The Lower River

  He forgave himself for not having tried to escape before this when he saw (struggling with the bike, pulling it again and again into the deep dust of the wheel ruts) the distance to the main road and the—what?—twenty miles to Magwero, twenty sweltering miles even at seven in the morning, for as soon as the sun was up, the heat gagged him and his face was pelted by insects.

  Still, the road was free of traffic, and the only people he saw were women walking to market with big cloth bundles on their heads, and men with sacks of flour or rice flopped over the crossbar of their bikes, not riding the bikes but pushing them.

  He had not forgotten the mango tree and the plump smooth log under it at Magwero, and when he saw it ahead he was excited. Some men were sitting under the tree, two of whom he recognized from his first day. He called out to them as he rode past, steering the bike to the village, and beyond it to the landing.

  In the morning sun, the gnat-flecked rays diffused by the tall marsh grass, eight-man canoes—wide hollow logs—were drawn up on the embankment, and the smaller dugouts and fishing canoes bobbed in the scummy water on mooring lines. At one large canoe that lay partly in the water, men were arranging sacks of meal and crates of mangoes.

  Hock greeted the men and said, “This is the boy who is going downriver.”

  The men loading the canoe did not react. They were already perspiring from their work, their sweat-darkened shirts clinging to their bodies. One of them glanced at Simon, but without interest.

  “What time are you leaving?”

  “Later.”

  Hock said, “We have to go now.”

  It was a meaningless sentence, because “now” never meant now. It meant soon, it meant sometime, it meant whenever. It wasn’t an urgent word; it also meant never.

  Hearing it, one of the men bent over and, sweaty-faced under a dusty sack, spat onto the slimy mud of the embankment.

  Hock said sharply, “Who’s the owner of this bwato?”

  A man in a crushed straw hat, wearing thick-lensed glasses, peered at Hock and said in English, “It is my.”

  “You know me?” Hock asked.

  The old man shook his head. “But my father, he was knowing.”

  Hock drew the man aside. He said, “The boy has to go right now,” and tapped his watch. “And I’m going with him. How much do you want?”

  “But the cargo,” the old man said. He scratched at his knuckles, loosening skin.

  “How much?” Hock could see through the trees to the nearby village, where women were ghostly in the smoke of cooking fires. Men and small children had gathered on the embankment to watch. They must have followed the motorbike, which leaned on its kickstand near the canoes.

  “We were expecting the boy, but not you, father.” The old man was peeling dead skin from his knuckles.

  “Five hundred,” Hock said.

  The old man had two yellow upper teeth. As he worked his jaw his tongue floated around them, seeming to tickle them. His thought process was visible in his chewing. He said, “Seven hundred.”

  “Tell the men to cast off,” Hock said. He handed the old man the fat sandwich of folded-over money, all small bills. And he called to Simon to get into the big canoe.

  It worried Hock that too much time had passed in the palaver, but once he and the boy were on board, and the two paddlers were beating it backward from the bank into the bobbing density of water hyacinths—the boy, feet apart, poling—he saw that he’d gotten away quickly. The village watched them go, the ghostly women at the smoky edge of the trees, the men standing near the unloaded piles of grain sacks and the crates of fruit. And there was the parked motorbike, the guarantee that no one from Malabo would arrive here anytime soon; it was the only vehicle in Malabo. And so he’d stranded Zizi in his bed, Manyenga in the village, Marsden at the Lutwe crossroads—and he was away, cheered by the men digging their paddles into the water, pushing the canoe through the narrow channel between the glistening water hyacinths, a profusion of stems and leaves and blossoms so tangled it seemed you could step out of the canoe and walk across this floating platform of green marsh weeds.

  Confident that he was safe, Hock leaned against the blunt bow of the canoe, resting on a sack of flour, and fell asleep, lulled by the rocking of the boat, the regular splash of the paddles. It was as though he had at last freed himself from the pull of gravity, not just escaped from Malabo but twisted away from the clinging people, the reaching hands, everything represented by the muddy embankment, which seemed like the edge of an alien planet, and was now bobbing through the sickly light in the soup of its atmosphere.

