“Remember me?”
“Yes, I do indeed!”
From that big, coarse, and aged body, from the cracked lips, a voice of refinement — astonishing, correct English.
“Come sit here,” she said, indicating a plank bench on the veranda, and she ordered Zizi and the other woman to bring drinks. “What will you have? Water? Tea? We have orange squash as well.”
“Tea,” Hock said, fearing the water.
Gala dropped herself heavily into the armchair and took up a fly whisk. She batted a brush of horsehair around her head and smiled at Hock and peered with watery eyes. Her eye shape had not changed, still hooded and Asiatic, but apart from her eyes he could not find anything else of Gala in this fleshy old woman.
“Now tell me about your journey,” she said, lapsing into the local approximation, jinny.
“You’re surprised to see me?”
“To see you, yes,” Gala said carefully. “But I heard you were at Malabo.”
“You knew I was there?”
“You arrived on the fifteenth, not so?”
Hock had lost track of time, yet she was precise.
“I didn’t know you would come here to pay a call and reacquaint yourself.”
He was baffled by the sensible and fluent voice in that big battered body. Pay a call sounded so formal, involving doorbells and visiting cards and teacups and overstuffed chairs with doilies, and here they were on the rough plank porch of a mud hut.
Gala looked like a market mammy, someone he might find behind a table heaped with bananas and mangoes, or eggs in a basket, fanning herself with a palm leaf, feet wide apart, her cloth wrap drooping.
Yet she said, “It is rare that we get visitors here, except the tax collector, or the boys from the ruling party soliciting donations.” Then she laughed, with a slight choking sound, kek-kek-kek. “You look fit.”
“I’m okay.”
“My granddaughter is looking after you.”
“You know that too?”
“Her mother has passed on from the scourge of eddsi”—AIDS was a word that no one could pronounce. “The Lower River has suffered. Even Malabo has suffered.”
But Hock saw a different connection — a revelation. He said, “So it’s not a coincidence. They knew about you and me?”
“We are part of the local legend,” Gala said, laughing again, kek-kek. “It was a source of pain for my late husband. I was a marked woman because of my friendship with the mzungu.”
“And that’s why they chose Zizi?”
“Some people might think so,” Gala said, and screwed up one eye against the sun.
So it was a setup. He should have known. They had assessed his weakness, his sentimentality, and he reflected on how shrewd they were, how predictable he was: just minutes ago he had embraced Zizi with hot hands on the bush track.
With exaggerated dignity he said, “I might not be staying much longer in Malabo.”
Gala flicked at her head with the fly whisk, then said, “So— hah! — what do you think of your village?”
“It’s changed,” he said.
“Maybe it hasn’t changed,” Gala said. “Maybe it was always like this.”
“Forty years ago it seemed like home to me.”
“That was a special period,” she said. “Maybe you could call it an era. People were hopeful in a way they hadn’t been before. After some few years the hope was gone. You had left by then, back to your people.”
“I thought of the Sena as my people,” Hock said. “What happened?”
“Nothing happened. That was the badness. People expected a miracle, and when the miracle didn’t come they were angry. You see these young people in Malabo — all over the Lower River. They are so angry. What do you think?”
Hock, staring at her, was thinking that he was about her age, and yet, for all her fluency, she was a physical wreck, decrepit in spite of her wisdom. What he could see of her eyes was clouded, not blind but dim-sighted and milky from her hard life in this sunlight.
“Zizi isn’t angry,” he said.
“I raised Zizi,” Gala said. “My children were not angry. I sent them away for their own good. My firstborn is in the UK, a pharmacist. Another is married, in South Africa.”
“How many children do you have.”
“I have borne a total of eight, but two died in infancy. One more from dysentery, another succumbed to malaria. I myself am troubled by malaria. I hope you are taking precautions.”
“I take a pill every day.”
“The headman, Festus Manyenga, he was with the Agency in a malaria eradication program. Also some food delivery.”
Her mention of the man gave him an opportunity to ask, “What do you think of him?”
Laughing, she said, “Festus was so puffed up when he worked for the Agency. He was the driver — not a very elevated position, you might say. But he had a smart uniform. He took advantage. His vehicle was so big and expensive. He treated it as his own. He pinched from them. Have some tea.”
Zizi held a tin tray, a cup trembling on it, as her aunt poured tea for Hock.
“I think we have some biscuits,” Gala said. She was making queenly gestures from her armchair. At last, with a frown and a dismissing hand she indicated that Zizi and the aunt should leave. In a low serious voice she said to Hock, “I hope you are being careful in Malabo.”
“Doing my best,” Hock said.
“Please take care.”
“You sound worried.”
“I know those people.” She leaned forward. “They are different from any people here that you knew before. We were quite cheerful. Independence was a joyful occasion for us. The school was new and it was something wonderful.”
“When did it fall apart?”
“Some few years after you left.”
“I used to think how happy I’d be living here,” he said in a soft speculating voice that implied, With you.
“You made the right decision by going home. You have a family?”
“A wife, a child,” he said. “An ex-wife. An angry child.”
“Angry or not, your child is forever your child.”
He could not explain why he felt differently, and that when he had left home he had said goodbye to his friend Roy and not to his ex-wife or his daughter. He said, “Are you warning me about the people in Malabo?”
“You are wiser than me,” she said. “But this is my home. These people know you only by name and reputation. They know you don’t fear snakes. Apart from that, you are a stranger here.”
She seemed so ominous, saying it in her deep voice, he laughed to lighten the moment. But she kept her head lowered in that confiding posture.
“They will eat your money,” she said. “When your money is gone, they will eat you.”
He flinched at this, and was sorry he showed his surprise. It was a far cry from the homecoming he’d expected, and a shock coming from this articulate old woman, who clearly had suffered. She was ill and overweight and short of breath, and having gasped that warning, she’d exhausted herself and was panting.
“So I can’t trust anyone?”
“You can trust me,” she said. “You can trust Zizi.”
“She’s, what, sixteen?”
“More than that. Soon to be seventeen, but still a girl, still mtsikana.” It was a village distinction, a girl who had not been initiated — a virgin.
“No chinamwali for her?”
“I didn’t agree to the initiation. Festus was so angry!”
Hock glanced at the girl. “Pretty young.”
“I was not much older when I met you. Eighteen.”
“I had no idea. You were a teacher.”
“Anyone could be a teacher in those days,” Gala said. “But as you found out, I was promised to Mr. Kalonda. Zizi is not promised.”