a Sena proverb he recognized: Koswe wapazala—the fleeing rat…

“The fleeing rat exposes all the others,” he said. “That’s what you think of him?”

She crouched near the dwarf and made that face again, twisting her mouth like a reluctant child, screwing up one eye.

That was another reason his desire was dampened: she was not a child, but she could seem childlike. She was still whole, as Aubrey had slyly intimated — locked, kept from her initiation. Still innocent: Hock couldn’t take that from her. In the village it mattered more than anything. Her virginity was a form of wealth, the value of her bride price, her pride, her only possession.

The day was hot, and the fact that Aubrey had already set off for Blantyre helped raise Hock’s hopes. If Aubrey succeeded, he might not be in Malabo much longer, but Hock quickly dismissed this forbidden thought. It was still early. How to give a point to the day was always a problem. The days in Malabo were shapeless and empty, and he felt assaulted by them — the emptiness, the screech of the cicadas, the squealing of bats; the days were idiots.

Toward noon, he said to Zizi, “Help me find some snakes.”

She frowned, pretending to sulk, but she got to her feet, gathered the basket, the burlap sack, the forked stick, the collecting equipment. And in the heat of the day, when everyone else was inside or in the shade, they walked across the clearing in the weight of the full overhead sun, to the creek, to look for snakes.

Hock was happy. A hunt for snakes — one of his pleasures from long ago — gave the day a purpose and some meaning, gave the flat and hot and undifferentiated landscape certain subtleties: the sandy patches where the snakes slept, the overhanging limbs that might hold the drooping length of a boomslang, the shallows in the creek where small narrow snakes like the snouted night adder whipped along just below the surface. The presence of snakes gave features to the monotony of the land, and looking for them, he was able to revisit his previous life here and to forget he was a captive.

Walking just ahead of him, the basket on her head, Zizi stirred him, since she was like the embodiment of his other, earlier Africa. Her granny, Gala, had seemed like a new woman then — educated, self-possessed, quick to respond, unexpectedly witty. Yet Zizi had no education, could not read, wore that simple wrap, went barefoot, and shaved her head, and apart from being kept by Gala from her initiation, she observed all the other customs of the Sena people that Hock remembered, even quoting proverbs to make a point. She was restrained in the old way, too, merely frowned at Hock’s wristwatch, and had taken no interest in his radio — chuckled when he told her it had been stolen.

The strangest habit she had, and the most endearing, was her singing deep in her throat when she was anxious. The melody was usually a dark, many-angled descant, a growly harmonizing that Hock followed with an aching heart.

She was singing now, the growl growing fainter, as they trod the gravelly hard-packed sand of the worn path at the perimeter of Malabo, through the head-high elephant grass.

Was it fear? It seemed that fear inspired her singing — or, not singing, but a vibrant harmony that rang through her whole slim body as she steadied the basket on her head, the basket in which they’d bring back the snakes.

“What else are you afraid of?” he asked.

Zizi whinnied in reply, a singing in her sinuses.

“Tell me.”

“I’m afraid to get married,” she said, and that sentence ended with a melody that seemed like an equivocation.

“Yes?” He wanted to encourage her to say more, but he was distracted, searching the hot gravel for snakes.

“But I’m not afraid to die.”

As she spoke the words, he saw her dead. It was an amazing pair of pronouncements and made her seem both wise and vulnerable. Virgins were so often martyrs. He thought of Aubrey again, who seemed to mock her for being innocent and yet was intimidated by her. And he remembered his asking her what men wanted, and her replying, They want what all men want. He wondered how to tell her that a man can be kind, that marriage can bring children. A husband would protect her and give her status: the Sena pieties that were part of the initiation. But Zizi was wise enough to know that a villager in Malabo chose a wife as he would a field hand, and that the role of a wife came to much the same thing.

But he didn’t say anything, because just then he saw a snake and all other thoughts left his head. She saw it too, raising her voice, an alarmed ascending song in her sinuses, and stepped back, reaching to steady the basket on her head.

The puff adder lay on the hot coarse sand but near enough to some dead leaves to seem like part of the trash of twigs and grass nearby, the thick brownish snake as unmoving as vegetable matter, its jaw resting against the sand.

