The Lower River

by Paul Theroux

  “Not everything. You are still our big man.”

  “That’s me,” Hock said, and now, overcome with fatigue, he had to sit. He dropped to the edge of the veranda, near the sacks of snakes, and did not invite Manyenga to join him.

  “You are our great chief and father.”

  “With no money.”

  “Even without money you are our father.” Manyenga, as always, whined the word, making it maahhnee.

  “I have nothing more to give you.”

  “But you have much,” Manyenga said. “You are a strong man.”

  More lies. “I’m weak. I’m sick.”

  “You are still so clever. You continue to plot, as a chief plots, whispering to this one and that one, and what and what.”

  And then Manyenga laughed horribly, showing his good teeth, whinnying, insincere, too loud.

  “I’m helpless.”

  “You have your people. We are knowing.”

  “What people?” Hock was indignant, straining to shout.

  “Us.”

  “You!”

  “Yes, and the old woman. The little man with mkate. The girl.”

  Mkate he knew as leprosy. Snowdon? That was news—or perhaps another lie. He’d thought the dwarf’s physical damage was from epilepsy, fits of falling down.

  He said, “The girl Zizi was attacked.”

  “At the boma. At night.” Manyenga spoke as though he was reciting the details of a crime she’d committed. “What was this young girl doing at the boma at night?”

  “I have no idea,” Hock said with a dry mouth.

  “As our chief you should know,” Manyenga said. “We believe she was sent there.”

  Hock stared at him. That was another aspect of the darkness—that Manyenga knew everything and still he lied, pretending not to know.

  “She was raped,” Hock said with all the snarling contempt he could muster.

  Manyenga was not moved. “She went alone to the boma, through the bush at midnight.” He looked around, saw the dwarf, turned away, and added, “Did she expect something different?”

  “She didn’t deserve to be raped.”

  “But why did she go, my friend?” Manyenga said. “Maybe we will never know!” In a different, sterner voice he said, “The ceremony will be tomorrow.”

  When Manyenga walked off, kicking across the clearing, Hock saw the brothers step from behind the great baobab stump and join him, heads down, conferring.

  He knows everything, Hock thought. He has the letter. That was why Zizi was in despair; she believed she had failed him.

  And so, in the time remaining before the ceremony the next day, Hock passed the hours in the only way he knew how. He paced the village, and the perimeter of the village, and the banks of the creek where the women were slapping their laundry on the smooth boulders. He carried a flour sack and his forked stick, and he gathered snakes. He found a puff adder sunning itself near the mango tree, a twig snake near the latrine, a nest of yellow-eyed snakes in the leaf trash of a decaying log; he found some more marsh vipers at the creek’s edge. They were weapons, they were friends, they were the only creatures in Malabo that had been neutral to him. He had destroyed Zizi, he had disappointed Gala. He had no other friends.

  Like the shipwrecked sailor who befriends a vagrant bird with a broken wing, he sought the only creatures he knew would respond to his sympathy. He had nothing else. So they would not fight or eat each other, he separated the snakes into eight sacks.

  When he looked for his knife to cut more flour sacks to sew into smaller bags, he saw it was missing. It was a cheap knife he’d bought as an afterthought, with boxes of food, from the market in Blantyre, but it had a sharp serrated blade. At the base of the blade, near the hilt, was a cutout for lifting bottle caps. In his time in Malabo he had not used the bottle opener. The few bottles of soda he’d drunk had been opened by Zizi, grimacing, with her side teeth. There had been no store-bought beer, only the plastic cups of home brew that was like sour porridge. Now the knife was gone and he felt defenseless and incompetent. It was bad that he had no knife; it was worse for him that someone else had it.

  He slept badly; he was too hot, too hungry, to sleep well. He lay perspiring on his string bed, the mosquito net confining him, deadening the air.

  He suffered the heat; it was something he’d never become accustomed to. He was hotter now than ever, more uncomfortable, because he was dirty and he felt ill, and his weakness made the heat harder to bear. The weight of it against his slimy skin made it no different from a fever.

