The Lower River

26

ALL DAY LONG in Malabo the heat sank lower, darting its tongue at him, licking at his head, swelling, growing heavier, dropping over him, creeping closer as the day ran on, encircling him. Often there was no sky at all, nothing that matched the word, the sun just a ragged patch of muted light in a threadbare blanket overfolded above him, no blue anywhere, nothing but the fuzzy canopy of gray over the colorless village. The dimmer the sun got, the hotter it was, squeezing his eyelids shut, offering dancing mirages, like sprites flitting across his closed eyes. The heaviness stifled the last of his energy, and he thought, Never mind, and decided to stay in his chair. The heat turned him into someone else, someone he hardly knew, and in a voice he hardly recognized, he called out to Zizi for a drink.

That was probably how everyone here always felt, the reason so little happened. He did not despair at the lack of effort; he was astonished that anything was accomplished at all. Another escape attempt had been a failure, and with each successive failure he became smaller, emptier, narrower, feeling slowly devoured and different. They will eat your money and then they will eat you.

You come with money to the poor, and they are so frenzied by hunger that all they see is the money. They never see your face, and so when the money is gone, you are revealed as mere flesh: a surprise. They don’t know you. Who can you be?

Manyenga, believing he was a virtuoso, never understanding how barefaced he was, came back again for money. Hock hesitated at first, but gave him some so the man would listen to him.

“I was once a businessman,” Hock said.

“That means you are lucky, like an Indian.”

“That means I understand the law of diminishing returns,” Hock said. “That’s the only law that operates here.”

Manyenga smiled and cocked his head, as though he’d heard a phrase of music. Then he folded the money into his pocket, saying, “Thank you, father.”

He was mocked by the memory of the grateful man he’d been on the first day. And he saw he was changed, a different man, not bitter but sad, and more accepting. He was exhausted by his failed escapes, and the malaria from weeks back had not completely left him. A residue of tainted blood remained in his veins, bringing him down again, with symptoms like the flu: fever and muscle aches and weakness and no appetite. He felt a lassitude from the heat, from his disturbed sleep, from his being continually thwarted. He was unsteady on his feet, and the surprise to him was not that he despaired of his captivity, but that he was often in his smallness absurdly grateful to be waited on.

“Make hot water — tea,” he called again to Zizi.

He had always thought of himself as strong for his age, still willing — hadn’t this strength taken him back to Africa? But for the first time in his life he had an intimation of old age. These days in Malabo he felt like a fossil, like Norman Fogwill in Blantyre, or like those toothless elders — younger than he was — gabbing under the tree at Marka village by the river. He was weary, with a shaky hand, and he smiled to think of Manyenga’s plot to tempt him with a teenage girl. Zizi, his only friend!

Yet he was resentful, and some days after “You are our chief, dear father,” he grew sullen, knowing that this flattery was no more than an elaborate insult, Festus Manyenga trapping him with lies. He was in his hut, unable to stand the pressure of the heat on his body and the way the heated air raised the stinks of the village. He lay in his string bed, his mouth half open, breathing slowly. He was dazed, groggy from the heat.

Someone knocked, then he heard two handclaps, and Zizi’s voice, her soft singsong inquiry, “Odi?”

She entered, padded to the side table. The mirror shook as she set the cup of tea down.

Lying on his side, too tired to move, he was studying her reflection in the mirror. He spoke to the mirror. “I want to see you.”

Bewilderment showed on her pinched girl’s face for a moment, which gave way to a half-smile, almost womanish, as if she was quietly pleased he was asking something of her.

“Yes, father.”

“Take off your chitenje.”

She drew in her lips and bit down on them, vexed, her face compressed in thought. Hock made a spiraling gesture with his finger that meant “unwrap.”

Zizi hesitated, and then, as though remembering, became calmer, turned away, and unknotted her cloth. She draped it over the chair back and faced him again, her hands clasped below her waist for the sake of modesty.

Still watching her in the mirror, Hock said, “Dance.”

She didn’t move, she simply blinked at the command, uvina.

“Dance,” he said, pleading.

It was late afternoon, the hottest time of day, the afternoon sun like a gray coal glowing in the glare of a smothering fattened cloud, slanting through the windows of the hut, the heat trapped in the motionless air under the tin roof. Zizi was perspiring, looking confused, hesitating on the uneven boards of the hut floor.

Picking up her cloth, she wrapped it loosely around her hips and left the hut, her feet thumping on the veranda planks and then on the steps as she fled.

I have lost her, Hock thought. He pressed his feverish head, tried to ease his burning eyes by massaging them with his fingers. As soon as he’d made the suggestion, he knew it had been a mistake. She was a girl, devoted to him — but a girl. And it was a great mistake because he had no other friend in Malabo. He rationalized what he’d said by telling himself that he was in despair. He had not embraced the village, but had decided to do just that, wishing to lift his spirits, by asking Zizi to dance for him, the only sweetness that Malabo was capable of offering him. But it was selfish and ill-timed. I have gone too far.

He heard the thump of feet on the loose planks of the veranda, the door opening and closing quickly, a gasp of effort, the small crooked bolt shot. Zizi stood in the hut, against the afternoon sun at the window. He could not see her face, only the outline of her long skinny body in silhouette, no features, no face, only darkness defined by the glare from outside.

She turned away and hung her cloth on the window, to serve as a curtain, and when she faced him again, with light on her body, Hock could see that she was white from head to toe, and looking closer, he understood. She was dusted in white flour. She had stepped outside and rolled herself naked on the mat of maize flour that she herself had pounded and spread to bleach in the sun. She had sprinkled the flour on her head, rubbed it on her face, her breasts, her whole body.

Some dancers whitened their faces with flour, some women sprinkled flour on themselves in order to achieve trance states, believing the spirit would come to inhabit this suitably decorated body. But Hock had never seen or heard of any woman this way, coated in white flour, with smooth powdered skin.

Thus arrayed, entirely whitened in flour, she danced for him. Her body was so thin it seemed incomplete, unfinished, yet her nakedness was softened and made sculptural with the dusting of white.

Untwining her fingers, lifting her hands, bending slightly, she parted her legs, then raised one knee and then the other, rolling her head — all the time looking aside, meeting his gaze only in the mirror. She planted her feet lightly, as she’d done at the feast. She had slender arms, spindly legs, and small staring breasts; her eyes gleamed with anxiety. As she danced, humming softly, stepping forward then back, raising her arms, she shook the grains of flour from her body. They dropped to the floor, and stepping in the flour, she left a pattern of dusted footprints.

Lying on his cot, glancing from the mirror to Zizi and back again, without moving, almost unable to breathe, Hock lay watching her whitened form. He ached with desire. He had never known such an agony of pleasure as this simple performance, the slow ghost dance, the powdered legs rising and falling, her head twisting on her long agile neck, the grains of flour sifting to the floor as she danced.

***

Someone must have seen. It took only one person to see, for everyone to know. She had been reckless: she’d gone outside and rolled on the mat of flour in front of her hut, near the mortar. She’d taken the risk to please him; in his wildest fantasies he would not have thought of her doing that, and if he had, he would not have dared to ask her. But once she had started, he could not bear the thought of her stopping. And when, after a long while, she found herself dancing in darkness, she giggled a little and snatched her wrap from the window and ran out of the hut.

He had not gone near her, only watched. The flour was a barrier — perhaps she knew that. Dusted that way, she was untouchable.

Soon afterward, the whole village seemed to know what happened. And that incident, an example of his weakness — resentment, boredom, a pang of desperation — had the effect of convincing the village that he meant to stay, that he’d found a way of being happy, that at last Zizi had devised a strategy to satisfy him, perhaps to please him. Was it considered odd in Malabo that Zizi had coated herself in flour to dance for him? Perhaps not. And it was not unknown for a woman to dance with a whitened face. To do so naked was simply taking it to the extreme. It had worked; it had cost nothing; and the mzungu was satisfied. They could not have known his true feeling, that he had watched her with inexpressible delight.

But they knew he was beguiled. A man with brown blotches on the whites of his eyes, a cousin to Manyenga (he said brother, but brother was a general term), came to him and said he wanted to buy a motorbike. He did not mention money; that was understood.

“And what will you do for me?” Hock said.

“Zizi will dance for you, sure.” The man stared at him, a smile in his spotted eyes, and he said no more.

Hock handed him some money, saying, “But I want a ride on your bike to the boma.”

“I will give you, father.”

Hock was ashamed. He wondered if money alone was sufficient atonement for his lapse of judgment. But he also knew it was a setup. And he longed for Zizi to perform her ghost dance again, but secretly, so that no one would see.

Manyenga visited after that. Hock told him of the man who claimed to be his brother.

“He will eat the money. He will drink the money,” Manyenga said. And then he asked for another loan.

They knew how much he had. They’d stolen some; they could take the rest at any time.

But as a way of jeering at him, Hock said, “Remember the law of diminishing returns?”

The day of Manyenga’s visit, Hock set off across the compound with Zizi and Snowdon. He heard the warning whistle, and ignoring it, still walking, the whistle became more insistent, drowning out all other sounds, even the shrillness of the birds. Some of the older boys followed him, keeping just behind him. Hock walked in an almost stately way, holding a basket to his chest. It was the basket in which he kept his money with the snake.

At the creek bank, he stooped and released the snake onto the hot sand, but before the snake could gather itself and slip away, Hock pinned it with a forked stick and let it thrash, whipping a pattern into the swale of sand with its thickened body. The village saw him bearing the empty basket from the creek and across the clearing to his hut, Zizi and the dwarf following him in a shuffling procession. The snake, a puff adder, was not especially venomous, but to Malabo it was deadly. They would know it was safe to steal from him again, and when the money was gone they’d release him.

After that, they didn’t whistle in the same way after he left his hut — it wasn’t the rising note of urgency that became shriller; it was a softer note, like birdsong, just a signaling tweet. And he knew why.

He walked to the ruined school, looked in on the orphan boys in their lair at the old school office. He went to the clinic and the creek bank, or to the graveyard near the mango tree, where no one ever went because of the azimu, the malicious spirits of the dead, that were invisibly twisted in the air there — Zizi and the dwarf hung back, crouching at a distance, as he sat in the shade of the tree, unapproachable, among the tumbled piles of burial stones.

And whenever he returned to his hut, almost without fail some money was missing from the basket where he’d kept the snake.

During this week — the week of the separate raids on his stash of money — he fell ill again. This time it came quickly, wrenching him sideways. It hit him as he was walking back from the ruined school, first a dizziness, then an aching throat and pain behind his eyes, a soreness in his limp muscles, and an urgent thirst.

He wondered whether it was the return of his malaria, or dehydration. He sat down on the bare ground and pressed his eyes. He could not walk any farther. He called for water, though he knew he might be past the point of being able to absorb any liquid.

“Water with salt,” he murmured to Zizi, and remembered mchere. But she smiled at the word and seemed too bewildered to move. “And sugar.”

Women carrying babies in cloth slings on their way home from hoeing weeds in the pumpkin fields stopped and watched him, more out of curiosity than pity, as he clutched his head.

“Mzungu,” he heard them whisper. And, “Sick.”

What happened to “chief”? They surrounded him as they would have a dog in distress, or any dying creature, and therefore a diversion and not a threat.

Snowdon was near him. Hock saw him from between his numbed fingers, creeping close.

“Water,” Hock said, and repeated it in Sena.

