The Lower River Read online

  Hock beckoned him over and gave him a lump of nsima. He crammed the whole lump into his mouth, crumbs on his fingers and cheeks, and chewed it with his mouth open.

  “Snowdon,” Hock said.

  Hearing his name, the dwarf opened his mouth wide in satisfaction, showing Hock the half-chewed food on his greenish pitted tongue.

  Hock leaned toward him and said, “Rubber buggy bumpers.”

  The dwarf hugged himself and gabbled and, sitting down and smiling, seemed to understand it as a phrase of welcome.

  It was only nine o’clock. Hock smiled, thinking of the day that stretched ahead—the long overbright day of village somnolence, supine in its stillness, under trails of wood smoke and the confident boasting of the strutting crows and the why-why-why of the nagging shrikes.

  9

  HOCK SAT OVER his notebook, smoothed it with the flat of his hand, poised his pen, tried to remember the date. What to say? Two lines, one about food, one about sleep; day and night. Superstitiously he avoided writing anything negative. He’d asked for this, and yet he pondered the clean pages of the notebook and his only thought was that he’d brought it from Medford, to record his memories. So far, there was nothing in Malabo he wanted to remember.

  Around noon, he walked to the maize patch, picked up a hoe, stepped into the dimba, and began chopping the dry earth with it, scraping the weeds away. Two older boys saw him and laughed. He knew why: it was women’s work. One of the boys held a rhino beetle on a length of thread; he had pierced the beetle with a needle. The beetle rose, trying to fly away, and fell heavily as the boy tugged it toward him.

  Hoeing and hacking at a patch of dry shucks, Hock startled a snake. Deftly, he pinned its head down with the hoe blade, pressing it, then picked it up, and as he pinched it just behind its head, its long whipping tail caught his arm and wrapped it with the whole coil of its body.

  “Kalikukuti,” he said. A twig snake, a juvenile, hardly two feet long.

  The two boys stepped back, murmuring “Njoka,” snake. The one with the beetle let go of the insect, which dropped to the scattered trash of the corn shucks and scrabbled away, dragging its thread. Hock stepped out of the maize patch and the boys ran, stamping in the dust. Hock peered at the snake’s odd horizontal pupil. He brought the snake back to his hut and put it into a basket on his veranda and covered it. Sitting near it, he felt less alone.

  He slept through lunch. In the afternoon, he walked again to the stream, retracing his steps of the morning—perhaps this was the beginning of a routine? All the while he was followed by children, some of whom carried homemade toys of wire twisted into the shapes of cars and wagons.

  They were small skinny children, all smiles—it seemed a village of children, like a settlement in a folktale. One said “Mankhwala”—medicine—and the rest chimed in. Hock knew they were asking for candy.

  “Tomorrow,” Hock said. He repeated it in Sena: “Mawa.” Seeing them laughing, he asked them if they knew English.

  They shyly admitted no.

  “Do you go to school?

  “No school!”

  He had intended to see the school that afternoon, but now the light was fading. Night came quickly: he’d see it tomorrow—something to do. As he watched the last long orangey tatters of the sunset, Manyenga called out, “Father!” for the evening meal. They ate as they had the previous night: the basin, the ceremony of being served by Zizi and the elder Mrs. Manyenga: nsima, stew, a portion of dried fish, a stinging swig of nipa.

  Manyenga sat with him and in a tone meant to reassure him, said, “I have ordered the iron roof for your hut.”

  “How much?”

  “Very cheap. I am knowing this man. I told him about you. His father remembers you too much. Maybe he was your student. He gave me a good price. He knows we are partnering.”

  Partnering? Hock said in Sena, “Lots of money”—ndalama zambiri.

  “No, father. Not at all. One sheet for six thousand kwacha only.” That was forty dollars.

  “How many sheets do you need?”

  Manyenga didn’t answer. Hock knew the man was making a complex calculation, thinking of numbers and discarding them. At last he said, “Six,” in the local way, sick-ees.

  “Say five.”

  “Can manage five,” Manyenga said readily.

