It worried Hock that too much time had passed in the palaver, but once he and the boy were on board, and the two paddlers were beating it backward from the bank into the bobbing density of water hyacinths — the boy, feet apart, poling — he saw that he’d gotten away quickly. The village watched them go, the ghostly women at the smoky edge of the trees, the men standing near the unloaded piles of grain sacks and the crates of fruit. And there was the parked motorbike, the guarantee that no one from Malabo would arrive here anytime soon; it was the only vehicle in Malabo. And so he’d stranded Zizi in his bed, Manyenga in the village, Marsden at the Lutwe crossroads — and he was away, cheered by the men digging their paddles into the water, pushing the canoe through the narrow channel between the glistening water hyacinths, a profusion of stems and leaves and blossoms so tangled it seemed you could step out of the canoe and walk across this floating platform of green marsh weeds.
Confident that he was safe, Hock leaned against the blunt bow of the canoe, resting on a sack of flour, and fell asleep, lulled by the rocking of the boat, the regular splash of the paddles. It was as though he had at last freed himself from the pull of gravity, not just escaped from Malabo but twisted away from the clinging people, the reaching hands, everything represented by the muddy embankment, which seemed like the edge of an alien planet, and was now bobbing through the sickly light in the soup of its atmosphere.
Exhausted by the early start and the effort in all his harangues — Zizi, the motorcyclist Marsden, the boy Simon, the elderly canoe owner — he lay in the boat asleep for over an hour. He woke with the sun full on his face, and gazing up he saw the long spikes of marsh reeds overhanging the bow as the big dugout glided past.
The two paddlers were angled against the gunwales of the boat, one on either side, the boy Simon thrusting with his pole. Hock peeled an orange and, throwing the scraps of skin into the channel, saw they were being sucked toward the stern.
“We’re going upstream,” he called out. “No — that way!”
The men kept their rhythm of paddling, chopping the water, their cheeks streaming with sweat.
“This is the channel,” one of them said in Sena. “We have to pass through the marsh to get to the river.”
In his second year in Malabo, he’d been taken fishing for tilapia in the river. They’d crossed the Dinde Marsh and entered the fast-flowing stream of the Shire River in less than thirty minutes. He explained this in a halting way to the paddlers, who listened while shoveling water with their paddle blades. Speaking about the past here was like speaking about a foreign land — happier, simpler, much bigger and highly colored, seemingly aboveground.
The man who had spoken before said, “That was years and years,” and he gestured to mean the years were gone.
“So the river changed?”
The man who had been silent said, “The river is a snake.”
The great marsh and its wall of reeds was an obstacle, or rather, a set of obstacles, the channel zigzagging through it without any logic or pattern, a maze in which they were pushing themselves, always upstream, slipping through narrow openings and up the widening channel, against the current. The grunts of the men and the smack of the paddles kept him awake as he peered ahead for the opening of the marsh into the river. Here and there, men in small canoes were surprised, as they fished, to see the big canoe and the red-faced man in it. And as they bobbed in its wake, staring at the mzungu, he noted the few possessions they had on board: the water bottle, the torn net, the dish of bait, the pathetic catch — a basket of small shiny fish.
He was fleeing, he knew. He could have ridden the motorbike to the boma, but he would have been seen and probably detained. The river was better — he could lose himself in the bush. He wanted to get away, to vanish across the Mozambique border. The thought of distancing himself from Malabo excited him; the idea that he was breaking free of Malawi made him joyous. He had a change of clothes, his little radio, his passport, his money: everything he needed.
In the stern the boy Simon was asking a question. Hock didn’t hear the question, but he heard the answer.
“It is there.”
The boy said in English to Hock, “Reevah.”
Sunlight spanked the water ahead with such brilliance the current showed as muscles beneath bright scales on the turbulent surface. The boat nosed through the last thinning wall of reeds and shot out of the mouth of the channel, where it was caught and tipped by the wide flow of the river. The bow was yanked into the current and then the whole dugout was carried sideways along the stream. One of the paddlers wiped his face on his shirt as the other used his paddle blade as a rudder, steering the boat away from the tall bank of reeds. And just then, in a scoop in the reeds, a little bay, a hippo raised its blotchy head and was so startled by the boat he opened his jaws wide. Hock could see the reddish flesh of the mouth and the blunt pegs of its thick round teeth and the raw mottled skin of its fat body. He yelped — his first cry of joy in many weeks — and he pointed.
“You!”
Paddling more easily now, the men kept the boat in the current, sliding its beam crossways in the stream from reach to reach.
“We eat them,” the first paddler said in Sena.
“People here never ate them before,” Hock said, and again in speaking of the past he seemed to be referring not to another time but to a distant country. “What is your name?”
“Lovemore.”
“Why do you eat hippos, Lovemore?”
“Because we are hungry.”
The other paddler gave his name as Dalitso — blessings — and it was he, not Lovemore, who spoke a little English. Hock offered some of his oranges and tangerines to them, but they refused all food. Simon ate an orange, removing the peel in fastidious pinchings, such delicacy in a dugout on a river flowing through the bush.
The paddlers drank water from their plastic jug, and they rolled cigarettes and smoked. Hock knew from their glassy eyes and their concentration that they were smoking weed.
“Chamba,” he said.
“Mbanje!” one said, using the slang word.
Even in the hottest hours of the day, as Hock dozed under the shirt he spread across the gunwales for shade, the paddlers kept on, fueled by the weed smoke. The banks of the river were more clearly defined now, steep and sculpted flat, like the walls of a ditch. They could not see beyond them — no trees were visible, no high ground, only now and then a break in the bank where a green stream leaked out, or a sandbar at the edge where a small bumpy green croc was sleeping.
“Where is Mozambique?” Hock asked.
No one spoke, though one man jabbed his paddle at the opposite bank.
Toward midafternoon Hock saw an island of low huts, thatched with black decaying bundles of straw. Wondering whether it was a Sena settlement, he asked idly, “Who lives there?”
“Dead people,” one of the paddlers whispered.
Hock blinked and an ache of fear tugged at his throat.
A mile or so below that island — of graves, of ghosts? — they came to a wide muddy embankment where the broken hull, bare ribs, and rusty ironwork of a large wooden boat had been pushed onto the foreshore to rot. It was the only sign of habitation he’d seen since leaving Magwero. As they drew closer, he could see a shed, a sloping landing, and a man at a table under a mango tree. The man wore the khaki shirt of officialdom, including a brass badge on his pocket.
“Mozambique,” the paddler Dalitso said, easing the dugout against the landing.
Hock climbed out, glad for the chance to walk, relieved that the day had gotten him this far from Malabo. He helped them haul the boat onto the landing, then climbed the embankment and walked toward the man at the table.