The Lower River by Paul Theroux

  I don’t exist, Hock thought. No one knows I’m here, no one knows me, no one cares, and were this flimsy canoe to turn over, or be flipped by a hippo, no one would ever find me; no one would know I died. The world would continue to turn without me, my death would be unnoticed, would make no difference, because I am no one, no more than meat.

  He saw himself with the eyes of a hawk that was passing high above, soaring without moving its wings, looking imperturbable, graceful in its effortless gliding. I am a speck, no more than that, Hock thought. I am a bug on a twig floating down a dark river. Less than a bug.

  A basket at his feet held three tiny fish: not bait, though they were small enough for that. It was perhaps the day’s catch, a peeled stick inserted through their gills, holding them together like a kebab. The boys would have started fishing before dawn. This was all they had to show for those five hours or so.

  The river narrowed. It had been fifty yards wide at the border post; now it was less than forty, and swifter because of that, rushing past sandbanks on which Hock saw the unmistakable signs of large crocodiles, the parallel paw prints and claw marks, the groove of the dragging tail between them.

  Hock pointed to an overhanging mud cliff that had been hollowed out beneath by the rushing river, using it as a landmark. He said, “Malawi?”

  “Nuh,” the boy said, jerking his head, but still stroking with his paddle.

  “Mozambique?”

  The boy clicked his teeth, but that didn’t mean yes; it meant the question was annoying and perhaps meaningless.

  The reeds, the marsh grass, the greasy weeds, the sandbanks, the blackish water—none of it was different from what he’d seen upstream. No high ground was visible beyond the steep riverbanks. But he was moving, and no one knew him. He had escaped Malabo, and he was watchful for whatever might come next.

  The pull of the current consoled him with the notion that he was being drawn to safety. All he had to do was surrender to the flow of the river, the Lower River, bearing him southward through the bush.

  After about an hour he saw in the distance downriver a single straight-sided humped-up mountain, solitary, like a granite monument, headless shoulders risen in the marshy plain. As they drew closer in the canoe it seemed like a citadel of tree-clad stone, its steep sides and cliffs formed in the shape of fortifications. It was such an oddity—its great size, its unusual shape—he asked its name.

  “Morrumbala,” the boy in the stern said.

  Hock knew the name but had never seen it. The war against the Portuguese had prevented him from traveling this far into Mozambique, so it was all new to him, a strangely hopeful sign. It lay in the distance, beyond the far bank.

  As Hock stared at it, the sun striking the trees on its sheer sides, the sunlit green as luminous as fresh lettuce, pulpous and pale yellow in patches, he did not notice the canoe drawing away from Morrumbala, closer to the near riverbank. Only when the canoe bumped did he look up and see that they’d been pushed by the current against a pair of poles sticking out of the mud. Lashed to the poles was a water-soaked board that served as a crude pier, and another board, a walkway to the high grass at the bank.

  A boy of four or five, wearing just a shirt—his bottom bare—saw Hock and began screaming in fear. He ran from Hock as from a demon, as the paddlers laughed—their first full-throated cry—and the small boy screamed out, “Mzungu!”

  His fright seemed to relax them, and they were still laughing as they tied the dugout to the poles and led Hock onto the bank and up a path to a clearing.

  He had seen many villages like this, the squat square huts arranged around the perimeter of an open space of smooth packed-down earth. From the condition of the fraying thatch on the hut roofs, and the exposed framework on the mud walls, and the rags hanging on clotheslines—from the sharp stink of smoke and dirt—he knew it was a poor village. Yet it was orderly, and there was something else—unusual, even remarkable—for though it was full of people, they were all very small, all of them, he saw, children in tattered clothes, the sort of T-shirts and shorts and trousers that were sold cheaply at the used-clothing markets, the shirts with American names on them, schools, the logos of well-known companies, names of cities, too, and famous universities.

  The small boy who had been screaming was scooped up by a girl of ten or so—she could barely lift him. He buried his face in her shoulder.

