The Lower River Read online

  “He says—I can see his face now, ginger hair, freckles, those cretinous Bermuda shorts—‘He’s on the Lower River.’” Fogwill nodded and smiled and showed his tooth. “It was you.”

  “We had a celebration there,” Hock said.

  “Were you here in Batley’s time? He was the rugger player. Remember Ray Castle? We called him Castle Lager, after the beer.”

  Mario tapped the chessboard and said, “Your move.”

  “What about Worley-Dodd? He had the Land Rover dealership. Married an Ismaili bint. And Bill Fiddes? Nyasaland Trading Company? ‘This is my UK woolly,’ he’d say in his pullover on those cold days when the chiperoni came down like sleet. And Major Moxon at the Gymkhana Club. Fred Horridge and his horrible restaurant. No sense of smell—bit of a handicap in a chef, what?”

  “Norman,” Mario said, making an impatient Italian gesture with cupped hands.

  “Jumping Jimmy Jesus, he wants me to thrash him again,” Fogwill said, and then to Hock, “Go to the lake. It’s beautiful there, like it always was.” But he’d kept his head down as he was speaking, studying the board, and did not look up, just grunted, when Hock said goodbye and left.

  At first Hock was sorry he’d spent the morning with this man. It had meant that leaving today was out of the question, that he’d have to leave in the morning. But he softened. It was a good thing that Fogwill knew he was going to the Lower River—someone else to say farewell to, someone else to have him in mind, like Gilroy at the consulate.

  And that night, hearing the music from the Starlight, the drumbeats thumping at the walls of his room, he thought how, long ago, he had toyed with the notion of courting Gala in Malabo, wooing her away from the man she’d been promised. She was lovely. They would have children. They would live on the Lower River and Hock would go on teaching—running the school, turning out brilliant students. But no—and he smiled at this: in the course of time, Gala would leave him, the children too, and he would be skinny, toothless, reminiscing in a coffee shop, killing time. Fogwill was the man he’d have become if he had stayed.

  PART II

  The Mzungu at Malabo

  7

  SUMMONED AT SIX from the parking lot to the travel desk in the lobby, the hotel driver laughed when Hock said that he wanted to be dropped at Nsanje. The driver wore a blue baseball cap and sunglasses, and the top buttons of his shirt were undone, a gold neck chain showing; his shoes were narrow and stylish, with thin soles. He was a city man, who would never have heard of Malabo village.

  “Muli bwanji, bambo?” Hock asked. “Dzina lanu ndani?”

  The man said in English, “My name is Chuma.”

  The sunglasses over his smooth jut-jawed face gave him a cricket’s profile. He smiled greedily at Hock’s watch. Hock knew that lingering gaze of admiration was like a request, but Chuma had a watch of his own.

  “Let’s leave at seven.”

  “Eight will be best. African time. No worry, be happy.”

  “Seven,” Hock said without a smile, and the man turned deferential—respectful, with a slight jerkiness in his face of fear. All that happened quickly. Hock could see that the time Chuma had spent with other foreigners as a driver had made him overconfident. Something showy about his clothes, his ease, his laugh, his knowingness; but the correction had reduced him, moving him from familiarity to subservience. It happened again on the road: “This is the best way,” he said leaving the city, to “Anything you say,” when Hock told him he wanted to pass through Chikwawa. Chikwawa was a place he’d remembered well, and he wanted to see how it had changed.

  Chuma lit a cigarette.

  “Don’t smoke,” Hock said.

  Squeezing the lighted tip with his bare fingers, Chuma took a deep resentful breath.

  The road south out of Blantyre was paved, but it was so broken, the potholes so numerous, it did not seem modern at all, but rather like another old set of obstacles; and the holes, deep enough to trap a wheel, required Chuma to make detours through the grass and mud at the edge of the road.

  The farther they got from town, the flimsier and more temporary the houses, from the solid terraces of shops fronting onto storm drains, to the tile-roofed bungalows, to the tin-roofed shacks, to the mud huts thatched with straw and the skeletal sticks of the frame showing through the crumbled mud plastering. And then the road grew worse, in some places just a strip of broken paving in a gully between two slopes, and on the slopes the stumps of trees that had been cut down, the forests stripped by people foraging for fuel.

