The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  Yet he still had his good wristwatch, his small duffel bag, his medicine, his passport, his money, a change of clothes. The bag was filthy, too, but it was valuable, and he saw it as a friend.

  “Bambo—father,” Hock called to the African in the uniform, raising his voice so he could be heard above the generator.

  The man winced, pretended not to hear, and went on polishing the tank. Hock, unable to bear seeing his dirty face, had moved away from the tank.

  “Water,” Hock said. Getting no response he said, “Madzi,” and repeated it.

  He thought he saw the African’s lips form the word pepani— sorry—but he could not be sure. The man glanced back at the bungalow, and while buffing the tank he stooped and picked up the plastic bottle he had used to dampen the washcloth. He wiped the mouth of the bottle on his shirt and then stuck its short neck through the chain-link fence.

  Hock crouched and drank, but clumsily: the water slopped at his mouth and ran down his chin. He was aware that, with the bottle tilted this way, and in his submissive posture, he was like a baby, or a zoo animal being fed through a fence. He had never felt so helpless, but he was grateful to the African, and when he finished, gagging from the greedy mouthful, he thanked the man.

  Without acknowledging Hock, obviously afraid that the white man might have seen him from the bungalow, he put the water bottle aside and set to work again. He had polished enough of the tank now so that Hock could see his upper body—horrible, wild man, desperate man, crazy man. Nothing this dirty man said could possibly be true.

  Back on the field, among the scavenging children, facing the helicopter, he had felt he was at a low point. In the days at the village of children, cowering in the abandoned hut, sleepless, watching for hyenas, he’d felt he was at his wits’ end. And on the riverbank at the frontier, looking for a passing canoe to take him downriver, he’d felt abandoned. At Malabo, too, on the night of his decision to leave, he’d felt full of despair.

  But none of these episodes could compare with the way he felt now, crouching on the wrong side of this perimeter fence, filthier than he’d ever been in his life, saying thank you to the African in the uniform for a gulp of the cloudy wash water.

  “It tasted like champagne,” people said at moments like this. But no, this mouthful of warm water tasted foul, and the sour aftertaste of failure lingered in Hock’s throat and nauseated him.

  He knew then that he had come to the end of something. He was defeated. He could not imagine anything worse than the degradation he felt on this sunny late afternoon in no man’s land, his reflection in the shiny tank staring back at him.

  Two white men walked quickly toward him on the gravel path. The slow walk of the man earlier had signaled unhelpfulness; this brisk stride indicated pure hostility.

  “You’re still here?” the first one said—the man from before, in the Hawaiian shirt.

  The other one wore a bush shirt, bush shorts, and heavy boots, and seemed military and almost familiar. Both men were so clean, so intimidating, their cleanliness like strength.

  “I know you,” he said.

  Hock said, “Please help me. Send a message.”

  “You’re the guy from the field, from this morning, when we were making the drop.” He turned to the other man, saying, “He was with those kids from the villages. He was trying to score a bag for himself. It was chaos, all his fault. We had to scrub it. That’s why I came back early. He put us off schedule.” He snapped at Hock, “How’d you get here?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me who he was with,” the other man said.

  “I am warning you,” the man in khaki said. “Get out of here the way you came in. If we see you again, we’ll shoot.”

  The African, listening, looked fearful, and when the man in khaki gestured, he went back to polishing the water tank, his eyes widened in terror.

  That fear penetrated Hock. He picked up his bag, and for the sake of his dignity he said, “You’re going to hear about this from the authorities. You’ll be sorry. I’m going to report you when I get back.”

  “Mister, the way you look, you’re not going to make it back.”

  Hock straightened and slung the strap of his bag over his shoulder. He stepped into the bush—he was still less than six feet from the fence, staring at the men. It occurred to him from the way they watched him that these men were unfamiliar with the bush, perhaps afraid, that they traveled in and out in the helicopter and had no sense of the path. Hock looked around, wishing for a snake—a fat one, a viper—that he could seize and shake at them like a thunderbolt.

  “I’ll make it,” Hock said.

