“The boy who came yesterday,” Hock said to Zizi the next afternoon as she raked the flour into soft, salt-white heaps on the mat.
“With the shoes, with the watch, with the red eyes”—she had seen him clearly.
“Tell him I want to talk to him.”
Zizi flashed a twitch of understanding with her eyebrows. Adult and conspiratorial, this time she would not go to the chief first. She was Hock’s ally.
“But whisper.”
It was another of the English words she knew. “I weespa.”
Hock thought, I am going to miss you.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
“Better tonight.”
“He is not staying at Malabo.”
“Yes?”
“But at Lutwe. Pafoopi.”
“How near?”
Zizi twisted her lips in vexation, implying not near, an inexact immeasurable distance.
“Is this a problem?”
“Night,” she said.
Hock stared at her with the suggestion of a smile.
“Night is a problem,” she said, using another word for problem, mabvuto, serious trouble.
Now Hock was frankly smiling, challenging her.
“Night is dangerous,” and she used a more severe word, kufa, which meant death.
“Because of”—Hock tried to think of the word for monsters; all he could remember was large beasts. “Zirombo,” he said. “Zirombo zambiri”—lots of beasts.
Zizi frowned, suspecting she was being teased, but she didn’t relent, because she was certain.
“Man,” she said, another English word she knew. She made a face and clutched her body. “And boy.”
“Beasts with two legs,” Hock said in Sena, to lighten the mood. She seemed so glum, and was probably tired, too, from raking and piling the new flour.
“Men,” she said, “wanting women.”
“You could take a torch with you. My big torch.”
“That is worse,” she said in her own language. “With a torch I would be seen.”
He was fascinated by her disclosing her fears, she who never hesitated to help him. He was touched by her seriousness, standing before him, shaven-headed, in her flimsy cloth and bare feet. She was actually resisting him for the first time, trying to explain something to him that mattered to her. The instinctive reluctance of Sena people to go out at night was something he’d always known. Animals prowled at night: crocs crept out of the shallows onto the embankments and into the nearby bush, looking for the carcasses of abandoned kills; hippos browsed in the tall grass after dark; hyenas loped along in packs and grunted and dug in the garbage piles at the edge of Malabo, fighting over bones. Some people spoke of snakes at night, though Hock knew that snakes seldom lurked in the dark, never hunted at that time, even the boomslangs remained in tree branches, never dropping at night.
“Hippos. Hyenas.”
Zizi clicked her tongue against her teeth, emphatically no.
“Mfiti.” Spirits.
Zizi wrinkled her nose in annoyance.
“Just men?”
“Man.” She said the word without any lightness, and showed her teeth, as though she was naming a species of vicious animal.
“What do they want?” he asked.
She stared at him, impatient, as though thinking, Why these ignorant questions?
“They want,” she said, “what all men want.”
But he said, “You can ask the boy in the day. Tell him I want to see him at night.”
So it was another day before Zizi set out for Lutwe, going a roundabout way so she would not be seen, to find Aubrey, to whisper to him that the mzungu wanted to see him in the dark.
Aubrey returned after nightfall the day that Zizi delivered the message. He arrived suddenly, stepping into Hock’s compound with another boy — younger, who didn’t appear to speak any English, who knelt before Hock’s hut near the dwarf, looking nervous, the dwarf grinning at him, mouthing in spittle his mutter, “Fee-dee-dom.”
Aubrey stood aside, just out of the lantern light, scarcely visible.
Two things disturbed Hock about this second visit. One was the way Aubrey sauntered across the clearing, his hands in his pants pockets. He did not observe the customary greeting, calling out, “Odi, odi,” and clapping his hands as an announcement, asking permission to enter the compound. This was rude, and uncommon — Manyenga himself usually said “Odi,” though often in a satirical tone. Hock was keenly aware of the niceties, wary when they were flouted, like the boys in the village of children who had called him mzungu to his face. “Hey, white man” was pure insolence.
The other disturbance was different but just as troubling. Meeting Aubrey for the first time, Hock had taken him to be lean but healthy, certainly healthier and better dressed than anyone else in Malabo. But in the uneven fire of the lantern light Aubrey’s skin was gray, his eyes bloodshot, his face gaunt. He was not lean but thin, and with his sleeves rolled up the skin of his arms was dry, crusted with whitened flakes of scurf. Aware that he was being scrutinized, he removed the sunglasses from his pocket and put them on, to cover his reddened eyes.
Or was this all an effect of the slippery light from the smoky orange lantern flame with an untrimmed wick? Hock was uncertain, and suspicious. He had lived too much on his nerves.
“You want to see me?”
Aubrey spoke in a low voice. He knew the meeting was secret. And his direct question was so strange to Hock, who was accustomed to the canny obliqueness of Manyenga and the others.
“Have a seat,” Hock said.
Aubrey motioned to Zizi, a two-part hand gesture that indicated “chair”—he pointed to the stool — and “bring it,” a beckoning with a stab of his skinny finger.
“No,” Hock said when Zizi moved toward the stool.
This surprised Aubrey, and the sudden expression revealed a slackness in his face to Hock, who saw how a person’s health is more obvious when making a physical effort.
“She’s not your servant.”
Smiling, Aubrey muttered in Sena to the young man who’d accompanied him. Just a few words, and the boy snatched the stool and moved it to a shadowy spot near Hock. As he sat, Aubrey glanced over at Zizi.
“She is proud,” he said in a tone of resentment, because Zizi had smiled when Hock had intervened.
“She’s got manners.”
“Because she works for the mzungu.”
“I’ve got a name,” Hock said, but before Aubrey could speak again, he said, “You can call me nduna.”
“Okay, chief.”
The boy was quick, in a manner he’d learned from foreigners, as Manyenga had. A sly alertness, not deftness but a slick evasion, and he had the words, too.
“She doesn’t work for me.”
“Whatever,” Aubrey said, tilting his head.
“I’m her guardian.”
Aubrey raised his head, facing Hock, but the sunglasses masked his expression. Was he looking at him in mockery?
“And I don’t want anyone to touch her.”
Aubrey tilted his head again, as though he was silently indicating “Whatever.”
“You understand?”
“I hear you.”
Hock felt himself growing angry. He had not realized until now how strongly he felt about Zizi’s virginity. He was certain she was a virgin — Gala herself had said so.
“I know she is still a girl,” Aubrey said. “She has not had her initiation. People call her kaloka, the little lock.”
Zizi frowned, hearing the word.
“Who’s got the key? Maybe you, bwana.”