She hadn’t been a lonely child. She’d been confident enough. But he’d seen her in the purity and blindness of her innocence. She did not know what was coming, the blight, the cynicism, the disappointment, and then her marriage, which was for him a sorry giveaway; and at last as a young woman she demanded money from him, and that poisoned everything. He needed to remember that she had once been blameless. He grieved for that child.
There was no consolation for him in the thought “Everything happens for the best,” because that was general and his misery was particular. Hock did not dare to consider his own plight. The thing was to become strong again. Oppressed by the heat, the bad food, and his futile escape attempt, he was dazed, sensing that he might be dehydrated. He knew the symptoms, and he had them — headaches, lassitude, muscle aches, and sometimes he could barely speak.
Zizi was unchanged. She was like Gala, whom he had known all those years ago: uneducated, but just as strong, like the original women of the Sena. She gave him hope. In his weakened condition, Zizi acted for him, brought him the hot kettle for tea, and filled the basin so he could wash. Since arriving back from his weeklong escape, he’d stopped eating at Manyenga’s, or even visiting, as an act of rebellion. Zizi brought him food. Though he offered to share it, she refused. She squatted with the dwarf, watching him eat, waiting for another order. She saw to the washing and ironing of his clothes, and the ironing was something he insisted on, because of the eggs of the putzi flies. He’d been through that before. Zizi was patient, obedient, observing him with large dark eyes, her knees drawn up, her chin resting on them, and wrapped in her purple chitenje cloth. While he’d been away, thinking he’d gone for good, she had mourned him in the traditional way, by letting her hair grow — only a week, but it showed. On his return, she shaved her head and held it proudly erect.
A few days after he returned, Hock woke at first light to hear a familiar thumping outside his hut, the thud-thud of a pestle dropped into a wooden mortar. He saw that Zizi was crushing maize into flour, standing under the tree, the air heavy with the static heat of morning stillness. She hugged the heavy pestle, lifted it, and let it drop, and as it did, her head jerked from the effort, her whole body falling back. Her face and head gleamed; she was never blacker than when she was sweating. She lifted her shoulders and, taking a deep breath, saw Hock at the window and smiled, then shyly covered her mouth.
Later that day, he saw that Zizi had spread a large mat on the ground in the sunniest part of the courtyard and scattered the newly pounded flour on it, to bleach in the bright light. In Malabo there was an informal competition among the women to make the whitest flour. From the veranda, he saw Zizi on her hands and knees sweeping the flour, turning it on the mat with a paddle, and his heart ached.
He could have said, he knew, “Go into the hut. Take your chitenje off. Get into the bed and wait for me.” She had obeyed him without a word the morning of his escape, crawling into the bed. He could have summoned her into the hut at any hour of the day or night.
But because of this power and of her obedience, because he could demand and receive anything from her, whatever he wanted, he didn’t ask. He only watched: Zizi’s bones, her skinny legs, her big feet, her full lips and shining eyes, the glimpses of her small breasts, the way she stood at times like a heron, on one leg. His wish was to see her crossing the stream to bathe, as he’d done on his first day, the way she danced, stepping deeper and deeper into the water, lifting her cloth higher against her legs. He wanted to stand behind the mango tree at the embankment and watch her strip naked, soaping herself, her black skin gleaming with creamy bubbles. But someone would see him.
Go into the hut and wash, he could have said. She would have done it. She would have turned away and allowed him to see her. She was shy, but she was willing — too willing; he couldn’t ask.
Yet she always seemed to be obliquely testing him with questions, even asking, “Is there anything else you want?” or in a single word, “Mbiri?”—More?
Hock shook his head and wondered if perhaps he was saying no because there was more power in his resisting her, that his rebuffing her gave him greater authority. But it was simpler than that, and obvious. He was a man in his sixties, a very old man for Malabo. He wanted only to be her benefactor, but the Lower River was a district without remedies.
“She respects you, father,” Manyenga said when he wandered over one day and saw Hock seated between Zizi kneeling and the dwarf squatting in the shade.
Manyenga knew Hock was being uncooperative. As a pretext for the visit — so it seemed — he had brought an old stumbling man, whom he led by one arm. The man held his face upturned in an attitude of listening. He stroked the air with his free hand.
“He is blind,” Manyenga said. “He said he wanted to meet our guest. He has heard about Mister Ellis.”
Hock asked the man his name, but it was Manyenga who answered, “He is Wellington Mwali, from an important family. But he cannot see, so he has no big position.”
The man mumbled to Manyenga.
“He wants to shake your hand.”
Hock reached for the man’s inquiring hand, and shook it, but the man did not let go. He spoke again to Manyenga.
“He says that he knows you are a friend to the snakes. He wants to tell you a story about them.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
“He is a storyteller,” Manyenga said. “That is his position.”
The man seemed to understand what was being said. He smiled with pride and spoke again in his feeble voice.
“He is tired now. He says some other time. But he is clever”—the old man was still speaking softly in a language or a dialect that Hock could not understand—“he knows there are other people, this little man, and this lovely lady.”
“She’s just a girl,” Hock said.
“Girls are better. You can take her as a wife. You can have any woman in this village. You can have anything.”
“No lobola,” Hock said, meaning bride price, because it was the man who paid the dowry in the Lower River.
“You have plenty.”
“I’ve given most of it to you,” Hock said. “And I don’t eat children.”
But Manyenga wasn’t rebuffed. He said, “She is old enough. She can bear you a child. She is making white flour for you!”
Zizi knew she was the subject of this talk. She raised her head, narrowed her eyes, and breathed deeply, and hearing her, the old blind man reached to touch her. She pushed his hand away, and he laughed. He kept laughing softly as Manyenga led him across the clearing.
Zizi still brought news to Hock — talk, the rumors of illness, the whisper that Manyenga’s motorbike was broken, or that a dance would be held. Hock asked about Gala. Zizi said she didn’t know anything, but later she had a story.