  “Where’s your father, your mother?” Hock asked the paddlers.

  One boy turned away in alarm, his rags making his fear pathetic. The other boy faced Hock and scowled, saying nothing, either insulted or afraid.

  “The chief,” Hock said. “Mfumu. Where is your bwana?”

  The boy made an even sourer face, thrusting out his lower lip, showing a kind of threat with its inner pinkness, and began to speak fast, turning his back to Hock as he talked. Finally he walked away on his toes, in disdain, holding upright like a symbol of prestige the stick with the three small stiff fish that he’d taken from the canoe.

  Hock sat on a discarded plank in the shade of a tree and watched a small girl poking a fire under a blackened pot, perhaps cooking, perhaps playing; another small girl holding a baby at her hip; infants crawling in the dust, picking at dry tufts of grass. More children were occupied stacking firewood, most of them boys, but the pile they made was so random—no more than a scattered heap—that looked like play, too, a game of tossed and broken branches. Some other, bigger boys sat under a tree on the far side of the clearing. Children and more children. They all wore faded T-shirts of various colors, much too big for them, some serving the smaller girls as dresses—T-shirts as shapeless frocks, one saying Niagara Falls, another Yale. They were dusty-faced and their hair was clotted with white bits of lint, and many of the children were unnaturally skinny, the infants potbellied with spindly arms and legs.

  They seemed indifferent to Hock, and they were silent, going about their chores or absorbed in repetitious play. When Hock got up from his plank and walked through the village, they took no notice of him.

  The border post on the river now seemed to him something defined and certain: the table, the sullen official with the stamp and ink pad, the battered sheds, the broken boat, the muddy embankment, the rapacious shopkeeper. It was on the map, or at least seemed so, an entry point. It was a ruin but it was not a horror, only futile-looking, decaying with the accumulation of garbage, and the rise and fall of the river, not maintained, conventionally ugly, as most of the depots on the Lower River looked, including the boma at Nsanje and the landings at Magwero and Marka. People congregated at the landings, but few people lived at them.

  Compared to the border post, even to Magwero, this village of children was whole, coherent, and some of it was swept clean—Hock could see small girls with twig brooms pushing the litter of leaves and peels to the side of the courtyard in front of the huts. None of the huts was in good shape—the usual bruised walls, the skeletal frame of branches showing through—and yet the village was inhabited, strangely so. Everyone he’d seen so far was young, some very young, mostly small children, the little girls holding infants, small boys playing together, the older boys watchful. And because most were so young there was a buzz of vitality in the village, a hurrying; running boys, skipping girls. Some played with crudely made toys, formed of twisted wire, or hanks of knotted rags that served as balls to kick, and some limbless dolls, plastic torsos with cracked heads—white dolls.

  This village made sense because it was full of lives being lived outdoors; it was visible and vital. Pots simmered over fires, and oddly, some small girls were taking turns with oversized mortars and pestles—the pestles much taller than they were and so heavy that some of them had to be hoisted and dropped by pairs of girls.

  It could have been a summer camp or a school; it had that look of monotony and order, all the children occupied. But most were working, even those he had taken to be playing. The girls wore large T-shirts to their knees, some were cinched with rope at the waist to make a
dress, others draped over them like nightshirts, or like smocks. Many of the small children wore a T-shirt and nothing else, and though the boys’ T-shirts fitted them better, all were faded and worn—Westfield High School and UConn and Bob’s Bluegrass Bar and UCLA and more. Once-white ones were gray with dirt, many had chewed collars and slashes, and some were shredded to rags.

  Taller, much bigger than any of these skinny kids, Hock felt a sense of safety, the instinctive confidence of the tall man, a giant among dwarfs, reassured by his size and the fact that he’d escaped from Malabo, and gotten away from the border post, and was now six or seven miles downstream, probably in Mozambique but on the west bank of the Lower River. There had to be a path that would lead to a wider road and a truck route and a town.

