The Lower River Read online

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

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

  “It’s changed,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Zizi isn’t angry,” he said.

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

  “How many children do you have.”

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

  “I take a pill every day.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Doing my best,” Hock said.

  “Please take care.”

  “You sound worried.”

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

  “When did it fall apart?”

  “Some few years after you left.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “So I can’t trust anyone?”

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

  “She’s, what, sixteen?”

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

  “No chinamwali for her?”

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

  Hock glanced at the girl. “Pretty young.”

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

  “I had no idea. You were a teacher.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  14

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

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

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

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

  “I can do it, Festus.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “A doctor has come.”

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

  “At the clinic.”

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

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

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

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

  “Where’s his vehicle?”

  “He has no vehicle,” Zizi said.

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

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

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

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

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

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