Paul Theroux - The Lower River

But the dugout was gone, the boy was gone, the man in the khaki shirt at the small table under the tree, gone. It was just another riverbank. Hock hurried to the landing and saw at the foot of it a woman washing clothes, slapping them, twisting the muddy water from them.

“Where are they?”

Even without English, the woman, seeing his confusion, knew what he was saying.

She pointed downriver and laughed and went on slapping the clothes against a large stone.

THE MUD AT the embankment was thick and dark, a slippery mass of insubstantial fudge, crawling with beetles and littered with chewed fish bones and fruit peels. For most of the morning Hock squatted there, slapping at the tsetse flies biting his ankles and watching for a boat, any boat, to take him away from the landing. The sky was cloudless, and empty except for the black profile of a gliding fish eagle, and nearer, the lovely trilling of a swamp warbler swaying on a reed. Yellow butterflies fluttered to the garbage heaps on the mud bank, settled on the rusted cans and the foul mass of plastic and sodden paper and broken bottles. He was not dismayed, but he felt the fatigue of being dirty and yearned to wash his face.

Though just yesterday Zizi had willingly crept into his bed, he was saddened by the thought of her, yet relieved to be here and not there. He’d crossed a border. This looked like a dump, and the settlement was just a camp, a portrait of abandonment in the bush, but it was a frontier, and he was on the right side of it, on his way home. With this thought at the front of his mind, he looked around at the placid river, the garbage, the wooden windowless shed where he’d slept, the hulk of the large wrecked boat with its still intact wheelhouse — the stink and decrepitude of it all — and he laughed. He was in the middle of nowhere, but he was free.

Just then he saw a dugout bobbing in the stream at the far bank. He stood up and whistled, with his fingers in his mouth. For a moment he thought the paddlers on board hadn’t heard, or that they were afraid. But like a compass needle swiveling in liquid, the narrow canoe turned to point at him, and it slid toward where he stood on the bank.

The paddlers were children, hardly more than ten or eleven.

He greeted them, and when they remained stony-faced, either afraid or unfriendly, he asked whether they could speak Sena.

They nodded yes, they could speak the language.

Hock said in Sena that he wanted to go to the far bank, and the boys’ reaction was expressionless again, implacable, and so he explained, “To your village.”

They seemed to understand the word for village, but did not reply to it, or say that he would be either welcome or unwelcome there. Still, they floated nearer, and that encouraged Hock to step to the river’s edge.

He threw his bag into the dugout and, up to his ankles in mud, he stepped in and held on. The boat rode lower in the water with him in it, was more stable with his weight holding it deeper.

The skinny boys thrashed with their paddles, one of the paddles merely the splintered portion of a short water-blackened board. Hock asked them their names, and they grunted some words he did not understand. But random incoherence seemed to be the theme of his escape. No record had been made of his passport details by the man in khaki. The washerwoman had laughed as she told him that his friends had left without him. The boy Simon and the other canoe were gone. He was in a small dugout in the middle of the river, still the Lower River, miles above the Zambezi, into which it flowed, the two small boys steering and slapping with their clumsy paddles on this hot morning.

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.