“No one has the key,” Hock said with force.
“I hear you,” Aubrey said, suddenly contrite. That was his manner — a boast, a wisecrack, and then a retreat when he saw he’d gone too far. “It’s special, you know. Most of the girls her age are”—he shrugged—“unlocked. They even have kids. But not her. We say of such a girl that she has all her cattle.”
Zizi said something under her breath, hissing at Aubrey.
And after her sharp reaction, Aubrey gave a tight smile, as though he’d just been slapped. He said, “She’s being rude to me,” and laughed, because the young boy with him had also reacted. “A wet snake, that’s what she said.”
“Maybe that’s what you are.”
“In our language it means something else.” He became angry again and sat more stiffly, keeping his face out of the light. “Did you want something?”
Hock stared at Aubrey’s gray twitching hands before replying. Finally he said, “I’ve got a job for you.”
“Some kind of favor?”
“A job.”
“It’ll cost you,” Aubrey said without hesitating.
But Hock was glad. That’s what he wanted, not friendliness, not a favor, which always carried a penalty with it, but a paid-for job. Aubrey, in his crass knowing way, was the man he needed.
Hock said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”
The smile on Aubrey’s thin face was sly, snake-like, ingratiating. He jerked his head to indicate, “Go on.”
“You’re going back to Blantyre soon?”
“That depends.”
“On what?”
“If you want me to go.”
“What if I do?”
Aubrey agitated his fingers, but subtly, touching his fingertips, his city gesture for money.
“I’ll give you two payments — one now, the other when you come back.”
“Who says I’m coming back?”
“You’ll be coming back with my friend, to show him the way.”
Now Aubrey smiled, and nodded almost imperceptibly, a tremor of his head, seeing another opportunity.
“You’re going to take something to Blantyre for me.”
“Like what?”
“A message.”
“That’s easy,” Aubrey said, and as though he’d regretted saying it, he corrected himself. “I can do it. But you’ll have to pay me in dollars.”
“I’ll give you fifty.”
Aubrey shrugged. “A couple of hundred at least.”
Although Hock had pretended to be relaxed, defying him, Aubrey seemed to understand that Hock was desperate, seemed able to smell it, the hopelessness, the anxiety. And Hock knew that Aubrey could not have seen any other mzungu in a hut like this, sitting in ragged clothes, with the skinny girl and the dwarf and the mat of pounded flour in the courtyard.
Tapping his finger on the arm of his chair and leaning close, Hock said, “You get a hundred now and a hundred when you show up with my friend. That’s a lot of money.”
“I need bus fare. And my small brother”—he indicated the staring boy—“he is needing too.”
“You know the American consulate in Blantyre?”
“Everyone knows it,” Aubrey said. “There’s always a long queue of people wanting visas.”
“That’s the place. I want you to go tomorrow.”
Aubrey said, “What’s the hurry?”
“No hurry. If you want to do it, you go tomorrow. That way I know you’re serious.”
Nodding, Aubrey said, “Okay, bwana.” And then, “Where’s the message?”
“When you’re ready to go, I’ll give you the message, and the money.”
As they had talked, the moon had risen, a nibbled crescent in a sky of stars, with high thin veils of cloud. Shadows brimmed around them, and they sat in the small pool of light from the lantern. Normally, Zizi would set a row of lanterns along the veranda at this time, because it was too early to sleep, too hot to retreat inside. But tonight, as though understanding the secrecy of the meeting, she merely sat, her knees drawn up, her chin on her folded hands, her cloth wrap gathered for modesty.
Hock could see the whites of her eyes, the dull gleam of her shaved head in the moonlight. He was too moved to speak, because she was pure. The night sky gave him hope, the way it was dusted with streaks of gray and masses of stars, a great flawless capsule of light — hopeful because it represented a bigger world than the small flat shadow of Malabo, like a crater, in lamplight, the moths fluttering around the sooty chimney, bumping it and burning.
In the silence, Hock sensed that Aubrey was eager to help— greedy for money; impatient, too, for the trip to Blantyre. But out of pride, or to keep the upper hand, he didn’t show it.
“You were born here, eh?” Hock said.
“Yes, but…”
Hock could sense the young man recoil. He said, “But you don’t like it here.”
“Yes, I don’t like.”
“What is it about Blantyre you like?”
Taking a deep reflective breath, Aubrey sighed. He did not reply at once. Hock could see that he was trying to formulate an answer. They sat in the shadows thrown by the lamp, and in the silence some talk carried from across the clearing, and smoke from cooking fires filled the night air with buoyant sparks.
Finally Aubrey said, “The lights.”
He had to repeat it, he spoke so quickly. But later that night, after Aubrey and the boy had left, and Zizi had gone to her hut, and Snowdon had stowed himself away among the litter and the branches behind Zizi’s hut, Hock lay in his cot and said the words to himself, the simplicity, the truth of them, the lights.
Aubrey came before dawn, in the dim light of the thin fading moon. He knew the matter was serious, and he knew how to be covert. He had tapped softly on the screen door. Hock was reassured by Aubrey’s early arrival, by his obliqueness, and especially by his greed.
Hock had prepared his message — the photocopy of his passport page that he always kept handy, showing his picture, his details, with the message he had printed before going to bed: I am seriously compromised and possibly in danger. Please help. This man will lead you to me, and his signature under his printed name.
Folding it small, Hock handed it over with the hundred-dollar bill tucked into it. Aubrey pocketed the pieces of paper, and then he raised his face to Hock’s, looking defiant.
“This is going to cost you a little more,” he said.
Hock had been in the village long enough to expect that. He had the twenty-dollar bill handy, also folded.
As Aubrey palmed it, Hock said, “Don’t let anyone see you.”
24
UNTIL NOW HE had not dared to hope, because all he’d found here was failure. He’d known the Sena people before they’d become artful, and he wondered if their plotting against him now was something they’d learned from the mzungus at the Agency. Or had they always been artful, and he too beguiled to see it?
He hated to wake each morning in the heat and remember that he was trapped. Yet after all this time the idea of saving himself, being freed from the village, was a mental leap that left him saddened; the very thought made him gloomy, for its futility. In the dust of his confinement the prospect of freedom was so absurd that he seldom left his own courtyard. In the past he had wandered around the village, chatting to people, adding to his word list, looking for signs of snakes. Now he sat under his tree, inhabiting a mirage, blinking away the flies, like other old men in Malabo.
Like the children, too, who never strayed far from their huts and their mothers. In his captivity, his inability to get away from this insignificant village, Hock had become childlike. The feeling had stolen upon him, making him smaller, his avoidance of strangers amounting to a fear he hated to acknowledge. He had come here as a man, with willingness and money, assured of meeting friends and — knowing the people, speaking the language — with a confidence that amounted almost to a sense of superiority. Not racial, it was a complex sympathy, the suave generosity masked as the humility of a passerby pressing a fifty into the hand of a beggar at Christmas, knowing that it would make a difference, and pausing a moment to hear, “Bless you, sir.” He had meant well, but that conceit had made him the beggar. He had become reduced; he was a child now, sitting in the shade. And during that time, as he’d become smaller, Zizi had proven herself stronger, almost motherly, someone he trusted and needed, who looked after him, someone older, wiser. He wanted to thank her but could not find the words, and she would have been startled to hear I would be lost without you.