  But when he turned, and ducked into the bush, and saw nothing but the narrow track with the faint impression of the motorcycle’s tire marks, he felt tired; and dispirited, away from the men, he sat down on a boulder. Almost immediately he was stung by ants. He slapped at his legs, he rubbed his arms. He walked farther, crossing to the far side of the steep bowl-like valley, wondering which direction to take. Looking around, he saw movement, a human figure. Leaning forward to see better, he heard mocking laughter. He knew who it was.

  PART IV

  Snakes and Ladders

  21

  THEIR OWN LONG late-afternoon shadows floated on the path in front of them, leggy torsos in the red dust. They tramped this lengthening darkness to the whine of cicadas, and before they reached the lip of the valley the sun had dropped beneath the level of the trees, and flights of mouse-faced bats filled the air, darting like swallows. While it was light enough to gather firewood, Manyenga parked the motorbike under a tree and they went in search of dry sticks. They piled the wood but waited until dark before they lit it, because the fire was to keep animals away, hyenas or baboons or biting lizards, and to repel ants and flying insects.

  “Where’s the food bag?” Hock asked, because he knew Manyenga had snatched one at the field.

  “It is for my family,” Manyenga said. He had found three green coconuts in his foraging. By the light of the fire he hacked off the tops, sawing at the sinews with his pocketknife, and they took turns drinking the coconut water and eating the gelatinous flesh. Until this moment they had only muttered. “Wood” and “matches” and “You take.”

  But as Hock lay near the fire on a pile of dead crackly leaves he had scraped together, his animal feeling rose up in him. He remembered the way he had looked in the shiny tank. He was not saddened by the memory of the filthy face and matted hair and stubble on his cheeks. If anything, he was encouraged now. The image of that dirty, defiant monkey face strengthened him as he lay, his head propped up by one hand so he could feel the heat of the fire.

  “I hate them,” he said, suddenly aloud.

  “And myself, I hate them, too much,” Manyenga said.

  “Festus,” Hock said, smiling, almost with affection.

  He slept with the dust of the forest in his nostrils, hearing the chirp and snapping of nighttime insects and the odd bird squawk. Once he thought he heard the whoo of a giant eagle owl, or the crack of a branch, undramatic, no louder than a matchstick snapped in half.

  At first light, in a racket of insects and birdcalls, with the heat beginning to rise, Manyenga rolled over and grunted. His face was a dark medallion in the sharpness of the sun. They set off through the bush, taking a new direction—north, Hock could tell; the sun was on their right. Manyenga knew the way, and after about an hour they began to see signs of disorder, the first village, hardly a village, one of those static settlements of the bush, a few huts, a wide-eyed boy, a woman fanning a fire with a pot lid, a yapping dog. And they kept going, on a proper footpath now, with the dampness of the river seeping into it, and the elephant grass too high for them to see over it.

  Then a road. It had once been a road; it was lumpy with tussocks of rough grass. Vehicles had passed here long ago; the parallel tire tracks, mostly overgrown, were still visible. Manyenga settled the motorbike into one of the ruts but traveled slowly. Hock hung on, and the morning passed,
the motorbike rocking him.

  At noon a familiar odor of risen dust and stagnant water and wood smoke, and a familiar glare, the heavy light pressing on his eyes, combined with heat. All that and the toasted smell of burned grass, the sight of solitary trees, most of them dead, stripped of their smaller limbs for firewood, some of them no more than crooked posts. Malabo was not far: they were approaching the back road from the south, a new direction for Hock.

  When they arrived at the village, Manyenga rode in a wide circle, as though performing a victory lap to show that he’d brought Hock back. Some small boys yelled, some women yodeled. And then he rode straight to Hock’s hut.

  “She will bring you tea.”

  A small slight figure was seated, in a posture of resignation or fatigue, at the edge of the veranda. It was Zizi, her head on her knees. Hearing the motorbike, she looked up, and when she saw who it was she burst into tears.

  She gazed at Hock with a mixture of fear and ecstasy. Her tormented face, sick with grief, was thinner. She looked haggard, her cheeks already wet with tears, and yet she was smiling. But it was also a smile of agony, as though she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing, Hock getting off the bike, slapping the dust from his bag, considering Manyenga and deciding not to thank him. Zizi put her fingers into her mouth, perhaps to stifle her sobs.