  After the meal, when Hock walked across the clearing to his hut, he saw a shadow on the veranda and turned his flashlight toward it—Zizi, her hand shielding her face, yellow palm showing. She knelt in the light, keeping her hand up, and he moved the beam away from her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Ujeni.” She faltered in the half word, whatsit.

  “Did Manyenga send you here?”

  She didn’t reply. Hock knew the answer. He said, “There’s a snake in that basket,” and hearing that, she stood and backed away. When she was gone he went inside and lay in the darkness, slightly drunk and levitated from the nipa.

  The next day was the same: the walk, the dwarf at breakfast, the riverbank, a nap, another walk, writing notes; then dinner at Manyenga’s, more talk of money, and bed. He wondered if time spent in such a random, unprofitable way could count as a routine. And he remembered his first weeks here—the full days of work, the hot nights by lantern light grading students’ exercise books. He grew sad, admiring his younger, hopeful self.

  “I want to see the school,” he said to Manyenga on the third day, seeing him straddling his motorbike.

  “It is finished, father.”

  “Maybe I could get it fixed up.”

  Manyenga considered this, chewing his lips, his face twisting in thought.

  “Some boys are there.”

  In Hock’s day, the school had been three buildings: a pair of classrooms joined by a veranda, an office block standing on its own, and a long brick privy, a chimbudzi that was also a wash house, boys at one end, girls at the other. These structures were roofed with a kind of plastic composite popular in the sixties. The cement floors were polished and buffed with oxblood-colored wax from a five-pound can.

  Manyenga propped his motorbike on its kickstand and walked with Hock beyond the clearing, through the tall grass, to the school. Head-high bushes had grown up around the buildings. The roof of the classrooms was mostly gone, only brittle pieces remaining. Weeds grew in the eaves. All the furniture had been removed. The table at his hut had been one of these. The windows were broken. The office was just a shell, though it showed signs that it had been lived in, mats and quilts twisted on the floor, scorch marks on the wall.

  “Watch for snakes,” Manyenga said.

  Hock had supervised a renovation of the store in Medford. He knew a little about construction. He studied this ruin and tried to imagine how to put it back together. It was like the remains of an old civilization, more plausible as a ruin, more coherent, more venerable as wreckage.

  A lovely tree dominated the scene of decrepitude, a tree Hock himself had planted, all those years ago, when the minister of education had visited to open the school—the minister had supervised the planting, but Hock had bought the sapling, dug the hole, and set the circle of bricks around it. The minister, fat in his suit, perspiring, had watched Hock slip the root ball into the hole and had lobbed a spadeful of earth into it as the children sang. Manyenga’s grandfather had been one of those children, in the school uniform, khaki shorts and a gray shirt. The tree was now forty feet high, swelling over a pool of shade. Why hadn’t they cut it down?

  Beyond the tree lay the battered classrooms, the skeleton of the office, the vandalized latrine. Graffiti on the latrine walls was crude, but it was graffiti all the same, stick figures in unmistakable postures of copulation.

  “How long has it been like this?”

  “I am not knowing,” Manyenga said, truly bewildered, which surprised Hock.

  “We could fix it.”

  The windows gaped, the roof was gone, the doors were splintered but still attached to hinges. Hock mentally scythed th
e grass, roofed the school, imagined it with a coat of paint, laid out gravel pathways. And he put himself in the picture: he was standing on the veranda, as the minister had stood long ago, leading the students in the national anthem and giving them a pep talk.

  “Didn’t you go to school here?”

  “I was schooling at Chimombo, near the boma. I completed my school certificate in Blantyre.”

  “You’ve done well. And you’re still young.”

  “Yes, father.”

  Hock was thinking of the compound, the four huts, the motorbike, the two wives, the many children.

  “I was a driver for the Agency some few years,” Manyenga said. “They were bringing food and whatnot.”

  Now Hock understood Manyenga’s buzzwords. “Why didn’t you keep working for them?”

  “They were cheeky. They were falsely accusing me. They couldn’t cope up at all with our customs. Not like you, father.”

  Hock said, “Will you help fix the school?”

  “I can send some chaps. They can help.”

  This wasn’t the answer Hock was looking for, but he said, “Okay,” and looking again at the ruin, he quoted a Sena proverb: “Slowly, slowly makes a bundle.”