In stepping back, Zizi had braced herself, keeping her knees together and slightly bent. As she murmured her fearful song, now softly slipping it into her throat, Hock could see that her face was beaded with sweat, not from effort or the heat, but wet as though from terror.

So transfixed was she by the sight of the fat snake that she had not noticed that her wrap, the faded chitenje cloth that had been hitched under her arms, had slipped its knot and drooped, exposing one neat breast and a swollen nipple, like a pure unsucked fruit at the top of the smooth bulge. She had a body almost devoid of curves, which made her hard muscled bottom and her small breasts so noticeable.

The snake was facing away from them, flicking its tongue, a slitted eye staring from each side of its head. Hock saw what perhaps in her fear Zizi did not see, that the adder had started to swell, slowly thickening. It had seen them. It had not changed its position on the sand, yet it was now almost one-third fatter than a moment ago, when they’d stopped six feet away.

Absent-mindedly, Zizi touched her throat as if registering the vibrato of her song on her skin. Then her hand slipped to her breast, cupping it, her fingertip caressing the nipple. Her mouth was open, the whining melody from it worrying a strand of saliva that was like a lute string vibrant between her parted lips. Her teeth were just visible. She seemed terrified, she’d gone rigid, her eyes glittering as though in ecstasy.

“Pick it up,” Hock said.

But she didn’t move. Her eyes were fixed on the fattening thing.

Hock had been carrying his forked stick behind his back. Without stepping nearer, he drew the stick forward and jabbed it in the direction of the snake, rousing it. The snake shortened its muscled body and then, uncoiling, chucked itself at the stick. And before it had time to prepare itself for another rush forward, before it was able to draw its body into another explosive knot, Hock clamped the fork of the stick at the back of its wide head. Now, its head pinned, its body whipped against the sand.

“Take it now.”

Zizi’s mouth gaped, the growly song of fear hovering in her tongue. Her knees were still pressed together.

“Hold it behind its head. Use your fingers to grip it tight.”

“I cannot.”

“Do it for me,” he said.

She removed the basket from atop her head and placed it without a sound on the sand next to her, all the while watching the pinned-down puff adder thrashing its swollen body and pushing at the sand.

“Please,” he said. It was a word he tried to avoid saying in the village, a word of the weak, a word of submission.

Zizi hunched her shoulders and knelt, her wrap slipping farther, both breasts exposed, as she reached and gripped the snake where Hock had indicated. As she took hold of it he lifted the stick, so when she stood she had the snake’s head and gaping jaws above her skinny fist and the whole body of the snake and its tail encircling her forearm.

The song, a jubilant chant, rose from her throat to her mouth and nose, and it pounded against her sweaty face. The snake’s jaws were wide open, not attempting to strike but gasping for air. Zizi’s grip was a stranglehold.

“Easy,” Hock said.

As if hearing him for the first time, Zizi faced him bare-breasted, holding the snake, the foamy, speckled jaws widened at Hock, its fangs dripping mouth-slime.

Hock was slightly alarmed by the change in Zizi — he had not seen this fierce face nor heard this song before. He reached over and took her wrist and, replacing his grip with hers, picked at the snake’s tail, uncoiling its body from her arm, where it had wrapped itself like a tentacle.

“You are strong,” he said.

She surrendered the snake, and as Hock took possession of it, she said, “I am not afraid,” and her face glowed, her eyes glittered, she was breathless. “Not afraid,” she repeated with wonderment, and then was silent, breathing hard, no longer singing.

Back at the hut, they slipped the snake into the basket and fastened the lid. Snowdon saw them and ran to tell the village.

Before going to sleep that night, and the next — because he’d had no word — he followed in his mind Aubrey’s progress to the boma, on the bus, to the Chikwawa Road, and to Blantyre; the young man presenting the envelope at the consulate and, as in a movie sequence, its passing from the receptionist to the secretary upstairs and finally to the vice consul.

“‘Seriously compromised,’” the vice consul would report to the consul. “We’d better send someone down to check on this.” Or the man would go himself, in an official car, Aubrey sitting in the back seat. The matter was urgent; the message was clear.

But even on the third day no one came. No one except Manyenga, who sauntered over, seeming to approach the hut sideways, to see the big snake in the basket, which was news in Malabo. He was impressed, especially when Hock told him that Zizi had caught it; and he was unusually friendly.