  “Falling tears! That is a good sign,” Manyenga cried out.

  “What are you saying?” Hock asked.

  “That it will rain,” Manyenga said, then, “She was missing you,” and he laughed at the absurdity of it. He kicked the bike into gear and gunned it across the clearing to his compound.

  Zizi dropped to her knees and held Hock’s legs, pressing her head against his trousers and weeping. The whir of emotion in her body penetrated his as she clung to him.

  She exhausted herself with tears, then used her wraparound cloth to wipe her face, lifting it, revealing her legs as sticks. When Hock sat in the shade of the veranda in his old chair and watched her stumble away, to bring him tea and something to eat, her big feet and stiff skinny legs giving her an odd clockwork gait, he thought with wonderment how Zizi had looked, so relieved at his return, perhaps having believed that he had gone for good, or been killed.

  The thought in his mind, not words but a breaking wave of warmth, was the rapture of being missed, having made someone happy with his presence. No one had ever missed him before, no one in his life. He had mentioned to Roy Junkins that he could write him in care of the U.S. consulate in Blantyre. But nothing had come. The man was silent, no letters—and a letter, delivered by the consulate, might have helped save him from Malabo. Nothing from the consulate, nothing from Fogwill. Yet Zizi was glad to see him, more than glad. For the first time, someone was grateful for his very presence.

  She was smiling when she came back to the veranda with the tea and a basket holding a hunk of buttered bread, a hard-boiled egg, and a steamed sweet potato. He ate slowly while she sat at his feet, hugging his knees, not smiling anymore but looking contented.

  “Jinny,” she said, with effort, her tongue against her teeth.

  Hock shook his head, squinting at the word.

  “Ulendo.”

  “Yes, journey,” he said. “Big journey.”

  A reddened welt on her bare arm caught his eye. He touched his own arm on the same place to draw her attention to it.

  “Chironda,” she said, meaning bruise, and explaining it, she made a whipping gesture.

  “Who did that?”

  “The big man.”

  “Manyenga?”

  She blinked and sniffed, to acknowledge it.

  “They wanted to know where you were. They said I must tell them.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  Zizi shook her head and smiled softly and averted her eyes. When she stepped off the veranda into the dusk, Hock knew there was something she didn’t want to say. She was silent for a while, and Hock finished the bread and the egg and drank another cup of tea. He had thought he would be hungrier, but he was tired and dirty and wanted only to crawl beneath his mosquito net and sleep for two days.

  Zizi was digging her toe shyly into the dust. He knew she wanted to say something more. He smiled to encourage her. He said, “Speak.”

  “I told them,” she said in a hoarse voice, “that I also wanted to know where you were.”

  He had begun to think of himself, in his flight down the river and through the bush, as a desperate, slowly shredding escapee, coming apart as he fled, growing insubstantial, fraying into a ghost. And even after Manyenga had snared him and carried him through the scrubby trees of no man’s land, he’d felt diminished, a stick figure, a wraith—a mere symbol of a mzungu, not a man with a name but a fugitive flickering past, someone whose only importance was that he might have money.

  They thought of him that way. He thought of himself that way. And he was resigned to being hunted down. So he had gotten on Manyenga’s bike and hung on, and let himself be carried through the bush to the L’Agence Anonyme compound and finally back to Malabo.

  And there, seeing how Zizi had missed him, he became whole again. He slept, and when he woke up he believed in himself anew. He’d failed in his second attempt to escape, in this exhausting experience of snakes and ladders. But the cruel game was not over, and he’d recaptured his sense of life, as though Zizi’s sorrow at his disappearance had proven to him that he was real, that he mattered, that it was not so bad slipping down the snake to Malabo as long as one person was loyal to him. Someday, he vowed, he would reward her.

  He heard her singing. He had heard it before, her habit of singing when she was afraid, when she was anxious, but now he saw that she was singing softly in contentment, releasing her emotion in a muffled melody.

  And when the dwarf Snowdon saw him, he chattered and smiled, drooling, pointing at Hock and at last bowing to him on his bandy legs, touching Hock’s feet as Zizi had done, but the dwarf performed it with respect so exaggerated it seemed a form of clowning.