  Exhausted by the early start and the effort in all his harangues—Zizi, the motorcyclist Marsden, the boy Simon, the elderly canoe owner—he lay in the boat asleep for over an hour. He woke with the sun full on his face, and gazing up he saw the long spikes of marsh reeds overhanging the bow as the big dugout glided past.

  The two paddlers were angled against the gunwales of the boat, one on either side, the boy Simon thrusting with his pole. Hock peeled an orange and, throwing the scraps of skin into the channel, saw they were being sucked toward the stern.

  “We’re going upstream,” he called out. “No—that way!”

  The men kept their rhythm of paddling, chopping the water, their cheeks streaming with sweat.

  “This is the channel,” one of them said in Sena. “We have to pass through the marsh to get to the river.”

  In his second year in Malabo, he’d been taken fishing for tilapia in the river. They’d crossed the Dinde Marsh and entered the fast-flowing stream of the Shire River in less than thirty minutes. He explained this in a halting way to the paddlers, who listened while shoveling water with their paddle blades. Speaking about the past here was like speaking about a foreign land—happier, simpler, much bigger and highly colored, seemingly aboveground.

  The man who had spoken before said, “That was years and years,” and he gestured to mean the years were gone.

  “So the river changed?”

  The man who had been silent said, “The river is a snake.”

  The great marsh and its wall of reeds was an obstacle, or rather, a set of obstacles, the channel zigzagging through it without any logic or pattern, a maze in which they were pushing themselves, always upstream, slipping through narrow openings and up the widening channel, against the current. The grunts of the men and the smack of the paddles kept him awake as he peered ahead for the opening of the marsh into the river. Here and there, men in small canoes were surprised, as they fished, to see the big canoe and the red-faced man in it. And as they bobbed in its wake, staring at the mzungu, he noted the few possessions they had on board: the water bottle, the torn net, the dish of bait, the pathetic catch—a basket of small shiny fish.

  He was fleeing, he knew. He could have ridden the motorbike to the boma, but he would have been seen and probably detained. The river was better—he could lose himself in the bush. He wanted to get away, to vanish across the Mozambique border. The thought of distancing himself from Malabo excited him; the idea that he was breaking free of Malawi made him joyous. He had a change of clothes, his little radio, his passport, his money: everything he needed.

  In the stern the boy Simon was asking a question. Hock didn’t hear the question, but he heard the answer.

  “It is there.”

  The boy said in English to Hock, “Reevah.”

  Sunlight spanked the water ahead with such brilliance the current showed as muscles beneath bright scales on the turbulent surface. The boat nosed through the last thinning wall of reeds and shot out of the mouth of the channel, where it was caught and tipped by the wide flow of the river. The bow was yanked into the current and then the whole dugout was carried sideways along the stream. One of the paddlers wiped his face on his shirt as the other used his paddle blade as a rudder, steering the boat away from the tall bank of reeds. And just then, in a scoop in the reeds, a little bay, a hippo raised its blotchy head and was so startled by the boat he op
ened his jaws wide. Hock could see the reddish flesh of the mouth and the blunt pegs of its thick round teeth and the raw mottled skin of its fat body. He yelped—his first cry of joy in many weeks—and he pointed.

  “You!”

  Paddling more easily now, the men kept the boat in the current, sliding its beam crossways in the stream from reach to reach.

  “We eat them,” the first paddler said in Sena.

  “People here never ate them before,” Hock said, and again in speaking of the past he seemed to be referring not to another time but to a distant country. “What is your name?”

  “Lovemore.”

  “Why do you eat hippos, Lovemore?”

  “Because we are hungry.”

  The other paddler gave his name as Dalitso—blessings—and it was he, not Lovemore, who spoke a little English. Hock offered some of his oranges and tangerines to them, but they refused all food. Simon ate an orange, removing the peel in fastidious pinchings, such delicacy in a dugout on a river flowing through the bush.