“That naartjie is for you,” he said, handing over a tangerine. The Afrikaans word was used by the Sena people, as was takkies, for sneakers. Manyenga often screamed, “Voetsak!” when he was telling an underling to go away. Hock felt that someone must have used the word with him.

Snowdon snatched the tangerine from Hock’s hand and ran off, waving it.

“Cheeky bugger,” Manyenga said, and made a threatening gesture.

“Leave him alone,” Hock said, laughing. He could not help seeing Snowdon as anything but a licensed jester, like the fool in a Shakespeare play.

“You are so kind, father,” Manyenga said. “That is why you are being our minister. You will be a great chief one day!”

“You don’t need me to be a chief.”

“Not true, father. You are our elder. You are so wise. You are always doing the right thing for us.”

Each of these words — kind, wise, minister, elder — was loaded. All such words, Hock saw, had money value, and could be exchanged for hard currency. It seemed that as Manyenga added each word, the final bill was increased. Hock thought of Aubrey saying smartly, “It’ll cost you,” when he asked for the favor. In the past, money had not mattered much. Small debts were settled with a chicken or some dried fish wrapped in banana leaves; big debts might cost a cow. Now, with money, every word and deed had a price.

“You are brave, too,” Manyenga said, tapping the basket after he had had a glimpse of the snake.

“Brave” was worth a handful of kwacha notes, certainly.

“Zizi caught the snake,” Hock said.

And hearing her name, Zizi stared at Manyenga.

“You are making her too proud,” Manyenga said.

There was a word for the handmaiden of a chief, a consort, a junior-wife-to-be, and Manyenga used it now, referring to her as “the small woman.”

Hock said, “She can handle snakes.”

“She can know how to handle anything you ask,” Manyenga said, and tapped his head, pleased with himself in his reply.

The next day — no Aubrey — Manyenga brought a bowl of eggs. He was not alone. Walking behind him was the old man whom he had introduced to Hock after they had arrived back from the Agency depot. Hock could not remember the man’s name, but as he saw him stumbling after Manyenga, led by a small boy, he was reminded that the man was blind.

“For the big man,” Manyenga said, and offered the bowl with both hands.

Eggs were scarce. Why were there so few in a village with so many hens? Only men ate eggs; children were not allowed to touch them. The chickens were not raised systematically; they clucked, and pecked at ants, and laid eggs in the tall grass, in back of huts, in twiggy nests. They were considered a delicacy.

Zizi accepted the bowl of eggs on Hock’s behalf.

Tapping the side of his head again for emphasis, Manyenga said, “But none for her, you understand?”

Another Sena belief associated with eggs was that women were made sterile by eating them.

“Because, as you say, if the girl can handle a snake, she is no longer a girl, but a woman.”

They were seated, Manyenga and Hock, under the tree, in the creaky chairs. The blind man sat on a stool, holding himself upright.

“I think you are knowing what I mean,” Manyenga said.

Snowdon was listening, a gob of drool sliding from the corner of his mouth. Somehow he had gotten hold of an egg. He rolled it back and forth in his stubby hand, like wealth.

Manyenga was still talking in his insinuating way, but all Hock could think about was the nonappearance of Aubrey.

“I remember this man,” Hock said. The old man had a kindly face and an intense expression, his eyes dead behind lids that were not quite closed. He leaned on his walking stick, listening.

“He is Wellington Mwali,” Manyenga said. He took the man’s hand. “This is Mr. Ellis Hock, our friend.”

The old man just smiled, murmuring, because he had not understood.

“He has a story,” Manyenga said.

And this too will cost money, Hock thought. But he said, “I want to hear it.”

Manyenga spoke to the blind man, who hesitated, and smiled again, and then cleared his throat and spoke. He told his story slowly, pausing after every few sentences so that Manyenga could translate. Manyenga spoke with such fluency and feeling it seemed that he was appropriating it as his story.

“You know our black Jesus, the man Mbona, who was killed near here, his head cut off and buried near the boma at Khulubvi?”

“I’ve heard of him. But I was never allowed to go to the shrine.”

