Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“Where’s the food bag?” Hock asked, because he knew Manyenga had snatched one at the field.

“It is for my family,” Manyenga said. He had found three green coconuts in his foraging. By the light of the fire he hacked off the tops, sawing at the sinews with his pocketknife, and they took turns drinking the coconut water and eating the gelatinous flesh. Until this moment they had only muttered. “Wood” and “matches” and “You take.”

But as Hock lay near the fire on a pile of dead crackly leaves he had scraped together, his animal feeling rose up in him. He remembered the way he had looked in the shiny tank. He was not saddened by the memory of the filthy face and matted hair and stubble on his cheeks. If anything, he was encouraged now. The image of that dirty, defiant monkey face strengthened him as he lay, his head propped up by one hand so he could feel the heat of the fire.

“I hate them,” he said, suddenly aloud.

“And myself, I hate them, too much,” Manyenga said.

“Festus,” Hock said, smiling, almost with affection.

He slept with the dust of the forest in his nostrils, hearing the chirp and snapping of nighttime insects and the odd bird squawk. Once he thought he heard the whoo of a giant eagle owl, or the crack of a branch, undramatic, no louder than a matchstick snapped in half.

At first light, in a racket of insects and birdcalls, with the heat beginning to rise, Manyenga rolled over and grunted. His face was a dark medallion in the sharpness of the sun. They set off through the bush, taking a new direction — north, Hock could tell; the sun was on their right. Manyenga knew the way, and after about an hour they began to see signs of disorder, the first village, hardly a village, one of those static settlements of the bush, a few huts, a wide-eyed boy, a woman fanning a fire with a pot lid, a yapping dog. And they kept going, on a proper footpath now, with the dampness of the river seeping into it, and the elephant grass too high for them to see over it.

Then a road. It had once been a road; it was lumpy with tussocks of rough grass. Vehicles had passed here long ago; the parallel tire tracks, mostly overgrown, were still visible. Manyenga settled the motorbike into one of the ruts but traveled slowly. Hock hung on, and the morning passed, the motorbike rocking him.

At noon a familiar odor of risen dust and stagnant water and wood smoke, and a familiar glare, the heavy light pressing on his eyes, combined with heat. All that and the toasted smell of burned grass, the sight of solitary trees, most of them dead, stripped of their smaller limbs for firewood, some of them no more than crooked posts. Malabo was not far: they were approaching the back road from the south, a new direction for Hock.

When they arrived at the village, Manyenga rode in a wide circle, as though performing a victory lap to show that he’d brought Hock back. Some small boys yelled, some women yodeled. And then he rode straight to Hock’s hut.

“She will bring you tea.”

A small slight figure was seated, in a posture of resignation or fatigue, at the edge of the veranda. It was Zizi, her head on her knees. Hearing the motorbike, she looked up, and when she saw who it was she burst into tears.

She gazed at Hock with a mixture of fear and ecstasy. Her tormented face, sick with grief, was thinner. She looked haggard, her cheeks already wet with tears, and yet she was smiling. But it was also a smile of agony, as though she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing, Hock getting off the bike, slapping the dust from his bag, considering Manyenga and deciding not to thank him. Zizi put her fingers into her mouth, perhaps to stifle her sobs.

“Falling tears! That is a good sign,” Manyenga cried out.

“What are you saying?” Hock asked.

“That it will rain,” Manyenga said, then, “She was missing you,” and he laughed at the absurdity of it. He kicked the bike into gear and gunned it across the clearing to his compound.

Zizi dropped to her knees and held Hock’s legs, pressing her head against his trousers and weeping. The whir of emotion in her body penetrated his as she clung to him.

She exhausted herself with tears, then used her wraparound cloth to wipe her face, lifting it, revealing her legs as sticks. When Hock sat in the shade of the veranda in his old chair and watched her stumble away, to bring him tea and something to eat, her big feet and stiff skinny legs giving her an odd clockwork gait, he thought with wonderment how Zizi had looked, so relieved at his return, perhaps having believed that he had gone for good, or been killed.

The thought in his mind, not words but a breaking wave of warmth, was the rapture of being missed, having made someone happy with his presence. No one had ever missed him before, no one in his life. He had mentioned to Roy Junkins that he could write him in care of the U.S. consulate in Blantyre. But nothing had come. The man was silent, no letters — and a letter, delivered by the consulate, might have helped save him from Malabo. Nothing from the consulate, nothing from Fogwill. Yet Zizi was glad to see him, more than glad. For the first time, someone was grateful for his very presence.

She was smiling when she came back to the veranda with the tea and a basket holding a hunk of buttered bread, a hard-boiled egg, and a steamed sweet potato. He ate slowly while she sat at his feet, hugging his knees, not smiling anymore but looking contented.

“Jinny,” she said, with effort, her tongue against her teeth.

Hock shook his head, squinting at the word.

“ Ulendo. ”

“Yes, journey,” he said. “Big journey.”

A reddened welt on her bare arm caught his eye. He touched his own arm on the same place to draw her attention to it.

“ Chironda, ” she said, meaning bruise, and explaining it, she made a whipping gesture.

“Who did that?”

“The big man.”

“Manyenga?”

She blinked and sniffed, to acknowledge it.

“They wanted to know where you were. They said I must tell them.”

“What did you tell them?”

Zizi shook her head and smiled softly and averted her eyes. When she stepped off the veranda into the dusk, Hock knew there was something she didn’t want to say. She was silent for a while, and Hock finished the bread and the egg and drank another cup of tea. He had thought he would be hungrier, but he was tired and dirty and wanted only to crawl beneath his mosquito net and sleep for two days.

Zizi was digging her toe shyly into the dust. He knew she wanted to say something more. He smiled to encourage her. He said, “Speak.”

“I told them,” she said in a hoarse voice, “that I also wanted to know where you were.”

He had begun to think of himself, in his flight down the river and through the bush, as a desperate, slowly shredding escapee, coming apart as he fled, growing insubstantial, fraying into a ghost. And even after Manyenga had snared him and carried him through the scrubby trees of no man’s land, he’d felt diminished, a stick figure, a wraith — a mere symbol of a mzungu, not a man with a name but a fugitive flickering past, someone whose only importance was that he might have money.

They thought of him that way. He thought of himself that way. And he was resigned to being hunted down. So he had gotten on Manyenga’s bike and hung on, and let himself be carried through the bush to the L’Agence Anonyme compound and finally back to Malabo.

And there, seeing how Zizi had missed him, he became whole again. He slept, and when he woke up he believed in himself anew. He’d failed in his second attempt to escape, in this exhausting experience of snakes and ladders. But the cruel game was not over, and he’d recaptured his sense of life, as though Zizi’s sorrow at his disappearance had proven to him that he was real, that he mattered, that it was not so bad slipping down the snake to Malabo as long as one person was loyal to him. Someday, he vowed, he would reward her.