  The paddlers drank water from their plastic jug, and they rolled cigarettes and smoked. Hock knew from their glassy eyes and their concentration that they were smoking weed.

  “Chamba,” he said.

  “Mbanje!” one said, using the slang word.

  Even in the hottest hours of the day, as Hock dozed under the shirt he spread across the gunwales for shade, the paddlers kept on, fueled by the weed smoke. The banks of the river were more clearly defined now, steep and sculpted flat, like the walls of a ditch. They could not see beyond them—no trees were visible, no high ground, only now and then a break in the bank where a green stream leaked out, or a sandbar at the edge where a small bumpy green croc was sleeping.

  “Where is Mozambique?” Hock asked.

  No one spoke, though one man jabbed his paddle at the opposite bank.

  Toward midafternoon Hock saw an island of low huts, thatched with black decaying bundles of straw. Wondering whether it was a Sena settlement, he asked idly, “Who lives there?”

  “Dead people,” one of the paddlers whispered.

  Hock blinked and an ache of fear tugged at his throat.

  A mile or so below that island—of graves, of ghosts?—they came to a wide muddy embankment where the broken hull, bare ribs, and rusty ironwork of a large wooden boat had been pushed onto the foreshore to rot. It was the only sign of habitation he’d seen since leaving Magwero. As they drew closer, he could see a shed, a sloping landing, and a man at a table under a mango tree. The man wore the khaki shirt of officialdom, including a brass badge on his pocket.

  “Mozambique,” the paddler Dalitso said, easing the dugout against the landing.

  Hock climbed out, glad for the chance to walk, relieved that the day had gotten him this far from Malabo. He helped them haul the boat onto the landing, then climbed the embankment and walked toward the man at the table.

  “Passport,” the man said.

  Hock took it from his pocket, smiling at the frontier—the man in his clean shirt, the table, the stamp and ink pad.

  “You speak English?”

  “No any Englis.” He examined the passport, moving the pages with his thumb. “Visa—forty dollar.”

  “So you do speak English.”

  “Visa,” the man said. He held up four fingers. “Forty dollar.”

  Why am I happy? Hock asked himself. I am happy because no one knows me here.

  At the small shed beyond the frontier post, Hock bought a box of salted crackers, a can of beans, some bottles of beer. He saw that the paddlers were building a fire, preparing a meal of nsima and stew, fussing with tin pots, scraping at the thick water-and-flour mixture.

  He offered Simon a bottle of beer and sat with him on the embankment, on plastic beer crates, facing the river and the reddening sun. Already the day was cooler, and the slanting sunlight gilded the swarms of insects that streamed over the river like flakes of gold.

  “Thank you,” the boy said, swigging beer.

  “Tomorrow where do we go?”

  “To Caya, on the Zambezi.”

  “And then?”

  “Find a lorry to Beira. Or maybe a bus.”

  “How far to Beira?”

  “One overnight. Then a bus to Maputo. Maputo, it is the capital city. Then Jo’burg.”

  “I want to go.”

  “It is your decision, father.”

  “I helped you with money.”

  “Yes, father.” Simon drank his beer slowly, a small mouthful at a time, as though rationing himself. He said, “I want a bright future for myself. I want to help my family with money. They are suffering too much. Maybe I can help my country, too. I can work, sure. I am willing and able, that is the goodness.”

  “Did you learn English at the school in Malabo?”

  “No, in Chikwawa. We have no school in Malabo. We have nothing in Malabo.”

  Hock was about to lecture him, to tell him that once, many years ago, there was a school in Malabo, which had a library and teachers. There was a clinic, a monthly visit from a missionary, a plan for digging a well, and another plan for electricity. There was a church that was sometimes used as a village hall. But he said nothing, only smiled, and when he finished his bottle of beer he said, “Ask these people if they have a bed for me.”

  “I will ask.”

  Hock tuned his little radio, found some faint music, and listened, growing sad. The sound of the radio made him feel more remote, as though he was listening to the earth from distant space.