The dwarf scuttled away on his wounded feet, and was soon back, approaching Hock with an enamel cup. But leaning over, he stumbled and lost it. The women laughed and clapped, excited by the spectacle, the slumped man, the patch of dampened dust, the dirty cup, the dwarf on his knees.

Snowdon retrieved the cup and gave it to Hock. Even though the cup was empty, the dark dust clinging to its rim, in a lunge of desperation Hock gripped it as if for balance. He held it to his face and licked at it and tasted grit. And the women screeched again.

Encouraged by the laughter, the dwarf snatched the cup from him. The women laughed so loudly that more people came to see — the orphan boys, some men kicking through the dust with their T-shirts hiked up to the top of their heads to keep off the sun. Hock was surrounded by the whole village, it seemed. But only the dwarf dared to come near him.

“Fee-dee-dom,” the dwarf cried out, and the women laughed.

Zizi tried to protect Hock, scolding the dwarf, but the women shouted her down. One woman pushed her aside, and the dwarf poked Hock with his own walking stick. Hock was helpless to resist, and when he looked up the dwarf was drooling through his broken teeth, with a bruised eager face, rushing at him wild-eyed.

Although Hock was enfeebled, struggling to sit upright, the dwarf seemed reluctant to touch him. But he threw pebbles at him, and he mock-charged him. He grunted — he used no language, only low notes bubbling from his snotty nose. But when Hock tumbled into the dust, and a cry went up, the dwarf began kicking him, straining with snuffling grunts, to the rejoicing of the crowd.

Hock’s tongue was so swollen when he woke, he could barely breathe. He was still clothed, on his string bed in the hut.

“Chief.”

They must have seen his eyes flutter. Without moving, he saw two figures backlit at the window, big and small. One of them was speaking.

“Mfumu.” It was Manyenga, murmuring the word for chief.

The smaller figure was Zizi, creeping toward him with the same sort of enamel cup that the dwarf had offered him. Hock raised himself and drank, expecting water, but it was thick and salty — soup — and as he lapped at it he sensed it easing his throat, seeping into his flesh, his body greedy for the salty liquid.

“More,” he pleaded when he’d finished.

Manyenga ordered the girl to fetch more soup, and lemon water mixed with sugar and salt. When she was gone, Manyenga spoke again, and though Hock could not tell whether the man was speaking English or Sena, the word “chief” was repeated.

With more of the soup, Zizi kneeling, ready to receive the empty cup, Hock was able to sit up in the string bed, propped against the woven back wall of the hut. Manyenga was standing with his back to the light, but even so, Hock knew that the man was smiling, and something in his posture said that he was relieved to see Hock’s strength returning.

But that was just a fleeting moment. After another drink Hock sank back, twisted on the string bed, his mouth open. Just before he slipped into another doze, he heard Manyenga speak again, and became aware from a rustling of voices that a throng of people had gathered outside the hut.

“Mfumu yayikulu,” Manyenga was saying in a voice that sounded awestruck and almost fearful. “Great chief.”

In the morning Hock sat up with a clearer head and felt well enough to walk, shuffling like an old man. Zizi knelt on the veranda. The dwarf crouched in his usual place, with a torpid smile that showed his cracked teeth.

“Bring me some food,” Hock said.

Zizi ran to her hut, fed her smoldering fire, and began to prepare a meal, with a clatter of tin pots.

Hock went to the basket that he’d shoved under his bed. He didn’t stoop over — it made him dizzy to move his head. He kicked the basket, and he knew before it tipped over that all the envelopes of money were gone. Seeing the empty basket, he laughed. His laughter must have made an eerie sound, because when he turned toward the doorway, the dwarf rolled sideways through it, then stood and tottered away.

Zizi brought a dish of porridge and some bananas and a cup of milky tea. As she set them down on the table, Hock reached over and held her hand. It was scaly, the skin almost snake-like, slippery, her fingertips hardened from work, the whole hand toughened and yet slender and small. She moved closer, biting her sucked-in lips. He saw mingled pity and gladness in her eyes.

“Dance,” he whispered.

Her giggling made him release her. Snowdon clapped his hands against his face, as though mimicking a shocked schoolgirl, scandalized by what he was seeing.

The spell of dehydration had slowed him and made him watchful. For the rest of the day he sat in the shade of his veranda, moving only to slap at flies. As the sun dropped to the level of the trees at the edge of the clearing, he broke a branch from the tree that overhung his hut and made himself a stick.

Followed by Zizi and the dwarf, he walked along the barrier of elephant grass, crossed the clearing, and pushed through the waist-high weeds to the ruined school. In a spirit of visitation, Hock looked in where he knew there were snakes. He poked at the trash piles of dead leaves and roused the black-lipped mamba. Seeing the snake whipping its tail, Zizi stepped back and the dwarf grunted through his nose. Just as darkness was gathering in the clearing, and the orphan boys were kicking a ball, he walked to the decaying baobab stump. He saw the puff adder, though it was almost indistinguishable from the flakes of old bark, thickened inside a widened cleft of the wood.

He was studying the adder when Manyenga appeared, but warily, keeping his distance, because he understood that Hock, staring hard at something he could not see, was probably looking at a snake, and very likely the snake was speaking in its own wicked way to him.

“I’ve been expecting you,” Hock said.

“Chief,” Manyenga said with a head-shake of respect.

“The money, it’s all gone,” Hock said.

“But we are so poor. What can we do?”

“Maybe you’ll have to take me to Blantyre so I can get some more.”

Now the man was uncertain, clumsy in his excessive politeness, eager to please but confused by Hock’s suggestion. He turned and called out in Sena, “Kill a chicken for the chief!”

The orphan boys scattered. And Zizi and the dwarf dropped back too. Manyenga leaned toward Hock and, without pointing, but nodding in a knowing way, whispered, “She is waiting you.”

Hock pretended not to hear. Feeling fragile, he squatted near the stump, and as he did the snake stirred. Manyenga stepped back.

“Please, father. Whatever you want.”

Although it was dusk, there was enough light from the reddened sky for Hock to see, at the far edge of the clearing, some women holding babies, and some old men, the orphan boys, and girls with firewood on their heads. He was reminded of the crowd that had encouraged the dwarf to mock him when he’d fainted. But this was different. He had not seen them like this since first arriving back in Malabo and being welcomed with apprehension. In his days of illness and being thwarted by them, he had almost forgotten how fearful they’d been. He smiled as he had that first day. Perhaps they were afraid again.

He waited in his hut, the lantern resting on the floor so that the light would be subdued. With his heart pounding, anxious, ashamed, unable to stop himself, he went eagerly to the small window. The suspense of knowing she was coming to him sharpened his pleasure. He saw Zizi hurrying from the courtyard of her small hut. When he heard her bare feet on the wood planks of his veranda he was almost breathless with expectation.

And then she entered, shot the loose bolt, flung up her cloth, and draped it over the window. Her sighing had the earnestness of sensuality. She stood before him, her naked body whitened with the fine dust of flour that adhered to her sweat-dampened skin, like a tall girl drawn in chalk.

Again Hock remembered her reply when he had asked her teasingly what it was that the men in the darkness want.

They want what all men want, she had said, and the memory shamed him. She was wiser than he, and now she looked at him, standing still, the only movement in her body the dark light in her eyes, her eyelashes dusted white.

Then she curtseyed with a formality that moved him, as though beginning not a village dance but a ballet, and this time she was calmer, her dance more graceful and measured than before.

She came to life in the dance, and was transformed, no longer the village girl with the kettle and the bowl of porridge, but a woman the shape of slender, spirit-like scissors, suspended in air, the suggestion of a trance in her whitened face and wild eyes.

The light of the lantern brightened the dusting of flour and gave her a new body, with subtle curves and shadows. After a series of small jumping and turning steps, she stood tall, rising on the balls of her feet, presenting herself to him. She marked out a semicircle on the floor with her whitened pointed foot, then slid her foot along the floor with her front knee bent, performed a full knee bend, with her heels off the floor, and kept her slender arms upraised, and in the course of the soundless dance shook the flour from her body and let the powder sift to the floorboards of the hut, each dance step a white footprint.

27

HOCK HAD ONCE tried to imagine a day like this, but hadn’t been able to understand how to achieve it. And now the day had arrived: no money in the snake basket, none in his wallet, his pockets empty. He was unburdened. He saw that arriving in Malabo with a bag of money had been his first, and most grievous, mistake; handing the money out, another. Long ago, as a teacher, he’d had nothing, and was invisible for having nothing. He should have come this time with nothing — nothing to steal, nothing to tempt or distract them, as a visiting bystander, detached, on the periphery where foreigners belonged, with only the clothes he stood up in and a ticket home. But he had become involved, entangled, and trapped.

Zizi’s dancing, dusted in flour, was his only pleasure, but a chaste one — the powder was like armor. He didn’t dare touch her. As for the rest, he was finished, nothing else could happen. The truth was stark, the village inert, encrusted, crumbled under a cloudy sun. Rain never fell. He felt skinny, picked clean, as naked and hungry and poor as anyone in Malabo. Nothing left — he had no money, and most of his spare clothes were gone, including his belt, which he needed now that he’d lost so much weight.

Snowdon lingered, drooled eagerly, and scratched his dirty palm with his stubby fingers, his way of asking for money. For a few coins he bought stalks of sugar cane, which he chewed and spat out, sucking the sweetness from the pith.

“Nothing,” Hock said, and was relieved.

Zizi never asked for money, but she represented his one joy, his strength, was his only friend. The village women expected some kwacha notes when they presented him with bananas or pumpkins. One of the women had helped Zizi with his laundry, bringing it in a stack that Zizi scorched to kill the putzi fly eggs embedded in the weave. But there was little laundry these days, because his clothes had been stolen too, and he owned no more than a thickness of threadbare cloth. The sight of it made him sad.

“Father,” the laundry woman said, setting down a folded shirt and a tattered T-shirt she’d wheedled from Zizi, in the hope of making money. She held a baby in a sling to her side.

“I have no money,” Hock said. He took a wild delight in declaring it.

The woman whined a little and gestured to the baby.

“All gone!” Hock said.

The woman implored him. Flies settled on the baby’s face and sucked at the edges of its eyelids and its prim lips.

“Now I’m like you,” he said.

Just like them, he was a wisp of diminishing humanity, with nothing in his pockets — hardly had pockets! — and he felt a lightness because of it. With no money he was insubstantial and beneath notice. As soon as everyone knew he had nothing, they would stop asking him for money, would stop talking to him altogether, probably. Yet tugging at this lightness was another sensation, of weight, his poverty like an anchor. He couldn’t move or go anywhere; he had no bargaining power. He was anchored by an absence of money, not just immovable but sitting and slipping lower.

More than ever they called him chief and great minister and father. The women were calmer and less competitive than the men. They wanted food for their children, or a tin pot. The men wanted motorbikes, or bus fare, or had a scheme for selling fish or obtaining contraband from Mozambique on the river. They asked for large amounts, and they resented the fact that Hock had no money left. They believed he was lying. And so they kept poking around his house when he was out walking. He encouraged them to do this by taking long conspicuous hikes, leaving his front door ajar.

“They went inside again,” Zizi would say.

But he wanted them to know that he had nothing left. And he hoped they would see that they themselves had had a share in reducing him to this. They had taken all his money, and everything of value. And they were no better off.

They were not diabolical; they were desperate. But desperation made them cruel and casual.

“Mzungu,” a man named Gilbert said, to get his attention. Some mischievous men called him “white man” to his face. No one used his name. It was as though when he lost all his money, he lost his name, too.