  “Fee-dee-dom,” the dwarf said.

  Manyenga had not seen that—a good thing—but he saw how Zizi and the dwarf attended to him.

  He said, “They treat you like a big man.”

  “Aren’t I a big man?”

  “At the Agency compound they sent you away with nothing.”

  “What did you want?”

  “Food and medicine. And what, and what. They are supposed to help us, but they cheat us. They give food to those devil children, and themselves, those azungu, they live like chiefs. Send them away!”

  “Why don’t you send me away?”

  Manyenga was stung. He’d come to Hock’s hut to offer a few mild insults and to remind Hock of the ineffectual power of someone looked after by a skinny girl and a dwarf—what sort of chief could this be?

  “Not at all,” Manyenga said. “I have come for kusonka.”

  It was one of those euphemistic words that meant to start a fire, but also to hand over a sum of money.

  Hock said, “You’ve already got a fire.”

  “Give money,” Manyenga said, licking his lips—geev mahnie. The crude demand made all of Manyenga’s replies like the grunts of a brute.

  “Who am I?”

  “Chiff.”

  “What do you say to the chief?”

  “Puddon?”

  Hock repeated his question.

  “Pliss.”

  “I’ll give it to you later, when you have food for me.”

  Neither Zizi nor the dwarf understood, yet they looked on with admiration, smirking at Manyenga, believing that Hock had defied the big man.

  He knew he had failed, had allowed himself to be abandoned, and captured, and threatened, and rejected, and seized again—snakes and ladders. He had been starved and out of desperation had drunk swamp water. In the shiny tank at the Agency compound his face, burned by the sun, looked scorched, and he was unshaven and dirty. He had sorrowed at that face of desperation.

  The one const
ant in his life as a shop owner in Medford had been his appearance. He was aware all those years, standing in his clothing store, that he had to dress well, dress better than anyone who entered, because he was advertising his own goods—the blazer, or the tweed vest he wore when in shirtsleeves, the cravat with the blue shirt, the dark dress suit with chalk stripes. He dressed for his store, where he could never be overdressed, knowing that a customer might say, “I want something like that,” meaning his tie or vest, since men were inarticulate, or at least self-conscious, when talking about new clothes. And Hock enjoyed dressing well; it was a way of armoring himself against the world. He hid himself in beautifully made clothes that were full of distractions—cuff links, tie pin, watch fob, belt buckle. He was reassured by the order, the sense of wearing a uniform. Decades of dressing well.

  Now he was naked, or as naked as any man could be in the Lower River. Even the poorest man wore trousers and a shirt—ragged-assed long trousers, a shirt in ribbons. A woman might go bare-breasted—Zizi’s aunt’s floppy breasts had been uncovered the day Hock had visited Gala. But a man could not bare his chest, and only small boys wore shorts.

  Still, he was naked—badly sunburned, and his skin was crusted with dirt. The cuffs of his trousers were in shreds, his sleeves were torn. His hands were clean, because Zizi had brought water in a basin for him to wash before eating, but his clean hands contrasted absurdly with his ragged clothes and dirty face. He was all the more touched that Zizi should care for him in this condition, was almost tearful that she accepted him.

  More than that, she brought him soap and a cloth, so that he could go to the stream and bathe. She did not follow him. Such a thing was not allowed in the Lower River, a woman or girl lurking anywhere near a man washing himself. But when he set off for the stream, thinking of her kindness, he remembered his first sight of her at the small lagoon beside the stream, when she had crossed, going deeper, lifting her wrap higher up her legs, and higher to her thighs, until the water brimmed against the secret of her nakedness.

  Hock washed himself, soaping his head, splashing like a dog and spewing. Then he wrapped the cloth around his body and walked back to the hut. The heat was so great, he was dry before he’d taken many steps. He rummaged in the bag he’d left behind, found the razor and his spare clothes, which Zizi had washed, and he shaved. After he changed into clean clothes, he sat in the shade, watched by Zizi and the dwarf. He was content for the moment; he had survived his escape attempt. It was better to be here than on the river alone, or in the village of children, or contending with the hostile men at the Agency depot.