  “They have a bed for you, father.” He led Hock to one of the nearby sheds. Seeing Hock with the radio to his ear he asked, “How many kwacha does that wireless cost for buying?”

  “I don’t know,” Hock said. “Here, you can listen. You might learn something. You sound like a self-improver. Give it back to me tomorrow.”

  A woman opening the door of the shed said, “Ndalama.”

  Hock gave her five dollars. She tucked it into the fastening across her breasts and handed him a small towel. This he spread across the hard pillow on the shelf that served as a bunk, two planks that had been fixed from one wall to the other.

  He lay in the hot stifling darkness. The small room stank of kerosene and dirt, and it was airless, the door closed, the bolt shot. It had no windows. It was obviously for storage, not a bedroom. Yet he was tired, and he slept, and when he woke and walked into the freshness of the morning, the river sparkling, he was happy again.

  But the dugout was gone, the boy was gone, the man in the khaki shirt at the small table under the tree, gone. It was just another riverbank. Hock hurried to the landing and saw at the foot of it a woman washing clothes, slapping them, twisting the muddy water from them.

  “Where are they?”

  Even without English, the woman, seeing his confusion, knew what he was saying.

  She pointed downriver and laughed and went on slapping the clothes against a large stone.

  17

  THE MUD AT the embankment was thick and dark, a slippery mass of insubstantial fudge, crawling with beetles and littered with chewed fish bones and fruit peels. For most of the morning Hock squatted there, slapping at the tsetse flies biting his ankles and watching for a boat, any boat, to take him away from the landing. The sky was cloudless, and empty except for the black profile of a gliding fish eagle, and nearer, the lovely trilling of a swamp warbler swaying on a reed. Yellow butterflies fluttered to the garbage heaps on the mud bank, settled on the rusted cans and the foul mass of plastic and sodden paper and broken bottles. He was not dismayed, but he felt the fatigue of being dirty and yearned to wash his face.

  Though just yesterday Zizi had willingly crept into his bed, he was saddened by the thought of her, yet relieved to be here and not there. He’d crossed a border. This looked like a dump, and the settlement was just a camp, a portrait of abandonment in the bush, but it was a frontier, and he was on the right side of it, on his way home. With this thought at the front of his mind, he looked arou
nd at the placid river, the garbage, the wooden windowless shed where he’d slept, the hulk of the large wrecked boat with its still intact wheelhouse—the stink and decrepitude of it all—and he laughed. He was in the middle of nowhere, but he was free.

  Just then he saw a dugout bobbing in the stream at the far bank. He stood up and whistled, with his fingers in his mouth. For a moment he thought the paddlers on board hadn’t heard, or that they were afraid. But like a compass needle swiveling in liquid, the narrow canoe turned to point at him, and it slid toward where he stood on the bank.

  The paddlers were children, hardly more than ten or eleven.

  He greeted them, and when they remained stony-faced, either afraid or unfriendly, he asked whether they could speak Sena.

  They nodded yes, they could speak the language.

  Hock said in Sena that he wanted to go to the far bank, and the boys’ reaction was expressionless again, implacable, and so he explained, “To your village.”

  They seemed to understand the word for village, but did not reply to it, or say that he would be either welcome or unwelcome there. Still, they floated nearer, and that encouraged Hock to step to the river’s edge.

  He threw his bag into the dugout and, up to his ankles in mud, he stepped in and held on. The boat rode lower in the water with him in it, was more stable with his weight holding it deeper.

  The skinny boys thrashed with their paddles, one of the paddles merely the splintered portion of a short water-blackened board. Hock asked them their names, and they grunted some words he did not understand. But random incoherence seemed to be the theme of his escape. No record had been made of his passport details by the man in khaki. The washerwoman had laughed as she told him that his friends had left without him. The boy Simon and the other canoe were gone. He was in a small dugout in the middle of the river, still the Lower River, miles above the Zambezi, into which it flowed, the two small boys steering and slapping with their clumsy paddles on this hot morning.