  The drumming pattered in his dream, and then seemed to wake him. He didn’t know whether he was still dreaming. He heard dogs barking, the hoarse helpless yapping of village mutts.

  Then voices outside told him some people were near, and they tramped on the planks of his veranda, many feet, dry footsoles on splintered boards, and his door rattled and was yanked open, the iron bolt torn off the jamb.

  He smelled them before he saw them. This is it, he thought. Manyenga’s “tomorrow” had meant the dark early morning. Moving figures stirred like upright shadows in his hut, muttering to each other, seeming not to know what to do next. He believed they were intimidated to be in the mzungu’s hut. They behaved strangely, unsure in their movements, tentative in their whispers.

  “What do you want?”

  “You, father.”

  Hock lifted the ragged mosquito net as though peering from a tent. He recognized two of Manyenga’s sons, Yatuta and Aleke, and one of the brothers from the village of children, the one with the baseball cap. Without the other brothers this boy looked very young. The only light was that of a flashlight one of the sons was carrying, whisking the beam around the room, showing Hock how ramshackle the place looked. The beam lingered on the flour sacks that bulged on the floor, then swept across them.

  “Why do you want me?”

  “For the big dance.”

  He’d said gule wamkulu. Hock knew the dance was secret and strange, not to be observed by an outsider.

  It was pointless to ask any more questions. Too weak to resist, Hock swung his legs over and sighed and got up from his creaky bed. He felt the way a condemned man does, rising wearily on death row in the middle of the night to be executed.

  One of the smaller boys, Aleke led the way across the clearing to Manyenga’s compound. The other two walked on either side of him, as if escorting him, and Hock scuffed along in rubber flip-flops, limping, falling forward.

  Manyenga was waiting at the edge of the firelight, near where two drummers thumped and pounded.

  “Welcome, chief.”

  Hock was about to speak, but the walk—the boys moving quickly—had tired him, and he was breathless. He put his hands to his hips and bent over to catch his breath. He was hot, unshaven, hungry, his gray hair wild. His shirt was dirty—he was out of fresh laundry—his trousers torn, his feet grimy in his flip-flops.

  “Chief, please sit. Here is your chair.”

  The chair had been set up away from the heat of the fire but within the orbit of its light.

  One of the brothers approached Manyenga, and Hock noticed that he was carrying a length of coiled rope, cheap yellow nylon braided like sisal.

  “No,” Manyenga said, waving him away.

  But the boy looked anxious, gesturing as though he intended to tie Hock’s hands.

  Hock said, “What does he want?”

  “He is thinking it is necessary to bind your wrists. But I tell him it is not necessary.”

  “What are you doing to me?”

  “We are promoting you,” Manyenga said.

  “They’re taking me.” Hock’s throat constricted, full of fear, and he gagged again as he said, “This is an abduction. Why are you letting them? You warned me about them. You told me they were dangerous.”

  “I never said those words.” Manyenga’s smug bureaucratic smile was one that Hock had seen before. He had assumed this smile whenever he rebuffed him; it would float across his lip
s, not always a smile, sometimes a sneer of pure contempt. He wore it now, as he said, “They are removing you, with our permission.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “We must. We have nothing in the pipeline.”

  His throat burning, Hock said, “What about my permission?”

  “It is not necessary. You belong to us,” Manyenga said with the same smile, and he looked upon Hock as a kind of prize, according him the trophy status they reserved for the larger animals whose flesh they ate, whose skins they used as prestige objects. “You are ours. Our great chief.”

  31

  THE TATTERED FLAMES from the stack of snapping branches of their ritual fire lit Manyenga’s pitiless smile and reddened his eyes. He was the only muscular man in the village, and his potbelly, and the way he stood, in an assertive pose, made him seem overbearing. He was shorter than Hock, but solid. His shirt, a familiar print, was clean, and his trousers had a crease. His sandals were sturdy, and a good watch slipped on its too large band on his wrist. It was Hock’s own watch. Hock recognized the sandals as his, the shirt and trousers, too, and like the watch, these clothes had disappeared from his hut a month or more ago. Until now, he hadn’t seen Manyenga wearing the stolen things. By stripping him of his symbols and his wealth, Manyenga had begun to inhabit him.