  Far ahead, toward the escarpment, the whitewashed houses of Chikwawa looked like sugar cubes, filling the valley in neat rows. But up close those same houses were stained shacks, made of painted wood and patched with plastic sheeting.

  “Don’t stop,” Hock said.

  Chuma said, “This must look different from before. How many years?”

  “Za kale,” Hock said, because “long ago” in English didn’t adequately describe the length of time.

  None of what he saw from the car was lovely: the Africa of people, not of animals. And that was its oddity, because it looked chewed, bitten, burned, deforested, and dug up. A herd of elephants could eat an acre of trees in a day, leaving behind a mass of trampled and splintered limbs, yet that acre stayed green and grew back. But this human settlement was befouled, the greenery slashed and burned, or dragged away until only dirt and stones remained—a blight, a permanent disfigurement.

  At the end of the badly paved road the car shuddered, slid on the loose rocks, and bumped in the deep ruts. At the margin, the tall thickened blades of elephant grass blocked the view. When they came to a bridge over a stream, or a roadside village, or a cluster of shops, Chuma said, “So many changes.”

  Hock said “Yes,” because the man was young and proud. But the answer was no, and he was glad.

  Out here the bush was still a semi-ruin, a landscape coarsening, losing its softness. He would have been happier to find that nothing had changed, because it was a place he had loved for its being itself, in spite of the aid workers and the charities and the missionaries. Now they were beyond Chiromo, in the southern province, nearing the Lower River. He recognized the flattened landscape at once, a kind of disorder even in the trees and the tall grass, and an odor of dust and smoke. It had been different from anything he’d known, not beautiful, too flat and featureless to photograph, but powerful, his first experience of the world, ancient in its simplicities.

  “You like,” the driver said, seeing that Hock had begun to smile.

  It all came back to him again. As a volunteer teacher, in this district of small huts and half-naked people and unpaved roads—a world made out of mud—he had been content. The Lower River became the measure of his happiness; he was happiest most of all because he’d been cut off. No telephone, only the weekly mail delivery, and sometimes an out-of-date newspaper, already yellow from age, the news irrelevant, overtaken by newer, greater trivia. There was nothing to fear. No one had money. He’d hated to leave; he’d longed to return. And here he was, back again—amazing.

  “Mwabvi Game Park,” Chuma said. “You want to stop?”

  Hock saw the entrance, the turnoff—just a barrier, an iron pipe resting across two steel oil drums, and a shed farther on.

  “Njobvu,” Hock said. “Chipembere.”

  “None of those, eh. But just monkeys,” Chuma said.

  “I said, don’t stop,” Hock said.

  The car was slowing down and seemed to be sliding sideways on the heavy gravel at the edge of the road, Chuma yanking on the steering wheel as if trying to avoid a skid. Hock sat forward, bracing himself against the dashboard with outstretched hands, and as he did, the car came to a stop on the slant of the roadside.

  “Puncture,” Chuma said.

  From his tilted seat, Hock said, “Fix it. You have a spare tire, right?”

  Chuma did not reply. He pushed his door open in a sulky gesture and went to the back of the car to open the trunk lid. Hock wat
ched him lifting out his big duffel bag and flipping up the carpet to get at the spare.

  “Tsoka,” Chuma said.

  Hock said, “What do you mean ‘bad luck’? You have a spare tire.”

  “Palibe ujeni,” Chuma said.

  “What ujeni?” The word meant whatsit.

  “Jack. I am not having.”

  “We’ll stop a car. We’ll borrow one.”

  Chuma looked into Hock’s face, seeming to defy him. He said, “Are you noticing any cars?”

  They were standing in the sun, breathing hard, their heads pounded by the heat, knowing they were helpless. And the whine of the locusts made it worse, reminding them they were alone. Chuma’s forehead was beaded with sweat. He took off his sunglasses. Unmasked, his face was weak and damp. He dug out his shirttail and lifted the whole front of his shirt to wipe his face. Hock walked a few steps, and when he looked back Chuma was unbolting the spare tire from the trunk. He set it against the car with care, and stared at it, and with sudden fury kicked it.

