Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“Luggages,” Marsden said, handing Hock his bag.

“Thanks — almost forgot,” Hock said, and smiled. He’d begun to believe the lie he’d told them about coming back.

“Maybe they’ll miss you at Malabo,” Marsden said. He knew it was forbidden for Hock to leave the village without supervision. Hock was theirs. The whole village knew that.

“It’s all right,” Hock said. “They won’t miss me.”

They’ll go to my house — and with this thought he saw them at the door, gingerly knocking — then see the lumped-up body under the mosquito net. They would whisper, “Sleeping,” and would go away. And not until midmorning, when Zizi got tired of lying with the sheet over her head and might be looking for Hock, would they realize that Hock had gone. By then he would be in the dugout, and the motorbike would be parked at Magwero, and the boy Marsden would be waiting under this tree at Lutwe, and in all this confusion Hock would be well into the marsh, headed downriver, passing Morrumbala into Mozambique. That was the plan.

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.