  “Now we must say bye-bye,” Manyenga said. “It is so sad for us, father.”

  Manyenga clapped his hands, summoning the dancers, six or seven skinny girls, and some boys whose faces had been smeared with flour, making them ghostly—they stared from their white faces with dark eyes. A man appeared in a torn jacket, wearing a hawk-nosed helmet mask; shredded reed fibers were bound to his legs and arms, like a scarecrow. He walked stiff-legged and carried a fly whisk. He seemed a more forbidding figure for being so ridiculously dressed, like a dangerous lunatic with nothing to lose. Perhaps he was intended to be costumed as a white man.

  The dance, the stamping, the pluckings of the mbira, meant nothing to Hock. In the years he’d spent in Malabo, and these months of his captivity, he had not been able to make sense of any of the nighttime dance ceremonies or songs. In his time, all the festivals had been Christian, with Bible readings and sermons. The church had vanished as completely as the school. Yet the secret memory of their drumming and dancing was known to the participants, if not the spectators. Or maybe there was no deeper meaning beyond the syncopation, as in the Likuba, like a conga line, the moving bodies in the firelight, the yodeling, the jumping shadows.

  Hock sat like a condemned man, awaiting the moment of death, helpless, stunned by the assault of the drumming, the chaotic dancing, the puppet-like jigging of the skinny girls, the yelps of the white-faced boys, and the bawling of the villagers. It pained him to be closely watched by the three brothers, who were seated on the ground, and by Manyenga, smiling, delighted by the drumming and dancing.

  “Ah, the vehicle!” Manyenga cried out as the cones of headlights swung into the clearing, the beams lighting the stony ground and the sloppily whitewashed boulders that marked the perimeter of the chief’s compound.

  The brothers rose and approached the vehicle—a white van that had crushed through the low bushes—and conferred with the driver. Hock could tell by the logo and the name L’Agence Anonyme that it was the same van that Aubrey had driven him in his failed escape.

  “Back up, turn around,” Manyenga called out, first in English and then in Sena, giving explicit commands. And hearing the efficiency of the orders, Hock remembered how Manyenga had told him he’d been a driver for the Agency.

  With the arrival of the van, the dancers had ceased their stamping and clapping. The drum rhythms slowed to a scraping patter on the drumheads as the van backed up, jerked forward, then turned and repeated this until the rear of the vehicle was facing the circle of spectators. Pleased with himself, his face gleaming in the firelight, Manyenga marched over and slapped the rear door of the van. “Open!” he called. He yanked the handle, pounded the doors again, and then, frustrated, he roared and the drum patter stopped.

  Now a small figure rounded the van from the driver’s side. He poked a key into a slot in the door handle, as Manyenga hovered, and swung the doors open.

  The dancers and spectators rushed forward and crowded the van, to marvel at the sacks of flour and rice, the cartons of milk powder, the stacked crates with labels that identified them as beans, marmalade, ketchup, salt, baby food, syrup, corned beef, chicken parts, creamed corn, pickles, and more. Some of the boxes were stenciled, others had colorful labels. Hock’s first thought was how clean the cardboard was, how well stacked the boxes, the order of them, absurdly framed by the dusty compound and scattered firewood, the hungry people gloating over the load like the jubilant, rewarded faces of a cargo cult.

  It was more than food: it represented influence far beyond the village. It was wealth. This penetration of the outer world was something like belief, a concentration of visible power. Small children jumped up and down at the sight of it, others pushed for a better look, and there was a howl of hunger in the laughter.

  “We will now unload,” Manyenga said, and he directed some of the bigger boys to begin stacking the crates against the wall of his hut.

  All the attention was directed at the van, the food, the process of unloading, the interior of the van growing emptier, larger, as the crates and boxes were removed. The very size of the boxes excited interest. Kitchen Magic Toaster Oven on one box and Electro-Mop on another; but since Malabo had no electricity, these items were no more than random loot.