Gilbert said, “The woman Gala wants to talk to you.” And then, becoming even more familiar, the man said, “I am needing a scooter.”

Many of them believed he still had money, and some of those people called him mzungu, not father. Gala would never have called him that. She might have called him Ellis, since she knew him by that name, but they would have heard it as “Alice.”

Zizi walked with him under the mopane trees and through the thorn bushes on the hot path to Gala’s hut. He guessed that the old woman had divined that Zizi’s relationship with him had changed. Not that it was explicitly sexual: there was something pure and resolute in Zizi’s virginal face and her frowning mouth and the way she stood and moved. But Gala would have known — either from village whispers or a guess — that he had seen Zizi naked, dusted with white flour, and had possessed her with his gaze, which was true. It was not a question of his daring to go further with her; he had no right. As for the dancing, there was nothing scandalous in that, since she wasn’t truly naked: the flour was her costume, her adornment.

Walking in front of him, Zizi cleared the way, only hesitating at the point where, a month or so before, he had seen the snake rattling through the clutter of dry leaves. He watched her body as she pushed the branches aside, and he thought: Once you have seen someone lovely naked, she is never anything but naked for you, no matter how she is dressed. She was sinuous on the path, her velvety skin glowing, her shaven head beaded with sweat, her neck shining.

Gala was waiting for them. Someone must have seen them on the path and told her they were on their way. Yet she looked impassive, monumental in her bulk, her eyes slanted in her fleshy face.

Hock clapped his hands and called out, “Odi, odi.”

The old woman was sitting in the same chair as before, on her veranda, on the planks worn smooth by bare feet, in the same posture as when he had left her — how long ago? And this time, too, she tried to heave herself out of the creaking chair to greet him. To spare her — he could see her effort, the deliberate stages of her hoisting herself, her struggling arms, planting her feet — he mounted the steps quickly and took her hands, and she laughed in helpless apology.

“Come, sit,” she said to Hock, and to the woman Zizi had called Auntie, “Bring tea. Go help them, Zizi.”

Smiling, patting her great fleshy face with a damp cloth, she shooed the children away.

As with all visits to huts like this, Hock sensed a brimming odor of human sweat, damp clothes, dirty feet, hot bodies; a rippling curtain of stink that was sharpest now in the heat of the day.

“Yes, go help,” Gala said to the last of the children, speaking as always in a mixture of Sena and English.

When they were alone, in the shade of the veranda, she lost her smile. It vanished into her plump smooth face and she became darker, heavier, and spoke in a growl.

“You did not heed me.”

He smiled at the word. Heed, reckoning, victuals — she was of the generation that used pulpit words.

“Even now you are not attending.”

Another of those words. He said, “I am — I always listen to you.”

“Ellis, my friend. One month ago I told you my opinion. It was a mistake for you to come here. Of course, I am glad for selfish reasons. Because the man I liked so well — I can even say loved — showed himself to be a righteous person. But you are not listening.”

The word “loved” was still glittering in his head.

He said, “Then I’m glad I came.”

“It should have been a holiday. But you lingered,” Gala said. “Sometimes the tourists and the aid workers visit here. They go to the Mwabvi park at the boma side to look at wild animals. Or they get lost here and ask directions. They spend some minutes and then they go away and we never see them again. That is what you should have done.”

“I think you mentioned that.”

“Indeed I did. But my words fell on deaf ears. You know we say muthu ukulu and so forth — a big head gets a knock.”

Her face was leathery, bruised by age and the harsh sun, with freckled cheeks, her eyes staring out of dark sunken skin. He could see her concern, and it alarmed him. Her proverb made her seem obtuse and simple-minded.

“I tried to get away,” he said. “I went downriver, almost to Morrumbala, and I was abandoned.”

“You fetched up at the children’s village.”

“The Place of the Thrown-Aways, they called it. How do you know that?”

“We have no secrets here. We know that Festus Manyenga brought you back. We know the Agency rejected you. We know those boys that call themselves ‘the brothers.’”

“I didn’t like the Agency,” Hock said. “I don’t trust those people.”

“They could have arranged safe passage for you. They have planes. They have vehicles.”

“I thought that young man Aubrey might help.”

“We know about him. He is sick.”

“I thought so. But he doesn’t look too bad.”

“He is taking the drug, like some others. They get it from the Agency. It is so dear, only a few people have it. It makes them stronger. It makes them dangerous.”

He guessed she was talking about the anti-retroviral drug that he had read about, but Gala would not have known those words. He said, “Aubrey said he was taking me to Blantyre. Manyenga had a different story. I don’t know what the truth is.”

“This looks such a simple place. But no, everyone lies, so you can’t know it at all. The truth is absent here.”

“Why do people lie?”

“Because they have been taught to lie. It works for them better than the truth. And they’re hungry. If you’re hungry, you will do anything, you will agree to anything, you will say anything. And they’re lazy. This is a terrible place. Why are you smiling?”

Hock said, “When we were both young, you said, ‘This is my home. This is my life. This is my country. We can make it better.’”

She laughed, but bitterly, and said, “If I were young again, I would say, ‘Take me far away from here.’”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere at all.” She saw that Zizi was pouring hot water from the kettle into a teapot. “I worry about her. She is still a namwali. Still a maiden.”

“Maiden” was another pulpit word, and it suited the thin girl, canted over and delicately filling the teapot. Her posture, so precise and poised, seemed proof of her innocence.

“But she’s strong,” Hock said.

“I was strong once, but look at me,” Gala said. She laughed, and it was true — she looked ruined, puffy-faced, her sad eyes glassy with fatigue, her ankles swollen. “And she is alone.”

“She’s been looking after me.”

“Yes, I know that,” Gala said.

What did she know? Perhaps the talk of Zizi dancing naked, and the detail that she rolled herself in flour and bewitched him, ghost-dancing like a priestess. Hock was abashed, felt he ought to explain, but did not know how to begin. He said, “Please don’t worry about her.”

“I am worried about you. Those people — Festus, Aubrey, the others. They are not to be trusted.”

He said, frowning at the absurdity of it, “I have no money left. I have nothing.”

“Then you are in greater danger.”

“I want to get away,” Hock said. “I don’t know how.”

“You must find a way. Zizi can help.” Gala saw Zizi and the other woman approaching the veranda with the tea things on tin trays — a plate of misshapen cakes, the teapot, the chipped cups, the small punctured can of evaporated milk, the sugar bowl. Before they were within earshot, Gala said, “This was a safe place once. Now it is so dangerous.” As the women mounted the steps, she said, “Malawi tea. From Mlanje Mountain! Please help yourself, my friend.”

They sat drinking tea, talking of the weather, how because the rain had stayed away, the roads had deteriorated. And how to fix them?

“A swing needs to be pushed,” Gala said, and tapped Hock’s arm to get his attention. “It means you can’t do anything alone.”

Zizi followed him home, down the path, in silence.

At the hut, she hung her head — politeness, averting her eyes— and said softly in Sena, “Do you want me to dance?”

But the visit to Gala had made him self-conscious, apprehensive, and he said no.

What had Gala heard? Obviously something, because the next day, around noon, a small boy appeared at Hock’s hut. Zizi had intercepted him and explained that the boy was carrying a message from Manyenga, who wanted to see him for dinner.

“I’m not hungry,” Hock said.

But that was no excuse. Food that was offered had to be accepted, even if the person had already eaten.

“Some boys have come,” Zizi said.

“Which boys?”

“They are from the other side,” she said, meaning the Mozambique border.

“How do you know?”

“People talk.”

People talked, but not to him, and that was the worst of it, that he lived in the village and all the while life continued apart from him. The talk did not reach him, or if it did, he did not understand. He was not only a mzungu, but a ghost, an ignorant ghost, existing outside of everything, merely watching, seeing only the surface of things, listening but missing most of what was said, not understanding the shouts or the drumbeats. At other times he was like a pet cringing in the doorway, a creature they kept to be stroked and murmured to, another species, captive and dumb and looking for a smile. He had been reduced to that. And the money was gone, so what was he worth?

Later in the afternoon, nearing Manyenga’s compound, he recognized the boys at once — the brothers, in their sunglasses, the one with the cap lettered Dynamo Dresden. And as before, he was struck by how American they looked in their T-shirts, sneakers, and shorts, not the castoff clothes distributed by a charity like the Agency, but new clothes that gave the boys a street style Hock recognized from Medford. They were the sweatshop products that had undone his business. Who would wear a button-down shirt and flannel slacks and a blazer if he could get away with a Chinese T-shirt and Chinese sneakers? He looked resentfully at the boys, thinking, China clothes the whole world!

“Father,” Manyenga called out, and failing to get his attention, he shouted, “Chief!”

But Hock was still watching the three boys, who sat picking at food on the plates that had been set out on the mat. The boy with the cap was sitting on a chair near Manyenga, the others squatting at the mat’s edge.

Another rule was that no one ate until the chief took the first bite, and when the chief appeared, or an elder, the younger members at the meal stood up, turned aside, eyes down, or knelt to show respect.

None of this. They were indifferent, as when Hock had seen them downriver at their makeshift village, as reckless as when they’d led Hock to the football field for the arrival of the Agency helicopter and the celebrities — the food drop. They had all started to eat, they chewed, they licked their fingers, they didn’t smile, and when they glanced at Hock it was in an appraising way, as you would look at merchandise in a market stall.

Hock saw that Zizi had not followed him, and guessing that she was back at the hut, he was confused, reluctant to meet these boys again. In their village they had taken no interest in him, even when he’d been starving. He recalled the ease with which they had handled the money he’d given them, fingering it expertly. Now they were in Malabo and talking with Manyenga, who had rescued him from them at the field, amid their scavenging, and had warned him against them. They had seemed like enemies then, and Manyenga a friend to him, but now he couldn’t tell the difference. He had no money, he had no friends. What did it matter whether he paid his respects to Manyenga by dining with him and these boys? Life went backward here, and he was more the stranger now than before.

“Eat!” Manyenga cried out, seeing Hock turn and, bent over, limp away. “Eat!”

He spoke as though to an obstinate animal, or a child, or a prisoner, and Hock realized that to them he was all three.

So he returned to his hut, and as an hour or so of daylight remained and it was too hot in the slanting sun to go inside, he lay on a mat on his veranda and shut his eyes and pitied himself for being there, at the mercy of the village, and having to endure the contempt of Manyenga’s having a meal with the three boys dressed as rappers. How had they gotten here from that far-off village? Well, he had made it here from there.

Then he slept, the sudden honking, sweating, late-afternoon slumber brought on by heat and despair.

He dreamed of being in a dusty sunlit room, hearing voices. And then he knew he wasn’t dreaming — the voices were those of the boys, talking about him to Manyenga, murmuring.

“He is sick.”

“Not sick, my friend. He is strong.”

“Old, too”—another voice.

“White men can be old and still have heart.”

The first words had woken him, but instead of sitting up he remained still, crumpled on the mat, his eyes closed, listening to the mutters.

It was as if they were haggling over him, Manyenga dealing with the boys — he was the salesman, they the reluctant buyers.

“And he can be insolent.”

The word was chipongwe; it was how he had seen them.

“You are strong. You have connections. You can handle him.”

“I think he is listening.”

“To what? You are not saying anything.”

“He is older than my father.”

“Your father is dead.”

“That is what I mean.”

Some weeks before, when he’d had his fever, he had lain in his hut and heard voices like this. And he had grown sad, unable to move, feeling chills and a skull-cracking headache, and he had been an eavesdropping wraith.

