Paul Theroux - The Lower River

They were small skinny children, all smiles — it seemed a village of children, like a settlement in a folktale. One said “ Mankhwala ”—medicine — and the rest chimed in. Hock knew they were asking for candy.

“Tomorrow,” Hock said. He repeated it in Sena: “ Mawa. ” Seeing them laughing, he asked them if they knew English.

They shyly admitted no.

“Do you go to school?

“No school!”

He had intended to see the school that afternoon, but now the light was fading. Night came quickly: he’d see it tomorrow — something to do. As he watched the last long orangey tatters of the sunset, Manyenga called out, “Father!” for the evening meal. They ate as they had the previous night: the basin, the ceremony of being served by Zizi and the elder Mrs. Manyenga: nsima, stew, a portion of dried fish, a stinging swig of nipa.

Manyenga sat with him and in a tone meant to reassure him, said, “I have ordered the iron roof for your hut.”

“How much?”

“Very cheap. I am knowing this man. I told him about you. His father remembers you too much. Maybe he was your student. He gave me a good price. He knows we are partnering.”

Partnering? Hock said in Sena, “Lots of money”— ndalama zambiri.

“No, father. Not at all. One sheet for six thousand kwacha only.” That was forty dollars.

“How many sheets do you need?”

Manyenga didn’t answer. Hock knew the man was making a complex calculation, thinking of numbers and discarding them. At last he said, “Six,” in the local way, sick - ees.

“Say five.”

“Can manage five,” Manyenga said readily.

After the meal, when Hock walked across the clearing to his hut, he saw a shadow on the veranda and turned his flashlight toward it — Zizi, her hand shielding her face, yellow palm showing. She knelt in the light, keeping her hand up, and he moved the beam away from her.

“What are you doing?”

“ Ujeni. ” She faltered in the half word, whatsit.

“Did Manyenga send you here?”

She didn’t reply. Hock knew the answer. He said, “There’s a snake in that basket,” and hearing that, she stood and backed away. When she was gone he went inside and lay in the darkness, slightly drunk and levitated from the nipa.

The next day was the same: the walk, the dwarf at breakfast, the riverbank, a nap, another walk, writing notes; then dinner at Manyenga’s, more talk of money, and bed. He wondered if time spent in such a random, unprofitable way could count as a routine. And he remembered his first weeks here — the full days of work, the hot nights by lantern light grading students’ exercise books. He grew sad, admiring his younger, hopeful self.

“I want to see the school,” he said to Manyenga on the third day, seeing him straddling his motorbike.

“It is finished, father.”

“Maybe I could get it fixed up.”

Manyenga considered this, chewing his lips, his face twisting in thought.

“Some boys are there.”

In Hock’s day, the school had been three buildings: a pair of classrooms joined by a veranda, an office block standing on its own, and a long brick privy, a chimbudzi that was also a wash house, boys at one end, girls at the other. These structures were roofed with a kind of plastic composite popular in the sixties. The cement floors were polished and buffed with oxblood-colored wax from a five-pound can.

Manyenga propped his motorbike on its kickstand and walked with Hock beyond the clearing, through the tall grass, to the school. Head-high bushes had grown up around the buildings. The roof of the classrooms was mostly gone, only brittle pieces remaining. Weeds grew in the eaves. All the furniture had been removed. The table at his hut had been one of these. The windows were broken. The office was just a shell, though it showed signs that it had been lived in, mats and quilts twisted on the floor, scorch marks on the wall.

“Watch for snakes,” Manyenga said.

Hock had supervised a renovation of the store in Medford. He knew a little about construction. He studied this ruin and tried to imagine how to put it back together. It was like the remains of an old civilization, more plausible as a ruin, more coherent, more venerable as wreckage.

A lovely tree dominated the scene of decrepitude, a tree Hock himself had planted, all those years ago, when the minister of education had visited to open the school — the minister had supervised the planting, but Hock had bought the sapling, dug the hole, and set the circle of bricks around it. The minister, fat in his suit, perspiring, had watched Hock slip the root ball into the hole and had lobbed a spadeful of earth into it as the children sang. Manyenga’s grandfather had been one of those children, in the school uniform, khaki shorts and a gray shirt. The tree was now forty feet high, swelling over a pool of shade. Why hadn’t they cut it down?

Beyond the tree lay the battered classrooms, the skeleton of the office, the vandalized latrine. Graffiti on the latrine walls was crude, but it was graffiti all the same, stick figures in unmistakable postures of copulation.

“How long has it been like this?”

“I am not knowing,” Manyenga said, truly bewildered, which surprised Hock.

“We could fix it.”

The windows gaped, the roof was gone, the doors were splintered but still attached to hinges. Hock mentally scythed the grass, roofed the school, imagined it with a coat of paint, laid out gravel pathways. And he put himself in the picture: he was standing on the veranda, as the minister had stood long ago, leading the students in the national anthem and giving them a pep talk.

“Didn’t you go to school here?”

“I was schooling at Chimombo, near the boma. I completed my school certificate in Blantyre.”

“You’ve done well. And you’re still young.”

“Yes, father.”

Hock was thinking of the compound, the four huts, the motorbike, the two wives, the many children.

“I was a driver for the Agency some few years,” Manyenga said. “They were bringing food and whatnot.”

Now Hock understood Manyenga’s buzzwords. “Why didn’t you keep working for them?”

“They were cheeky. They were falsely accusing me. They couldn’t cope up at all with our customs. Not like you, father.”

Hock said, “Will you help fix the school?”

“I can send some chaps. They can help.”

This wasn’t the answer Hock was looking for, but he said, “Okay,” and looking again at the ruin, he quoted a Sena proverb: “Slowly, slowly makes a bundle.”

He was slashing at the weeds with a hacker the next day when the four boys arrived, creeping through the tall grass, parting the blades with their outstretched hands. None was older than fifteen or so. One said he’d just come from the creek, where he’d been fishing. They were like the young boys he’d known in the past, hungry, very thin, wearing rags for shirts and tattered trousers. They had been speaking in Sena.

“Speak English,” Hock said.

“Ah!” And they laughed and covered their faces.

“The mfumu sent us.”

So Manyenga was a chief?

“This was a school long ago,” Hock said.

“It is nothing now,” one of the boys said.

“But we can fix it. Then Malabo will have a school.”

They were watching shyly, making sounds of breathing, not saying anything more, but the little breaths meant they were paying attention and seemed to understand.

“Who are your parents? Maybe I knew them.”

They didn’t reply. They seemed to grow shyer.

“No father, no mother,” one said.

“They were sick,” another, the tallest boy, said, drawing out the Sena word. He chopped with the flat of his hand. “They died.”