Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“What about relatives?”

“We live down there”—and the boy squinted into the sun.

“How many altogether?”

The boy flashed ten fingers at Hock. “Small and big.”

Hock was still holding the hacker, standing among the tall weeds and the overhanging bushes he had slashed. The cuttings on the ground were already withered, going pale in the strong sunshine and the heat.

“Help me,” Hock said.

“We can try,” the tall boy said. He took the knife from Hock. Another boy grasped the spare machete from a stump. They whacked at the weeds while Hock went through the classrooms to examine the wreckage. He heard the boys muttering and was gladdened by the sound of slashing. The blue sky showed through the smashed roof. The trusses were still sound — usable, anyway. The rooms were hot, sunlit, cluttered with dead leaves that had blown through the roof. Hock stepped carefully. He smelled snakes — it was an oiliness, a hanging odor of a decaying nest, the hot eggy stink.

He found a narrow tree limb and stripped it of its twigs and then poked with it and startled the snake he knew was there, a black-lipped mamba. He prodded it, let it whip and coil, and pressed its head with the end of the stick, quickly snatched it, keeping its frothy mouth just above his fist. Then he brought it outside to show the boys, a trophy they’d remember.

“Mamba,” he said. “ Mbadza. ”

But the boys were gone, and not only that, they’d taken the two knives.

“They are useless,” Manyenga said later. He thought a moment. “Did you give them money?”

Hock said no.

Manyenga relaxed and smiled. “Ah,” he said, as though to say, What did you expect?

They didn’t discuss it further. Hock was not sure how to proceed. Perhaps it was all a mistake, perhaps this noncooperation meant it was time to go. All he had to do was ask Manyenga to take him to the boma, thirty-odd miles away, and catch the bus to Blantyre. But that would be so final, such a resignation, no hope of coming back. He’d put it off for a little while.

This thought induced him to distribute some small amounts of money to the women he encountered in his walks through the village. And one morning a few days later, he told Manyenga that it was time to leave.

With a pleading face, Manyenga said to him, “We need you, father.”

Manyenga appeared disturbed by the suddenness. Hock had seemed at home, and now his abrupt announcement that he was leaving. Perhaps they feared his assertiveness. But he was affected by Manyenga’s simple statement.

That same day the corrugated sheets of roofing were delivered, dumped at the roadside by an old van. Manyenga said they would put them on the house soon. “ Tsopano, tsopano, ” he insisted, slipping into Sena, then, “Now, now.” When he spoke English, Hock felt the man was being untruthful.

Even without the boys’ help, Hock went back to the school, and he slashed at the weeds and tried to tidy the classrooms and found the same black-lipped mamba in a corner of one of the rooms. Rather than disturb it, he swept the veranda, and Zizi helped with her straw broom. The dwarf Snowdon watched, flicking at the flies that settled on his sores.

Hock gave Zizi a handful of kwacha notes for helping him — just a dollar. He knew that Manyenga had sent her to stay by him, to sleep with him, and that all he needed to say was “Go inside,” and she would have obeyed. She was thin, tall for a Sena woman, with a shaven head and skinny fingers, bony wrists, almost shapeless, small breasts, long legs, with wide feet. Those feet and the way she sometimes stood reminded him of a water bird, a heron perhaps. With a bath and stylish clothes she could have passed for the sort of model he’d seen in magazines — bald, with the starved angularity of high fashion. But she was hungry and hollow-eyed. She shadowed him, never coming too near, never quite sure what he wanted, yet eager to please him.

Snowdon just watched, and sometimes giggled, or held tight to a knife and wouldn’t hand it over, jabbing at Hock, teasing him.

Hock kept working at the margins of the school, conspicuously, to attract attention or curiosity, perhaps shame the villagers into helping. No one helped, though sometimes a woman came looking for firewood, taking the splinters he chopped, or boys who scrawled with charcoal on the walls of the office, where they might have slept some nights.

It was as though he’d arrived and was living without being seen: an invisible mzungu.

THE NIGHT SKY was different from any other, a cloudless dome of bright blobs and pinpricks, and around a bald pitted moon were star clusters bright enough to read by. Every waking hour he was reminded that the world he knew was distant and inaccessible, so remote as to seem like another planet. He was immobilized in a vegetating settlement on a distant moon of that planet. In Medford, at the store, he’d often thought of the Lower River as a place he could easily travel to, if he’d only had the time. It was a matter of buying a ticket, making a few arrangements, withdrawing money from the bank, and setting off — a taxi to the airport, a blur of flights in a narrow seat, and then Malawi — Blantyre, Nsanje, Malabo. A jump across the world.

But here was a paradox: the way home from here was so hard it was nearly impossible to visualize from the depths of this place. He could imagine the narrow path out of the village, and the stony Lutwe road, but after that his imagination failed him. He had put himself into Manyenga’s hands; Manyenga had guided him here. He had surrendered to the gravitational pull of the Lower River, and from here the whole world was hidden, as though he were not just on a faraway moon but trapped on its dark side, in an underworld. He’d arrived as if having squirmed through a thicket of baffles and finally the funnel that was the bad road, depositing him in a narrowness of bush and dust. He had no idea how to get out. A clear way was not apparent. No electricity meant early nights and twelve hours of equatorial darkness, no computer access, no Internet, no fax machine. He had asked to be disconnected, but that had been before he’d arrived. Now he was buried in utter silence, or else the mumble of “not possible.” At first the disconnection had been an amusement. He’d even rehearsed his telling the tale to Roy or Jerry or Teya — how cut off he’d been, how remote, “another world,” “lower depths.” It astonished him to think that there was still a place on earth that lay outside the great transit of information or international chat. Long ago, much of Malawi had been like this — much of the world lay in darkness. Then, it had not been so remarkable to be isolated. He’d accepted it as normal.

Nowadays, such isolation was a novelty, and that was how he regarded it, as news to bring home — no phone, no mail, no juice at all. The separate villages in the Lower River were cut off from each other, the boma seemed as far away as Blantyre, and not only far but forbidden, the haunt of predators — tax collectors, party officials, thuggish boys — from whom villagers hid as from snakes. The stone under which they lay never moved.

Hock had taught English in Malabo, and though he was no reader, he’d boned up on the set books: Great Expectations had been one, and an African novel about independence, Wordsworth’s poems, an abridged and simplified Julius Caesar. It now seemed extraordinary that he’d talked about them so earnestly in that ruined, roofless school. Only one other person had been able to teach them, Gala, and she’d gone off to a teachers’ college in the hills outside Blantyre and earned a higher grade of teaching certificate.

Hock’s own reading was, as he called it, “mind rot.” He read detective stories, thrillers, “trash,” he said, dismissing it all. Yet he persisted. He read science fiction and consoled himself with the thought that even though it might be regarded as trash, its redeeming feature was that it was based on a sort of speculative science. Science fiction spoke of the world of perhapses: perhaps we would find another habitable planet, perhaps we were not alone in the universe, perhaps on another orbiting rock elsewhere in darkest space lived loping plant-like creatures awaiting contact over great intergalactic distances…