It was like that now, but worse, and the scene that came to mind was the Somerville woman — what was her name? — lying in her bed with the python beside her. That snake had flattened itself and Hock grew alarmed, knowing that it was preparing to flex its jaws and swallow her.

When they fell silent he opened his eyes and rolled over to face them. He saw them walking away, and Zizi beside him, bug-eyed.

He spoke what he was thinking: “They want to eat me.”

“Not eat. But to buy you.” Zizi took a long breath. “The big man Festus is wanting money for you.”

Exhausted, Hock slept well that night, and was alarmed only when he woke up in daylight and remembered what had happened the evening before, and was appalled.

Zizi was standing beside the bed, looking ghostly against the mosquito net. She said, “They are still here in the village, those boys.”

He saw that she was holding a kettle.

“Put the kettle down.” She set it down with a clank. “Come here.” He parted the mosquito net and she crept in, ducking the curtain of net. She lay on the cot, but held herself compactly, facing away. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I just want to talk.”

28

ANYTHING THAT HAPPENED at night was so muffled and menacing that to the villagers nothing happened at night. In the Lower River, darkness fell in a blinding way, a swift and sudden collapse of light, and in the morning the village was as it had been left at sundown — that overturned bucket moistened with dew, the pucker of footprints so deep in the gray dampened sand they could have been fossils, the scattered and sucked mouthfuls of sugar cane fibers and the bitten stalk, the bunting of torn shirts hanging limp on a line, the blackening stem of bananas twisted on a rusted coathanger on a tree branch, out of the reach of rats and hyenas. Only the Nyau ceremony, a ritual in darkness, was allowable at night, but the last Nyau had been danced long ago, when the presiding image had been Hock’s own face — the long nose, the scraps of white rags and plastic — and he had believed that he’d been granted power. But time had shown his power to be no more potent than the rags.

For weeks he believed a miracle might happen. He imagined it this way, as in a movie. On a tray on a desk in the American consulate in Blantyre was an accumulating stack of letters from Roy Junkins, sent from Medford. And a voice: That’s odd. Another one. This guy Ellis Hock doesn’t pick up his mail. Maybe we should go down there and see if everything’s okay. The concerned consul would act quickly. Hock extended this scene into a hopeful drama of rescue, the sleek consular vehicle drawing into Malabo and an American in a suit greeting him, then bearing him away. Hock would halt the vehicle, saying, “There’s someone else,” and call to Zizi.

He played the scene in his head, to console himself, but it only made him sadder.

He was now so far from that hope he’d begun to think that he might never leave, that he would go on suffering here as he had for more than two months, living on lumpy steamed nsima, dried fish, boiled slimy greens, bread and tea, a mango, a wedge of pumpkin, groundnuts seethed in their shells. That nothing would change. Already he knew what it was like to be elderly, to be feeble, to fall ill, to walk with difficulty and hate the sun. He’d lose his teeth like Norman Fogwill. In his recurring mood of bitter pettiness he remembered how in the hour or more that he had spent with Fogwill, the man hadn’t stirred or been particularly friendly, and when Hock had risen to leave, Fogwill had remained in his chair.

At one time he might have been strong enough to make a dash to the boma. In the first few weeks he’d felt up to it, but procrastinated in the African way. He might have been lucky. But he had weakened, and declined. He’d come to Malabo a healthy man, active for his age, with the idea of fixing the school and being capable of putting in a day’s work at the building. He’d felt optimistic, and he imagined leaving a lump sum with someone like Manyenga for the upkeep of the school, perhaps depositing money in the bank at the boma, the Malabo account.

Too late. His health was gone, and he could tell almost to the day when he’d realized he was too old. Malabo had made him an old man, had tipped him into near senility. He needed those long nights, that silence, that darkness, not just to be restored by sleep but for the illusion that he was free to dream — good dreams, of home and friends and health. He forgave everyone at home, forgave Deena and Chicky. They had not hurt him. Deena had freed him, and Chicky had merely turned her back on him. But when he woke in his hut in Malabo in the monotonous heat of the morning, he was reminded that he was a prisoner.

The boys — the brothers, as they called themselves — did not leave the village, as he assumed they might. They remained, sitting in the shady area of the courtyard at Manyenga’s compound, and Hock knew they could do that only with Manyenga’s permission. He saw them chatting with Manyenga during the day, as he himself had once done, believing he was a friend. He saw them being brought black kettles of hot water, and in the evening he saw them seated on mats near Manyenga’s cooking fire, where he had once sat as an honored guest. They had displaced him, these boys in sunglasses, and he had the sense that they were hovering, waiting — for what?

The tolerance in Malabo for any outsider lasted just a matter of days. Then the guest had to do some work, or leave. Hock saw the boys lingering and, it seemed, running up a debt. Manyenga was too shrewd to endure these boys eating his food and drinking his tea and crowding him, unless something else was happening — a protracted negotiation, Hock guessed, like all the talk over the months it took to arrive at an acceptable bride price.

Strangers in a village usually caused a buzz of activity — speculation, giggling, whispers. But the presence of these boys created a greater silence, a solemn watchfulness; the villagers were more cautious, less talkative, brisker in their walk. And they avoided Hock in the way they avoided anyone with an illness. The days were hotter, the cicadas louder.

“Our friends are still here,” he said to Gilbert, who had called him mzungu and asked him for money. Gilbert was a fisherman, pushing his bike through the deep sand at the edge of Malabo, setting off for a riverside village near the boma. It would take him the whole day to ride those thirty-odd miles; he’d launch his canoe tomorrow morning.

Gilbert gazed at him with a blank deaf stare. Irony was lost on him. What friends?

“Those boys from the bush,” Hock said, “staying with Festus.”

“I am not knowing,” Gilbert said in English.

When anyone spoke English to him, it was a way of warning him that the conversation would be brief, vague, and probably untruthful.

No one now asked Hock for money, or for anything. Women walked past his hut without looking at him. Only children took an interest, but it was a form of play; nothing frightened them. And when he strolled through the village in the cooler early evening, searching for snakes at the edge of the marsh or in the low-lying dimbas, no one, not even children, acknowledged him. He seemed to drift like a ghost, as though he had no substance.

He was real only to Zizi. She brought him food, cleaned what clothing was left, crouched near him on his veranda, and sometimes in secret she danced for him, his only joy. The paradox of a naked girl, entirely dusted with flour, dancing slowly by lantern light in the suffocating hut, his greatest reality and his only hope.

“Why do you dance for me?” he asked.

“I dance because it makes you happy.”

Zizi brought him news of the brothers: they still lived at Manyenga’s compound. “Still talking.” Naturally suspicious, full of warnings at the best of times, she told Hock that they had designs on him.

“Gala told you this?”

“I can see them,” she said.

“They pay no attention to me at all.”

“That means they are always thinking about you,” she said. “They are proud.”

He said, “If I could bring a message to the boma — post a letter — my friends in Blantyre would help me.”

Zizi stared with widened eyes, swallowed a little, giving herself dimples, then said, “I can do it.”

“They’d see you.”

“Not at night.”

The very word “night” was like a curse. He said, “No one goes out at night. There are animals in the night. It’s not safe.”

He could see he was worrying her. He’d thought of sending her, but he knew it was too risky; and anyway, she couldn’t walk that distance. He told her that.

“Njinga,” she said. The jingle of a bicycle bell was the word for bike.

“You don’t have a bike.”

“But my friend,” she said, and swallowed again, “is having.”

He was past the point of allowing his hopes to be raised with any scheme. Nothing had worked. He was almost resigned to living here, to decaying here, like Gala. To dying here.

Yet in the long mute smothering hours of the night after that talk with Zizi, he kept himself awake in the dark, lying on his back, composing the letter in his head.

To the American consul, he began, murmuring under his mosquito net. This is an urgent appeal for your help. I am being held against my will in the village of Malabo on the Lower River, Nsanje District. There is no phone here or I would call. I can’t get to the boma. I am sending this message to you with the help of a trusted villager who is at considerable risk, in the hope it will reach you safely.

I have no money left. It has all been taken from me. I have no possessions to speak of, other than a change of clothes and a few other items. I came here in the belief that I might be useful to these people. That was a mistake.

I have made several attempts to escape, but each time I failed, and this has hardened the villagers against me.

I am not well, having suffered several bouts of fever, and the effects still linger. My health is gone and I am in fear of my life. I have no allies here other than the individual who is posting this letter. My medicine is used up.

The village of Malabo is known to you. I think someone came here from your consulate to deliver school supplies for me and was told I was away. That was a lie. I was seriously ill.

Please come at once. I will pay all expenses. I am absolutely desperate, and I’m afraid that if I am not rescued soon I will be taken from here, perhaps downriver into Mozambique, and kept as a hostage, for ransom. In that case, someone will have to search for me.

I am not sure…

But there he stopped, near tears, too sad to continue, fear making him wakeful, his misery keeping him silent.

In the morning he sat and wrote the message on a sheet of paper torn from a copybook, one of the many copybooks he’d bought for the school that had lain unused. He printed in block capitals, taking his time. When he was done, he reread it and began to cry, holding his hand over his mouth to stifle his sobs.

His own letter terrified him, as weeks before, at the Agency compound, he’d seen his face in the polished side of the water tank and been stricken by the sight of the defeated eyes and hollow cheeks of the old man staring back at him.

Until now, he had not put his plight into words, and so he had survived, even managed to convince himself that there was a way out. The days had passed with little to remember except for Zizi’s kindnesses. He thought, Something will happen, someone will help. He avoided the mirror in his hut, but his letter was a mirror of his feelings, and the very sight of it frightened him. His cheeks were dirty with tears.

He had not read anything, nor written anything in his journal, for over a month, since heading downriver with Simon and the paddlers. Something about his writing, the order of his sentences, his voice on the page, reminded him of his other life, the world he had left; and seeing his plea, the pressure of his inky pen point, the helpless words, left him in despair.

He folded the letter and sealed it in an envelope, not intending to send it but so that he wouldn’t have to look at it. The envelope was dusty, one of several left over from the bank, with melancholy smudges of finger marks on the flap.

Zizi saw the envelope but did not mention mailing the letter. She knew the risks of going out at night alone. Hock could not find a way of phrasing the request, so the question remained unasked.

In the days that followed Zizi hovered around the hut, alerting Hock to the movements of the boys. A week after their arrival they were still at Manyenga’s.

“They want money,” Hock said.

“Or maybe they are waiting for a vehicle.”

Yes, that made sense. They lived a three-day walk away, through the bush, around the marsh, along the riverbank. Even if they left in a canoe from Marka, it was a two-day downriver trip to their village.

“What vehicle?” he asked.

“The Agency helps them. Maybe Aubrey.”

Like the others, she gave the name extra syllables, Obbery, rhyming it with “robbery.”

“He’s still around?”

“He is sick.”

Hock kept his distance from her until darkness fell, and then he sat near her on the veranda, not lighting the lantern. Finally he crept into the hut, leaving the door ajar so that she could follow. She never spoke. She lifted the mosquito net and slid against him in the cot, lying on her back, her hands clasped at her breast, breathing softly through her nose, and sometimes singing in her throat. She smelled of soap and dust and sweat and blossoms, familiar to him — no one had her odor. He plucked one of her hands and held it — so hard, so skinny, so scaly, like a lizard’s. Her whole life was readable in that hand, all her work; it was older than her age, not a child’s hand but a woman’s, someone who had known hardship, much tougher than his own hand.

