The Lower River Read online

  He spent much of his time at the zoo’s Snake House, always on weekdays so he could be alone—no families, no schoolchildren, no one tapping the glass of the snake cages.

  The Snake House also contained some loud screeching birds; it was warm, damp most days, the air ripe with the scaly stink of snake and the tang of their piss, of the fat coiled bodies of the snakes in the cages, and the ancient reptilian odors that seemed like the emanations from an old tomb. On these December days in the overheated Snake House, the sun shining through the skylights, seeing a thick snake slipping from beneath a boulder to bask on the heated gravel of its cage, Hock would often close his eyes and listen to the birds and inhale the snakes’ sharp odors and imagine he was back in Malabo.

  3

  ON THOSE DAYS at the zoo, in his reverie, Hock remembered the Lower River, the southernmost part of the southern province, the poorest part of a poor country, home of the Sena people. The Sena, a neglected tribe, despised by those who didn’t know them, were associated with squalor, cruelty, and incompetence. And his village, Malabo, was so small, just a cluster of huts, a tiny chapel, and a primary school that he’d helped build, that on the rare occasions when he was buying supplies in Zomba or Blantyre, he’d say, “I live in Port Herald,” because no one would know his village. In his time, Port Herald was renamed Nsanje, but Malabo remained Malabo, unknown to anyone outside the district.

  From Blantyre to Chikwawa, the road south, below the escarpment, was a sliding surface of loose rocks and deep sand, slow in any season and sometimes impassable in the rains. And bypassing Malabo it narrowed to a dead end, at the pinched-off frontier of Mozambique, then known as Portuguese East. Beyond the frontier lay the Zambezi, one of its obscurest reaches, wide and shallow: no bridge, hardly any villages, only dugout canoes piled with contraband that bumped among the sandbanks. The Shire River at Port Herald was a feeder to the Zambezi, thick with goggling hippos and the snouts of crocodiles, and not navigable higher up except by canoe, because of the Elephant Marsh. The marsh had defeated David Livingstone, who famously dismantled his steamer on the riverbank and sent it north in pieces on the heads of his porters.

  The floods in the wet season isolated the villages on the Lower River; the hot season brought temperatures of well over a hundred in the shade. Records were so dire they weren’t worth keeping. October the settlers at the boma called the Suicide Month, because of the heat, but November could be even hotter. The land was low-lying and malarial, the Sena people mocked for holding to their traditions of child marriage, polygamy, and witchcraft. The boma at Port Herald had a generator, the district commissioner’s house was lit; but two hundred yards away the light faltered against a wall of darkness. One school served the district, yet the fees kept most students away, and the children were needed in the fields. Cotton was one of the crops, rice another, and maize and vegetables were tended in the low-lying dimbas, which were always full of snakes. Small girls looked after infants, and small boys helped their fathers fish from the canoes.

  Mud huts, thatched roofs, the hot dust holding footprints in powder on narrow paths; and the silence of the solemn sun-baked bush was broken only by the wolf whistles of certain birds and the screech of insects like the howl of one untuned violin string under a dragging bow. In the mornings he was woken by the shapely notes of birdsong.

  One of the first sights he’d beheld as a young teacher was a pair of naked children, the smaller one with his head bowed, the girl child delousing his hair, picking through his scalp, an elemental image of intimacy.

  The heat meant that the Sena people wore few clothes, the men tattered trousers rolled to their knees, and a ragged shirt was more symbolic than useful. The women, bare-breasted, wore a wraparound, an nsalu or a chitenje cloth. Showing your legs was considered immodest; even the men unrolled their trousers whenever they were away from the river. But they wore only scraps of clothing in the Nyau dance, sometimes a monthly event, which went on all night, the mganga wearing a grotesque mask, the drumming growing more frenzied as dawn approached. That ceremony was a way of easing bewitchments. Initiations were another thing. The Sena men initiated the young girls, and in a hyena’s pelt, a man would engage in an elaborate defloration. When a man died, his earthly goods were dispersed—plucked from his hut by neighbors—and within a day or two the widow had sex with her brother-in-law beside her husband’s corpse, and thus became his junior wife. Women were forbidden from whistling, from drinking beer, from eating eggs, from owning a dugout. The Lower River was populous, but beyond the boma no building was more than six feet high, and so the bush seemed uninhabited, or just more mud; many of the termite mounds were taller and more symmetrical. A shoe was a novelty; even the word for shoe, nsopato, came from the Portuguese, as nsalu was derived from sari.

