Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“Come, sit,” she said to Hock, and to the woman Zizi had called Auntie, “Bring tea. Go help them, Zizi.”

Smiling, patting her great fleshy face with a damp cloth, she shooed the children away.

As with all visits to huts like this, Hock sensed a brimming odor of human sweat, damp clothes, dirty feet, hot bodies; a rippling curtain of stink that was sharpest now in the heat of the day.

“Yes, go help,” Gala said to the last of the children, speaking as always in a mixture of Sena and English.

When they were alone, in the shade of the veranda, she lost her smile. It vanished into her plump smooth face and she became darker, heavier, and spoke in a growl.

“You did not heed me.”

He smiled at the word. Heed, reckoning, victuals — she was of the generation that used pulpit words.

“Even now you are not attending.”

Another of those words. He said, “I am — I always listen to you.”

“Ellis, my friend. One month ago I told you my opinion. It was a mistake for you to come here. Of course, I am glad for selfish reasons. Because the man I liked so well — I can even say loved — showed himself to be a righteous person. But you are not listening.”

The word “loved” was still glittering in his head.

He said, “Then I’m glad I came.”

“It should have been a holiday. But you lingered,” Gala said. “Sometimes the tourists and the aid workers visit here. They go to the Mwabvi park at the boma side to look at wild animals. Or they get lost here and ask directions. They spend some minutes and then they go away and we never see them again. That is what you should have done.”

“I think you mentioned that.”

“Indeed I did. But my words fell on deaf ears. You know we say muthu ukulu and so forth — a big head gets a knock.”

Her face was leathery, bruised by age and the harsh sun, with freckled cheeks, her eyes staring out of dark sunken skin. He could see her concern, and it alarmed him. Her proverb made her seem obtuse and simple-minded.

“I tried to get away,” he said. “I went downriver, almost to Morrumbala, and I was abandoned.”

“You fetched up at the children’s village.”

“The Place of the Thrown-Aways, they called it. How do you know that?”

“We have no secrets here. We know that Festus Manyenga brought you back. We know the Agency rejected you. We know those boys that call themselves ‘the brothers.’”

“I didn’t like the Agency,” Hock said. “I don’t trust those people.”

“They could have arranged safe passage for you. They have planes. They have vehicles.”

“I thought that young man Aubrey might help.”

“We know about him. He is sick.”

“I thought so. But he doesn’t look too bad.”

“He is taking the drug, like some others. They get it from the Agency. It is so dear, only a few people have it. It makes them stronger. It makes them dangerous.”

He guessed she was talking about the anti-retroviral drug that he had read about, but Gala would not have known those words. He said, “Aubrey said he was taking me to Blantyre. Manyenga had a different story. I don’t know what the truth is.”

“This looks such a simple place. But no, everyone lies, so you can’t know it at all. The truth is absent here.”

“Why do people lie?”

“Because they have been taught to lie. It works for them better than the truth. And they’re hungry. If you’re hungry, you will do anything, you will agree to anything, you will say anything. And they’re lazy. This is a terrible place. Why are you smiling?”

Hock said, “When we were both young, you said, ‘This is my home. This is my life. This is my country. We can make it better.’”

She laughed, but bitterly, and said, “If I were young again, I would say, ‘Take me far away from here.’”

“Where to?”

“Anywhere at all.” She saw that Zizi was pouring hot water from the kettle into a teapot. “I worry about her. She is still a namwali. Still a maiden.”

“Maiden” was another pulpit word, and it suited the thin girl, canted over and delicately filling the teapot. Her posture, so precise and poised, seemed proof of her innocence.

“But she’s strong,” Hock said.

“I was strong once, but look at me,” Gala said. She laughed, and it was true — she looked ruined, puffy-faced, her sad eyes glassy with fatigue, her ankles swollen. “And she is alone.”

“She’s been looking after me.”

“Yes, I know that,” Gala said.

What did she know? Perhaps the talk of Zizi dancing naked, and the detail that she rolled herself in flour and bewitched him, ghost-dancing like a priestess. Hock was abashed, felt he ought to explain, but did not know how to begin. He said, “Please don’t worry about her.”

“I am worried about you. Those people — Festus, Aubrey, the others. They are not to be trusted.”

He said, frowning at the absurdity of it, “I have no money left. I have nothing.”

“Then you are in greater danger.”

“I want to get away,” Hock said. “I don’t know how.”

“You must find a way. Zizi can help.” Gala saw Zizi and the other woman approaching the veranda with the tea things on tin trays — a plate of misshapen cakes, the teapot, the chipped cups, the small punctured can of evaporated milk, the sugar bowl. Before they were within earshot, Gala said, “This was a safe place once. Now it is so dangerous.” As the women mounted the steps, she said, “Malawi tea. From Mlanje Mountain! Please help yourself, my friend.”

They sat drinking tea, talking of the weather, how because the rain had stayed away, the roads had deteriorated. And how to fix them?

“A swing needs to be pushed,” Gala said, and tapped Hock’s arm to get his attention. “It means you can’t do anything alone.”

Zizi followed him home, down the path, in silence.

At the hut, she hung her head — politeness, averting her eyes— and said softly in Sena, “Do you want me to dance?”

But the visit to Gala had made him self-conscious, apprehensive, and he said no.

What had Gala heard? Obviously something, because the next day, around noon, a small boy appeared at Hock’s hut. Zizi had intercepted him and explained that the boy was carrying a message from Manyenga, who wanted to see him for dinner.

“I’m not hungry,” Hock said.

But that was no excuse. Food that was offered had to be accepted, even if the person had already eaten.

“Some boys have come,” Zizi said.

“Which boys?”

“They are from the other side,” she said, meaning the Mozambique border.

“How do you know?”

“People talk.”

People talked, but not to him, and that was the worst of it, that he lived in the village and all the while life continued apart from him. The talk did not reach him, or if it did, he did not understand. He was not only a mzungu, but a ghost, an ignorant ghost, existing outside of everything, merely watching, seeing only the surface of things, listening but missing most of what was said, not understanding the shouts or the drumbeats. At other times he was like a pet cringing in the doorway, a creature they kept to be stroked and murmured to, another species, captive and dumb and looking for a smile. He had been reduced to that. And the money was gone, so what was he worth?

Later in the afternoon, nearing Manyenga’s compound, he recognized the boys at once — the brothers, in their sunglasses, the one with the cap lettered Dynamo Dresden. And as before, he was struck by how American they looked in their T-shirts, sneakers, and shorts, not the castoff clothes distributed by a charity like the Agency, but new clothes that gave the boys a street style Hock recognized from Medford. They were the sweatshop products that had undone his business. Who would wear a button-down shirt and flannel slacks and a blazer if he could get away with a Chinese T-shirt and Chinese sneakers? He looked resentfully at the boys, thinking, China clothes the whole world!