He had not gone near her, only watched. The flour was a barrier — perhaps she knew that. Dusted that way, she was untouchable.
Soon afterward, the whole village seemed to know what happened. And that incident, an example of his weakness — resentment, boredom, a pang of desperation — had the effect of convincing the village that he meant to stay, that he’d found a way of being happy, that at last Zizi had devised a strategy to satisfy him, perhaps to please him. Was it considered odd in Malabo that Zizi had coated herself in flour to dance for him? Perhaps not. And it was not unknown for a woman to dance with a whitened face. To do so naked was simply taking it to the extreme. It had worked; it had cost nothing; and the mzungu was satisfied. They could not have known his true feeling, that he had watched her with inexpressible delight.
But they knew he was beguiled. A man with brown blotches on the whites of his eyes, a cousin to Manyenga (he said brother, but brother was a general term), came to him and said he wanted to buy a motorbike. He did not mention money; that was understood.
“And what will you do for me?” Hock said.
“Zizi will dance for you, sure.” The man stared at him, a smile in his spotted eyes, and he said no more.
Hock handed him some money, saying, “But I want a ride on your bike to the boma.”
“I will give you, father.”
Hock was ashamed. He wondered if money alone was sufficient atonement for his lapse of judgment. But he also knew it was a setup. And he longed for Zizi to perform her ghost dance again, but secretly, so that no one would see.
Manyenga visited after that. Hock told him of the man who claimed to be his brother.
“He will eat the money. He will drink the money,” Manyenga said. And then he asked for another loan.
They knew how much he had. They’d stolen some; they could take the rest at any time.
But as a way of jeering at him, Hock said, “Remember the law of diminishing returns?”
The day of Manyenga’s visit, Hock set off across the compound with Zizi and Snowdon. He heard the warning whistle, and ignoring it, still walking, the whistle became more insistent, drowning out all other sounds, even the shrillness of the birds. Some of the older boys followed him, keeping just behind him. Hock walked in an almost stately way, holding a basket to his chest. It was the basket in which he kept his money with the snake.
At the creek bank, he stooped and released the snake onto the hot sand, but before the snake could gather itself and slip away, Hock pinned it with a forked stick and let it thrash, whipping a pattern into the swale of sand with its thickened body. The village saw him bearing the empty basket from the creek and across the clearing to his hut, Zizi and the dwarf following him in a shuffling procession. The snake, a puff adder, was not especially venomous, but to Malabo it was deadly. They would know it was safe to steal from him again, and when the money was gone they’d release him.
After that, they didn’t whistle in the same way after he left his hut — it wasn’t the rising note of urgency that became shriller; it was a softer note, like birdsong, just a signaling tweet. And he knew why.
He walked to the ruined school, looked in on the orphan boys in their lair at the old school office. He went to the clinic and the creek bank, or to the graveyard near the mango tree, where no one ever went because of the azimu, the malicious spirits of the dead, that were invisibly twisted in the air there — Zizi and the dwarf hung back, crouching at a distance, as he sat in the shade of the tree, unapproachable, among the tumbled piles of burial stones.
And whenever he returned to his hut, almost without fail some money was missing from the basket where he’d kept the snake.
During this week — the week of the separate raids on his stash of money — he fell ill again. This time it came quickly, wrenching him sideways. It hit him as he was walking back from the ruined school, first a dizziness, then an aching throat and pain behind his eyes, a soreness in his limp muscles, and an urgent thirst.
He wondered whether it was the return of his malaria, or dehydration. He sat down on the bare ground and pressed his eyes. He could not walk any farther. He called for water, though he knew he might be past the point of being able to absorb any liquid.
“Water with salt,” he murmured to Zizi, and remembered mchere. But she smiled at the word and seemed too bewildered to move. “And sugar.”
Women carrying babies in cloth slings on their way home from hoeing weeds in the pumpkin fields stopped and watched him, more out of curiosity than pity, as he clutched his head.
“Mzungu,” he heard them whisper. And, “Sick.”
What happened to “chief”? They surrounded him as they would have a dog in distress, or any dying creature, and therefore a diversion and not a threat.
Snowdon was near him. Hock saw him from between his numbed fingers, creeping close.
“Water,” Hock said, and repeated it in Sena.
The dwarf scuttled away on his wounded feet, and was soon back, approaching Hock with an enamel cup. But leaning over, he stumbled and lost it. The women laughed and clapped, excited by the spectacle, the slumped man, the patch of dampened dust, the dirty cup, the dwarf on his knees.
Snowdon retrieved the cup and gave it to Hock. Even though the cup was empty, the dark dust clinging to its rim, in a lunge of desperation Hock gripped it as if for balance. He held it to his face and licked at it and tasted grit. And the women screeched again.
Encouraged by the laughter, the dwarf snatched the cup from him. The women laughed so loudly that more people came to see — the orphan boys, some men kicking through the dust with their T-shirts hiked up to the top of their heads to keep off the sun. Hock was surrounded by the whole village, it seemed. But only the dwarf dared to come near him.
“Fee-dee-dom,” the dwarf cried out, and the women laughed.
Zizi tried to protect Hock, scolding the dwarf, but the women shouted her down. One woman pushed her aside, and the dwarf poked Hock with his own walking stick. Hock was helpless to resist, and when he looked up the dwarf was drooling through his broken teeth, with a bruised eager face, rushing at him wild-eyed.
Although Hock was enfeebled, struggling to sit upright, the dwarf seemed reluctant to touch him. But he threw pebbles at him, and he mock-charged him. He grunted — he used no language, only low notes bubbling from his snotty nose. But when Hock tumbled into the dust, and a cry went up, the dwarf began kicking him, straining with snuffling grunts, to the rejoicing of the crowd.
Hock’s tongue was so swollen when he woke, he could barely breathe. He was still clothed, on his string bed in the hut.
“Chief.”
They must have seen his eyes flutter. Without moving, he saw two figures backlit at the window, big and small. One of them was speaking.
“Mfumu.” It was Manyenga, murmuring the word for chief.
The smaller figure was Zizi, creeping toward him with the same sort of enamel cup that the dwarf had offered him. Hock raised himself and drank, expecting water, but it was thick and salty — soup — and as he lapped at it he sensed it easing his throat, seeping into his flesh, his body greedy for the salty liquid.
“More,” he pleaded when he’d finished.
Manyenga ordered the girl to fetch more soup, and lemon water mixed with sugar and salt. When she was gone, Manyenga spoke again, and though Hock could not tell whether the man was speaking English or Sena, the word “chief” was repeated.
With more of the soup, Zizi kneeling, ready to receive the empty cup, Hock was able to sit up in the string bed, propped against the woven back wall of the hut. Manyenga was standing with his back to the light, but even so, Hock knew that the man was smiling, and something in his posture said that he was relieved to see Hock’s strength returning.