  The Sena people were small, slender, delicate, and violent only when they were bingeing. They did not seem strong, yet they could paddle all day against the current of the river, especially when they were fortified by puffs of chamba, the local form of marijuana.

  Most meals were the same: porridge of nsima, steamed white corn flour, or rice; greens stewed to a sliminess; and sometimes a small river fish or a segment of roasted eel. Chicken was served on feast days, but there were few feasts.

  The Sena lived in a web of beliefs. The Lower River was thick with spirits, mfiti, most of them vindictive specters of the dead, restless in their malevolence. Nothing happened without a reason. A tree fell because someone wished it down, a thatched roof caught fire because someone prayed for the flames. Disease, disfigurement, a bad harvest, a broken bone, a stillborn infant—all were caused by human agency, the witch in the next hut or the next village, or the mfiti representing an avenging soul. Now and then a Belgian priest visited, a White Father from the mission at Thyolo, and said Mass in starched magnificence. He had a little medical skill and jars of pills that he distributed as though giving communion. “L’Afrique profonde,” he once confided to Hock, then left on his motorcycle.

  The year turned on two parallel activities: for the men, the rising of the river and their opportunities to fish; for the women, the sequence of planting the garden dimbas, rice and maize and cotton—preparing the land in October, putting the seeds in before the rains, weeding for months, and the harvest in June. Then the grinding of the maize in the hand-cranked mills, and later the slashing and burning of the fields, so dramatic inland, the low hills alight, the snakes of flame thrashing on the slopes.

  In his first year, village life had seemed a struggle to Hock. But the effort had a point; and for periods, sometimes a month or more, especially after the harvest, there was nothing for the men to do but drink the yeasty village beer they called mowa, or nipa, the gin distilled from sprouted maize or banana peels. In those quieter months, the women brought their corn to be milled into flour and gathered firewood. The children looked after each other, and older girls carried the babies.

  Bhagat’s General Store at the boma stocked Sunlight soap, Koo ketchup, cooking oil, bottles of Lion Lager, cigarettes sold singly, and loose tobacco and tea. But few people had more than a few tickeys, the thin gray threepence pieces that bought two cigarettes. The market stalls sold vegetables and rice, smoked fish and cassava. Not much of anything, but in all the time he’d lived there, Hock decided that you didn’t need any more than that.

  At first glance, the Lower River seemed to have no population, because people stayed out of the sun. They crept in the shadows, in the sheltered courtyards of their huts, under the trees, in the elephant grass, on the riverbank.

  After a year, Hock understood the inflections of the weather. It was not the stifling, squalid place of its reputation; it was dense and subtle. The heat enlivened him. The smells were of wood smoke and stagnation and the perfume of the water hyacinths in the river, sweetish with decay; the sun-heated dust was like talcum.

  Hidden in the high grass was Malabo, inland from the river in Ndamera District, on the road to Lutwe. To the south, the tall trees in th
e distance were the mopane forests in Mozambique. By tradition, the people of Malabo were allowed to keep boats on the landing near Marka—one of them, a large hollowed-out log, could hold six paddlers. It was a day’s paddle through the Dinde Marsh to the main channel of the Shire, and three days to the Zambezi.

  Teaching at the primary school he’d helped to build at Malabo, Hock had become popular in the district, and when the local member of parliament paid a visit to Nsanje, he’d asked to meet Hock, to verify what the villagers had told him—their requests for a clinic and road mending and a new roof for the market. The MP had a second family in Zomba, so he seldom visited the district.

  Hock served as a counselor, wrote letters for the villagers, sent messages, and read letters for those villagers who couldn’t read, whispering the words for the sake of privacy. All the languages in the region were written phonetically, so he could convey the meaning even when he didn’t have any idea of what was written on the torn-out copybook page.