“No, no,” Manyenga said. “It is a holy place.” The old man went on speaking. He took up the story again. “Mbona is a spirit, but sometimes he spends the night with his wife on earth, the woman we call Salima. This is how the great one visits. He makes sure that Salima is fast asleep, otherwise she would become frightened and run away.”

The old man’s voice dropped to a whisper. Manyenga strained to listen, then spoke again.

“Mbona comes in the form of a python, slipping into the hut beside the mat of Salima. He opens his mouth and licks her body, beginning with her face, so that she believes she is being kissed. All this while he makes the python sound, moaning, and the moans are words, telling her his dreams.”

Still speaking, now as if in counterpoint to Manyenga, the old man turned his blind eyes upward, as in a trance state.

Manyenga said, “After he licks her whole body to calm her, he wakes her. And she sees the huge python. But she is not afraid. She sees that it is her husband, Mbona, and she allows him to coil around her body and lick her everywhere, from her head to her feet, telling her his dreams. Meanwhile, he tells her many things in her dreams. The licking makes her sleep again, and his dreams become her dreams. After he goes, she just wakes up. She knows that her husband had been there, and she has all the important information.”

“About what?” Hock asked.

The old man nodded, hearing the question.

“About the weather. About storms and rains. About planting. And when his visit is at an end, he returns to his place.”

“Where does the python Mbona go?”

“To the pool near the river, which was formed when Mbona’s blood turned into water,” Manyenga said. “Large flocks of doves drink there, which proves that it is a holy place.”

Hock said, “Thanks for the story. Tell the man I said so.”

“We are needing you, father,” Manyenga said. He saw Zizi squatting, brushing flies from his face. “She needs you. She can make you happy.”

The story of the snake encircling the widow and licking her had induced a reverie in Hock, which helped him forget his plight. But as soon as Manyenga stopped translating, he began importuning again, and jarred from his reverie, Hock said abruptly, “How much do you want now?”

“I will tell you in a moment,” Manyenga said. “But first the important information. I must know if you are happy.”

“I am happy. Thanks for bringing this man to me.”

Manyenga leaned closer and licked his lips and said with severity, “And that you will not abandon us again.”

His tone was so serious that Hock said quickly, “Don’t worry.” Then, hearing himself, he added, “Why would I want to leave Malabo?”

“Of course you are safe here,” Manyenga said, too engrossed to hear the irony. “Because we are making you safe.” Before Hock could speak, Manyenga said, “Has anyone harmed you here?”

Hock shook his head, unable to put the sadness he felt into words: the terror of the suspense that had crushed his spirit, the dull ache of fear that was like an illness he’d begun to live with. And everything that Manyenga said had had a price.

“How much?” Hock said.

Only then did Manyenga give him the large number, adding that the old man would need some too. He stood and squared his shoulders and waited for the money to be handed over.

25

LEVELING HIS GAZE and leaning forward to squint across the clearing into the glare and the heat, in the long days he spent waiting for Aubrey to show up — or would it be some sort of response from the consulate? — he thought only of home. The nest-like comfort of it, his clean bedroom and kitchen, the armchair where he had sat, sorting through his visa application and all the paraphernalia of timetables that had led him back here. Medford now seemed as safe, as reassuring, as mute and indestructible as Malabo had once been in his imaginings. Home was solid, not only because he had nothing to fear, but because it could be trusted. Malabo existed in a web of deceits. Manyenga lied, everyone lied, hardly without pretense. They spoke a shadow language of untruth; every word could be translated into a defiant lie.

Home was iced coffee in a tall glass, crisp lettuce on a china plate, a cold bottle of beer, chilled fruit, the snap of a celery stalk, a clear glass of cool water, a ham sandwich with cheese on new-baked bread, fresh sheets, an oak tree’s enveloping shade, his barefoot soles on the polished hardwood floor of his condo, the rattle of white tissue paper in a box of new shirts. The very words. But home was unattainable.

Darkness and cold now seemed to him blessings that sustained life and gave it rest. This heat was like a sickness without a remedy. He went on staring across the clearing, Zizi squatting on his right, Snowdon on his left.