  He was slashing at the weeds with a hacker the next day when the four boys arrived, creeping through the tall grass, parting the blades with their outstretched hands. None was older than fifteen or so. One said he’d just come from the creek, where he’d been fishing. They were like the young boys he’d known in the past, hungry, very thin, wearing rags for shirts and tattered trousers. They had been speaking in Sena.

  “Speak English,” Hock said.

  “Ah!” And they laughed and covered their faces.

  “The mfumu sent us.”

  So Manyenga was a chief?

  “This was a school long ago,” Hock said.

  “It is nothing now,” one of the boys said.

  “But we can fix it. Then Malabo will have a school.”

  They were watching shyly, making sounds of breathing, not saying anything more, but the little breaths meant they were paying attention and seemed to understand.

  “Who are your parents? Maybe I knew them.”

  They didn’t reply. They seemed to grow shyer.

  “No father, no mother,” one said.

  “They were sick,” another, the tallest boy, said, drawing out the Sena word. He chopped with the flat of his hand. “They died.”

  “What about relatives?”

  “We live down there”—and the boy squinted into the sun.

  “How many altogether?”

  The boy flashed ten fingers at Hock. “Small and big.”

  Hock was still holding the hacker, standing among the tall weeds and the overhanging bushes he had slashed. The cuttings on the ground were already withered, going pale in the strong sunshine and the heat.

  “Help me,” Hock said.

  “We can try,” the tall boy said. He took the knife from Hock. Another boy grasped the spare machete from a stump. They whacked at the weeds while Hock went through the classrooms to examine the wreckage. He heard the boys muttering and was gladdened by the sound of slashing. The blue sky showed through the smashed roof. The trusses were still sound—usable, anyway. The rooms were hot, sunlit, cluttered with dead leaves that had blown through the roof. Hock stepped carefully. He smelled snakes—it was an oiliness, a hanging odor of a decaying nest, the hot eggy stink.

  He found a narrow tree limb and stripped it of its twigs and then poked with it and startled the snake he knew was there, a black-lipped mamba. He prodded it, let it whip and coil, and pressed its head with the end of the stick, quickly snatched it, keeping its frothy mouth just above his fist. Then he brought it outside to show the boys, a trophy they’d remember.

  “Mamba,” he said. “Mbadza.”

  But the boys were gone, and not only that, they’d taken the two knives.

  “They are useless,” Manyenga said later. He thought a moment. “Did you give them money?”

  Hock said no.

  Manyenga relaxed and smiled. “Ah,” he said, as though to say, What did you expect?

  They didn’t discuss it further. Hock was not sure how to proceed. Perhaps it was all a mistake, perhaps this noncooperation meant it was time to go. All he had to do was ask Manyenga to take him to the boma, thirty-odd miles away, and catch the bus to Blantyre. But that would be so final, such a resignation, no hope of coming back. He’d put it off for a little while.

  This thought induced him to distribute some small amounts of money to the women he encountered in his walks through the village. And one morning a few days later, he told Manyenga that it was time to leave.

  With a pleading face, Manyenga said to him, “We need you, father.”

  Manyenga appeared disturbed by the suddenness. Hock had seemed at home, and now his abrupt announcement that he was leaving. Perhaps they feared his assertiveness. But he was affected by Manyenga’s simple statement.

  That same day the corrugated sheets of roofing were delivered, dumped at the roadside by an old van. Manyenga said they would put them on the house soon. “Tsopano, tsopano,” he insisted, slipping into Sena, then, “Now, now.” When he spoke English, Hock felt the man was being untruthful.

  Even without the boys’ help, Hock went back to the school, and he slashed at the weeds and tried to tidy the classrooms and found the same black-lipped mamba in a corner of one of the rooms. Rather than disturb it, he swept the veranda, and Zizi helped with her straw broom. The dwarf Snowdon watched, flicking at the flies that settled on his sores.