  In the first year, he improved the existing school building, bought sheets of corrugated pressed fiberglass for the roof, and put up a new brick latrine they called the chimbudzi. In his second year, he organized brickmaking and built a second block of classrooms, with a wide veranda that served as a stage where he conducted morning assembly.

  The villagers had pitched in. His fellow American teacher hated the Lower River, and Malabo particularly, but got no sympathy from Hock and begged to be transferred. So Hock was alone, out of touch; he seldom left the district, and the telephone at the boma was unreliable. By the light of a Tilley lamp Hock corrected copybooks and sometimes read. He had never forgotten reading The Death of Ivan Ilych, especially the death scene, because of the fizzing and flickering of the lamp. Hock learned the Sena language and was one of those volunteer teachers about whom the other Americans talked with respect tinged with satire, because they never saw him, and no one wanted to go to the Lower River.

  For the Sena he was the mzungu, then the American, and at last Snake Man. He fell in love with a Sena woman who was a student teacher in Port Herald. Her name was Gala. She had dark, slanted, almost Asiatic eyes, suggesting Zulu ancestry, a thin face, a perpetual frown that showed she was trying not to laugh, and usually a head wrap that contrasted in color with her long gown-like dress. He invited her for tea, welcomed her into his house, and urged her to sit on his bed, where he joined her. But when he embraced her, she resisted him so strenuously he knew she was not a coquette but was defending her virtue, and he was ashamed. She explained that she had been promised to a man from her village near the boma, and that if it became known that she slept with Hock, the man would reject her and not hand over the bride price of three cows her father had demanded. Her fiancé was a party official, and she suggested that he was well connected.

  Still, Hock had considered wooing her, persuading her father that he was worthy, and perhaps marrying her, becoming a resident, staying in the country, raising a family, spending his life there.

  The term was two years. Hock stayed almost four—later judged to be a record for any foreigner in the hot, miserable, bug-ridden, swampy Lower River, among the half-naked Sena people and their procrastinations.

  The happiest years of his life.

  4

  THE LOWER RIVER remained in his mind in the way that the notion of home might persist in someone else’s. When all hope is lost and everything is up the wall, he thought, reassuring himself, I can always go back there. As for Gala, because he’d loved her and been denied sex with her, he’d never stopped thinking about her—perhaps his desire persisted as a yearning through all those years because fulfillment had been thwarted.

  What was it about having lived in Africa that made him so certain of it as a refuge? Africa cast a green glow in his memory, and its capacity for happiness occupied his mind. He had been much more than a mere visitor or resident. He had worked there, he was invested there, he felt proudly proprietary about Africa, though it was something he believed so strongly he never spoke about it. He was obscurely offended when he read of a celebrity who’d started a school in Africa, or a billionaire who’d funded a medical intervention, or an actress adopting an African child, or an actor involving himself in a pacification effort among warring tribes. That was the effect of Africa, of the people and the great spaces, and its simplicity. Maybe outsiders felt that in this green preindustrial continent it might still be possible to avoid the horrors that had come to Europe—war, machines, materialism, frozen food—to develop a happier place. He often felt that, as well as a sense of responsibility, almost the conceit of ownership. As long as Africa remained unfinished, there was hope. But the name Africa—grand and meaningless—was just his code word for the Lower River.

  He was alone again after almost thirty-five years.

  He’d made an early success of the business; he’d been happy as a father and husband. But the business was destroyed by imports and cheap competition, and his family had fallen apart. These weren’t failures. You had to adapt and go on living. He had enough money to see himself into his old age, yet he wanted more than that: the joy he’d known as a young man in Africa. Nothing he’d gained in his life had matched the pleasure he’d known then. Even at the time he’d thought, I have everything I want.

  Looking back, he saw that it had all been a digression—business, marriage, children. Now, at sixty-two, he had money, he had all the time in the world. Apart from reading—travel, some natural history, snakes—he had no recreations. His family had been fractured, the parts dispersed. No one needed him.

