“Passport,” the man said.
Hock took it from his pocket, smiling at the frontier — the man in his clean shirt, the table, the stamp and ink pad.
“You speak English?”
“No any Englis.” He examined the passport, moving the pages with his thumb. “Visa — forty dollar.”
“So you do speak English.”
“Visa,” the man said. He held up four fingers. “Forty dollar.”
Why am I happy? Hock asked himself. I am happy because no one knows me here.
At the small shed beyond the frontier post, Hock bought a box of salted crackers, a can of beans, some bottles of beer. He saw that the paddlers were building a fire, preparing a meal of nsima and stew, fussing with tin pots, scraping at the thick water-and-flour mixture.
He offered Simon a bottle of beer and sat with him on the embankment, on plastic beer crates, facing the river and the reddening sun. Already the day was cooler, and the slanting sunlight gilded the swarms of insects that streamed over the river like flakes of gold.
“Thank you,” the boy said, swigging beer.
“Tomorrow where do we go?”
“To Caya, on the Zambezi.”
“And then?”
“Find a lorry to Beira. Or maybe a bus.”
“How far to Beira?”
“One overnight. Then a bus to Maputo. Maputo, it is the capital city. Then Jo’burg.”
“I want to go.”
“It is your decision, father.”
“I helped you with money.”
“Yes, father.” Simon drank his beer slowly, a small mouthful at a time, as though rationing himself. He said, “I want a bright future for myself. I want to help my family with money. They are suffering too much. Maybe I can help my country, too. I can work, sure. I am willing and able, that is the goodness.”
“Did you learn English at the school in Malabo?”
“No, in Chikwawa. We have no school in Malabo. We have nothing in Malabo.”
Hock was about to lecture him, to tell him that once, many years ago, there was a school in Malabo, which had a library and teachers. There was a clinic, a monthly visit from a missionary, a plan for digging a well, and another plan for electricity. There was a church that was sometimes used as a village hall. But he said nothing, only smiled, and when he finished his bottle of beer he said, “Ask these people if they have a bed for me.”
“I will ask.”
Hock tuned his little radio, found some faint music, and listened, growing sad. The sound of the radio made him feel more remote, as though he was listening to the earth from distant space.
“They have a bed for you, father.” He led Hock to one of the nearby sheds. Seeing Hock with the radio to his ear he asked, “How many kwacha does that wireless cost for buying?”
“I don’t know,” Hock said. “Here, you can listen. You might learn something. You sound like a self-improver. Give it back to me tomorrow.”
A woman opening the door of the shed said, “Ndalama.”
Hock gave her five dollars. She tucked it into the fastening across her breasts and handed him a small towel. This he spread across the hard pillow on the shelf that served as a bunk, two planks that had been fixed from one wall to the other.
He lay in the hot stifling darkness. The small room stank of kerosene and dirt, and it was airless, the door closed, the bolt shot. It had no windows. It was obviously for storage, not a bedroom. Yet he was tired, and he slept, and when he woke and walked into the freshness of the morning, the river sparkling, he was happy again.
But the dugout was gone, the boy was gone, the man in the khaki shirt at the small table under the tree, gone. It was just another riverbank. Hock hurried to the landing and saw at the foot of it a woman washing clothes, slapping them, twisting the muddy water from them.
“Where are they?”
Even without English, the woman, seeing his confusion, knew what he was saying.
She pointed downriver and laughed and went on slapping the clothes against a large stone.
17
THE MUD AT the embankment was thick and dark, a slippery mass of insubstantial fudge, crawling with beetles and littered with chewed fish bones and fruit peels. For most of the morning Hock squatted there, slapping at the tsetse flies biting his ankles and watching for a boat, any boat, to take him away from the landing. The sky was cloudless, and empty except for the black profile of a gliding fish eagle, and nearer, the lovely trilling of a swamp warbler swaying on a reed. Yellow butterflies fluttered to the garbage heaps on the mud bank, settled on the rusted cans and the foul mass of plastic and sodden paper and broken bottles. He was not dismayed, but he felt the fatigue of being dirty and yearned to wash his face.
Though just yesterday Zizi had willingly crept into his bed, he was saddened by the thought of her, yet relieved to be here and not there. He’d crossed a border. This looked like a dump, and the settlement was just a camp, a portrait of abandonment in the bush, but it was a frontier, and he was on the right side of it, on his way home. With this thought at the front of his mind, he looked around at the placid river, the garbage, the wooden windowless shed where he’d slept, the hulk of the large wrecked boat with its still intact wheelhouse — the stink and decrepitude of it all — and he laughed. He was in the middle of nowhere, but he was free.
Just then he saw a dugout bobbing in the stream at the far bank. He stood up and whistled, with his fingers in his mouth. For a moment he thought the paddlers on board hadn’t heard, or that they were afraid. But like a compass needle swiveling in liquid, the narrow canoe turned to point at him, and it slid toward where he stood on the bank.
The paddlers were children, hardly more than ten or eleven.
He greeted them, and when they remained stony-faced, either afraid or unfriendly, he asked whether they could speak Sena.
They nodded yes, they could speak the language.
Hock said in Sena that he wanted to go to the far bank, and the boys’ reaction was expressionless again, implacable, and so he explained, “To your village.”
They seemed to understand the word for village, but did not reply to it, or say that he would be either welcome or unwelcome there. Still, they floated nearer, and that encouraged Hock to step to the river’s edge.
He threw his bag into the dugout and, up to his ankles in mud, he stepped in and held on. The boat rode lower in the water with him in it, was more stable with his weight holding it deeper.
The skinny boys thrashed with their paddles, one of the paddles merely the splintered portion of a short water-blackened board. Hock asked them their names, and they grunted some words he did not understand. But random incoherence seemed to be the theme of his escape. No record had been made of his passport details by the man in khaki. The washerwoman had laughed as she told him that his friends had left without him. The boy Simon and the other canoe were gone. He was in a small dugout in the middle of the river, still the Lower River, miles above the Zambezi, into which it flowed, the two small boys steering and slapping with their clumsy paddles on this hot morning.
I don’t exist, Hock thought. No one knows I’m here, no one knows me, no one cares, and were this flimsy canoe to turn over, or be flipped by a hippo, no one would ever find me; no one would know I died. The world would continue to turn without me, my death would be unnoticed, would make no difference, because I am no one, no more than meat.
He saw himself with the eyes of a hawk that was passing high above, soaring without moving its wings, looking imperturbable, graceful in its effortless gliding. I am a speck, no more than that, Hock thought. I am a bug on a twig floating down a dark river. Less than a bug.