As always, he was muddled in trying to remember what day it was. He guessed that a week had passed since Aubrey had gone, a week of suspense. That meant either that the message had not reached the consulate or that the consulate had shelved it. But surely they would not have ignored such a desperate plea from an American citizen. Hock guessed that Aubrey had taken the money and fled, tossing the message away. So he resolved to give up hoping, and the night of the very day he abandoned hope and tried to think of another plan — he was alone, sitting beside his sooty smoky lantern — a boy in a tattered shirt and torn pants and unlaced sneakers stepped out of the darkness like a cat and knelt and said, “Mzungu.”

“Don’t call me mzungu.”

“Bwerani,” the boy said — come with me — no apology. Perhaps he didn’t speak English.

Hock followed as the boy had asked, leaving the lantern, walking behind the scuffing boy, through the garden, tramping among the furrowed dimbas of pumpkins and corn stalks, so as not to be seen, but traveling in the general direction of the road beyond the village. It was the road that led to Gala’s hut, but they were walking in the opposite direction.

Ever since arriving in Malabo, he had been dictated to by the young and the ragged and the insolent. And here I am again, he thought, a big fool, fumbling after a boy on a moonlit path. The seat of the boy’s trousers was torn, exposing the muffin of one skinny buttock.

“Come,” the boy said again in his language.

Overwhelmed with helplessness, and without any faith, Hock had simply stopped in the cornfield. Hearing that the sounds of brushed and trampled corn stalks had ceased, the boy had turned and seen Hock, his hands on his hips, standing in the field, sighing.

“What’s the point?” Hock said, not caring that the boy didn’t understand. But when he sighed again and made a move to return home, the boy spoke again.

“Aubrey,” he said, but in three syllables, pronouncing it to rhyme with “robbery.”

“Where is he?” Hock asked in Sena.

“He has a vehicle,” the boy said in Sena. But the word garimoto could mean anything with a motor — a car, a bus, a tractor.

Doubting, stepping slowly, he obeyed the boy, and past a row of trees, in the frosty glow of the moon, he saw a van parked at the entrance to a path just off the side road.

Even if the night had been moonless he would have seen the van, a model known as a combi, because it gleamed white, and on a side panel, inside a gold shield, was the large double-A of L’Agence Anonyme. The whole name was picked out on the rear doors. It was the only four-wheeled vehicle Hock had so far seen at Malabo — a novelty, of improbable size, and seemingly new: no dents, perhaps polished, like the powerful instrument of a dramatic rescue.

Inside, one small red light burned, went dim, and brightened again, and on closer inspection Hock could see it was a cigarette that Aubrey was puffing in the front seat.

Seeing Hock, he said, “Get in — hurry up.”

The ragged boy who’d led him there stepped beside Hock and pushed at him.

“You give money,” he said, his first words in English.

Hock nudged him aside and spoke to Aubrey: “We’re going now?”

“Yes, yes. Come inside. We go.”

The dimness of the pale moonlight exaggerated the shadows on Aubrey’s face, making it skull-like, bonier, more like a mask. The glow on his dark skin and the streaky froth of his sweat on the creases of his neck were greenish.

“I can’t leave everything behind.” He was thinking of Zizi.

“You have your money?”

Hock had all his money — always had it, because he had ceased to trust — and with it his passport and wallet in a pouch in his fanny pack, the only safe place.

“Some money. Not all,” he said, though they probably knew he was lying.

His clothes, some papers, his knife, his stick, his shaving kit, his medicine, his duffel. The snake in the basket. He could leave all of it. But Zizi: once again she was unaware she was being abandoned. Nothing he owned mattered when he realized his life was at stake, and as for Zizi — he’d do something, send her money through Gala, get her to safety, away from the dead end of Malabo.

The ragged boy had pressed himself against Hock’s legs, pleading for money. Hock pushed him, and then, in a twitch of superstition, he handed over the Bic lighter he found in his pocket.

“No,” the boy objected, and gestured with it, as though to hand it back.

But by then Hock was in the van, in the sudden comfort of a seat with springs, a cushion, a handle he grasped to steady himself. He was momentarily reassured. Aubrey started the engine, slipped the gearshift down, and, rocking the van across some ruts, jounced onto the road.

“Put on your headlights,” Hock said.

“No lights.”

“You’ll drive into the creek.”

“Lights are bad. The others will see us.”

Aubrey drew his lips back, as if it was an effort to speak. His teeth were long, exposed almost to their roots, the gums shrunken — another revelation of the moonlight. He was nervous and sounded weary, and perhaps it was also the slow bumping progress of the vehicle in the moon-frosted darkness that made it seem that he was driving badly.

