“I didn’t like the Agency,” Hock said. “I don’t trust those people.”
“They could have arranged safe passage for you. They have planes. They have vehicles.”
“I thought that young man Aubrey might help.”
“We know about him. He is sick.”
“I thought so. But he doesn’t look too bad.”
“He is taking the drug, like some others. They get it from the Agency. It is so dear, only a few people have it. It makes them stronger. It makes them dangerous.”
He guessed she was talking about the anti-retroviral drug that he had read about, but Gala would not have known those words. He said, “Aubrey said he was taking me to Blantyre. Manyenga had a different story. I don’t know what the truth is.”
“This looks such a simple place. But no, everyone lies, so you can’t know it at all. The truth is absent here.”
“Why do people lie?”
“Because they have been taught to lie. It works for them better than the truth. And they’re hungry. If you’re hungry, you will do anything, you will agree to anything, you will say anything. And they’re lazy. This is a terrible place. Why are you smiling?”
Hock said, “When we were both young, you said, ‘This is my home. This is my life. This is my country. We can make it better.’”
She laughed, but bitterly, and said, “If I were young again, I would say, ‘Take me far away from here.’”
“Where to?”
“Anywhere at all.” She saw that Zizi was pouring hot water from the kettle into a teapot. “I worry about her. She is still a namwali. Still a maiden.”
“Maiden” was another pulpit word, and it suited the thin girl, canted over and delicately filling the teapot. Her posture, so precise and poised, seemed proof of her innocence.
“But she’s strong,” Hock said.
“I was strong once, but look at me,” Gala said. She laughed, and it was true — she looked ruined, puffy-faced, her sad eyes glassy with fatigue, her ankles swollen. “And she is alone.”
“She’s been looking after me.”
“Yes, I know that,” Gala said.
What did she know? Perhaps the talk of Zizi dancing naked, and the detail that she rolled herself in flour and bewitched him, ghost-dancing like a priestess. Hock was abashed, felt he ought to explain, but did not know how to begin. He said, “Please don’t worry about her.”
“I am worried about you. Those people — Festus, Aubrey, the others. They are not to be trusted.”
He said, frowning at the absurdity of it, “I have no money left. I have nothing.”
“Then you are in greater danger.”
“I want to get away,” Hock said. “I don’t know how.”
“You must find a way. Zizi can help.” Gala saw Zizi and the other woman approaching the veranda with the tea things on tin trays — a plate of misshapen cakes, the teapot, the chipped cups, the small punctured can of evaporated milk, the sugar bowl. Before they were within earshot, Gala said, “This was a safe place once. Now it is so dangerous.” As the women mounted the steps, she said, “Malawi tea. From Mlanje Mountain! Please help yourself, my friend.”
They sat drinking tea, talking of the weather, how because the rain had stayed away, the roads had deteriorated. And how to fix them?
“A swing needs to be pushed,” Gala said, and tapped Hock’s arm to get his attention. “It means you can’t do anything alone.”
Zizi followed him home, down the path, in silence.
At the hut, she hung her head — politeness, averting her eyes— and said softly in Sena, “Do you want me to dance?”
But the visit to Gala had made him self-conscious, apprehensive, and he said no.
What had Gala heard? Obviously something, because the next day, around noon, a small boy appeared at Hock’s hut. Zizi had intercepted him and explained that the boy was carrying a message from Manyenga, who wanted to see him for dinner.
“I’m not hungry,” Hock said.
But that was no excuse. Food that was offered had to be accepted, even if the person had already eaten.
“Some boys have come,” Zizi said.
“Which boys?”
“They are from the other side,” she said, meaning the Mozambique border.
“How do you know?”
“People talk.”
People talked, but not to him, and that was the worst of it, that he lived in the village and all the while life continued apart from him. The talk did not reach him, or if it did, he did not understand. He was not only a mzungu, but a ghost, an ignorant ghost, existing outside of everything, merely watching, seeing only the surface of things, listening but missing most of what was said, not understanding the shouts or the drumbeats. At other times he was like a pet cringing in the doorway, a creature they kept to be stroked and murmured to, another species, captive and dumb and looking for a smile. He had been reduced to that. And the money was gone, so what was he worth?
Later in the afternoon, nearing Manyenga’s compound, he recognized the boys at once — the brothers, in their sunglasses, the one with the cap lettered Dynamo Dresden. And as before, he was struck by how American they looked in their T-shirts, sneakers, and shorts, not the castoff clothes distributed by a charity like the Agency, but new clothes that gave the boys a street style Hock recognized from Medford. They were the sweatshop products that had undone his business. Who would wear a button-down shirt and flannel slacks and a blazer if he could get away with a Chinese T-shirt and Chinese sneakers? He looked resentfully at the boys, thinking, China clothes the whole world!
“Father,” Manyenga called out, and failing to get his attention, he shouted, “Chief!”
But Hock was still watching the three boys, who sat picking at food on the plates that had been set out on the mat. The boy with the cap was sitting on a chair near Manyenga, the others squatting at the mat’s edge.
Another rule was that no one ate until the chief took the first bite, and when the chief appeared, or an elder, the younger members at the meal stood up, turned aside, eyes down, or knelt to show respect.
None of this. They were indifferent, as when Hock had seen them downriver at their makeshift village, as reckless as when they’d led Hock to the football field for the arrival of the Agency helicopter and the celebrities — the food drop. They had all started to eat, they chewed, they licked their fingers, they didn’t smile, and when they glanced at Hock it was in an appraising way, as you would look at merchandise in a market stall.
Hock saw that Zizi had not followed him, and guessing that she was back at the hut, he was confused, reluctant to meet these boys again. In their village they had taken no interest in him, even when he’d been starving. He recalled the ease with which they had handled the money he’d given them, fingering it expertly. Now they were in Malabo and talking with Manyenga, who had rescued him from them at the field, amid their scavenging, and had warned him against them. They had seemed like enemies then, and Manyenga a friend to him, but now he couldn’t tell the difference. He had no money, he had no friends. What did it matter whether he paid his respects to Manyenga by dining with him and these boys? Life went backward here, and he was more the stranger now than before.
“Eat!” Manyenga cried out, seeing Hock turn and, bent over, limp away. “Eat!”
He spoke as though to an obstinate animal, or a child, or a prisoner, and Hock realized that to them he was all three.
So he returned to his hut, and as an hour or so of daylight remained and it was too hot in the slanting sun to go inside, he lay on a mat on his veranda and shut his eyes and pitied himself for being there, at the mercy of the village, and having to endure the contempt of Manyenga’s having a meal with the three boys dressed as rappers. How had they gotten here from that far-off village? Well, he had made it here from there.