Paul Theroux - The Lower River

That a doctor had come to the ruins of the clinic today seemed an unexpected miracle, but for Hock — usually to his sorrow — Malabo was a place where the unexpected often occurred. Yet this was news. No matter who it was, a doctor would have come from afar, and would have a vehicle. There was no other way for such a person to reach the village.

So Hock flung his papers aside and left his hut, walking quickly, overeager, finding himself gasping in the heat — he was not used to hurrying, and the sunlight slashed at him. Zizi stepped ahead of him, taking long strides, seeming to dance. She wore her purple wrap, and the turban wound round her head against the sun gave her stature, made her seem exotic and stylish, as Hock followed.

The sight at the clinic was old and familiar, even uplifting: hopeful villagers waiting at the open doorway, a long line of them, forty or more, women carrying infants in cloth slings, men squatting, some boys, their hands on their brows to shield their faces from the sunlight — all gathered here to see the doctor, as in years past.

“Where’s his vehicle?”

“He has no vehicle,” Zizi said.

When the people in line saw Hock, they seemed to recoil, looking away, as though self-conscious or fearful. He was cautioned by their apparent fear, so he kept apart from them and walked slowly to the gaping window — no glass, no frame — at the back of the derelict building.

Stretched out, in the surrendering posture of a patient, a man in shirtsleeves and brown trousers lay on a straw mat, half in shadow, half in bright sunlight, in the roofless room. With his hands clutching his face, he looked as if he was grieving.

Kneeling beside him, a smaller man attended to him, working closely on his ankle. He was no doctor. On his head was a grubby fur hat, over his shoulders a stiff cloak of animal skin that might have been a leopard; he wore old black track-suit trousers as well, and what looked like a woman’s satin slippers. He held a knife at the patient’s leg, and Hock saw that he was making a continuous cut in the man’s ankle, jabbing from time to time to go deeper, until he sighed and rocked back on his heels, revealing the wound he had made, an open anklet of bright blood.

He set his knife down and adjusted his hat with wet fingers, leaving a gluey bloodstain on the fur. He reached into a bucket by his side and pinched out some dark ashes — the dust of powdered charcoal — and after wiping the ankle he rubbed the ashes into the groove of the wound. Almost without pausing, he took up his knife and cut the man’s other ankle, encircling it, pushing the blood flow aside with his thumb, finally plunging his hand in the bucket and, his sticky fingers blackened, pressing the ashes into the wound. He shuffled forward on his knees and began again: tugged at the man’s right arm, flourished his bloody knife, cut into the wrist.

“Doctor,” Zizi said, giving the word three syllables.

Hock leaned toward her and whispered, “Ask someone what he is doing.”

She slipped away, and before the man had finished the wrist, Zizi was beside him, her head lowered.

“Snake doctor,” she said in her language.

Without thinking, Hock groaned — too loud — and the little man in the fur hat drew back, his face upturned, scowling at the window. Startled by the sight of the mzungu and the turbaned girl, he made a scouring sound in his toothless open mouth, a harsh cat-like hiss.

At dusk the next day, framed by a volcanic sunset, Manyenga visited Hock at his hut to announce that he had been seen with Zizi at the clinic. And why?

Hock said, “I thought he was a doctor. I needed some aspirin.”

“I enjoy your sense of humor, father! Sure, he is a doctor. Better than a European doctor. After he does his work, a person is protected for life.”

“Protected from what?”

“From the bite of a snake,” Manyenga said, and he raised his fists to his face so that Hock could see the old raised scars that circled his wrists. “You see, we are not fearing you!”

A thud like that of a woman bopping her pestle into a mortar woke him in the darkness one night some days later, pulsing under his hut, the very soil jarred by its steady beat. He felt the thud in his body, prodding him, and was then wide awake. He walked to the window and the thudding entered his feet. Seeing nothing, he went to the door and as always was amazed by the crystalline brightness of the stars, some blobby, some pinpricks, their milky light shimmering on the leaves of the trees, the starry glow on the bare ground coating it with fluorescence.

Still the thudding, a sickening repetition, pushing at him. And then he saw the fire jumping at the edge of the village, in the football field where the orphan boys sometimes kicked a ball between two overturned buckets that represented a goal mouth.

As soon as he stepped away from his hut, Hock became self-conscious in the bluish light of the stars. He looked for Zizi. But she seldom slept near his hut. She seemed to drift off after he’d gone to bed, showing up in the early morning, probably at a signal from Snowdon, who crept to the veranda before dawn.

Yet Hock was not alone. The football field glowed yellow in the firelight. The ta-dum ta-dum of the drum being slapped, the plink - plink of the plucked finger harp like the shrill notes of a xylophone made of glass, and the far-off yodeling of women mingled with the growls of men. It seemed the whole village was awake.

Had he been a first-timer on a bush walk, down here to look at hippos in the river or to go bird watching in the marsh, he might have seen this as a colorful nighttime get-together. He smiled briefly, the naïve thought of a party crossing his mind, and then he went grim again, picking his way to the fat baobab stump forty yards from his hut. He crouched at the stump. He knew what he was watching, and it was not a party.

In his day, this ceremony had been performed outside the village as an expression of the secret society of men, directed by the chief. It was so hidden that he’d only heard the drumming those nights and seen the exhausted faces the following morning. He’d inquired and been told it was “the Big Dance,” the Nyau or image dance — maybe a wedding, or a funeral, or an ujeni (“whatsit”), they said, meaning something forbidden or not to be spoken about to a mzungu, or an outsider, or an uninitiated girl.

He knew what he was hearing, and he could see the dancers gathering and stamping their feet in time to the drums and the tinkling finger harp, now tripping faster, plinka-plinka-plinka. He knelt and held on to the stump for balance and to ease the weight on his knees. He’d sometimes see a snake here at the stump, a puff adder that swelled to the thickness of his wrist, but snakes didn’t stir at night.

He was more concerned by the crowd gathering around the leaping fire, the sharp gunshot crack of the burning branches, the sparks flying up in clusters — some carried into the sky, borne by the uprush of heat and flames. He had never overcome his fear of an African crowd, how it might grow from a handful of people to a restless sweaty mob. He’d seen such mobs at political rallies in his first years, the crazy mass of yelling men and yodeling women. Once, on the bus to Chikwawa, he’d witnessed a group of men at a roadblock. Laughing with a superior-sounding anger, they boarded the bus and used thick clubs to beat the Sena men who were not wearing the party badge that showed the president’s face. He’d seen one man, begging for his life, kicked and trampled into silence.

The Big Dance, for all its apparent order, was no less menacingly mob-like. It seemed that every man and boy in Malabo was on the field. The women were audible in their ululation, but they were distant, unseen, nearer the huts. Even the orphan boys, in their rags and shaggy hair and torn T-shirts, were stamping to the drumbeat.