  The only shade was a low thorn tree just down the road. Hock walked to it, but when he prepared to sit he saw a smooth termite mound caked against the lower trunk. He stood for a while, then wandered back to the car, where Chuma was scowling at the tire.

  Hearing the roar of an engine, Hock looked up to see a new white van with a gold logo on its side speeding toward them in the center of the road, like a locomotive on a track. Hock waved his arms but to no effect—the vehicle tore past them, its tires chewing at the road dirt, throwing up stones and leaving them shrouded in dust.

  Chuma said, “The Agency. They are giving to the people here,” and in a mocking voice, “They are mzungus from your country!”

  “They didn’t stop!” Hock cursed and batted at the dust the vehicle had left. “So what’s the plan?”

  Because of Chuma’s big sunglasses, all that Hock saw was the lower portion of his face, seemingly impassive.

  Hock stood apart from him, watching the dust settle. An hour passed. He kept checking his watch, dreading that they would be stuck there in the night. Looking up from his watch, he saw a boy approach on an old bike. As the boy wobbled by, Chuma spoke to him sharply, not like someone in trouble, but in a domineering way, making the boy wince.

  “What are you saying to him?”

  “He must get some men and boys from the village. He must help us.”

  The boy looked stricken and confused. Hock showed him some money. He said, “Ndikufuna thandiza. We need help. You understand?”

  “Sah,” the boy said in a hoarse voice. He mounted his bike and rode away.

  “He won’t come back,” Chuma said.

  And for another hour and a half, under the tree, Hock believed Chuma was right. But the boy did come back, with four laughing men, who laughed harder when they saw the car, lopsided on the gravel at the sloping roadside. One of them was carrying a crowbar, holding it less like a tool than a weapon.

  They spoke to Chuma. Hock heard the words “jack” and “palibe”—none—and more laughter. Without hesitating, the men walked into the bush and came out hugging big rocks, one apiece, which they piled near the flat tire. They repeated this, bringing boulders from the bush and adding them to the pile of football-sized boulders. When they had enough, they pushed some under the axle and the others against the wheels to prevent the car from rolling back.

  Using the biggest boulder as a fulcrum, and the crowbar as a lever, they lifted the car, three of the men snatching at the bumper to raise it as the boy added smaller boulders under the axle. This took almost half an hour, the men resting between thrusts of the crowbar, examining the height of the flat tire. They asked for a spanner—they used that word—and loosened the nuts. At last the tire was off the ground and able to turn. They removed the nuts, and when the wheel was off, Hock could see the way the axle rested on a pile of boulders and fitted-in rocks, an ancient but indestructible arrangement, as neatly made and as symmetrical as a stone altar.

  One man bounced and rolled the spare tire from the place where it had fallen after Chuma had kicked it. They fitted it, tightening the nuts. And when they were done they removed the boulders from in front of the wheels and pushed the car off its pillar of rocks, rolling it forward.

  Hock gave them money, each man a thickness of kwacha notes. They touched the notes to their foreheads and laughed some more and bade Hock a safe journey.

  In the car, Chuma said, “You gave them too much money.”

  “They saved our lives,” Hock said, suddenly angry, because Chuma hadn’t helped or so much as spoken to the men. Hock felt a pent-up anxiety from watching the primitive display, the laborious work of levering and carrying and piling boulders.

  “They are just village farmers,” Chuma said.

  “They know more than you.”

  Chuma did not reply, but Hock could see that he had stung him.

  Hock calculated that they had four hours of daylight left. Then they were passing the road junction at Bengula, and were following the course of the river, on the west bank, throwing up whitish dust and heading straight into the sun, toward the Lower River. By late afternoon they were in Nsanje.

  “Keep going,” Hock said.

  “You said Nsanje. This is the boma.”

  The district commissioner’s house was a ruin, Bhagat’s General Store was boarded up, the railway station had been abandoned, but the greeny-black river brimmed at the embankment, and at this hour of the day the pelicans still roosted on the dock posts at the landing. Hock raised his eyes, looking for the bats, and was heartened to see the sky thick with them, fluttering and swooping from the riverside trees.