  It was just after four. He’d eaten the last of his crackers and beans in the morning, waiting on the riverbank, and nothing since. His hunger sharpened with the odor of cassava roasting on a grill over a fire, tended by a small girl on her knees. She turned the dark, roughly carved root slices with a forked stick. After watching her for a while, Hock got up and walked over to the fire. The girl shrank from him, though stayed kneeling, fanning smoke from her eyes, rearranging the slices, moving them to the side of the grill farthest from Hock.

  Instinctively, as he reached, Hock looked for an adult, anyone his size, who might object, and seeing only children, he picked up one of the pieces of cooked cassava. It was hot, he bobbled it in his palm, then blew on it and took a bite. He had not realized how hungry he was until he ate the thing, stringy, dense, tasting of wood smoke. He wolfed it down and wanted another.

  The girl tending the fire (her T-shirt was lettered Colby Chess Club) had turned toward him but with averted eyes, gazing past him. Hock looked around and saw, on a log in front of a hut, three big boys staring at him. He was surprised and disconcerted to see that they were wearing sunglasses, three bug-eyed boys in T-shirts and trousers. Something in their posture gave them an air of authority, even hauteur, and the sunglasses seemed, if not menacing, then unfriendly, intentionally ambiguous. Their clothes were clean, and that unusual fact made them seem stronger and put Hock on his guard. One of them wore a black baseball cap with the words Dynamo Dresden stitched in yellow on the front.

  He’d been dazed and dulled by the effort of getting away from Malabo, and the canoe trip to the frontier had tired him. He hadn’t expected to be abandoned by Simon—after giving him money and sermonizing about his future, the ungrateful rat—hadn’t expected this, a village of children.

  Hock was still hungry but, sensing disapproval from the watching boys, instead of taking any more food from the fire, he walked up the slight incline of sloping earth and dead grass to where the boys sat in the afternoon sun.

  “Hello, how are you?” he asked in Sena, certain they would understand; the language was spoken all over the Lower River.

  They simply stared, or seemed to, in the stylish unrevealing goggles, as though they hadn’t heard or didn’t know the words.

  “Where is your chief?” Hock used all the words for “big man” he knew, not only mfumu and nduna, but also nkhoswe, the elder who traditionally looked after all the smaller siblings—nephews and dependents.

  “No chief,” the boy in the middle said in English. He was a skinny sharp-faced boy with wet insolent lips and he sounded triumphant. “No nkhoswe.”

  “No bwana?”

  “You are the only bwana.”

  Hock felt a thrill at the idea of a village in the bush with no one in charge.

  “What is the name of this village?” he asked.

  The boy wearing the black cap lettered Dynamo Dresden said, “It is Mtayira.”

  “I don’t know that word.”

  “It is The Place of the Thrown-Aways.”

  So precise, the sad name.

  “Where is the road?” Hock asked. He spoke in Sena, to be sure, for the word njira meant any road, big or small, even a footpath.

  “No road,” the sharp-faced boy said, crowing in English.

  “You speak English. Did you learn it at school?”

  “Not at school, never.”

  The truculent and unwilling tone and the sulky nayvah in the boy’s response annoyed Hock, who said, “I haven’t eaten anything all day. I need some food.”

  “We have no food for you.”

  The three pairs of sunglasses were pitiless. And none of the boys had risen, in itself an act of defiance, for on the Lower River, even in the disgrace that was Malabo, the children stood up in the presence of adults. Hock turned toward the cooking fire and saw that the girl had gathered all the cassava and was carrying it away in a tin bowl, moving quickly on short legs across the clearing with the head-bobbing walk of a child.

  “I’m hungry,” Hock said in a mildly protesting way.

  “We are more hungry,” the same boy said.

  “If you help me, I’ll give you money,” Hock said, and was at once uncomfortably aware of the pleading note in his voice.

  “We want dollars,” one of the other boys said, a new voice that was a growl.

