The Lower River Page 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Does she live in Malabo?”

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

  “You know where she lives?”

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

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

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

  “How do you know her?”

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

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

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

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

  “No more British,” Hock said.

  “In the Lower River nothing change.”

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

  “Gala’s not coming?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Can you take me to her hut?”

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

  “Today?”

  She clicked her tongue against her teeth, a yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Mamba,” she said.

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

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

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

  “Not far,” Zizi said.

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

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

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

  “How far?” he asked.

  “Near. I can hear.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Remember me?”

  “Yes, I do indeed!”

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

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

  “Tea,” Hock said, fearing the water.

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

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

  “You’re surprised to see me?”

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

  “You knew I was there?”

  “You arrived on the fifteenth, not so?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’m okay.”

  “My granddaughter is looking after you.”

  “You know that too?”

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

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

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

  “And that’s why they chose Zizi?”

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

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