Paul Theroux - The Lower River

The small boy who had been screaming was scooped up by a girl of ten or so — she could barely lift him. He buried his face in her shoulder.

“Where’s your father, your mother?” Hock asked the paddlers.

One boy turned away in alarm, his rags making his fear pathetic. The other boy faced Hock and scowled, saying nothing, either insulted or afraid.

“The chief,” Hock said. “ Mfumu. Where is your bwana?”

The boy made an even sourer face, thrusting out his lower lip, showing a kind of threat with its inner pinkness, and began to speak fast, turning his back to Hock as he talked. Finally he walked away on his toes, in disdain, holding upright like a symbol of prestige the stick with the three small stiff fish that he’d taken from the canoe.

Hock sat on a discarded plank in the shade of a tree and watched a small girl poking a fire under a blackened pot, perhaps cooking, perhaps playing; another small girl holding a baby at her hip; infants crawling in the dust, picking at dry tufts of grass. More children were occupied stacking firewood, most of them boys, but the pile they made was so random — no more than a scattered heap — that looked like play, too, a game of tossed and broken branches. Some other, bigger boys sat under a tree on the far side of the clearing. Children and more children. They all wore faded T-shirts of various colors, much too big for them, some serving the smaller girls as dresses — T-shirts as shapeless frocks, one saying Niagara Falls, another Yale. They were dusty-faced and their hair was clotted with white bits of lint, and many of the children were unnaturally skinny, the infants potbellied with spindly arms and legs.

They seemed indifferent to Hock, and they were silent, going about their chores or absorbed in repetitious play. When Hock got up from his plank and walked through the village, they took no notice of him.

The border post on the river now seemed to him something defined and certain: the table, the sullen official with the stamp and ink pad, the battered sheds, the broken boat, the muddy embankment, the rapacious shopkeeper. It was on the map, or at least seemed so, an entry point. It was a ruin but it was not a horror, only futile-looking, decaying with the accumulation of garbage, and the rise and fall of the river, not maintained, conventionally ugly, as most of the depots on the Lower River looked, including the boma at Nsanje and the landings at Magwero and Marka. People congregated at the landings, but few people lived at them.

Compared to the border post, even to Magwero, this village of children was whole, coherent, and some of it was swept clean — Hock could see small girls with twig brooms pushing the litter of leaves and peels to the side of the courtyard in front of the huts. None of the huts was in good shape — the usual bruised walls, the skeletal frame of branches showing through — and yet the village was inhabited, strangely so. Everyone he’d seen so far was young, some very young, mostly small children, the little girls holding infants, small boys playing together, the older boys watchful. And because most were so young there was a buzz of vitality in the village, a hurrying; running boys, skipping girls. Some played with crudely made toys, formed of twisted wire, or hanks of knotted rags that served as balls to kick, and some limbless dolls, plastic torsos with cracked heads — white dolls.

This village made sense because it was full of lives being lived outdoors; it was visible and vital. Pots simmered over fires, and oddly, some small girls were taking turns with oversized mortars and pestles — the pestles much taller than they were and so heavy that some of them had to be hoisted and dropped by pairs of girls.

It could have been a summer camp or a school; it had that look of monotony and order, all the children occupied. But most were working, even those he had taken to be playing. The girls wore large T-shirts to their knees, some were cinched with rope at the waist to make a dress, others draped over them like nightshirts, or like smocks. Many of the small children wore a T-shirt and nothing else, and though the boys’ T-shirts fitted them better, all were faded and worn— Westfield High School and UConn and Bob’s Bluegrass Bar and UCLA and more. Once-white ones were gray with dirt, many had chewed collars and slashes, and some were shredded to rags.

Taller, much bigger than any of these skinny kids, Hock felt a sense of safety, the instinctive confidence of the tall man, a giant among dwarfs, reassured by his size and the fact that he’d escaped from Malabo, and gotten away from the border post, and was now six or seven miles downstream, probably in Mozambique but on the west bank of the Lower River. There had to be a path that would lead to a wider road and a truck route and a town.

It was just after four. He’d eaten the last of his crackers and beans in the morning, waiting on the riverbank, and nothing since. His hunger sharpened with the odor of cassava roasting on a grill over a fire, tended by a small girl on her knees. She turned the dark, roughly carved root slices with a forked stick. After watching her for a while, Hock got up and walked over to the fire. The girl shrank from him, though stayed kneeling, fanning smoke from her eyes, rearranging the slices, moving them to the side of the grill farthest from Hock.

Instinctively, as he reached, Hock looked for an adult, anyone his size, who might object, and seeing only children, he picked up one of the pieces of cooked cassava. It was hot, he bobbled it in his palm, then blew on it and took a bite. He had not realized how hungry he was until he ate the thing, stringy, dense, tasting of wood smoke. He wolfed it down and wanted another.

The girl tending the fire (her T-shirt was lettered Colby Chess Club ) had turned toward him but with averted eyes, gazing past him. Hock looked around and saw, on a log in front of a hut, three big boys staring at him. He was surprised and disconcerted to see that they were wearing sunglasses, three bug-eyed boys in T-shirts and trousers. Something in their posture gave them an air of authority, even hauteur, and the sunglasses seemed, if not menacing, then unfriendly, intentionally ambiguous. Their clothes were clean, and that unusual fact made them seem stronger and put Hock on his guard. One of them wore a black baseball cap with the words Dynamo Dresden stitched in yellow on the front.

He’d been dazed and dulled by the effort of getting away from Malabo, and the canoe trip to the frontier had tired him. He hadn’t expected to be abandoned by Simon — after giving him money and sermonizing about his future, the ungrateful rat — hadn’t expected this, a village of children.

Hock was still hungry but, sensing disapproval from the watching boys, instead of taking any more food from the fire, he walked up the slight incline of sloping earth and dead grass to where the boys sat in the afternoon sun.

“Hello, how are you?” he asked in Sena, certain they would understand; the language was spoken all over the Lower River.

They simply stared, or seemed to, in the stylish unrevealing goggles, as though they hadn’t heard or didn’t know the words.

“Where is your chief?” Hock used all the words for “big man” he knew, not only mfumu and nduna, but also nkhoswe, the elder who traditionally looked after all the smaller siblings — nephews and dependents.

“No chief,” the boy in the middle said in English. He was a skinny sharp-faced boy with wet insolent lips and he sounded triumphant. “No nkhoswe. ”

“No bwana?”

“You are the only bwana.”

Hock felt a thrill at the idea of a village in the bush with no one in charge.