Like the shipwrecked sailor who befriends a vagrant bird with a broken wing, he sought the only creatures he knew would respond to his sympathy. He had nothing else. So they would not fight or eat each other, he separated the snakes into eight sacks.
When he looked for his knife to cut more flour sacks to sew into smaller bags, he saw it was missing. It was a cheap knife he’d bought as an afterthought, with boxes of food, from the market in Blantyre, but it had a sharp serrated blade. At the base of the blade, near the hilt, was a cutout for lifting bottle caps. In his time in Malabo he had not used the bottle opener. The few bottles of soda he’d drunk had been opened by Zizi, grimacing, with her side teeth. There had been no store-bought beer, only the plastic cups of home brew that was like sour porridge. Now the knife was gone and he felt defenseless and incompetent. It was bad that he had no knife; it was worse for him that someone else had it.
He slept badly; he was too hot, too hungry, to sleep well. He lay perspiring on his string bed, the mosquito net confining him, deadening the air.
He suffered the heat; it was something he’d never become accustomed to. He was hotter now than ever, more uncomfortable, because he was dirty and he felt ill, and his weakness made the heat harder to bear. The weight of it against his slimy skin made it no different from a fever.
The drumming pattered in his dream, and then seemed to wake him. He didn’t know whether he was still dreaming. He heard dogs barking, the hoarse helpless yapping of village mutts.
Then voices outside told him some people were near, and they tramped on the planks of his veranda, many feet, dry footsoles on splintered boards, and his door rattled and was yanked open, the iron bolt torn off the jamb.
He smelled them before he saw them. This is it, he thought. Manyenga’s “tomorrow” had meant the dark early morning. Moving figures stirred like upright shadows in his hut, muttering to each other, seeming not to know what to do next. He believed they were intimidated to be in the mzungu’s hut. They behaved strangely, unsure in their movements, tentative in their whispers.
“What do you want?”
“You, father.”
Hock lifted the ragged mosquito net as though peering from a tent. He recognized two of Manyenga’s sons, Yatuta and Aleke, and one of the brothers from the village of children, the one with the baseball cap. Without the other brothers this boy looked very young. The only light was that of a flashlight one of the sons was carrying, whisking the beam around the room, showing Hock how ramshackle the place looked. The beam lingered on the flour sacks that bulged on the floor, then swept across them.
“Why do you want me?”
“For the big dance.”
He’d said gule wamkulu. Hock knew the dance was secret and strange, not to be observed by an outsider.
It was pointless to ask any more questions. Too weak to resist, Hock swung his legs over and sighed and got up from his creaky bed. He felt the way a condemned man does, rising wearily on death row in the middle of the night to be executed.
One of the smaller boys, Aleke led the way across the clearing to Manyenga’s compound. The other two walked on either side of him, as if escorting him, and Hock scuffed along in rubber flip-flops, limping, falling forward.
Manyenga was waiting at the edge of the firelight, near where two drummers thumped and pounded.
“Welcome, chief.”
Hock was about to speak, but the walk — the boys moving quickly — had tired him, and he was breathless. He put his hands to his hips and bent over to catch his breath. He was hot, unshaven, hungry, his gray hair wild. His shirt was dirty — he was out of fresh laundry — his trousers torn, his feet grimy in his flip-flops.
“Chief, please sit. Here is your chair.”
The chair had been set up away from the heat of the fire but within the orbit of its light.
One of the brothers approached Manyenga, and Hock noticed that he was carrying a length of coiled rope, cheap yellow nylon braided like sisal.
“No,” Manyenga said, waving him away.
But the boy looked anxious, gesturing as though he intended to tie Hock’s hands.
Hock said, “What does he want?”
“He is thinking it is necessary to bind your wrists. But I tell him it is not necessary.”
“What are you doing to me?”
“We are promoting you,” Manyenga said.
“They’re taking me.” Hock’s throat constricted, full of fear, and he gagged again as he said, “This is an abduction. Why are you letting them? You warned me about them. You told me they were dangerous.”
“I never said those words.” Manyenga’s smug bureaucratic smile was one that Hock had seen before. He had assumed this smile whenever he rebuffed him; it would float across his lips, not always a smile, sometimes a sneer of pure contempt. He wore it now, as he said, “They are removing you, with our permission.”
“You can’t do that.”
“We must. We have nothing in the pipeline.”
His throat burning, Hock said, “What about my permission?”
“It is not necessary. You belong to us,” Manyenga said with the same smile, and he looked upon Hock as a kind of prize, according him the trophy status they reserved for the larger animals whose flesh they ate, whose skins they used as prestige objects. “You are ours. Our great chief.”
31
THE TATTERED FLAMES from the stack of snapping branches of their ritual fire lit Manyenga’s pitiless smile and reddened his eyes. He was the only muscular man in the village, and his potbelly, and the way he stood, in an assertive pose, made him seem overbearing. He was shorter than Hock, but solid. His shirt, a familiar print, was clean, and his trousers had a crease. His sandals were sturdy, and a good watch slipped on its too large band on his wrist. It was Hock’s own watch. Hock recognized the sandals as his, the shirt and trousers, too, and like the watch, these clothes had disappeared from his hut a month or more ago. Until now, he hadn’t seen Manyenga wearing the stolen things. By stripping him of his symbols and his wealth, Manyenga had begun to inhabit him.
“Now we must say bye-bye,” Manyenga said. “It is so sad for us, father.”
Manyenga clapped his hands, summoning the dancers, six or seven skinny girls, and some boys whose faces had been smeared with flour, making them ghostly — they stared from their white faces with dark eyes. A man appeared in a torn jacket, wearing a hawk-nosed helmet mask; shredded reed fibers were bound to his legs and arms, like a scarecrow. He walked stiff-legged and carried a fly whisk. He seemed a more forbidding figure for being so ridiculously dressed, like a dangerous lunatic with nothing to lose. Perhaps he was intended to be costumed as a white man.
The dance, the stamping, the pluckings of the mbira, meant nothing to Hock. In the years he’d spent in Malabo, and these months of his captivity, he had not been able to make sense of any of the nighttime dance ceremonies or songs. In his time, all the festivals had been Christian, with Bible readings and sermons. The church had vanished as completely as the school. Yet the secret memory of their drumming and dancing was known to the participants, if not the spectators. Or maybe there was no deeper meaning beyond the syncopation, as in the Likuba, like a conga line, the moving bodies in the firelight, the yodeling, the jumping shadows.
Hock sat like a condemned man, awaiting the moment of death, helpless, stunned by the assault of the drumming, the chaotic dancing, the puppet-like jigging of the skinny girls, the yelps of the white-faced boys, and the bawling of the villagers. It pained him to be closely watched by the three brothers, who were seated on the ground, and by Manyenga, smiling, delighted by the drumming and dancing.