Gaining the top of a ridge, Hock felt the breeze on his sweaty face, as though he’d stuck his head above a fence into a wind. He looked across at what must have been the Matundu Hills, a silhouette of rounded peaks in blue haze. Below was a circular valley, a green bowl of foliage. Behind him, Manyenga was pushing the motorcycle slowly, bumping over tree roots and the protruding knuckles at the base of thick-stemmed bushes.
“Do you see it?” Manyenga asked.
“The valley?”
“The compound.”
“What compound?
All that Hock saw were the smooth sides of the valley and a profusion of bushy treetops, and the word that came to him, because he was so unused to seeing such a lush unspoiled valley, was “uneaten.” He could not see any road in or out, no gardens, no cultivation, nothing dead or burned, only the great bowl of green trees.
“There,” Manyenga said, “that side.”
A glint of silver metal, a glimpse of geometry, a fence; and then he saw it, an enclosure, perfectly square, though some of it was hidden, two of its corners. At this distance it looked like a cage in the form of a playpen, a high fence with some buildings inside it, painted green, blending with the green of the valley, easily mistaken for a symmetrical hillock. But they were houses, and studying them he saw the people, more easily visible than the houses because the people were white.
“Mzungu,” Hock said.
“Azungu,” Manyenga gasped, correcting him with the plural. He had lit a cigarette and coughed, and panted from having pushed the motorbike up the slope.
“What are they doing there?”
He sucked in smoke and coughed again and bared his teeth for air. He said, “You can ask them, father.”
No road led to the fenced enclosure; the path they used was probably a game trail. Apart from this sturdy camp, no sign of any other human structure was visible — odd in a place that was so fertile-looking, but perhaps not so odd considering how far this valley was from the river and how hard this rocky soil would have been to break with a plow.
“There, that side,” Manyenga said, dropping his voice while pushing the bike, guiding it along the narrow track that was damp enough to keep the prints of animals that had used it: the monkey feet — narrow, with long toes — here and there the hooves of dik-diks, an oblong that might have been a hare’s paw, and clusters of dark grape-sized scat.
Hock had seen Manyenga only as bossy or smilingly manipulative, the brute or the calculator, not as he was now, cautious, stealthy, shy, almost intimidated as he approached the looming chain-link fence that surrounded the three flat-roofed buildings — prefab bungalows, painted green. A garden of purpley-pink bougainvillea near one bungalow was contained in a circle of whitewashed rocks, giving a suburban touch to this forest compound. Beyond the buildings was an open area marked with a large white-painted X on the bare ground, obviously a helipad.
“The helicopter must have come from here.”
“Of course,” Manyenga said. “What do you think?”
“You’ve been here before?”
“I tell you, my friend, I am knowing these people. And they are knowing Festus.”
He was peering through the last of the bush cover, where it had been cleared for the high fence. He was peering through the fence too, which seemed absurdly strong, overbuilt, the sort of fence you’d see at a national frontier, Hock thought, something to keep undesirables out, a steel barrier topped with coils of razor wire.
“They are stupid,” Manyenga said, still studying the fence. “Look at this.”
“What is it, anyway?”
“They are calling it the depot.”
“Where’s the chopper?”
“Maybe making another food drop in the bush somewhere, isn’t it? Because they are having a visit from the big people.”
“That man and woman on the chopper?”
“Famous, I tell you! Big people. Pop stars! You are knowing them.”
“I don’t know them,” Hock said, thinking of the man in the cowboy hat, the blond woman in the catsuit. “My daughter might know them.”
“You can ask her. She will be so happy. Eh! Eh! ‘You have seen the big people in Malawi!’”
As though talking to himself, rehearsing the improbable notion, Hock said, “When I go home, maybe I’ll call my daughter. I’ll tell her where I was. I’ll tell her what I saw.”
“Famous pop stars in the bush!”
But Hock was looking at the compound. It was like a fortress, a prison, or perhaps, given its remoteness in this empty valley, a space station — all the steel and the compact buildings, a detached and singular platform in this hidden place. On top of the buildings solar panels were propped at an angle, black squares on gleaming brackets, with a white satellite dish and a tall radio antenna. What held Hock’s attention and consoled him was the neatness of the place, the idea that such order was possible. His eye had become accustomed to dirty huts and windows, the filthy underworld of the Lower River. This sight of a cared-for place was bittersweet; it lifted his spirits and saddened him, too — the clean symmetry was an aspect of his own world that he had forgotten. Encountering this compound unexpectedly gave him hope.
Hock clapped his hands to announce himself, and called out, “Odi! Odi!”
Only then was he aware of the sound of an engine that had just started up, which he took to be a generator. The rattle was disturbing, a reminder of the harshness of that other world and its motors.
He saw an African man in a clean uniform — green, like army fatigues or hospital scrubs, with a green baseball cap. The man, his back to the fence, was polishing a fat stainless-steel tank, a water tank most likely, about the size of a basement boiler and as tall as the man who was wiping it, with a cloth dampened with water from a plastic bottle. He then coated the tank with a whitish fluid, which quickly dried in the heat to a dusty film.
“You talk to him,” Hock said, unable to get the man’s attention.
“No. It is for you. Get some supplies. We are needing.”
“Why me?”
“Because it is your duty,” Manyenga said, and bared his teeth again, breathing hard.
“What are you talking about? It’s not my duty!”
Even as he spoke, he saw the absurdity of his arguing in this remote valley of the Matundu Hills, beside the chain-link fence and the big half-polished tank — no apparent door, only a seamless enclosure. Hock was screaming at Manyenga; Manyenga was screaming back at him.
“I don’t have a duty!” Hock shouted. “Do I, Festus?”
“You lied to me! You tricked Zizi into the hut! You stole my motorbike! You ran off down the river with those boys. You betrayed me when I trusted you.”
“You didn’t trust me!”
“I made you my chief minister. I respected you too much, but you did not respect me, not at all, isn’t it?”
“I came in good faith,” Hock said, almost weeping at the memory of his arrival in Malabo. “I came to help.”
“You are talking bloody rubbish,” Manyenga said, wrinkling his nose in disgust. “I saved you from these boys who capture Europeans and sell them.”
Their shouting was loud enough for the man in uniform to hear over the rat-tatting of the generator. He turned from his polishing and, startled by the sight of the two quarreling strangers outside the fence, dropped his cloth and the bottle of polish and hurried across the compound to the largest of the green bungalows, losing one of his rubber flip-flops as he ran.
“You scared him away,” Hock said.
But when, hearing no reply, he glanced around, Manyenga was nowhere to be seen. Hock hooked his fingers on the fence and hung there, his head down, jarred by the chattering of the generator. The whole self-contained compound, with its lawn sprinklers and its bougainvillea and its gravel paths, so hopeful a little while ago, filled him with despair, because here he was, contemplating it from behind a ten-foot fence.