“Ask me,” she said, as he held her hand.

Her body lay against him, without weight. She did not look at him. Her face was upturned, to the ridgepole of the hut. Hock saw that she was shy, but she was serious in her abrupt question.

In a whisper he could barely hear, needing a moment for him to translate, she said, “I will do anything.”

The words, whispered that way, nearly undid him, touched him so deeply he could not speak. It was a crucial moment, one of the few in his life, when an answer was demanded of him, when everything that followed depended on what he replied. He had a choice to make. Once, Deena had said, It’s up to you, Ellis. What do you really want? Make up your mind. And he had realized it was over, that he’d spend the rest of his life without her. Or Chicky saying, But what about when you pass? If you remarry, your new family will get it and I won’t get diddly. If I don’t get it now, I’ll never see it.

He held Zizi’s hand, that bony callused little claw, and thought, She is offering herself, I can have her. He had known from the busy way she hovered that she was telling him that. He had shown her that she was safe with him. A Sena woman, even a marriageable one like Zizi, was not looking for sex. Security was what mattered most, the need to be protected, to bear children who would be secure. The man could be old or young, but he needed to be strong for his wife.

Zizi was clothed beside him in the string bed, but what he saw was her dancing naked for him, dusted with white flour, in the seclusion of the room, while he lay before her, the girl lifting her skinny legs and lowering them, shaking the flour from them, her lips pressed together, her soft throat-song seeming to echo a melody in her head.

He said, “I want to send a letter.”

“I can take it.”

“It needs a stamp.”

“I can find one.”

“How will you get to the boma?”

“My friend’s njinga.”

“You can do that?”

“I can do more,” she said, turning aside and rolling away from him, partly in shyness but also submitting, seeming to present her small hard body. It was a kind of appeal, her posture of compliance, but he was too sad to answer.

“Post the letter,” he said. “And when you come back, when we’re safe, everything will be ours — whatever you want.”

“What you want,” she said.

At some point in the early predawn darkness, she left. He woke to find her gone, and the envelope too. He imagined hearing the jingle of a bicycle bell, like laughter.

The activity, the stirring the next day, made him imagine that everything he’d said to Zizi, everything he’d done, lying next to her, had been seen, was known. The boys were up and about, talking louder, ranging more widely in the village. With Zizi gone, he had no ally. Even Snowdon had been lured away from him by the novelty of the three brothers in sunglasses, and the protracted bargaining with Manyenga.

They had to be talking about money. It was now over a week since they’d showed up in Malabo, and they had insinuated themselves into the life of the village, staying in one of Manyenga’s many huts in the heat of the day, emerging in the late afternoon when the air was cooler, strolling away from the compound and sauntering through the village, staring at the younger girls, murmuring among themselves, seeming to pay no attention to Hock. Yet it was obvious they were closing in on him.

In defiance, Hock used these afternoon hours to go out and capture snakes. Snakes were his only strength. The adults of the village kept their distance whenever he walked with his bag and his stick. The children followed him, jumping and screeching, daring each other to go nearer.

Hock would find the fattest snake, a sleepy black mamba or a puff adder, and flourish it, allowing it to coil around his arm as he pinched behind its head. And then he returned to his hut, depositing the snake in a basket and fastening the lid.

The day after Zizi vanished with the letter, he went on a conspicuous snake hunt and found a viper. This he carried through the village to his hut, the children following, calling out, “Snake!”

Hock listened for the bicycle bell, but there was nothing, no sign of Zizi. That was the earliest she could have returned. In his heart he did not expect to be rescued; every attempt so far had failed. But he could not imagine remaining in Malabo without Zizi; he could not imagine living without her, as her guardian. Yet she was nowhere to be seen.

Another night, another early morning, another whole day of waiting. Hock walked to the edge of the village superstitiously, to the spot where, on his arrival in Malabo, he had first seen her walking slowly into the creek, lifting the cloth up her thighs as she went deeper, until she was in the water up to her waist.

Hearing rustling behind him, the swish of legs in dry embankment grass, he turned and saw Manyenga. He was smiling — always a sign of concealment for the man. The older, cap-wearing brother approached too, not smiling, looking sullen.

“Time to talk,” Manyenga said.

As though not recognizing either of the men, Hock pushed past them and walked down the path and across the clearing toward his hut.

Manyenga called out, “Wait, father.”

Hock kept walking, his shadow lengthening.

“You are going with those boys.” Manyenga caught up with him, breathless, sucking air. “They will help you.”

“How much did they pay you for me?”

“You are making a joke, father.”

Hock said, “Never,” as he reached his hut. He unhooked the lid of a basket on the veranda and, thrusting his hands inside, snatched two handfuls of dark vipers. Bristling with snakes, he filled his doorway, saying, “We are staying here.”

29

HOCK STILL HELD the knots of squirming snakes, which glinted in the last of the daylight — greenish marsh snakes, hissing, contending, their throats widened, their wagging heads flattened in alarm. The villagers in Malabo were terrified of them, and told stories of battling the marsh snake they called mbovi, because it was a good swimmer, and often darted at their legs when they were bathing in the creek. But the snakes were small, harmless, they had no fangs, and perhaps that accounted for the scaly drama of their aggression.

Shaking them into their basket, Hock heard a scuffing in the courtyard, and some whining adenoidal clucking. He turned to see Snowdon, who kept his distance because of the snakes, his stubby fingers protecting his face.

“Come,” he said. He never used Hock’s name, or any name; he hardly ever made an intelligible sound; and so this one uttered gulp of command got Hock’s attention.

Snowdon then stumbled and ran, and Hock followed him across the dimba of pumpkins and then to the back path. The dwarf labored ahead of him, his snorting audible, pulling his bandy legs along, working his elbows. Stumpily built, he moved as though he was pedaling a tricycle, his head and shoulders bobbing through the low bush. The branches tore at Hock’s arms as he tried to part them. Snowdon ducked beneath them, hurrying onward, in the direction of Gala’s compound.

The path was a streak of pale powder in the starlight. Hock had once felt daunted, standing under the glittering stars of the night sky of the Lower River. To the villagers his stargazing was proof that he was a sorcerer. None of them knew him, or cared. Malabo, a landmark in his life, had been trifled with, corrupted, then ignored, and finally forgotten, of no use to anyone. That was why, walking fast down this dusty gutter of a path in the bush, he felt he was going nowhere, that he was lost, following the dwarf, who was wheezing and tumbling forward.

Entering the smoke smell of Gala’s compound, Hock saw only one lighted window at the front — the door shut, no one on the porch, Gala’s chair empty. The lantern light in the room threw the figures into relief, enlarging them, turning them into the silhouettes of three people, hunched over, not moving, not speaking, the shadows as sharp as black paper cutouts.

They were praying. Hock caught some of the words, Gala leading the others in slow imploring moans.

Clapping his hands to announce himself, Hock plucked the slumping door and dragged it open. The praying stopped. The three women he’d seen through the window, looking naked in the echo of their pleading, were ranged around a mat on the floor. The only sound now was from the figure on the mat, unrecognizable, wrapped in a striped towel, lying face-up, sighing softly. The face was bruised, the head enlarged, and one of the women was bathing the raw cut flesh, patting it with a wet cloth. Big winged beetles swung in circles around the lantern light.

“My God,” Gala said, dithering at the sight of Hock. She said it again. Goad.

But Hock was peering at the figure lying flat. It did not look like Zizi; that was not her face. But who else could it be?

One of the ceremonies mumbled in the dark — forbidden by the missionaries in Hock’s time — had been the spilling of chicken blood on the head of a crudely carved foot-high idol — misshapen, foreshortened, the head the size of a coconut. The larger the carving, the more clumsily it was made, with bits of glass inserted in the eye sockets that gave it a blind, half-alive stare. And the blood wrung from the beheaded chicken was so sticky, a fuzz of pin feathers adhered to its wood. This secret fetish had no name that could be uttered aloud because, smeared with the dried blisters of blood, it was an ugly potent thing capable of repelling evil.

The blood gave it subtlety and strength, simplified its hacked angles as if with thick paint, the coated splinters and plastered-on feathers making it more artful, with an aura of power, the gleaming blood lending it the sinewy density of bruised meat.

That was what Hock saw on the floor, a dark swollen head, the scalp split in places, with the chopped-apart raggedness of torn fabric. Puffy eyes, purple lips, the whole skull crusted in darkened drying blood that looked sacrificial.

Only the extreme grief of the women conveyed to Hock that it was not a big stiff fetish doll — that it might be human. The wide helpless hands and feet, their familiar size, the way they lay in repose, told him the bloody thing was Zizi.

“How is she?” He was far too fearful to ask the blunter question, whether she was alive.

“She was beaten,” Gala said. “And worse.”

Wuss meant everything. And now he heard a groan — she was alive. She opened her eyes, saw Hock in the lantern light, and began as though hiccupping to cry.

Yet her tears made him hopeful. He sensed life in her explosive sobs, a kind of self-awareness, the sobs coming from deep within her, from a part of her that was not broken.

Hearing her cry, Snowdon, peeking at the doorway, began to chuckle, as if the tears from someone in worse shape than he was provoked him to mock.

“Get out!” Gala said, and spat at him, as the dwarf limped to the door and cowered, covering his mouth. She repeated the cry distractedly in Afrikaans, as older people in the Lower River sometimes did, perhaps for its force: “Voetsak!”

Zizi was alive, she was murmuring, she shifted on the mat for a better look at Hock. He frowned, thinking that she had never looked younger, more childlike, less sexual; that an injured body aroused no desire in him, inspired only the wish to protect, and an acute fear for its appearing so vulnerable. She had cuts on her hands, and there was blood on the covering cloth and the old towel; the sheet was dotted with blood spatter. The woman who had been bathing her face began to dab her cuts with gentian violet. They wiped it on all the wounds, painting her purple.

“They found her near the boma, two women who are known to me,” Gala said. “They were form-two students here. Thanks be to God, they rescued her.”

“How did they bring her here?”

“They didn’t have a lift all the way. They were dropped by one of the fish trucks on the road, and they walked, just footing the rest. That is why she is so tired.”

This talk reassured Hock. He had not had to ask the dreadful question of whether she would live. She was badly injured, but he gathered from what Gala said that she would make it. And in the short time he’d been in the room, Hock could see that she’d begun to stir.

“Tell me what happened,” Hock said.

“Don’t trouble her,” Gala said in a whisper. “She is hurt. She is weak. And she is ashamed.”

It was apparent that she’d been attacked — she looked as though she’d fought off an animal. She is hutt. Baboons disturbed in the night would bare their doggy teeth, and bite and scratch. Hyenas were nocturnal and would attack a solitary person if they had the advantage. Worst of all — in the Lower River, anyway — were the packs of wild dogs, which snarled, circled their prey, and closed in, snapping their jaws.

But if it was any of these animals, none of the women said so; and he’d had the suspicion since entering the hut and hearing their sorrowing that it was a peculiar attack that went beyond a beating. They were grieving for her pain, and for something that had been lost: she had been violated.

She is ashamed meant only one thing. Zizi owned nothing, not even shoes, had no money, no ornament; not even the cooking pots were hers. She was a stick figure with no spare flesh, wrapped in a faded purple cloth. But she was a namwali; she had the glory of her virginity. She was known in the village for her aloofness, and it was this, in the beginning, that made her a prize for Hock — Manyenga’s prize. Her wholeness gave her power, made her desirable, and was perhaps a devious test for Hock. He knew this, which was why he had resisted, for in resisting he had proven himself stronger than them.

