He stood, tottering, and began to move — he was at the edge of the bank — and they stood too, advancing on him, crowding him so that he had to step back. And when he slipped on the mud and struggled to maintain his balance, they advanced again, a low wall of chattering children in dirty shirts, pressing him back to the muddy lip of the embankment.
The river flowed just below him, swirling against the two poles that served as a mooring, curls of green current encircling the uprights. While he watched, a large wide-winged dragonfly shot back and forth between the children and him, finally coming to rest at the top of one of the poles, where it became still and insubstantial. Then it flew off, and the sight of this insect floating freely through air, landing, then flitting away, gave Hock another pang and filled him with despair.
Seeing that he had edged back, the children pushed forward as in a game, and now, standing at the bank, Hock’s heels were just above the water.
He recognized some of the children — the girls he’d seen the day before tending the cooking fires; the small skeletal boy who’d mimicked his walk; the several girls carrying infants, drooling dirty-faced infants covered in brown flies; the small boys who’d been kicking the rag ball; the girl whom he encountered grilling the slices of cassava. He had spoken to some of them. None had been friendly, but neither had they been openly hostile. Where he was concerned, they had, it seemed, engaged in careless play. But now in a mass they were implacable, blocking the path, forcing him to inch backward, blank-faced in his helpless indecision. He hated them all, even the infants.
He wished for a snake, any snake, big or small. Twig snakes and adders sometimes lurked at riverbanks, to pounce on mice or frogs. He would snatch up the snake and brandish it as a weapon. The children, who were not afraid of him, were terrified of snakes, and they’d run.
They saw him searching the tufts at the embankment edge, and what he saw disgusted him: twists of their excrement and the crudded leaves, for this was also their latrine; they squatted here, too lazy to dig a pit near the village. And they were so small their bare bottoms did not extend far enough over the edge of the bank, so they fouled the edge where he was standing.
“Enough,” he said, his voice an involuntary shriek, and raised his hand. “Go back.”
He looked for pity in their hesitation, but soon they were laughing, and repeating, “Enough! Go back!”—Nuff! Go beck! — and thrusting their dirty hands at him, moving toward him, so near that he clung to the mooring posts while holding on to his bag.
More children had gathered behind the ones in front, the first to arrive, and now there were thirty or forty in torn and dirty T-shirts—Las Vegas, Red Raiders, Willow Bend Fun Run, Rockland Lobster Festival. They were enjoying his fear, the sight of him growing frantic. They knew the river was deadly, filled with crocs and snakes and hippos, and if he fell, the steep side of the river would trap him.
“Please,” he said in their language.
Seeing his helplessness, his humiliation, they laughed, they screeched, they repeated the word, mimicking his nasal voice.
He thought of lashing out, perhaps hurting one or two of them with a slap or a punch, but there were far too many of them, and if he injured anyone, he’d be in worse trouble. So far, all he had done was show up and be meek, but that had turned him into their victim.
“I came to help you,” he said. “I want to give you something — anything. What do you want? I’m from America. I can get food, I can find money for you. A boat — I can get you a big boat. Or a well for water. I can bring a machine and drill a well for you. Lights, books, medicine, what do you want?”
He had spoken slowly, ungrammatically, searching for the right words in their language. They recognized “food,” and “money,” and “boat,” and “medicine,” as he appealed to them in his begging voice. And for some seconds he believed he had them.
The small boy who had mimicked him stood up and shrieked, “We want you to die!”
“Yes, yes!” the chant went up. “Eenday! Eenday!”
A clod of mud flew past him, and another hit his shoulder. He hoped it was only mud, though it stank like a turd and could easily have been one.
They were all calling out now—“Die!” and “Yes!”—and delighting in the sight of the big unsteady mzungu, red-faced in dirty clothes, holding the tall mooring posts, gripping his bag, desperate before them. How many mzungus had they seen? Not many, perhaps none. And now, in a jeering crowd, they had no more fear than a dog pack and were prepared to push him over the edge and into the river.
I’ll jump, Hock thought, not in those words but seeing the act, his frantic leap; I’ll take my chances in the river.
He turned his back to position his feet, so he could brace and launch himself into the water. The current would take him quickly, and if he was lucky, he could climb the embankment farther downstream and hide from the children.
Still he heard the shrieks and catcalls behind him, but there was another sort of shouting too, and when he glanced back he saw that the crowd of children was thinning out, and in the middle, on the path, the boys in sunglasses were kicking at them, scattering them, making room for Hock to move to a safer part of the embankment, away from the crumbling edge.
For a panicky moment he feared they’d rush him, topple him into the river. It would have been so easy, but the tallest of the three, the sharp-faced boy in the Dynamo Dresden baseball cap, who had sold him his dinner the night before, stuck his hand out — in an unfriendly way, a perfunctory grip — yanking him forward onto the path.
“Thank you,” Hock said with a sob, half grateful, half resentful that he was thanking them. In his heart he hated them, but he was so afraid his hatred would show, he approached them with exaggerated mildness.
The boy had started down the path, Hock following.
“Why did they want to hurt me?”
“They are children. They don’t care about you.”
“But I can help them.”
“How can you help them?”
“Food,” Hock said. “Money.”
“They are having food. And there is nothing to buy.”
“Water,” Hock said. “A well.”
“We have the river.”
“What does the government give you?”
“There is no government here,” the boy said, and there was a malicious smile in his voice when he added, “We are the government.”
Now they were back at the clearing, and the children were watching Hock walking just behind the big boy, the two other boys walking casually to the side. Hock was looking for protection, hoping that the children would keep away. He was terrified of them, for their utter recklessness, and he rationalized his fear as no different from a fear of insects or vermin or the fatal bite of the smallest viper, a night adder.
“I could arrange for a school here.”
“They hate school.”
“They could learn English, like you.”
The boy turned his sharp-featured face on Hock and made a cruel mouth. “I don’t want them to learn English like me. I don’t want them to learn anything.”
The two other boys sniggered, hearing this.
“Where are their parents? Where are their elders?”
“Dead. All dead.”
There were orphans’ huts in Malabo. And Hock had heard of children’s villages, the result of the spread of AIDS in the country. He had imagined them structured and supported by the government, not wild and improvisational like this, reverted to semi-savagery, living hand to mouth, foraging, and yet defiant as some animal packs were defiant, and self-sufficient like those same packs.