  For years he’d thought of going away, but he never had. A vacation was a burden, idleness was a burden, and he had a store to look after. But when he found a buyer—the electronics chain, specializing in cell-phone technology, which saw potential in the location—he had no excuse for procrastinating.

  Now he had a plan. He had a destination—Malabo. He even had a departure date, yet he was uneasy about leaving, uneasy just thinking about it. Something important remained to be done, but what? He could not imagine what it might be, yet it mattered—one of those anxious thoughts that troubled his mind when he woke in the old Medford High condo he’d begun to hate. Was it a debt he’d incurred, a promise he’d made, a threat against him in the dream he’d interrupted by waking from it?

  He had never stopped thinking about Africa, yet he hadn’t dared to let it preoccupy and possess him, because he’d felt it would remain unrealized, a torment. But the woman’s snake had brought it all back, given his reverie a distinctive smell, the odor of earth and straw, the rich vegetable aroma of snake flesh, the crackly hum of old snake skin that had been shed and that lay like a white ghost-husk of the snake itself.

  The experience of the snake had directed him, and without any help or consultation he had gone online, found a flight to Malawi and a good fare, found a connecting flight to Blantyre, a hotel there, conducted the whole business without speaking to a single soul. Using his computer, paying by credit card, he felt self-consciously secretive, as if he was planning something illicit, sneaking away, escaping to Africa.

  Yet he’d wanted to share his excitement with at least one person. Not sharing it made him feel covert in a way that suffocated him and made him superstitious. He wished that Teya had been a listener, that she’d known him better, so he could startle her by saying out of the blue, “By the way, I’m leaving. Going to Africa.”

  I’m clearing out, he wanted to say, even if, as he knew, it was only for a few weeks.

  He wanted someone to know he was going. Without a cell phone, he began to send Deena an email from his computer. He had rehearsed what he was going to tell her.

  As he typed his message to her, tapping the keys, no more than two sentences into it, he imagined her reply. After such a long marriage he knew exactly what she would say. She wouldn’t reply by email. She would find a way of calling him—he had a landline in his condo—saying, “That is so you, announcing what you’re going to do—no give-and-take
, just a flat pronouncement, and what I want to know—let me finish—is what—I said let me finish—what on earth has this got to do with me?”

  So he did not send the message. He deleted it, then considered one to Chicky, and heard in his mind, “Great, giving yourself a vacation while Dougie and I stay home. Ever occur to you that we could use a vacation? You never took one when Ma and I went to the Cape year after year. Ever occur to you . . .?”

  He did not even start a message to Chicky.

  He wanted someone to be interested. More than that, he wanted someone to know where he was going—someone who’d still be here when he returned, someone to tell his stories to, someone to look at his pictures. He could not go without someone knowing. Leaving without a farewell was too depressing, too spooky, like a ghost dissolving, vanishing into the woodwork. Who?

  Royal Junkins—Roy—he had known since grade school. Not an intimate friend—he had none—but a close friend, a bright boy in elementary school, a standout runner in junior high, a track star in high school. He was someone who actually owned a car, at a time when Hock’s father said it was something they couldn’t afford to give him. And Roy Junkins had given Hock rides whenever he’d seen him waiting for the bus. Hock’s house in the Lawrence Estates was not far from Roy’s on Jerome Street, but it was years before they visited each other’s house. Anyone from Medford would have understood this immediately. Jerome Street was black, the Lawrence Estates white. It was not unthinkable, just awkward for a white person to stroll down Jerome, just as awkward and unlikely as a black face in the Lawrence Estates. But they were friends on the neutral ground of school, and it was Roy’s car they used for the senior prom.

  Roy had gone to college on a track scholarship in Rhode Island, and after that he had disappeared, reemerging in the 1970s with stories of California and foreign travel and hints of having made and lost a lot of money on drugs. In the way that Roy had turned up at school, always with a good story, he then visited Hock at the store. He too had been to Africa, he said, purely on a whim, in one of his flush years; and he was one of the few people to whom Hock had confided his happiness on the Lower River.