A basket at his feet held three tiny fish: not bait, though they were small enough for that. It was perhaps the day’s catch, a peeled stick inserted through their gills, holding them together like a kebab. The boys would have started fishing before dawn. This was all they had to show for those five hours or so.
The river narrowed. It had been fifty yards wide at the border post; now it was less than forty, and swifter because of that, rushing past sandbanks on which Hock saw the unmistakable signs of large crocodiles, the parallel paw prints and claw marks, the groove of the dragging tail between them.
Hock pointed to an overhanging mud cliff that had been hollowed out beneath by the rushing river, using it as a landmark. He said, “Malawi?”
“Nuh,” the boy said, jerking his head, but still stroking with his paddle.
“Mozambique?”
The boy clicked his teeth, but that didn’t mean yes; it meant the question was annoying and perhaps meaningless.
The reeds, the marsh grass, the greasy weeds, the sandbanks, the blackish water — none of it was different from what he’d seen upstream. No high ground was visible beyond the steep riverbanks. But he was moving, and no one knew him. He had escaped Malabo, and he was watchful for whatever might come next.
The pull of the current consoled him with the notion that he was being drawn to safety. All he had to do was surrender to the flow of the river, the Lower River, bearing him southward through the bush.
After about an hour he saw in the distance downriver a single straight-sided humped-up mountain, solitary, like a granite monument, headless shoulders risen in the marshy plain. As they drew closer in the canoe it seemed like a citadel of tree-clad stone, its steep sides and cliffs formed in the shape of fortifications. It was such an oddity — its great size, its unusual shape — he asked its name.
“Morrumbala,” the boy in the stern said.
Hock knew the name but had never seen it. The war against the Portuguese had prevented him from traveling this far into Mozambique, so it was all new to him, a strangely hopeful sign. It lay in the distance, beyond the far bank.
As Hock stared at it, the sun striking the trees on its sheer sides, the sunlit green as luminous as fresh lettuce, pulpous and pale yellow in patches, he did not notice the canoe drawing away from Morrumbala, closer to the near riverbank. Only when the canoe bumped did he look up and see that they’d been pushed by the current against a pair of poles sticking out of the mud. Lashed to the poles was a water-soaked board that served as a crude pier, and another board, a walkway to the high grass at the bank.
A boy of four or five, wearing just a shirt — his bottom bare — saw Hock and began screaming in fear. He ran from Hock as from a demon, as the paddlers laughed — their first full-throated cry — and the small boy screamed out, “Mzungu!”
His fright seemed to relax them, and they were still laughing as they tied the dugout to the poles and led Hock onto the bank and up a path to a clearing.
He had seen many villages like this, the squat square huts arranged around the perimeter of an open space of smooth packed-down earth. From the condition of the fraying thatch on the hut roofs, and the exposed framework on the mud walls, and the rags hanging on clotheslines — from the sharp stink of smoke and dirt — he knew it was a poor village. Yet it was orderly, and there was something else — unusual, even remarkable — for though it was full of people, they were all very small, all of them, he saw, children in tattered clothes, the sort of T-shirts and shorts and trousers that were sold cheaply at the used-clothing markets, the shirts with American names on them, schools, the logos of well-known companies, names of cities, too, and famous universities.
The small boy who had been screaming was scooped up by a girl of ten or so — she could barely lift him. He buried his face in her shoulder.
“Where’s your father, your mother?” Hock asked the paddlers.
One boy turned away in alarm, his rags making his fear pathetic. The other boy faced Hock and scowled, saying nothing, either insulted or afraid.
“The chief,” Hock said. “Mfumu. Where is your bwana?”
The boy made an even sourer face, thrusting out his lower lip, showing a kind of threat with its inner pinkness, and began to speak fast, turning his back to Hock as he talked. Finally he walked away on his toes, in disdain, holding upright like a symbol of prestige the stick with the three small stiff fish that he’d taken from the canoe.
Hock sat on a discarded plank in the shade of a tree and watched a small girl poking a fire under a blackened pot, perhaps cooking, perhaps playing; another small girl holding a baby at her hip; infants crawling in the dust, picking at dry tufts of grass. More children were occupied stacking firewood, most of them boys, but the pile they made was so random — no more than a scattered heap — that looked like play, too, a game of tossed and broken branches. Some other, bigger boys sat under a tree on the far side of the clearing. Children and more children. They all wore faded T-shirts of various colors, much too big for them, some serving the smaller girls as dresses — T-shirts as shapeless frocks, one saying Niagara Falls, another Yale. They were dusty-faced and their hair was clotted with white bits of lint, and many of the children were unnaturally skinny, the infants potbellied with spindly arms and legs.
They seemed indifferent to Hock, and they were silent, going about their chores or absorbed in repetitious play. When Hock got up from his plank and walked through the village, they took no notice of him.
The border post on the river now seemed to him something defined and certain: the table, the sullen official with the stamp and ink pad, the battered sheds, the broken boat, the muddy embankment, the rapacious shopkeeper. It was on the map, or at least seemed so, an entry point. It was a ruin but it was not a horror, only futile-looking, decaying with the accumulation of garbage, and the rise and fall of the river, not maintained, conventionally ugly, as most of the depots on the Lower River looked, including the boma at Nsanje and the landings at Magwero and Marka. People congregated at the landings, but few people lived at them.
Compared to the border post, even to Magwero, this village of children was whole, coherent, and some of it was swept clean — Hock could see small girls with twig brooms pushing the litter of leaves and peels to the side of the courtyard in front of the huts. None of the huts was in good shape — the usual bruised walls, the skeletal frame of branches showing through — and yet the village was inhabited, strangely so. Everyone he’d seen so far was young, some very young, mostly small children, the little girls holding infants, small boys playing together, the older boys watchful. And because most were so young there was a buzz of vitality in the village, a hurrying; running boys, skipping girls. Some played with crudely made toys, formed of twisted wire, or hanks of knotted rags that served as balls to kick, and some limbless dolls, plastic torsos with cracked heads — white dolls.
This village made sense because it was full of lives being lived outdoors; it was visible and vital. Pots simmered over fires, and oddly, some small girls were taking turns with oversized mortars and pestles — the pestles much taller than they were and so heavy that some of them had to be hoisted and dropped by pairs of girls.
It could have been a summer camp or a school; it had that look of monotony and order, all the children occupied. But most were working, even those he had taken to be playing. The girls wore large T-shirts to their knees, some were cinched with rope at the waist to make a dress, others draped over them like nightshirts, or like smocks. Many of the small children wore a T-shirt and nothing else, and though the boys’ T-shirts fitted them better, all were faded and worn—Westfield High School and UConn and Bob’s Bluegrass Bar and UCLA and more. Once-white ones were gray with dirt, many had chewed collars and slashes, and some were shredded to rags.