Hock knew from his Medford store that there is a way a person handles money that shows familiarity, not just the deftness of a clerk at the cash drawer, but also in a bush village like this, in the practiced movements of someone’s fingers — a response of hands more than eyes. The boy had taken the twenty-dollar bill, had smoothed it and folded it in half, hardly looking at it, and Hock knew that the boy had experienced American money, handled it easily, his pinching fingers testing the paper, making it speak.
In return for the money, Hock was given a mat in a dirty hut at the edge of the village. He sat before it in shadows, eating a plate of roasted cassava, some bananas, and peanuts boiled in their shells, glad for the cup of boiled water into which he had swirled some tea leaves. He ate slowly, to prolong the pleasure.
The sunset was a syrup of golden red dissolving the clouds in the pools of its light, lovely over his squalid hut, lending the mud walls a pinkish glow.
18
SITTING CROSS-LEGGED in the broken wattle-and-daub hut that had no door, Hock remembered an incident from his second year in Malabo. One of his students, a girl sleeping in a doorless hut like this, was attacked by a hyena that had padded in and begun to eat her face. Her struggling did not deter the creature, though an ember from the dying fire, thrown by the girl’s mother at the hyena, the sparks setting its fur alight, repelled him. Two days later, at the filthy clinic where her severe wounds had gone septic, her head yellow and swollen tight with infection, the girl died.
From that day, Hock could not sleep in Malabo without barricading his door. For decades in Medford he’d hardly thought of that event, but this night in the village of children he sat in the doorway of the hut, heavy with fatigue and a sense of grievance, feeling wronged, not by the imposters in Malabo but by his divorce, thinking angrily of Deena’s demanding the house, his daughter’s abusing him and then wanting her cut of her inheritance in advance, believing that he would marry again and have more children — and here he was, indignant, sitting on the dirt floor of a filthy hut alone in this underworld, on an obscure reach of the Lower River.
Only as dawn was breaking, brightening the wide blades of elephant grass and the delicate tassels on the banks of reeds in the marsh at the edge of the river, and with the night animals dispersed — the feathered girlish shrieks of the birds seeming to drive them off — did he slump to the ragged mat at the back of the hut and sleep until the midmorning sun scorched his face.
The thought of the tangle of children and the insolence of the cruel sharp-faced boy roused him. His bag served as his pillow. The sight of the leather and canvas bag, his companion since leaving Medford, moved him — it was bruised and worn, faded from Malabo, stained from the puddle of bilge and fish guts in the big dugout, wet from yesterday’s canoe, crusted with mud. It had the humble and mute look of loyalty; just a bag but also a talisman. It reflected the beating that he had taken. He snatched it up and felt stronger as he walked away from the hut, heading across the clearing and down the sloping path to the tall reeds. He knew the landing was there, and the Lower River that flowed south into the Zambezi. He’d find a boat, and a way out.
The children had awakened, the fires were smoking and sending up smuts, and a blue haze of wood smoke curled in the windless air of the village. What had seemed at first to him an almost charming place of industrious and innocent children now was a vision of pure menace — stupid unreasonable children, and too many of them, hungry, irrational, impulsive, and somehow resentful, seeing him as an enemy. And the smoke stinging his eyes in the unbreathable air made it all worse.
He expected one or two of them to interfere with him on his way to the riverbank. But as on the day before, they turned their backs on him. Why did it seem a greater hostility that they ignored him rather than faced him with insults? He was shamed by his memory of bantering with them like the silliest safari tourist, believing he could deal with children. His years of teaching had shown him that, misleadingly so. No, he was the father of an ungrateful and spoiled child — that’s who he was, and here were more of them.
Yet in another sense these children were like a separate species altogether, feral and damned. A village of adults might have listened, might have been persuadable, might have understood his predicament, his need to get down the river and go home. But these children had an infantile indifference and probably no thought of him except when he was close by. They had no notion of his plight, perhaps no idea of what home or attachment meant; they were too small, too abused, too rat-like and lost. They had no sympathy, either, and if they seemed to him like an alien species — cold, weird, cruel, hungry, blighted, dim, with dirty feet — then he must have seemed to them like a hairy giant, big and pale, in a sweat-stained shirt, clutching a bag, who’d come ashore to pester them.
A fat stick of wood landed near him, hard, clacking on the stones — someone had thrown it. He whirled around and saw a small boy laughing, and just in time to bat another stick away. What to do? It was foolish to lob a stick at one of these tormenting children, and when he reprimanded the laughing boy, saying, “Stop that!” the other children hooted at him. They were small and unafraid and looked compact and indestructible.
So he walked on, and glancing back he saw a boy behind him, mimicking the way he walked, feet apart, arms swinging — and there was more laughter.
The children were fearless. He walked faster, trying to be obvious in ignoring them, but when he got to the riverbank he saw that the canoe was gone. The river was dark green and depthless in the morning light. The buoyant clumps of ragged hyacinth — flowers and roots — in the wrinkles of current scarfing through the reeds showed the speed of the river’s flow. Swimming was out of the question. There were hippos, crocs, snakes, and just as dangerous, the burrowing bilharzia snails. The Lower River was as the people on its banks said — a snake, a poisonous one.
A kingfisher came to rest on a reed, and there it swayed. When it flew off, Hock felt a pang at the ease of its departure. He hoped to see a passing dugout, the sort of boat that had brought him here. But he knew that because the border between Malawi and Mozambique was so close, this was essentially a no man’s land, avoided by most travelers and many fishermen.
Unshaven and dirty, his shirt wet against his body, his trousers heavy with dampness, the cuffs muddy, he sat on his bag and batted at the mosquitoes around his head. Hunger, and the lumps of undercooked food he’d eaten the night before, made his mouth foul, his teeth slimy, and the morning sun slanting in his eyes made his head ache.
The river surged past him, gulping and chuckling in the muddy hollows where it undercut the bank, and he was teased by its speed, seeing the torn vines spinning downstream. Meditating this way, he began to find his old composure, the strength he often felt in solitude. Yet he had to fight the other thoughts — that he’d been a fool to return to Malabo, that he should have raised an alarm there, that he’d abandoned Zizi with the lie “I’m coming back,” that it had been a mistake to attempt an escape downriver instead of to the boma at Nsanje.
Breathing deeply, making his intake of breath a hopeful prayer, he calmed himself, vowing, I will find a way out and never come back. But at some point in this meditation he must have let out a sigh or a sob, a sound revealing of weakness, because no sooner had he released it than another sound rose as a mocking echo, and another, and a flutter of low laughter and tongue clicks and whispers.
He turned and saw twenty gleaming faces, boys in front, girls behind them, some holding infants, all of them blocking the path. They laughed again, and now his heart beat faster, making him hotter.