He became accustomed to Zizi bringing him news, or sometimes warnings. Boys in ragged shirts would wander past his hut, going slowly, tilting their heads, giving him sidelong glances. Before he asked who they were, Zizi would hiss through her teeth, “Bad boys. They are wanting.” One day, hearing a commotion, Zizi squinted into the emptiness of the village, as though conjuring a vision. “They are killing a goat, but he is not dying.” She might mention that someone was brewing beer, or that visitors had come to Manyenga’s compound — the delivery of medicine, the arrival of a relative. Another day, she reported a death, but it was not the death of the man that she described; rather, she told how Manyenga’s family had gone to the dead man’s hut, at the far side of the village, and they had stripped it of all the pots and knives, taken his hoe and his ax, his mirror, his mats and baskets, then set the house on fire, something that Hock had once witnessed, the ritual raid the Sena called “erasing the death.”
“What will Festus do with the hoe and the ax?” Hock asked, to see what Zizi would say.
“They will sell them, because they are lazy.”
No government officials ever visited the village, no missionaries, no aid people, no foreigners, no health workers. Hock inquired. Zizi shook her head.
“But the Agency,” she said, “they have food for Festus.”
“What’s the Agency?” It was a recurring name. Gala had also mentioned it.
She couldn’t say; it seemed she didn’t know. She shrugged and pointed to the sky.
Sorting papers early one morning, still in his hut, disconsolate that he had stopped his diary, because every day’s entry was the same two lines, he heard Zizi calling to him, clucking through the window.
“A doctor has come.”
It seemed a blessing, it gave him hope. “Where is he?”
“At the clinic.”
Like the school, the two-room clinic was a ruin — no roof, the doors and window frames torn out and used for firewood. What remained was a set of brick walls that dated from Hock’s time as a teacher in Malabo, one of the buildings put up at independence. Every month, a doctor or a medical missionary would arrive in a Land Rover from the boma, or Chikwawa, or farther afield; word spread and within the hour a line of people formed to be treated or to ask for medicine. Hock always went to the clinic to hand over letters to be posted, or to obtain chloroquine for students who were down with malaria. He’d been treated, too, for tonsillitis, for an infected knee, and once he’d had a chigger dug from beneath the nail of his big toe, a fat leggy flea that had writhed and kicked on the blade of the doctor’s lancet. “Cheeky bugger,” the doctor had said, smiling at the flea, wiping it away.
That a doctor had come to the ruins of the clinic today seemed an unexpected miracle, but for Hock — usually to his sorrow — Malabo was a place where the unexpected often occurred. Yet this was news. No matter who it was, a doctor would have come from afar, and would have a vehicle. There was no other way for such a person to reach the village.
So Hock flung his papers aside and left his hut, walking quickly, overeager, finding himself gasping in the heat — he was not used to hurrying, and the sunlight slashed at him. Zizi stepped ahead of him, taking long strides, seeming to dance. She wore her purple wrap, and the turban wound round her head against the sun gave her stature, made her seem exotic and stylish, as Hock followed.
The sight at the clinic was old and familiar, even uplifting: hopeful villagers waiting at the open doorway, a long line of them, forty or more, women carrying infants in cloth slings, men squatting, some boys, their hands on their brows to shield their faces from the sunlight — all gathered here to see the doctor, as in years past.
“Where’s his vehicle?”
“He has no vehicle,” Zizi said.
When the people in line saw Hock, they seemed to recoil, looking away, as though self-conscious or fearful. He was cautioned by their apparent fear, so he kept apart from them and walked slowly to the gaping window — no glass, no frame — at the back of the derelict building.
Stretched out, in the surrendering posture of a patient, a man in shirtsleeves and brown trousers lay on a straw mat, half in shadow, half in bright sunlight, in the roofless room. With his hands clutching his face, he looked as if he was grieving.
Kneeling beside him, a smaller man attended to him, working closely on his ankle. He was no doctor. On his head was a grubby fur hat, over his shoulders a stiff cloak of animal skin that might have been a leopard; he wore old black track-suit trousers as well, and what looked like a woman’s satin slippers. He held a knife at the patient’s leg, and Hock saw that he was making a continuous cut in the man’s ankle, jabbing from time to time to go deeper, until he sighed and rocked back on his heels, revealing the wound he had made, an open anklet of bright blood.
He set his knife down and adjusted his hat with wet fingers, leaving a gluey bloodstain on the fur. He reached into a bucket by his side and pinched out some dark ashes — the dust of powdered charcoal — and after wiping the ankle he rubbed the ashes into the groove of the wound. Almost without pausing, he took up his knife and cut the man’s other ankle, encircling it, pushing the blood flow aside with his thumb, finally plunging his hand in the bucket and, his sticky fingers blackened, pressing the ashes into the wound. He shuffled forward on his knees and began again: tugged at the man’s right arm, flourished his bloody knife, cut into the wrist.
“Doctor,” Zizi said, giving the word three syllables.
Hock leaned toward her and whispered, “Ask someone what he is doing.”
She slipped away, and before the man had finished the wrist, Zizi was beside him, her head lowered.
“Snake doctor,” she said in her language.
Without thinking, Hock groaned — too loud — and the little man in the fur hat drew back, his face upturned, scowling at the window. Startled by the sight of the mzungu and the turbaned girl, he made a scouring sound in his toothless open mouth, a harsh cat-like hiss.
At dusk the next day, framed by a volcanic sunset, Manyenga visited Hock at his hut to announce that he had been seen with Zizi at the clinic. And why?
Hock said, “I thought he was a doctor. I needed some aspirin.”
“I enjoy your sense of humor, father! Sure, he is a doctor. Better than a European doctor. After he does his work, a person is protected for life.”
“Protected from what?”
“From the bite of a snake,” Manyenga said, and he raised his fists to his face so that Hock could see the old raised scars that circled his wrists. “You see, we are not fearing you!”
A thud like that of a woman bopping her pestle into a mortar woke him in the darkness one night some days later, pulsing under his hut, the very soil jarred by its steady beat. He felt the thud in his body, prodding him, and was then wide awake. He walked to the window and the thudding entered his feet. Seeing nothing, he went to the door and as always was amazed by the crystalline brightness of the stars, some blobby, some pinpricks, their milky light shimmering on the leaves of the trees, the starry glow on the bare ground coating it with fluorescence.
Still the thudding, a sickening repetition, pushing at him. And then he saw the fire jumping at the edge of the village, in the football field where the orphan boys sometimes kicked a ball between two overturned buckets that represented a goal mouth.
As soon as he stepped away from his hut, Hock became self-conscious in the bluish light of the stars. He looked for Zizi. But she seldom slept near his hut. She seemed to drift off after he’d gone to bed, showing up in the early morning, probably at a signal from Snowdon, who crept to the veranda before dawn.