Paul Theroux - The Lower River

He had spoken slowly, ungrammatically, searching for the right words in their language. They recognized “food,” and “money,” and “boat,” and “medicine,” as he appealed to them in his begging voice. And for some seconds he believed he had them.

The small boy who had mimicked him stood up and shrieked, “We want you to die!”

“Yes, yes!” the chant went up. “ Eenday! Eenday! ”

A clod of mud flew past him, and another hit his shoulder. He hoped it was only mud, though it stank like a turd and could easily have been one.

They were all calling out now—“Die!” and “Yes!”—and delighting in the sight of the big unsteady mzungu, red-faced in dirty clothes, holding the tall mooring posts, gripping his bag, desperate before them. How many mzungus had they seen? Not many, perhaps none. And now, in a jeering crowd, they had no more fear than a dog pack and were prepared to push him over the edge and into the river.

I’ll jump, Hock thought, not in those words but seeing the act, his frantic leap; I’ll take my chances in the river.

He turned his back to position his feet, so he could brace and launch himself into the water. The current would take him quickly, and if he was lucky, he could climb the embankment farther downstream and hide from the children.

Still he heard the shrieks and catcalls behind him, but there was another sort of shouting too, and when he glanced back he saw that the crowd of children was thinning out, and in the middle, on the path, the boys in sunglasses were kicking at them, scattering them, making room for Hock to move to a safer part of the embankment, away from the crumbling edge.

For a panicky moment he feared they’d rush him, topple him into the river. It would have been so easy, but the tallest of the three, the sharp-faced boy in the Dynamo Dresden baseball cap, who had sold him his dinner the night before, stuck his hand out — in an unfriendly way, a perfunctory grip — yanking him forward onto the path.

“Thank you,” Hock said with a sob, half grateful, half resentful that he was thanking them. In his heart he hated them, but he was so afraid his hatred would show, he approached them with exaggerated mildness.

The boy had started down the path, Hock following.

“Why did they want to hurt me?”

“They are children. They don’t care about you.”

“But I can help them.”

“How can you help them?”

“Food,” Hock said. “Money.”

“They are having food. And there is nothing to buy.”

“Water,” Hock said. “A well.”

“We have the river.”

“What does the government give you?”

“There is no government here,” the boy said, and there was a malicious smile in his voice when he added, “We are the government.”

Now they were back at the clearing, and the children were watching Hock walking just behind the big boy, the two other boys walking casually to the side. Hock was looking for protection, hoping that the children would keep away. He was terrified of them, for their utter recklessness, and he rationalized his fear as no different from a fear of insects or vermin or the fatal bite of the smallest viper, a night adder.

“I could arrange for a school here.”

“They hate school.”

“They could learn English, like you.”

The boy turned his sharp-featured face on Hock and made a cruel mouth. “I don’t want them to learn English like me. I don’t want them to learn anything.”

The two other boys sniggered, hearing this.

“Where are their parents? Where are their elders?”

“Dead. All dead.”

There were orphans’ huts in Malabo. And Hock had heard of children’s villages, the result of the spread of AIDS in the country. He had imagined them structured and supported by the government, not wild and improvisational like this, reverted to semi-savagery, living hand to mouth, foraging, and yet defiant as some animal packs were defiant, and self-sufficient like those same packs.

“Some of these children are having the eddsi disease as well. If they bite you, you will die.”

This the boy said slowly, becoming amused, laughing as he finished the sentence, though Hock thought only of the fatal bite of the night adder.

They left him alone the rest of the day, and the whole of the following day. He heard the children laughing — screeching. He sat in the space they had given him, hoping that they were ignoring him and not plotting against him. He had no way of telling. At intervals the children crept near to watch him. Hock took some consolation at the sight of fire finches in the branches near his hut and the metallic call of the tinkerbird, which he heard but could not see. As for the children, they were the youngest, the dirtiest, and they simply stared at him with hungry faces.

In retrospect, he was afraid of the children, and when he saw two of the big boys approach him in the dusk he felt a fluttering of fright in his heart like a trapped bird.

“Your friends are coming, this boy says.”

“What do you mean?” He backed away. He didn’t want the boy near him.

“This boy”—a lean, exhausted-looking boy in ragged shorts lurked behind him—“he says they are coming.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Who is coming?”

“Your people.”

The boy seemed at once milder, kinder, much less of a threat. He was holding bananas, a cluster of four. These he gave to Hock.

“My people?” Hock took a breath but could not calm himself. “When?”

“Just wait,” the boy said, and pointed casually at the last of the sunset — shreds of purple, layers of darkening velvet lit by glints of gold, sinking under the darkness, making Hock sadder. “We will see them.”

On the third day, the boy wearing the Dynamo Dresden cap and sunglasses kicked through the small gathering of watching children and said, “You, mzungu. ”

“Don’t call me mzungu. ”

“I will call you Old Man.”

Hock glared at him, then gestured to the children. “What do they want?”

“They want you to go.”

Hock took a stride to come abreast of him and said in a heated whisper, “I want to go. Let me go. You said you don’t want me here.”

But the boy wouldn’t look at him, or if he was looking at him Hock couldn’t tell, because the sunglasses did not reveal his eyes. All he saw was the sour disapproving mouth.

“That was the other day. That was previously.” He spoke the syllables separately like a whole sentence.

“I’d like to know where you learned English,” Hock asked again.

“From your people.”

“I don’t have any people.”

“Yes, yourself you are having. They are coming. That is why we want you to stay.”

“They’re coming here?”

“We will see.”

“When are they coming?”

“We will see.”

Hock had often been frustrated by Sena-speaking people, with all their euphemisms and evasions, but much worse was his trying to make sense of conversing with someone like this Sena boy, for the fact that the boy spoke English reasonably well was a barrier to any understanding and only maddened him more. There was a point where a reasonable command of English made someone like this punk in sunglasses incomprehensible.

“I’m hungry,” Hock said. “I’ll need food.”

The boy said nothing, only raised his face to the sky, seeming to listen, and in this posture, looking up, distracted, appeared disapproving of Hock, as though he were an annoyance, an inconvenient straggler, an adult alien in a village of children, on the Lower River, in the marshes that were neither Malawi nor Mozambique, without a road or a well or, as far as Hock could tell, any garden.