“What are you eating?” He took the plastic tumbler of water. The water was cloudy. He touched the tumbler to his lips but didn’t drink.
“Cassava alone. The rice is finished.” Gala arranged a bead-fringed doily over the top of the pitcher. “I would like to make scones for you. We have some dried fish. Some few bananas. Naartjies too. It is the situation.”
Hock lingered, and then went outside and leaned over the rail to look at the flour sacks quivering under the veranda, the squirming snakes inside. The sacks from Malabo were stamped with the shield logo and the words L’Agence Anonyme.
“I wish I had something to give you,” Hock said when he reentered the hut.
“You have given Malabo everything you had,” Gala said. “Your food has been eaten. Your money has been eaten. Your hope, too, all gone. We have eaten you.”
That made him remember why he had come. He knelt before Zizi and whispered, “The letter — did you post it?”
Her hands had slipped from her face as she’d watched him talk with Gala, but now with her fingers splayed, she covered her face again and began to cry.
And Hock thought: Why am I even asking? I don’t deserve for the letter to have been mailed. I’m responsible for this skinny bruised girl lying here, her cracked lips, her swollen eyes, the scales of dried blood peeling on her ears, and a much worse wound I can’t see that will never heal.
When he turned to go, gathering the sacks of snakes from the shade, Gala said, “Snake Man,” and nodded. “Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as a serpent.” He leaned to kiss her, but she hissed into his ear, “The people are hungry. They will do anything.”
He wanted to say: Until I saw Zizi, I doubted that. Now I am prepared to believe anything.
But Zizi was better than yesterday, so he was hopeful for tomorrow. Still, given that he had sent her to the boma, he felt he did not deserve to be rescued.
“We are in God’s hands,” Gala said.
That was like surrender. Any mention of God filled him with despair.
Manyenga was waiting for him at his hut when he returned from Gala’s. Odd, the big man standing in the heat, because he seldom left his compound these days. He was someone who had plenty of food, and he guarded it.
“I hope you have something delicious in your gunny sacks,” Manyenga said.
“We shall see,” Hock said.
“I like the way you say that. Not yes, not no. Like a wise man.”
“That’s me, Festus.”
Manyenga said, “I have arranged a ceremony.”
“What ceremony?”
“To make you our chief.”
“But I’m already your chief,” Hock said in a weary voice, slinging the sacks onto his veranda.
“Of course, but we must have a proper ceremony, with dancers and drummers and music. That old blind man Wellington can play the mbira with his fingers. And then the voyage in a canoe. The float on the river.”
“And what would be the point of that?” Hock said, playing along. “You are my people.”
Manyenga laughed, then just as quickly scowled and became serious. “Yes. You belong to us.”
Until Manyenga had said that, Hock had been thinking, Everything this man says is a lie. The remark about “a wise man,” the references to the chief, the business about the “proper ceremony”—all lies. And that had been the case since the day he’d arrived. He had forgotten again the length of time he’d been in Malabo — three months now? But it was a guess. Maybe more. He knew the date of his arrival; it was stamped in his passport. But he did not know today’s date. No one in Malabo knew it. He was like them in this respect. He’d arrived after the planting, the rains had failed, the maize stalks were tiny, crowded by weeds, the pumpkin vines were withered and whitened with rot. Those were visible facts. The harvest would be poor. Everything else was a lie, every word he’d been told by Manyenga, most of what the others had said. Gala told the truth, but her only message, from the moment he’d seen her, had been: Get out, go home, save yourself.
The way that Manyenga had said, “You belong to us,” not with respect but with a growl of menace, reminded Hock that it was the one truth in a world of lies. They had always felt that Hock had been delivered, and his money had been taken. But much more serious than his money, his hope had been stripped from him.
“Festus, I’ve given you everything I have,” he said.
“Not everything. You are still our big man.”
“That’s me,” Hock said, and now, overcome with fatigue, he had to sit. He dropped to the edge of the veranda, near the sacks of snakes, and did not invite Manyenga to join him.
“You are our great chief and father.”
“With no money.”
“Even without money you are our father.” Manyenga, as always, whined the word, making it maahhnee.
“I have nothing more to give you.”
“But you have much,” Manyenga said. “You are a strong man.”
More lies. “I’m weak. I’m sick.”
“You are still so clever. You continue to plot, as a chief plots, whispering to this one and that one, and what and what.”
And then Manyenga laughed horribly, showing his good teeth, whinnying, insincere, too loud.
“I’m helpless.”
“You have your people. We are knowing.”
“What people?” Hock was indignant, straining to shout.
“Us.”
“You!”
“Yes, and the old woman. The little man with mkate. The girl.”
Mkate he knew as leprosy. Snowdon? That was news — or perhaps another lie. He’d thought the dwarf’s physical damage was from epilepsy, fits of falling down.
He said, “The girl Zizi was attacked.”
“At the boma. At night.” Manyenga spoke as though he was reciting the details of a crime she’d committed. “What was this young girl doing at the boma at night?”
“I have no idea,” Hock said with a dry mouth.
“As our chief you should know,” Manyenga said. “We believe she was sent there.”
Hock stared at him. That was another aspect of the darkness — that Manyenga knew everything and still he lied, pretending not to know.
“She was raped,” Hock said with all the snarling contempt he could muster.
Manyenga was not moved. “She went alone to the boma, through the bush at midnight.” He looked around, saw the dwarf, turned away, and added, “Did she expect something different?”
“She didn’t deserve to be raped.”
“But why did she go, my friend?” Manyenga said. “Maybe we will never know!” In a different, sterner voice he said, “The ceremony will be tomorrow.”
When Manyenga walked off, kicking across the clearing, Hock saw the brothers step from behind the great baobab stump and join him, heads down, conferring.
He knows everything, Hock thought. He has the letter. That was why Zizi was in despair; she believed she had failed him.
And so, in the time remaining before the ceremony the next day, Hock passed the hours in the only way he knew how. He paced the village, and the perimeter of the village, and the banks of the creek where the women were slapping their laundry on the smooth boulders. He carried a flour sack and his forked stick, and he gathered snakes. He found a puff adder sunning itself near the mango tree, a twig snake near the latrine, a nest of yellow-eyed snakes in the leaf trash of a decaying log; he found some more marsh vipers at the creek’s edge. They were weapons, they were friends, they were the only creatures in Malabo that had been neutral to him. He had destroyed Zizi, he had disappointed Gala. He had no other friends.