Besides, he knew that in her eyes he was hardly human, an old beaky mzungu in flapping trousers and a torn shirt. He would see himself with her eyes and be disgusted. All he could offer her was his protection. And he had made a point of keeping her safe, until three days ago, when out of desperation he’d floated the idea of mailing the letter at the boma at night. She’d been afraid, knowing it was the only thing he wanted, yet she’d set off alone. And now she was back from the boma, lying in her own blood. Bloodstains were stiffened in places on her cloth in dark, disc-like patches.

She seemed to rally a little since he’d arrived. She was inert, yet she followed him with her weepy reddened eyes.

“I think she’ll be all right,” Hock said to Gala, looking for reassurance.

“With God’s help,” she said, which left the question unanswered.

Hock crouched, about to kneel, when Gala tapped his shoulder, cautioning him, and she turned, making a downward gesture of her hand, paddling the air, urging him away.

The dwarf limped from the door, seeing Gala beckoning Hock onto the veranda. Zizi became fierce, her face set in anger, her lower jaw protruding. He had never seen this expression. She was indignant, refusing to die, clearly insulted — the abuse was apparent in the welts and scratches on her body — but something else showed through: the strength of her anger. She was trying to speak to Hock through her bruised lips.

She muttered a word Hock could not understand.

“Come away, Ellis,” Gala said, tugging his shoulder.

Turning from Zizi’s pleading, Hock followed Gala to the veranda. In the distance, at the edge of the slant of light thrown by the lantern at the open window, Snowdon knelt, scratching the scabs on his arm and murmuring — Hock guessed—“Fee-dee-dom.”

Hock said, “What do you know?”

“Only what the women told me who found her and fetched her here. They knew her. Why are you surprised?”

“Because the boma is so far from Malabo.”

“She is namwali. She is known. Girls suitable for marriage are well known in the district. I was her guardian until Manyenga took her for you.”

“You didn’t mind?”

“I knew you would look after her. An elder person is a swamp that stops a fire. But she wandered off.”

“You mean to the boma?”

“Yes. And at night. On a bicycle.”

Hock wondered whether he should tell Gala the reason for Zizi’s journey. He was about to speak when Gala resumed.

“The women could not recognize her at first, her face was so bloody. Her chitenje cloth was torn.”

Hock said, “Was Zizi going toward the boma or traveling away from it?”

“What difference does it make?” she said.

Then he knew he couldn’t tell her about the letter, because it seemed so petty, worrying about a letter when Zizi was lying injured inside the smoky hut. But the question was crucial. If the attack had occurred on her way to the boma, it meant she hadn’t mailed the letter, and he would be stalled again, and have to face the brothers.

“It was a blessing that the women were there.”

He said, “Why were they there at night?”

“Because of the hunger. You know the harvest will be poor?”

That and the lack of rain were the most common complaints of the villagers who had come to him for money, so common he’d begun to think of it as an excuse, perhaps a lie, because Manyenga always had food.

“There is little rice. There is no millet. Not much flour. We are eating cassava most of the time,” Gala said. “The Agency vehicle is making deliveries of bags of flour and rice and beans, taking them to the boma. The women wanted to be early — first in the queue for free rice.”

“But it’s not safe for them either.”

“They are women with small children. They are safe. They have nothing — no money, no valuables.”

“Zizi has nothing.”

In a reproachful tone, the light flashing on her face, Gala said, “She has what all women want. She is a maiden. She was a maiden. Now she is bleeding, because it was taken from her.”

Hock said, “That’s terrible.”

“You don’t understand. You are innocent. You don’t know anything.” The words were contemptuous, but Gala’s tone was rueful, softened by her fatalism.

“What don’t I know?”

“That such girls are taken by sick men. Men with the AIDS” —she said eddsi. “They take the girls if they can find them. They also take small children.”

Hock said, “I’ve heard of this.”

“They believe that sex with a virgin is a cure.”

He was too shocked to speak. He groaned, wishing he hadn’t heard.

“That is why Zizi was taken — sure.”

“She must have fought hard,” he said helplessly.

“So hard,” Gala said. “They had to beat her, to subdue her, and then they just”—she whipped her hand, the fatalistic village gesture, snapping her fingers. “It’s a shame.”

“Tell me she’ll recover, please.”

“With God’s help. No bones are broken, but you know what happens with wounds and bruises. They go septic so fast. We must prevent it.”

Then Hock remembered. “You said the women were going to the boma to get food from the Agency vehicle?”

“Yes.”

“Did they get the food?”

“They found Zizi. They never saw the vehicle.”

“Maybe it came and didn’t drop the food,” he said.

“Why do you say that?” Gala frowned at him. “It makes no sense. The job of the Agency vehicle is to deliver the food.”

“I don’t know,” Hock said. “I think I should go, but I want to say goodbye to Zizi.”

“She may be sleeping.”

But she was awake, her eyes half closed, her jaw set in the same determined way, as though enduring pain, struggling to stay alive. All her cuts had been painted with the gentian violet, and the patches of purple made her seem like a broken doll.

Putting his face close to hers, Hock said, “Zizi, can you hear me?”

She did not speak, yet she made a characteristic tightening of her face, a slight eyebrow flash, lifting them in recognition.

“Who was it?”

She groaned, her lips were dry and cracked, she could not form a word, though she showed her teeth, beautiful teeth, flecked with blood.

“Was it Aubrey?”

She winced as if pierced with a knife blade.

Hock considered this, and he wondered whether his whisper had been heard by Gala or either of the women, who’d kept their distance, to give him some privacy.

“The letter,” Hock said, and let this word, kalata, sink in. “What happened?” When she did not react, he said, “Did you post it?”

He waited, but she only rolled her head from side to side, snared by pain, and it seemed she was saying No or I don’t know.

Shortly afterward, when he left, Snowdon led him back through the darkness of the bush, chattering the whole way, perhaps feeling frisky after seeing the broken girl and the blood.

30

THE HEAT OF the Lower River, trapped beneath the white sky, penetrated the dust with the steam of its stillness, driving away all energy, sapping the strength of the people, withering the leaves that dangled limp on the low thorn bush. Malabo had never seemed flatter, quieter, more colorless, the heat baking it to a monochrome, like an old sun-faded photograph of itself.

Or was it their hunger that kept the people idle? Since the news that the upcoming harvest would be meager, Hock had noticed a perceptible slackening, a greater silence. He’d become used to shouts, yelps, the loud teasing of children, the singsong of scolding women. Now there were only murmurs. Something in the screech of the cicadas, like the scrape of a knife being sharpened on a wheel, or the burr and crackle of winged beetles, made the heat seem more intense. In the blinding muted daylight and humid air, in the village of mud huts that were crumbled like stale cake, he heard despair in the whispers, and the small children had stopped running.

He visited Zizi again, tramping through the tangle of bush at midday so he could gather snakes on the way. He plucked one from a swale of drifted sand, another from near a termite mound that rose like a cracked minaret of red dirt. And when he arrived at Gala’s, calling “Odi, odi,” she looked out from her veranda and saw two weighty flour sacks.

“What have you brought?” she asked, in the expectation of food.

He held the sacks up and swung them. She knew, she laughed, she said, “Snake Man Ellis.”

“Some people eat them.”

“But the Bible does forbid. Creatures that crawl on the belly are abominable and unclean. It is the law.”

“I agree,” he said. He knotted the tops of the sacks and slung them in the shade under the veranda. “How’s Zizi?”

“A little better.”

Zizi lay just inside the hut, propped against a pillow but still on the mat. Flat on the floor, she looked more like a casualty. She raised her hands to her bruised face when she saw him, as though in shame. “Pepani,” she said. Sorry.

He said, “Don’t worry,” and sighed at the futility of his words as soon as he spoke them — worse than futility, they represented helpless anxiety.

Behind him, holding a pitcher, Gala said, “I can’t offer you anything. Water only. Or tea.”

“What are you eating?” He took the plastic tumbler of water. The water was cloudy. He touched the tumbler to his lips but didn’t drink.

“Cassava alone. The rice is finished.” Gala arranged a bead-fringed doily over the top of the pitcher. “I would like to make scones for you. We have some dried fish. Some few bananas. Naartjies too. It is the situation.”

Hock lingered, and then went outside and leaned over the rail to look at the flour sacks quivering under the veranda, the squirming snakes inside. The sacks from Malabo were stamped with the shield logo and the words L’Agence Anonyme.

“I wish I had something to give you,” Hock said when he reentered the hut.

“You have given Malabo everything you had,” Gala said. “Your food has been eaten. Your money has been eaten. Your hope, too, all gone. We have eaten you.”

That made him remember why he had come. He knelt before Zizi and whispered, “The letter — did you post it?”

Her hands had slipped from her face as she’d watched him talk with Gala, but now with her fingers splayed, she covered her face again and began to cry.

And Hock thought: Why am I even asking? I don’t deserve for the letter to have been mailed. I’m responsible for this skinny bruised girl lying here, her cracked lips, her swollen eyes, the scales of dried blood peeling on her ears, and a much worse wound I can’t see that will never heal.

When he turned to go, gathering the sacks of snakes from the shade, Gala said, “Snake Man,” and nodded. “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as a serpent.” He leaned to kiss her, but she hissed into his ear, “The people are hungry. They will do anything.”

He wanted to say: Until I saw Zizi, I doubted that. Now I am prepared to believe anything.

But Zizi was better than yesterday, so he was hopeful for tomorrow. Still, given that he had sent her to the boma, he felt he did not deserve to be rescued.

“We are in God’s hands,” Gala said.

That was like surrender. Any mention of God filled him with despair.

Manyenga was waiting for him at his hut when he returned from Gala’s. Odd, the big man standing in the heat, because he seldom left his compound these days. He was someone who had plenty of food, and he guarded it.

“I hope you have something delicious in your gunny sacks,” Manyenga said.

“We shall see,” Hock said.

“I like the way you say that. Not yes, not no. Like a wise man.”

“That’s me, Festus.”

Manyenga said, “I have arranged a ceremony.”

“What ceremony?”

“To make you our chief.”

“But I’m already your chief,” Hock said in a weary voice, slinging the sacks onto his veranda.

“Of course, but we must have a proper ceremony, with dancers and drummers and music. That old blind man Wellington can play the mbira with his fingers. And then the voyage in a canoe. The float on the river.”

“And what would be the point of that?” Hock said, playing along. “You are my people.”

Manyenga laughed, then just as quickly scowled and became serious. “Yes. You belong to us.”

Until Manyenga had said that, Hock had been thinking, Everything this man says is a lie. The remark about “a wise man,” the references to the chief, the business about the “proper ceremony”—all lies. And that had been the case since the day he’d arrived. He had forgotten again the length of time he’d been in Malabo — three months now? But it was a guess. Maybe more. He knew the date of his arrival; it was stamped in his passport. But he did not know today’s date. No one in Malabo knew it. He was like them in this respect. He’d arrived after the planting, the rains had failed, the maize stalks were tiny, crowded by weeds, the pumpkin vines were withered and whitened with rot. Those were visible facts. The harvest would be poor. Everything else was a lie, every word he’d been told by Manyenga, most of what the others had said. Gala told the truth, but her only message, from the moment he’d seen her, had been: Get out, go home, save yourself.

The way that Manyenga had said, “You belong to us,” not with respect but with a growl of menace, reminded Hock that it was the one truth in a world of lies. They had always felt that Hock had been delivered, and his money had been taken. But much more serious than his money, his hope had been stripped from him.

