Snowdon lingered, drooled eagerly, and scratched his dirty palm with his stubby fingers, his way of asking for money. For a few coins he bought stalks of sugar cane, which he chewed and spat out, sucking the sweetness from the pith.
“Nothing,” Hock said, and was relieved.
Zizi never asked for money, but she represented his one joy, his strength, was his only friend. The village women expected some kwacha notes when they presented him with bananas or pumpkins. One of the women had helped Zizi with his laundry, bringing it in a stack that Zizi scorched to kill the putzi fly eggs embedded in the weave. But there was little laundry these days, because his clothes had been stolen too, and he owned no more than a thickness of threadbare cloth. The sight of it made him sad.
“Father,” the laundry woman said, setting down a folded shirt and a tattered T-shirt she’d wheedled from Zizi, in the hope of making money. She held a baby in a sling to her side.
“I have no money,” Hock said. He took a wild delight in declaring it.
The woman whined a little and gestured to the baby.
“All gone!” Hock said.
The woman implored him. Flies settled on the baby’s face and sucked at the edges of its eyelids and its prim lips.
“Now I’m like you,” he said.
Just like them, he was a wisp of diminishing humanity, with nothing in his pockets — hardly had pockets! — and he felt a lightness because of it. With no money he was insubstantial and beneath notice. As soon as everyone knew he had nothing, they would stop asking him for money, would stop talking to him altogether, probably. Yet tugging at this lightness was another sensation, of weight, his poverty like an anchor. He couldn’t move or go anywhere; he had no bargaining power. He was anchored by an absence of money, not just immovable but sitting and slipping lower.
More than ever they called him chief and great minister and father. The women were calmer and less competitive than the men. They wanted food for their children, or a tin pot. The men wanted motorbikes, or bus fare, or had a scheme for selling fish or obtaining contraband from Mozambique on the river. They asked for large amounts, and they resented the fact that Hock had no money left. They believed he was lying. And so they kept poking around his house when he was out walking. He encouraged them to do this by taking long conspicuous hikes, leaving his front door ajar.
“They went inside again,” Zizi would say.
But he wanted them to know that he had nothing left. And he hoped they would see that they themselves had had a share in reducing him to this. They had taken all his money, and everything of value. And they were no better off.
They were not diabolical; they were desperate. But desperation made them cruel and casual.
“Mzungu,” a man named Gilbert said, to get his attention. Some mischievous men called him “white man” to his face. No one used his name. It was as though when he lost all his money, he lost his name, too.
Gilbert said, “The woman Gala wants to talk to you.” And then, becoming even more familiar, the man said, “I am needing a scooter.”
Many of them believed he still had money, and some of those people called him mzungu, not father. Gala would never have called him that. She might have called him Ellis, since she knew him by that name, but they would have heard it as “Alice.”
Zizi walked with him under the mopane trees and through the thorn bushes on the hot path to Gala’s hut. He guessed that the old woman had divined that Zizi’s relationship with him had changed. Not that it was explicitly sexuaclass="underline" there was something pure and resolute in Zizi’s virginal face and her frowning mouth and the way she stood and moved. But Gala would have known — either from village whispers or a guess — that he had seen Zizi naked, dusted with white flour, and had possessed her with his gaze, which was true. It was not a question of his daring to go further with her; he had no right. As for the dancing, there was nothing scandalous in that, since she wasn’t truly naked: the flour was her costume, her adornment.
Walking in front of him, Zizi cleared the way, only hesitating at the point where, a month or so before, he had seen the snake rattling through the clutter of dry leaves. He watched her body as she pushed the branches aside, and he thought: Once you have seen someone lovely naked, she is never anything but naked for you, no matter how she is dressed. She was sinuous on the path, her velvety skin glowing, her shaven head beaded with sweat, her neck shining.
Gala was waiting for them. Someone must have seen them on the path and told her they were on their way. Yet she looked impassive, monumental in her bulk, her eyes slanted in her fleshy face.
Hock clapped his hands and called out, “Odi, odi.”
The old woman was sitting in the same chair as before, on her veranda, on the planks worn smooth by bare feet, in the same posture as when he had left her — how long ago? And this time, too, she tried to heave herself out of the creaking chair to greet him. To spare her — he could see her effort, the deliberate stages of her hoisting herself, her struggling arms, planting her feet — he mounted the steps quickly and took her hands, and she laughed in helpless apology.
“Come, sit,” she said to Hock, and to the woman Zizi had called Auntie, “Bring tea. Go help them, Zizi.”
Smiling, patting her great fleshy face with a damp cloth, she shooed the children away.
As with all visits to huts like this, Hock sensed a brimming odor of human sweat, damp clothes, dirty feet, hot bodies; a rippling curtain of stink that was sharpest now in the heat of the day.
“Yes, go help,” Gala said to the last of the children, speaking as always in a mixture of Sena and English.
When they were alone, in the shade of the veranda, she lost her smile. It vanished into her plump smooth face and she became darker, heavier, and spoke in a growl.
“You did not heed me.”
He smiled at the word. Heed, reckoning, victuals — she was of the generation that used pulpit words.
“Even now you are not attending.”
Another of those words. He said, “I am — I always listen to you.”
“Ellis, my friend. One month ago I told you my opinion. It was a mistake for you to come here. Of course, I am glad for selfish reasons. Because the man I liked so well — I can even say loved — showed himself to be a righteous person. But you are not listening.”
The word “loved” was still glittering in his head.
He said, “Then I’m glad I came.”
“It should have been a holiday. But you lingered,” Gala said. “Sometimes the tourists and the aid workers visit here. They go to the Mwabvi park at the boma side to look at wild animals. Or they get lost here and ask directions. They spend some minutes and then they go away and we never see them again. That is what you should have done.”
“I think you mentioned that.”
“Indeed I did. But my words fell on deaf ears. You know we say muthu ukulu and so forth — a big head gets a knock.”
Her face was leathery, bruised by age and the harsh sun, with freckled cheeks, her eyes staring out of dark sunken skin. He could see her concern, and it alarmed him. Her proverb made her seem obtuse and simple-minded.
“I tried to get away,” he said. “I went downriver, almost to Morrumbala, and I was abandoned.”
“You fetched up at the children’s village.”
“The Place of the Thrown-Aways, they called it. How do you know that?”
“We have no secrets here. We know that Festus Manyenga brought you back. We know the Agency rejected you. We know those boys that call themselves ‘the brothers.’”