  Hock laughed at the idea that he was negotiating with a boy in a baseball cap who was no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, in a bush village on the river, a sullen boy in sunglasses.

  “Twenty dollars,” the boy said.

  Hock felt pressure on his legs, a rubbing and pushing, and saw that a crowd of children had gathered around him. Instead of standing at a distance, as children always did by tradition, out of respect, these children stood close to him, chafing him, hemming him in, preventing him from moving. It was as though he was standing in thick bush grass up to his waist. He could sway, but he could not lift his legs. He’d put his bag between his feet and could feel it against his calves but was unable to reach it.

  “What do I get for twenty dollars?”

  “Some food to eat.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Some tea to drink.”

  “I need a place to sleep,” Hock said.

  The children jostling at his legs made him totter and almost lose his balance. He lifted his arms and waved them to steady himself, feeling foolish.

  “Maybe we have a space.”

  “I want to be your friend,” Hock said.

  “We do not know you at all.” It was the growly voiced boy.

  “Please tell these children to move away.”

  The boy spoke to them sharply, but they responded by chattering, laughing, gesturing.

  “They say that you must go, not them,” the boy said, and the children laughed again, as if guessing what was being said. And when they laughed, jeering, careless, Hock became worried.

  He reached through the tangle of small bodies and found the strap of his bag and lifted it, hugging it, protecting it with his arm. Everything he owned was in it—not much now, he’d left most of his clothes in Malabo, and Simon had stolen his radio. But he had the essentials—medicine and money and a change of clothes.

  The worst thing you could do in these circumstances, he knew, was to pull out an envelope and show money to such a crowd of rude catcalling children. He said only, “See? I have it.”

  The middle boy gestured, and the boys on either side of him snarled what sounded like an order, or abuse. But the crowd of children did not disperse at once. They chattered some more, they made insolent noises, they poked and pinched at Hock’s legs and tugged at his bag to taunt him. And only then did they move away, at first slowly, then running, chasing each other, leaving Hock short of breath, his heart beating fast.

  Hock knew from his Medford store that there is a way a person handles money that shows familiarity, not just the deftness of a clerk at the cash drawer, but also in a bush village like this, in the practiced movements of someone’s fingers—a response of hands more than eyes. The boy had taken the twenty-dollar bill, had smoothed it and folded it in half, hardly looking at it, and Hock knew that the boy had experienced American money, handled it easily, his pinching fingers testing
the paper, making it speak.

  In return for the money, Hock was given a mat in a dirty hut at the edge of the village. He sat before it in shadows, eating a plate of roasted cassava, some bananas, and peanuts boiled in their shells, glad for the cup of boiled water into which he had swirled some tea leaves. He ate slowly, to prolong the pleasure.

  The sunset was a syrup of golden red dissolving the clouds in the pools of its light, lovely over his squalid hut, lending the mud walls a pinkish glow.

  18

  SITTING CROSS-LEGGED in the broken wattle-and-daub hut that had no door, Hock remembered an incident from his second year in Malabo. One of his students, a girl sleeping in a doorless hut like this, was attacked by a hyena that had padded in and begun to eat her face. Her struggling did not deter the creature, though an ember from the dying fire, thrown by the girl’s mother at the hyena, the sparks setting its fur alight, repelled him. Two days later, at the filthy clinic where her severe wounds had gone septic, her head yellow and swollen tight with infection, the girl died.

  From that day, Hock could not sleep in Malabo without barricading his door. For decades in Medford he’d hardly thought of that event, but this night in the village of children he sat in the doorway of the hut, heavy with fatigue and a sense of grievance, feeling wronged, not by the imposters in Malabo but by his divorce, thinking angrily of Deena’s demanding the house, his daughter’s abusing him and then wanting her cut of her inheritance in advance, believing that he would marry again and have more children—and here he was, indignant, sitting on the dirt floor of a filthy hut alone in this underworld, on an obscure reach of the Lower River.