  Hock had turned away and was looking at the one person who seemed indifferent to the spectacle of unloading. It was the driver, that small skinny person who had unlocked the rear doors of the van—Aubrey.

  Hock stared at him. Aubrey’s face was scratched, welts had been raised on his cheeks in places, and he wore a white bandage on his neck. His arms had been raked, too, and one of his wrists was wrapped in a thickness of gauze. Alerted by Hock’s staring, Aubrey jerked his head away. He blinked, shifted his posture, and touched his face. Then he stepped back, as though cowering.

  “You!” Hock called out, and in the confusion of unloading no one heard him, or rather, only Aubrey heard. The shout was enough to make him hesitate.

  Hock rose from his chair and took three long strides to where Aubrey was standing. As soon as he had gotten out of the chair he’d felt the strain of the effort, and the thought came to him: I am weak.

  Pure fury had carried him forward, and when he reached Aubrey he did not hesitate. He swung and slapped his face with such force the young man lost his balance and fell against the legs of some women who were celebrating the arrival of the food. Aubrey tried to regain his footing, but while he was on his knees, Hock hit him again, slapping him with his sore hand, and Aubrey slumped to the ground. He crouched, whimpering, making himself small.

  All Hock’s anger, months of frustration, stiffened the muscles in his arm and gave strength to that slap, delivered so hard his hand stung. He hoped that such a slap might flay the skin from the young man’s face. Hock stood over him, to assess the pain he’d inflicted, as Aubrey crawled on all fours, away from the firelight and into the shadows near one of Manyenga’s huts.

  The children who’d been so excited by the sight of the food were distracted by the sudden fight, and they grouped around the groveling Aubrey, kicking out at him, while the women mocked. The attention shifted from the van to the sight of Hock following Aubrey, the screeching children urging Hock to slap him again, crying, “Fight! Fight!”

  That was when Manyenga stepped in. He placed himself between Hock and Aubrey. He shouted for silence, he roared again, and when the crowd became quieter he began a speech in English—Hock realized it was for him to hear—and that it was so loud and so pompous, in a language that most did not understand, assured Manyenga of their close attention. Holding his mouth open when he spoke, he affected a gagging British accent.

  “This is an auspicious night,” Man
yenga said. “Never mind that our chief is angry. He has brought us good luck. He was here long ago and he returned to find us wanting and poor. So he did his level best to give us help—”

  Hock turned his back on him. He could not bear listening. He walked a little distance and saw that the van was empty now. All the boxes had been piled near one of Manyenga’s huts, and a blue plastic tarpaulin was being fitted over the pile and fastened to keep the dust off. Manyenga was taking possession of it all.

  “—the mzungu is our dear father. Without him we would be lost. We are therefore offering him a promotion.”

  As he spoke, standing near the fire so that he could be seen, glorying in the uprush of sparks from the flames, Manyenga commanded the attention of the entire crowd. Only Hock was not watching, and hardly listening. He saw a small hunched-over figure bobbing in the shadows behind the van, so small he was hardly visible.

  “This is our ceremony of farewell,” Manyenga said. “You, find the driver. Make him ready,” he added, shoving one of the brothers. “He must stand up. He cannot be intimidated by a little slap in the face. It is time to say goodbye.”

  The small bobbing figure—was it Snowdon?—moved around the van, efficiently, close to the ground, and then was gone, and when Hock looked again he saw Aubrey emerge from the crowd covered in dust, one side of his face swollen. Hock stepped forward, intending to hit him again. But his arm was snatched and held, his other arm gripped. He was restrained so tightly he couldn’t move.

  “Shut him in the van,” Manyenga said to the two boys holding Hock.

  “Festus, wait,” Hock said, struggling.

  “But we must,” Manyenga said.

  “You’re selling me—I know you’re selling me,” Hock said. “Why are you doing this?”

  In his affected British accent that was like gargling, Manyenga said, “We are doing so because we are hungry.”

  “And what will they do with me?”

  “Those boys will tend to you,” Manyenga said. “And one day you will be released to your people.”