Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“What is the name of this village?” he asked.

The boy wearing the black cap lettered Dynamo Dresden said, “It is Mtayira.”

“I don’t know that word.”

“It is The Place of the Thrown-Aways.”

So precise, the sad name.

“Where is the road?” Hock asked. He spoke in Sena, to be sure, for the word njira meant any road, big or small, even a footpath.

“No road,” the sharp-faced boy said, crowing in English.

“You speak English. Did you learn it at school?”

“Not at school, never.”

The truculent and unwilling tone and the sulky nayvah in the boy’s response annoyed Hock, who said, “I haven’t eaten anything all day. I need some food.”

“We have no food for you.”

The three pairs of sunglasses were pitiless. And none of the boys had risen, in itself an act of defiance, for on the Lower River, even in the disgrace that was Malabo, the children stood up in the presence of adults. Hock turned toward the cooking fire and saw that the girl had gathered all the cassava and was carrying it away in a tin bowl, moving quickly on short legs across the clearing with the head-bobbing walk of a child.

“I’m hungry,” Hock said in a mildly protesting way.

“We are more hungry,” the same boy said.

“If you help me, I’ll give you money,” Hock said, and was at once uncomfortably aware of the pleading note in his voice.

“We want dollars,” one of the other boys said, a new voice that was a growl.

Hock laughed at the idea that he was negotiating with a boy in a baseball cap who was no more than fourteen or fifteen years old, in a bush village on the river, a sullen boy in sunglasses.

“Twenty dollars,” the boy said.

Hock felt pressure on his legs, a rubbing and pushing, and saw that a crowd of children had gathered around him. Instead of standing at a distance, as children always did by tradition, out of respect, these children stood close to him, chafing him, hemming him in, preventing him from moving. It was as though he was standing in thick bush grass up to his waist. He could sway, but he could not lift his legs. He’d put his bag between his feet and could feel it against his calves but was unable to reach it.

“What do I get for twenty dollars?”

“Some food to eat.”

“Is that all?”

“Some tea to drink.”

“I need a place to sleep,” Hock said.

The children jostling at his legs made him totter and almost lose his balance. He lifted his arms and waved them to steady himself, feeling foolish.

“Maybe we have a space.”

“I want to be your friend,” Hock said.

“We do not know you at all.” It was the growly voiced boy.

“Please tell these children to move away.”

The boy spoke to them sharply, but they responded by chattering, laughing, gesturing.

“They say that you must go, not them,” the boy said, and the children laughed again, as if guessing what was being said. And when they laughed, jeering, careless, Hock became worried.

He reached through the tangle of small bodies and found the strap of his bag and lifted it, hugging it, protecting it with his arm. Everything he owned was in it — not much now, he’d left most of his clothes in Malabo, and Simon had stolen his radio. But he had the essentials — medicine and money and a change of clothes.

The worst thing you could do in these circumstances, he knew, was to pull out an envelope and show money to such a crowd of rude catcalling children. He said only, “See? I have it.”

The middle boy gestured, and the boys on either side of him snarled what sounded like an order, or abuse. But the crowd of children did not disperse at once. They chattered some more, they made insolent noises, they poked and pinched at Hock’s legs and tugged at his bag to taunt him. And only then did they move away, at first slowly, then running, chasing each other, leaving Hock short of breath, his heart beating fast.

Hock knew from his Medford store that there is a way a person handles money that shows familiarity, not just the deftness of a clerk at the cash drawer, but also in a bush village like this, in the practiced movements of someone’s fingers — a response of hands more than eyes. The boy had taken the twenty-dollar bill, had smoothed it and folded it in half, hardly looking at it, and Hock knew that the boy had experienced American money, handled it easily, his pinching fingers testing the paper, making it speak.

In return for the money, Hock was given a mat in a dirty hut at the edge of the village. He sat before it in shadows, eating a plate of roasted cassava, some bananas, and peanuts boiled in their shells, glad for the cup of boiled water into which he had swirled some tea leaves. He ate slowly, to prolong the pleasure.

The sunset was a syrup of golden red dissolving the clouds in the pools of its light, lovely over his squalid hut, lending the mud walls a pinkish glow.

SITTING CROSS-LEGGED in the broken wattle-and-daub hut that had no door, Hock remembered an incident from his second year in Malabo. One of his students, a girl sleeping in a doorless hut like this, was attacked by a hyena that had padded in and begun to eat her face. Her struggling did not deter the creature, though an ember from the dying fire, thrown by the girl’s mother at the hyena, the sparks setting its fur alight, repelled him. Two days later, at the filthy clinic where her severe wounds had gone septic, her head yellow and swollen tight with infection, the girl died.

From that day, Hock could not sleep in Malabo without barricading his door. For decades in Medford he’d hardly thought of that event, but this night in the village of children he sat in the doorway of the hut, heavy with fatigue and a sense of grievance, feeling wronged, not by the imposters in Malabo but by his divorce, thinking angrily of Deena’s demanding the house, his daughter’s abusing him and then wanting her cut of her inheritance in advance, believing that he would marry again and have more children — and here he was, indignant, sitting on the dirt floor of a filthy hut alone in this underworld, on an obscure reach of the Lower River.

Only as dawn was breaking, brightening the wide blades of elephant grass and the delicate tassels on the banks of reeds in the marsh at the edge of the river, and with the night animals dispersed — the feathered girlish shrieks of the birds seeming to drive them off — did he slump to the ragged mat at the back of the hut and sleep until the midmorning sun scorched his face.

The thought of the tangle of children and the insolence of the cruel sharp-faced boy roused him. His bag served as his pillow. The sight of the leather and canvas bag, his companion since leaving Medford, moved him — it was bruised and worn, faded from Malabo, stained from the puddle of bilge and fish guts in the big dugout, wet from yesterday’s canoe, crusted with mud. It had the humble and mute look of loyalty; just a bag but also a talisman. It reflected the beating that he had taken. He snatched it up and felt stronger as he walked away from the hut, heading across the clearing and down the sloping path to the tall reeds. He knew the landing was there, and the Lower River that flowed south into the Zambezi. He’d find a boat, and a way out.

The children had awakened, the fires were smoking and sending up smuts, and a blue haze of wood smoke curled in the windless air of the village. What had seemed at first to him an almost charming place of industrious and innocent children now was a vision of pure menace — stupid unreasonable children, and too many of them, hungry, irrational, impulsive, and somehow resentful, seeing him as an enemy. And the smoke stinging his eyes in the unbreathable air made it all worse.