“Festus, I’ve given you everything I have,” he said.

“Not everything. You are still our big man.”

“That’s me,” Hock said, and now, overcome with fatigue, he had to sit. He dropped to the edge of the veranda, near the sacks of snakes, and did not invite Manyenga to join him.

“You are our great chief and father.”

“With no money.”

“Even without money you are our father.” Manyenga, as always, whined the word, making it maahhnee.

“I have nothing more to give you.”

“But you have much,” Manyenga said. “You are a strong man.”

More lies. “I’m weak. I’m sick.”

“You are still so clever. You continue to plot, as a chief plots, whispering to this one and that one, and what and what.”

And then Manyenga laughed horribly, showing his good teeth, whinnying, insincere, too loud.

“I’m helpless.”

“You have your people. We are knowing.”

“What people?” Hock was indignant, straining to shout.

“Us.”

“You!”

“Yes, and the old woman. The little man with mkate. The girl.”

Mkate he knew as leprosy. Snowdon? That was news — or perhaps another lie. He’d thought the dwarf’s physical damage was from epilepsy, fits of falling down.

He said, “The girl Zizi was attacked.”

“At the boma. At night.” Manyenga spoke as though he was reciting the details of a crime she’d committed. “What was this young girl doing at the boma at night?”

“I have no idea,” Hock said with a dry mouth.

“As our chief you should know,” Manyenga said. “We believe she was sent there.”

Hock stared at him. That was another aspect of the darkness — that Manyenga knew everything and still he lied, pretending not to know.

“She was raped,” Hock said with all the snarling contempt he could muster.

Manyenga was not moved. “She went alone to the boma, through the bush at midnight.” He looked around, saw the dwarf, turned away, and added, “Did she expect something different?”

“She didn’t deserve to be raped.”

“But why did she go, my friend?” Manyenga said. “Maybe we will never know!” In a different, sterner voice he said, “The ceremony will be tomorrow.”

When Manyenga walked off, kicking across the clearing, Hock saw the brothers step from behind the great baobab stump and join him, heads down, conferring.

He knows everything, Hock thought. He has the letter. That was why Zizi was in despair; she believed she had failed him.

And so, in the time remaining before the ceremony the next day, Hock passed the hours in the only way he knew how. He paced the village, and the perimeter of the village, and the banks of the creek where the women were slapping their laundry on the smooth boulders. He carried a flour sack and his forked stick, and he gathered snakes. He found a puff adder sunning itself near the mango tree, a twig snake near the latrine, a nest of yellow-eyed snakes in the leaf trash of a decaying log; he found some more marsh vipers at the creek’s edge. They were weapons, they were friends, they were the only creatures in Malabo that had been neutral to him. He had destroyed Zizi, he had disappointed Gala. He had no other friends.

Like the shipwrecked sailor who befriends a vagrant bird with a broken wing, he sought the only creatures he knew would respond to his sympathy. He had nothing else. So they would not fight or eat each other, he separated the snakes into eight sacks.

When he looked for his knife to cut more flour sacks to sew into smaller bags, he saw it was missing. It was a cheap knife he’d bought as an afterthought, with boxes of food, from the market in Blantyre, but it had a sharp serrated blade. At the base of the blade, near the hilt, was a cutout for lifting bottle caps. In his time in Malabo he had not used the bottle opener. The few bottles of soda he’d drunk had been opened by Zizi, grimacing, with her side teeth. There had been no store-bought beer, only the plastic cups of home brew that was like sour porridge. Now the knife was gone and he felt defenseless and incompetent. It was bad that he had no knife; it was worse for him that someone else had it.

He slept badly; he was too hot, too hungry, to sleep well. He lay perspiring on his string bed, the mosquito net confining him, deadening the air.

He suffered the heat; it was something he’d never become accustomed to. He was hotter now than ever, more uncomfortable, because he was dirty and he felt ill, and his weakness made the heat harder to bear. The weight of it against his slimy skin made it no different from a fever.

The drumming pattered in his dream, and then seemed to wake him. He didn’t know whether he was still dreaming. He heard dogs barking, the hoarse helpless yapping of village mutts.

Then voices outside told him some people were near, and they tramped on the planks of his veranda, many feet, dry footsoles on splintered boards, and his door rattled and was yanked open, the iron bolt torn off the jamb.

He smelled them before he saw them. This is it, he thought. Manyenga’s “tomorrow” had meant the dark early morning. Moving figures stirred like upright shadows in his hut, muttering to each other, seeming not to know what to do next. He believed they were intimidated to be in the mzungu’s hut. They behaved strangely, unsure in their movements, tentative in their whispers.

“What do you want?”

“You, father.”

Hock lifted the ragged mosquito net as though peering from a tent. He recognized two of Manyenga’s sons, Yatuta and Aleke, and one of the brothers from the village of children, the one with the baseball cap. Without the other brothers this boy looked very young. The only light was that of a flashlight one of the sons was carrying, whisking the beam around the room, showing Hock how ramshackle the place looked. The beam lingered on the flour sacks that bulged on the floor, then swept across them.

“Why do you want me?”

“For the big dance.”

He’d said gule wamkulu. Hock knew the dance was secret and strange, not to be observed by an outsider.

It was pointless to ask any more questions. Too weak to resist, Hock swung his legs over and sighed and got up from his creaky bed. He felt the way a condemned man does, rising wearily on death row in the middle of the night to be executed.

One of the smaller boys, Aleke led the way across the clearing to Manyenga’s compound. The other two walked on either side of him, as if escorting him, and Hock scuffed along in rubber flip-flops, limping, falling forward.

Manyenga was waiting at the edge of the firelight, near where two drummers thumped and pounded.

“Welcome, chief.”

Hock was about to speak, but the walk — the boys moving quickly — had tired him, and he was breathless. He put his hands to his hips and bent over to catch his breath. He was hot, unshaven, hungry, his gray hair wild. His shirt was dirty — he was out of fresh laundry — his trousers torn, his feet grimy in his flip-flops.

“Chief, please sit. Here is your chair.”

The chair had been set up away from the heat of the fire but within the orbit of its light.

One of the brothers approached Manyenga, and Hock noticed that he was carrying a length of coiled rope, cheap yellow nylon braided like sisal.

“No,” Manyenga said, waving him away.

But the boy looked anxious, gesturing as though he intended to tie Hock’s hands.

Hock said, “What does he want?”

“He is thinking it is necessary to bind your wrists. But I tell him it is not necessary.”

“What are you doing to me?”

“We are promoting you,” Manyenga said.

“They’re taking me.” Hock’s throat constricted, full of fear, and he gagged again as he said, “This is an abduction. Why are you letting them? You warned me about them. You told me they were dangerous.”

“I never said those words.” Manyenga’s smug bureaucratic smile was one that Hock had seen before. He had assumed this smile whenever he rebuffed him; it would float across his lips, not always a smile, sometimes a sneer of pure contempt. He wore it now, as he said, “They are removing you, with our permission.”

“You can’t do that.”

“We must. We have nothing in the pipeline.”

His throat burning, Hock said, “What about my permission?”

“It is not necessary. You belong to us,” Manyenga said with the same smile, and he looked upon Hock as a kind of prize, according him the trophy status they reserved for the larger animals whose flesh they ate, whose skins they used as prestige objects. “You are ours. Our great chief.”

31

THE TATTERED FLAMES from the stack of snapping branches of their ritual fire lit Manyenga’s pitiless smile and reddened his eyes. He was the only muscular man in the village, and his potbelly, and the way he stood, in an assertive pose, made him seem overbearing. He was shorter than Hock, but solid. His shirt, a familiar print, was clean, and his trousers had a crease. His sandals were sturdy, and a good watch slipped on its too large band on his wrist. It was Hock’s own watch. Hock recognized the sandals as his, the shirt and trousers, too, and like the watch, these clothes had disappeared from his hut a month or more ago. Until now, he hadn’t seen Manyenga wearing the stolen things. By stripping him of his symbols and his wealth, Manyenga had begun to inhabit him.

“Now we must say bye-bye,” Manyenga said. “It is so sad for us, father.”

Manyenga clapped his hands, summoning the dancers, six or seven skinny girls, and some boys whose faces had been smeared with flour, making them ghostly — they stared from their white faces with dark eyes. A man appeared in a torn jacket, wearing a hawk-nosed helmet mask; shredded reed fibers were bound to his legs and arms, like a scarecrow. He walked stiff-legged and carried a fly whisk. He seemed a more forbidding figure for being so ridiculously dressed, like a dangerous lunatic with nothing to lose. Perhaps he was intended to be costumed as a white man.

The dance, the stamping, the pluckings of the mbira, meant nothing to Hock. In the years he’d spent in Malabo, and these months of his captivity, he had not been able to make sense of any of the nighttime dance ceremonies or songs. In his time, all the festivals had been Christian, with Bible readings and sermons. The church had vanished as completely as the school. Yet the secret memory of their drumming and dancing was known to the participants, if not the spectators. Or maybe there was no deeper meaning beyond the syncopation, as in the Likuba, like a conga line, the moving bodies in the firelight, the yodeling, the jumping shadows.

Hock sat like a condemned man, awaiting the moment of death, helpless, stunned by the assault of the drumming, the chaotic dancing, the puppet-like jigging of the skinny girls, the yelps of the white-faced boys, and the bawling of the villagers. It pained him to be closely watched by the three brothers, who were seated on the ground, and by Manyenga, smiling, delighted by the drumming and dancing.

“Ah, the vehicle!” Manyenga cried out as the cones of headlights swung into the clearing, the beams lighting the stony ground and the sloppily whitewashed boulders that marked the perimeter of the chief’s compound.

The brothers rose and approached the vehicle — a white van that had crushed through the low bushes — and conferred with the driver. Hock could tell by the logo and the name L’Agence Anonyme that it was the same van that Aubrey had driven him in his failed escape.

“Back up, turn around,” Manyenga called out, first in English and then in Sena, giving explicit commands. And hearing the efficiency of the orders, Hock remembered how Manyenga had told him he’d been a driver for the Agency.

With the arrival of the van, the dancers had ceased their stamping and clapping. The drum rhythms slowed to a scraping patter on the drumheads as the van backed up, jerked forward, then turned and repeated this until the rear of the vehicle was facing the circle of spectators. Pleased with himself, his face gleaming in the firelight, Manyenga marched over and slapped the rear door of the van. “Open!” he called. He yanked the handle, pounded the doors again, and then, frustrated, he roared and the drum patter stopped.

Now a small figure rounded the van from the driver’s side. He poked a key into a slot in the door handle, as Manyenga hovered, and swung the doors open.

The dancers and spectators rushed forward and crowded the van, to marvel at the sacks of flour and rice, the cartons of milk powder, the stacked crates with labels that identified them as beans, marmalade, ketchup, salt, baby food, syrup, corned beef, chicken parts, creamed corn, pickles, and more. Some of the boxes were stenciled, others had colorful labels. Hock’s first thought was how clean the cardboard was, how well stacked the boxes, the order of them, absurdly framed by the dusty compound and scattered firewood, the hungry people gloating over the load like the jubilant, rewarded faces of a cargo cult.

It was more than food: it represented influence far beyond the village. It was wealth. This penetration of the outer world was something like belief, a concentration of visible power. Small children jumped up and down at the sight of it, others pushed for a better look, and there was a howl of hunger in the laughter.

“We will now unload,” Manyenga said, and he directed some of the bigger boys to begin stacking the crates against the wall of his hut.