Without warning, Aubrey threw his skinny shoulders at the steering wheel and pulled the van to the side of the road. He cut the engine and rolled down his side window and listened.

“What is it?”

Saying nothing, he opened his mouth wider, as though his gaping mouth, his long bony teeth, helped him hear better. And perhaps they did, because, straining to listen, he began to nod.

“The fishermen are just now going out.”

A group of young men in Malabo kept a canoe on the embankment at Marka. They sometimes set off in the middle of the night to walk the twenty miles to the riverside village so they could launch their boat before dawn, enter the channel, and be on the mainstream of the river in daylight.

“So what?”

“Moon,” Aubrey said, and made a sweeping gesture with his hand.

The ruts on the dusty road had the whiteness of new ashes, and the bushes beside them were blue in the moonlight. The tree branches were iced with the same eerie light, for though the moon was a crusted disk, half in shadow, no clouds obscured it. The sky was clear, and the whole landscape glowed, seeming to lie under a coating of frost.

“They can see,” Aubrey said, without moving but still breathing hard.

One of the characteristics of the Sena people that Hock had noticed was their ability to sit without stirring for long periods. It was not repose; it was an almost reptilian trait. They kept alert — watchful, anyway — like bush creatures, snakes in dead leaves, lizards on rocks, blending with their surroundings and only their eyelids flicking. Aubrey seemed to slip into this state of immobility, resting against the steering wheel, his head tilted to the side windows, his eyes on the landscape of cold lunar phosphorescence.

They were near enough to the shallow creek that ran along the right-hand side of the road to hear the gulp of frogs, the odd suck and chirp of insects, and another noise, a rattling like pebbles in a pot, which Hock knew to be the vocalizing of a certain nocturnal heron, with a fish in its throat.

Hock whispered, “Did you give my message to the Americans?”

Aubrey sniffed, an ambiguous reply that in its evasiveness Hock took for no.

“But that’s what I paid you to do.” Hock was still whispering, but more harshly.

“This is more better.”

That was a definite no. “So you read my message,” Hock said, louder now. “I gave you something simple to do, but you didn’t do it.”

“I am helping you,” Aubrey said, and he wheezed the words so softly they were scarcely audible.

“Where’d you get this van?”

“The Agency.”

Now, parked at the edge of the road, Hock felt only confusion — the uncertainty of night and the seeming indecision of Aubrey. He felt that he was about to be subjected to a greater ordeal, perhaps robbed.

He said, “Listen to me,” and moved his head closer to Aubrey’s. As he did so, he got a whiff of dirt — not just sweat on old clothes but illness, the doggy odor of human decay, the stink of rotting lungs. The darkness inside the van seemed to make the odor sharper and inescapable. Hock winced and went on, “I don’t have much money.”

“No matter.”

That answer surprised Hock. He said, “In fact, very little money.”

Hock wanted to make sure he wasn’t being taken away to be mugged and abandoned. But Aubrey simply nodded, accepting the fact, and faced Hock without blinking. Perhaps Aubrey didn’t really care. Perhaps he was resigned to the hundred dollars Hock had given him, and the promise of a hundred more when they got to Blantyre.

“So where are you going?”

“Where you want.”

“I want to go to Blantyre,” Hock said. And, getting no response, “Now.”

“Too much moon,” Aubrey said. He hitched himself close to the windshield and twisted his face to look at the sky, making a false smile from the effort, his teeth showing in his narrow face, the shadows of his sharp features turning his face into a mask. “But some clouds are coming.”

Hock saw a mass of purple clouds, whitened at their edges by the moon, rising from where the river entered Mozambique, like smoke swelling upward from a bush fire. He watched the clouds advance, broadening, thinning, in the same way as smoke in still air. He found himself silently urging them on, and when the first wisps flickered past the bright moon and veiled it, lifting into shadow, Hock stamped his foot as though on the accelerator.

“Okay, let’s go.”

Too slowly for Hock’s liking, Aubrey cocked his head again, then turned the key and started the engine. He held the wheel awkwardly, gripping it at the top with both hands, hanging on it like a new driver. Then they were moving again, bumping over ruts, brushing the tall grass at the side. Aubrey switched on the fog lights, and they showed the road ahead as bouldery and crusted with mud like a dry streambed.