  “The village I want is farther on.”

  “That is extra charge.”

  “It’s twenty miles,” Hock said.

  “More money,” Chuma said, with menace in the words.

  “Stop the car,” Hock said. The driver was so rattled he kept going. “Stop the car—I’ll walk.”

  “It is far, sir,” Chuma said, with that same jerkiness of fear in his face.

  “It’s not far. I know where we are.” The driver glanced at him. Hock said, “No extra charge.”

  And down the road two miles, at Marka, Hock signaled for him to stop, and the driver said, “Iwe,” in the familiar form—“You!” But it was an anxious appeal, like a cry of help. Then he saw the men sitting under the tree and said, “They are waiting for you.”

  “Yes,” Hock said, but he knew better. Even in his time, it had been the usual place in Marka for men to sit, a log under a mango tree. The logs were never moved, the mango trees never cut down for firewood. Yet the men murmured when they saw Hock, and they shouted a greeting.

  Chuma got out of the car but stayed back, smoking a cigarette, watching with fascinated distaste—these yokels at the edge of this ramshackle village, tearing the fiber from sugar cane stalks with their teeth. Chuma seemed uneasy, eager to leave.

  “What time you coming back, bwana?”

  The air was so still, his cigarette smoke clung to his face. He slapped the smoke but kept puffing on the cigarette.

  “You can go,” Hock said.

  Chuma relaxed. He was released. The sun slanted into his face. The bush pressed up against the road, and some of it flopped over the tire tracks. The river was not visible, but its smell was in the air: the stagnation, the mud glow, the bittersweet decay of crushed hyacinths, and—strongly, part of the same heaviness, like hot damp fur—a human smell.

  “I’m not coming back today,” Hock said.

  The great soft cloud of white dust raised by the departing car closed over it as it rocked in the wheel ruts of the narrow road, going much too fast, north toward the boma, the horn blaring at something unseen. Even Hock found the departure a strange breach of etiquette. The man should have lingered a little, eaten something, accepted some bananas or a cup of tea, handed out a cigarette or two.

  “Welcome, father,” one of the old men said, rising from the log.

&
nbsp; This man gave his name as Maso, and introduced the man next to him as Nyachikadza. Hock said that he knew both their fathers, from long ago.

  Hock greeted the men formally, holding his elbow as he shook each hand, then said to Maso, “I’m going to Malabo. I used to live there. Can you send a message? I’m looking for the headman.”

  “Festus Manyenga,” Maso said. He called to a boy sitting against a bicycle, holding Hock’s duffel bag, and told him to go to Malabo. “Tell Manyenga the American is here.”

  They knew of the mzungu at Malabo, they said. They had heard stories about him.

  Hock said, “Maybe it was someone else.”

  “There was only one mzungu at Malabo!” the man Nyachikadza said.

  And he explained: Hock was famous; he had attained the status of an almost mythical figure. He had built the school, which also served as the clinic for the monthly visits of the doctor. He had served as go-between for the White Father and the member of parliament, all those years ago. He’d presented them, at independence, with a dugout canoe, called a bwato, that could hold eight paddlers.

  “Come,” Nyachikadza said, and led them all through the low spreading trees and across the hard-packed dirt of a courtyard, which was being swept by a woman. This was Marka village, almost unchanged from what Hock had remembered, an important village for being near the edge of the landing stage into the channel of the great marsh.

  They sat before a hut and drank tea, Hock in the place of honor, on a low stool, next to a woven mat. Hock asked about the harvest and the weather and the fishing. To each question he got the same reply, not words; the men made regretful noises, clicking their tongues, meaning, Not good, but they were too superstitious to form words for their bad fortune.

  As they talked of other things—the rains, the height of the river, their children—Hock looked around and marveled at the compact village and the sheltering trees, the cooling shade, the way the sunlight speckled the ground, the children playing, kicking a knotted ball of rags. The men sat on simple benches, a woman refilling their cups from a fire-blackened kettle.