All the attention was directed at the van, the food, the process of unloading, the interior of the van growing emptier, larger, as the crates and boxes were removed. The very size of the boxes excited interest. Kitchen Magic Toaster Oven on one box and Electro-Mop on another; but since Malabo had no electricity, these items were no more than random loot.

Hock had turned away and was looking at the one person who seemed indifferent to the spectacle of unloading. It was the driver, that small skinny person who had unlocked the rear doors of the van — Aubrey.

Hock stared at him. Aubrey’s face was scratched, welts had been raised on his cheeks in places, and he wore a white bandage on his neck. His arms had been raked, too, and one of his wrists was wrapped in a thickness of gauze. Alerted by Hock’s staring, Aubrey jerked his head away. He blinked, shifted his posture, and touched his face. Then he stepped back, as though cowering.

“You!” Hock called out, and in the confusion of unloading no one heard him, or rather, only Aubrey heard. The shout was enough to make him hesitate.

Hock rose from his chair and took three long strides to where Aubrey was standing. As soon as he had gotten out of the chair he’d felt the strain of the effort, and the thought came to him: I am weak.

Pure fury had carried him forward, and when he reached Aubrey he did not hesitate. He swung and slapped his face with such force the young man lost his balance and fell against the legs of some women who were celebrating the arrival of the food. Aubrey tried to regain his footing, but while he was on his knees, Hock hit him again, slapping him with his sore hand, and Aubrey slumped to the ground. He crouched, whimpering, making himself small.

All Hock’s anger, months of frustration, stiffened the muscles in his arm and gave strength to that slap, delivered so hard his hand stung. He hoped that such a slap might flay the skin from the young man’s face. Hock stood over him, to assess the pain he’d inflicted, as Aubrey crawled on all fours, away from the firelight and into the shadows near one of Manyenga’s huts.

The children who’d been so excited by the sight of the food were distracted by the sudden fight, and they grouped around the groveling Aubrey, kicking out at him, while the women mocked. The attention shifted from the van to the sight of Hock following Aubrey, the screeching children urging Hock to slap him again, crying, “Fight! Fight!”

That was when Manyenga stepped in. He placed himself between Hock and Aubrey. He shouted for silence, he roared again, and when the crowd became quieter he began a speech in English — Hock realized it was for him to hear — and that it was so loud and so pompous, in a language that most did not understand, assured Manyenga of their close attention. Holding his mouth open when he spoke, he affected a gagging British accent.

“This is an auspicious night,” Manyenga said. “Never mind that our chief is angry. He has brought us good luck. He was here long ago and he returned to find us wanting and poor. So he did his level best to give us help—”

Hock turned his back on him. He could not bear listening. He walked a little distance and saw that the van was empty now. All the boxes had been piled near one of Manyenga’s huts, and a blue plastic tarpaulin was being fitted over the pile and fastened to keep the dust off. Manyenga was taking possession of it all.

“—the mzungu is our dear father. Without him we would be lost. We are therefore offering him a promotion.”

As he spoke, standing near the fire so that he could be seen, glorying in the uprush of sparks from the flames, Manyenga commanded the attention of the entire crowd. Only Hock was not watching, and hardly listening. He saw a small hunched-over figure bobbing in the shadows behind the van, so small he was hardly visible.

“This is our ceremony of farewell,” Manyenga said. “You, find the driver. Make him ready,” he added, shoving one of the brothers. “He must stand up. He cannot be intimidated by a little slap in the face. It is time to say goodbye.”

The small bobbing figure — was it Snowdon? — moved around the van, efficiently, close to the ground, and then was gone, and when Hock looked again he saw Aubrey emerge from the crowd covered in dust, one side of his face swollen. Hock stepped forward, intending to hit him again. But his arm was snatched and held, his other arm gripped. He was restrained so tightly he couldn’t move.

“Shut him in the van,” Manyenga said to the two boys holding Hock.

“Festus, wait,” Hock said, struggling.

“But we must,” Manyenga said.

“You’re selling me — I know you’re selling me,” Hock said. “Why are you doing this?”

In his affected British accent that was like gargling, Manyenga said, “We are doing so because we are hungry.”

“And what will they do with me?”

“Those boys will tend to you,” Manyenga said. “And one day you will be released to your people.”

“I want to be released now.” Hock heard the gulp of a whimper in his own voice.

At this, perhaps maddened by the whimper, Manyenga screamed and lost his British accent. “You mzungu can go anywhere! You people can do what you like. You are free to just come and go because you have maahhnee! This is a little holiday for you, but this is our whole life, as we are condemned to live on the Lower River forever!”

Hock said simply, “I’ve given you all my money.”

“Because you hate us and demand us to stay here,” Manyenga raged, bug-eyed, obstinate in his evasive temper. “You insult us with food, you throw it to us like animals. We are not your monkeys now. Take him away!”

“Help me,” Hock said to the women standing near him.

Manyenga laughed, and with a bleak fanatical stare he put his sweaty face against Hock’s. “They will do nothing for you. If my people do not obey me, their paramount chief, it will mean a lifelong infamy for them.”

Seeing Manyenga’s defiance, the women began to jeer at Hock, and the children took up the cry. Hock remembered his fever, the time he’d fallen in the clearing, severely dehydrated. Then, the women had laughed so hard that Snowdon was emboldened to kick him in the face, occasioning more laughter. And oddly, with that memory present in his mind, Hock believed he saw Snowdon hurrying into the darkness with his lopsided gait — the way you might be thinking of a person for no reason and then, coincidentally, the next moment you see him walking down the street.

As he was led to the van — again he felt like a condemned man — Hock heard cursing, a deep serious denunciation, its helpless abuse in great contrast to the hilarity and the speeches and the children’s laughter. He heard Manyenga conferring, and Manyenga’s consternation.

“You are a devil,” Manyenga said, drawing his lips back from his big teeth.

Hock was too weary to react, but if he’d been able to summon the strength, he would have jeered at Manyenga as the villagers had jeered at him.

“Someone has slashed the tires,” Manyenga said with venom. “One of your people. It was done with your knife. We have no knife sharp enough.”

The cheap knife from Blantyre, with the serrated edge, had been stolen from his hut. Had it been Snowdon, whom he’d almost certainly just seen in the shadows near the van? And now, though it was an effort — he wanted them to know how he felt — Hock did laugh.

“This is bloody stupid,” Manyenga said. In his anger, he lost all his guile.

So the ceremony of farewell ended as many of the ceremonies in Malabo ended, in confusion and disorder, and with an air of exhaustion, around a dying fire of black skeletal embers.

As the disappointed villagers vanished into the darkness, Hock returned to his hut. He wasn’t saved — he knew that — but he was reprieved for the night. He was being watched: the brothers glared at him as he left. He went to bed and, wearied by fear, slept soundly.

In the morning, nothing had changed. The village was no different from the first morning of his visit months ago — hot, passive, with the burned-toast smell of wood smoke, the thick damp air under the white sky, the sight of scarred mopane trees and dusty leaves and the perimeter of elephant grass, and a sepulchral suggestion of decay from the latrine. Malabo had felt like this forty years before. It was why he had come back. It was why he now waited, hopelessly, to leave. But he had been sold to the brothers. He would probably be transported to the village of children on the riverbank and confined until he was ransomed. He became aware, with alarm, that the only sound he heard was the gasp and catch of his own breathing.

The white Agency van was still parked at the edge of Manyenga’s compound, on flat tires. Another day of heat and hunger, another day of his thinking, This is my life now. He knew he was living like a sick man. But nearly everyone in Malabo lived that way, either sitting or lying down, and the tone of every remark, even the lies and the sour hopes, was part of the sickness. He smiled at the thought that the long Agency van looked like an ambulance or a hearse.

A number of villagers — the women who would have been hoeing the gardens, the men who usually lolled under the mango tree, and many children — gathered at his hut, knowing that he was soon to be taken away. In the foreground, Snowdon squatted, gnawing the fingers of one hand with a befuddled smile, his fool’s license. In the other hand he held the knife with the serrated blade.

Standing in his doorway, Hock held up two of the bulging sacks that he’d removed from the veranda to the shadows under his bed. He shook them to prove that they had weight.

“Tell Festus Manyenga that I still have money and food in these sacks in my hut. And there are more,” he said. “After I’m gone, he can have them. You can all have them.”

He had spoken in Sena, so even the children understood, and some of them ran to inform their chief of this good news.

And when, in the middle of the hot morning, lying in his string bed, he heard an engine straining, he knew the van had been repaired, the tires patched and pumped up. He guessed that Aubrey — the rapist — was at the wheel of this van, which had been paid for by donations from sympathetic people all over the world. The van, emptied of its food, for which he had been traded, food that was now Manyenga’s, would carry him away to be kept as a hostage.

The engine sounded querulous as the van maneuvered in the clearing, being put into position so he could be loaded into the cargo hold where the boxes had been. He was a reasonable swap for the food stolen from the Agency; he’d be held and haggled over and sold again. He was no more than a carcass, but he knew they’d have to feed him and keep him alive if they were to sell him. That gave him a flicker of comfort.

Yet in his heart he believed he would die. He had felt that for some time — that he’d returned to Africa to die. In his months in Malabo he’d had intimations of death; in an African village, death was ever present. He had lost the strength to object, and not even his anger could rouse him to resist.

But looking out through the patched screen of his hut window, expecting the van, he saw instead a sleek black Jeep. Accustomed to being subverted, he felt a greater despair at the sight of the newer, more powerful vehicle, probably another from the Agency. This one was a sinister intimidating size, with fat unslashable tires.

Just then, as he faced the Jeep, a quacking American voice was raised across the clearing, a disbelieving voice, harsh in its contradiction, saying, “But we know he’s gotta be here somewhere!”

Repeating its complaint, the quacking carried all that distance, from near Manyenga’s compound — stern, scolding, full of authority.

Hock stepped out of the hut for a better look, and saw, crossing the stony ground near the baobab stump, a pink-faced man in a shirt and tie. The man caught sight of Hock and walked faster. Then, all business, he turned and called out behind him to his driver.

“Bring up the car!” He wiped the perspiration from his face with a neatly folded white handkerchief. He was near enough to offer a handshake. “You must be Hock — almost didn’t recognize you. Quite a letter. Where are your things?”

A kick of hope in his gut made Hock tearful. “I don’t have any things.”

“Take it easy, sir,” the man said. Hock knew him from Blantyre but in his muddle could not think of his name. He was young, dependable, with a good shirt, a silk tie, a linen jacket. “You’ll be all right.”

Swallowing a sob, Hock said, “There’s someone else coming with us.”

In the small screen of the rearview mirror skinny arms and small faces were sucked into the distance, jumping children and staring men, pinched by the receding road and the shaken curtains of elephant grass. From the dark water glinting at the end of trampled paths he saw that he was leaving the river behind, surfacing after months of holding his breath.

Now he could breathe. The girl — no longer a girl — sat upright in the speeding Jeep. Even seated she was stately; even wounded, with blood crusts of damage on her face, she was radiant for seeming unafraid; innocent, too, gladdened by the strangeness, smiling at the turbulent grass in the slipstream. She’d never been up this road before. Strengthened by her smile, Hock felt purposeful with her beside him.

The dust rose behind the van, a brown rearing dust-snake. Each time he looked there was more dust, uncoiling in pursuit, but so like a dissolving mirage that he stopped looking back, and lifted his eyes from the mirror to the wider road ahead.