Aubrey was nervous, he drove badly, and Hock thought, He’s going so slow I could jump out here and walk back to Malabo. He knew this bend in the road. They were passing the bank of the shallow creek that lay just past the tall grass, where the village women washed their clothes on the flat rocks and often bathed in the seclusion of the reeds.

Then Aubrey groaned. Hock heard him above the engine that was racing, then slowing, as Aubrey thumped the gas pedal, too hard, then too softly, uncoordinated, the clumsiness of a beginner — or was he as ill as he seemed?

He was moving jerkily, accelerating over each bump, braking as he faltered forward.

“What is it?” Hock said, peering through the windshield. The dirty glass distorted the road.

“You did not give him money!” Aubrey shouted.

Up ahead, in the feeble glow of the fog lights, the ragged boy stood with Manyenga.

Behind this man and boy, spectral in the dim light, a tree lay across the road. Fresh chips that had flown from the stump littered the ground — the tree had just been chopped down — and though it was slender, it was an obstacle. There was no way around it. Manyenga, looking fierce, like an executioner, held the panga he had used on the tree, and the ragged boy from twenty minutes ago, beside him, scowling.

“Back up,” Hock said.

“Cannot.” Aubrey had slowed the van to a crawl.

“It’s not my fault.”

“It is being your fault one hundred percent,” Aubrey said hoarsely. “You sent the boy away with nothing.”

“Why didn’t you give him something?”

“You are the mzungu.”

“So what?”

“You are the money!”

But by then Manyenga was at Hock’s side of the van. He snatched the door open. He was in shadow now, but Hock could smell his strong odor — a whiff of anger, the sweaty effort of hacking down the tree, his body reeking of hostility.

Manyenga spoke rapidly in Sena to Aubrey, hissing at him. It must have been insulting, because it had a physical effect on him: Aubrey slackened his grip on the steering wheel and looked beaten.

“You want to stay with him?” Manyenga said to Hock.

Aubrey had turned his face away from the men.

“You want to die?”

“I want to go to Blantyre. I want to go home,” Hock said in a whisper of fury.

Manyenga laughed so hard it brought on a coughing fit. He smacked the panga against his thigh, the big knife slapping at his dirty trousers.

“This is your home, father.”

Out of pride, seeing it was hopeless, Hock got out before Manyenga ordered him to, and he walked a few steps from the van, keeping away from the light.

“Mzungu,” the ragged boy said in two insolent grunts—zoon-goo. Now Hock understood: because he had not tipped him, the boy had run to Manyenga’s to tell him that Hock was fleeing. Malabo was only minutes from the left-hand side of the road. The boy would get something from Manyenga.

On the footpath through the tall grass, Hock picked his way in the half-dark of the cloud glow, parting the moonlit blades of grass.

“Why do you hate me?” Manyenga asked.

Hock said nothing, but Manyenga was aggrieved, or pretending to be, slashing at the grass with his bush knife.

“I have been protecting you!”

Swishing through the grass, Hock said in a small defeated voice, “I want to go.”

“You are so ungrateful,” Manyenga said. “And you are ignorant, too.”

The night was peaceful, not cool, though the heat was softened by the darkness. Hock knew without seeing any huts that they were at the perimeter of the village — he could smell the mud huts, the dead cooking fires, the human odors, old food, dead skin, dusty faces, sour feet, the stink of latrines.

“He was kidnapping you,” Manyenga said. “These people are thieves. He is a thief. I know this boy Aubrey. His father is my cousin. They think they are powerful. They work for the Agency. You don’t know!”

“How do you know so much?”

“That small boy told me everything. He knows the secrets. He was so angry. He said, ‘The mzungu gave me nothing.’”

“I should have given him something. Then I’d be free.”

“No, bwana. Don’t you see what they were going to do with you?”

“What were they going to do with me?”

Manyenga didn’t answer. Instead, he said loudly, “You are our chief, dear father.”

The talk had woken the roosters, which began to crow, unseen in the darkness. Across the clearing Hock could see a flashlight, and a length of its yellow beam wagging, coming closer, maybe Zizi.