Now he was naked, or as naked as any man could be in the Lower River. Even the poorest man wore trousers and a shirt — ragged-assed long trousers, a shirt in ribbons. A woman might go bare-breasted — Zizi’s aunt’s floppy breasts had been uncovered the day Hock had visited Gala. But a man could not bare his chest, and only small boys wore shorts.
Still, he was naked — badly sunburned, and his skin was crusted with dirt. The cuffs of his trousers were in shreds, his sleeves were torn. His hands were clean, because Zizi had brought water in a basin for him to wash before eating, but his clean hands contrasted absurdly with his ragged clothes and dirty face. He was all the more touched that Zizi should care for him in this condition, was almost tearful that she accepted him.
More than that, she brought him soap and a cloth, so that he could go to the stream and bathe. She did not follow him. Such a thing was not allowed in the Lower River, a woman or girl lurking anywhere near a man washing himself. But when he set off for the stream, thinking of her kindness, he remembered his first sight of her at the small lagoon beside the stream, when she had crossed, going deeper, lifting her wrap higher up her legs, and higher to her thighs, until the water brimmed against the secret of her nakedness.
Hock washed himself, soaping his head, splashing like a dog and spewing. Then he wrapped the cloth around his body and walked back to the hut. The heat was so great, he was dry before he’d taken many steps. He rummaged in the bag he’d left behind, found the razor and his spare clothes, which Zizi had washed, and he shaved. After he changed into clean clothes, he sat in the shade, watched by Zizi and the dwarf. He was content for the moment; he had survived his escape attempt. It was better to be here than on the river alone, or in the village of children, or contending with the hostile men at the Agency depot.
Having survived, he was wiser if not stronger. And the order of his life here helped. He wasn’t alone. Sitting there, flicking at flies — they were tsetses, small and quick, biting flies that left a pinch on his skin — staring into open space, he tried to work out how long he had been in Malabo. He had believed it to be six weeks. But was it? The arrival week was vivid in its reminders, because it was all he had planned to spend there. The second week was emphatic with disappointment — the ruined school, his pointless labor. After that, an effort to get away. The dance. The visit to Gala and finally his fleeing downriver, now over a week ago. More than six weeks, now into the seventh, maybe two months. He was mocked by this passage of time in which he had accomplished nothing, made more futile by the thought that he was not sure exactly how much time had passed — he who had measured every hour of every day he’d spent at his store in Medford.
He could not find the confidence to think about leaving now. He was physically well, but his mind was too battered to have answers, and it took him a long time to concentrate. He was content to sit, to do nothing, to contemplate his small shady courtyard. He was oddly reassured by the girl Zizi, waiting for him to ask something, and by the dwarf Snowdon, who sat blinking at the flies gathered and hurrying around his eyes.
The next day, Manyenga was back. Hock had seen him crossing the clearing from his cluster of huts, and he could tell from the way Manyenga walked — determined, forcing himself to march — that he had a favor to ask or a demand to make. It was an importuning walk, elbows out, head forward. He wanted something.
“Yes, father,” he said, and uttered all the formulaic Sena greetings — that too indicated that he’d be demanding. At last he said, “You instructed me to come back, and myself here I am.”
“With your hand out.”
Instead of standing, out of respect, or asking Manyenga to sit, he remained on his creaky chair, enjoying the man’s discomfort as he rocked on his heels.
“Because you are owing us too much of money.”
“Why do I owe you?” Hock said. “I came here many weeks ago to visit you. I was going to leave, but somehow I am still here.”
“As our honored guest. As minister. As our friend.”
“Is that why I owe you?”
“No, my friend,” Manyenga said, and looked fixedly at him. “At the Agency you came away with nothing at all. They didn’t respect you — no.”
The truth of this was hurtful. He remembered the sneering man, the African servant offering him a drink of warm water, his being threatened and sent away, and his turning and walking into the bush, on a muddy game trail, tramping the leaf litter.
“And myself I rescued you.”
The memory of all that was so painful that Hock cut him short, saying, “How much do you want?”
“Petrol, food, transport,” Manyenga said, beginning to itemize, his way of nagging.
“Let me go,” Hock said. “I’ll send you money.”
“You never will.”
“I promise.”
“Just words. How will we know?”
Manyenga wasn’t sentimental; he wasn’t even pretending to like Hock. He was fierce and toothy, with cold eyes, and he seemed to enjoy reminding Hock that he was a hostage by telling him he was a guest.
“How much?” Hock repeated in a lower voice.
“What is the price of one human life?” Manyenga asked.
What Agency hack had taught him that sentence? Hock had kept some money in his pocket for just such an occasion, so he wouldn’t have to rummage for it in Manyenga’s presence. He took out some folded-over bills and handed them over.
Manyenga did not close his fingers around the money. He let it rest on his open palm.
“See? We are worth nothing,” he said.
As though suspecting that Hock had the advantage, the dwarf crept over to Manyenga and clawed at his trouser leg, setting his head to the side as if he was going to bite him.
Manyenga kicked out at him, and the dwarf tumbled into the dust, honking in protest.
But already Hock was on his feet. He stepped off the veranda and stood so close to Manyenga that his chin was in the man’s face. He was at least six inches taller than Manyenga.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” Hock said, and nudged the man back, bumping him with his chest. At this the dwarf looked up and smiled, showing his broken teeth. “Say sorry.”
Manyenga faced him with reddened eyes.
“Say pepani.”
Now Snowdon understood and looked pleased.
“Pepani to you.”
“Now leave us alone,” Hock said.
“Not until I say one thing more, father. Remember this. When your rival stands on an anthill, never say ‘I have caught you’ until you are up there yourself.”
With that, he left, the same determination in his stride that he had on his arrival. And Hock remained among the screaming cicadas in the thin hot air and the dusty trees and the gray sun in a sagging spider web of sky, and the dwarf mewling, all of it like aspects of his futility. He was miserable, but there was grim precision to it, and he took comfort in his condition, knowing that it was true, that it was exact, that he was not being fooled in his suffering.
22
HE RESENTED BEING captive in this flattened vegetating place, and he had come to hate the idiot wisdom of the proverbs these ragged people subjected him to. I never want to hear another proverb, he thought, or another opinion from someone so obviously doomed. If there was anything true or lasting in the village, it was in their dancing, but like so much else, this authentic expression of the past had become flat-footed. Instead of grieving for himself, he lamented the village that had disappeared utterly, its school buildings fallen, its well gone dry, its spirit vanished; lamented the evaporated essence of a place that he knew from its bitter residue of dust, like the skid of a footprint of someone who had fled for good. Malabo had become an earlier, whittled-down version of itself, recalling a simpler, crueler time, of fetishes and snake doctors and chicken-blood rituals.