  Hock gave Zizi a handful of kwacha notes for helping him—just a dollar. He knew that Manyenga had sent her to stay by him, to sleep with him, and that all he needed to say was “Go inside,” and she would have obeyed. She was thin, tall for a Sena woman, with a shaven head and skinny fingers, bony wrists, almost shapeless, small breasts, long legs, with wide feet. Those feet and the way she sometimes stood reminded him of a water bird, a heron perhaps. With a bath and stylish clothes she could have passed for the sort of model he’d seen in magazines—bald, with the starved angularity of high fashion. But she was hungry and hollow-eyed. She shadowed him, never coming too near, never quite sure what he wanted, yet eager to please him.

  Snowdon just watched, and sometimes giggled, or held tight to a knife and wouldn’t hand it over, jabbing at Hock, teasing him.

  Hock kept working at the margins of the school, conspicuously, to attract attention or curiosity, perhaps shame the villagers into helping. No one helped, though sometimes a woman came looking for firewood, taking the splinters he chopped, or boys who scrawled with charcoal on the walls of the office, where they might have slept some nights.

  It was as though he’d arrived and was living without being seen: an invisible mzungu.

  10

  THE NIGHT SKY was different from any other, a cloudless dome of bright blobs and pinpricks, and around a bald pitted moon were star clusters bright enough to read by. Every waking hour he was reminded that the world he knew was distant and inaccessible, so remote as to seem like another planet. He was immobilized in a vegetating settlement on a distant moon of that planet. In Medford, at the store, he’d often thought of the Lower River as a place he could easily travel to, if he’d only had the time. It was a matter of buying a ticket, making a few arrangements, withdrawing money from the bank, and setting off—a taxi to the airport, a blur of flights in a narrow seat, and then Malawi—Blantyre, Nsanje, Malabo. A jump across the world.

  But here was a paradox: the way home from here was so hard it was nearly impossible to visualize from the depths of this place. He could imagine the narrow path out of the village, and the stony Lutwe road, but after that his imagination failed him. He had put himself into Manyenga’s hands; Manyenga had guided him here. He had surrendered to the gravitational pull of the Lower River, and from here the whole world was hidden, as though he were not just on a faraway moon but trapped on its dark side, in an
underworld. He’d arrived as if having squirmed through a thicket of baffles and finally the funnel that was the bad road, depositing him in a narrowness of bush and dust. He had no idea how to get out. A clear way was not apparent. No electricity meant early nights and twelve hours of equatorial darkness, no computer access, no Internet, no fax machine. He had asked to be disconnected, but that had been before he’d arrived. Now he was buried in utter silence, or else the mumble of “not possible.” At first the disconnection had been an amusement. He’d even rehearsed his telling the tale to Roy or Jerry or Teya—how cut off he’d been, how remote, “another world,” “lower depths.” It astonished him to think that there was still a place on earth that lay outside the great transit of information or international chat. Long ago, much of Malawi had been like this—much of the world lay in darkness. Then, it had not been so remarkable to be isolated. He’d accepted it as normal.

  Nowadays, such isolation was a novelty, and that was how he regarded it, as news to bring home—no phone, no mail, no juice at all. The separate villages in the Lower River were cut off from each other, the boma seemed as far away as Blantyre, and not only far but forbidden, the haunt of predators—tax collectors, party officials, thuggish boys—from whom villagers hid as from snakes. The stone under which they lay never moved.

  Hock had taught English in Malabo, and though he was no reader, he’d boned up on the set books: Great Expectations had been one, and an African novel about independence, Wordsworth’s poems, an abridged and simplified Julius Caesar. It now seemed extraordinary that he’d talked about them so earnestly in that ruined, roofless school. Only one other person had been able to teach them, Gala, and she’d gone off to a teachers’ college in the hills outside Blantyre and earned a higher grade of teaching certificate.

  Hock’s own reading was, as he called it, “mind rot.” He read detective stories, thrillers, “trash,” he said, dismissing it all. Yet he persisted. He read science fiction and consoled himself with the thought that even though it might be regarded as trash, its redeeming feature was that it was based on a sort of speculative science. Science fiction spoke of the world of perhapses: perhaps we would find another habitable planet, perhaps we were not alone in the universe, perhaps on another orbiting rock elsewhere in darkest space lived loping plant-like creatures awaiting contact over great intergalactic distances . . .