Paul Theroux - The Lower River

He folded the letter and sealed it in an envelope, not intending to send it but so that he wouldn’t have to look at it. The envelope was dusty, one of several left over from the bank, with melancholy smudges of finger marks on the flap.

Zizi saw the envelope but did not mention mailing the letter. She knew the risks of going out at night alone. Hock could not find a way of phrasing the request, so the question remained unasked.

In the days that followed Zizi hovered around the hut, alerting Hock to the movements of the boys. A week after their arrival they were still at Manyenga’s.

“They want money,” Hock said.

“Or maybe they are waiting for a vehicle.”

Yes, that made sense. They lived a three-day walk away, through the bush, around the marsh, along the riverbank. Even if they left in a canoe from Marka, it was a two-day downriver trip to their village.

“What vehicle?” he asked.

“The Agency helps them. Maybe Aubrey.”

Like the others, she gave the name extra syllables, Obbery, rhyming it with “robbery.”

“He’s still around?”

“He is sick.”

Hock kept his distance from her until darkness fell, and then he sat near her on the veranda, not lighting the lantern. Finally he crept into the hut, leaving the door ajar so that she could follow. She never spoke. She lifted the mosquito net and slid against him in the cot, lying on her back, her hands clasped at her breast, breathing softly through her nose, and sometimes singing in her throat. She smelled of soap and dust and sweat and blossoms, familiar to him — no one had her odor. He plucked one of her hands and held it — so hard, so skinny, so scaly, like a lizard’s. Her whole life was readable in that hand, all her work; it was older than her age, not a child’s hand but a woman’s, someone who had known hardship, much tougher than his own hand.

“Ask me,” she said, as he held her hand.

Her body lay against him, without weight. She did not look at him. Her face was upturned, to the ridgepole of the hut. Hock saw that she was shy, but she was serious in her abrupt question.

In a whisper he could barely hear, needing a moment for him to translate, she said, “I will do anything.”

The words, whispered that way, nearly undid him, touched him so deeply he could not speak. It was a crucial moment, one of the few in his life, when an answer was demanded of him, when everything that followed depended on what he replied. He had a choice to make. Once, Deena had said, It’s up to you, Ellis. What do you really want? Make up your mind. And he had realized it was over, that he’d spend the rest of his life without her. Or Chicky saying, But what about when you pass? If you remarry, your new family will get it and I won’t get diddly. If I don’t get it now, I’ll never see it.

He held Zizi’s hand, that bony callused little claw, and thought, She is offering herself, I can have her. He had known from the busy way she hovered that she was telling him that. He had shown her that she was safe with him. A Sena woman, even a marriageable one like Zizi, was not looking for sex. Security was what mattered most, the need to be protected, to bear children who would be secure. The man could be old or young, but he needed to be strong for his wife.

Zizi was clothed beside him in the string bed, but what he saw was her dancing naked for him, dusted with white flour, in the seclusion of the room, while he lay before her, the girl lifting her skinny legs and lowering them, shaking the flour from them, her lips pressed together, her soft throat-song seeming to echo a melody in her head.

He said, “I want to send a letter.”

“I can take it.”

“It needs a stamp.”

“I can find one.”

“How will you get to the boma?”

“My friend’s njinga. ”

“You can do that?”

“I can do more,” she said, turning aside and rolling away from him, partly in shyness but also submitting, seeming to present her small hard body. It was a kind of appeal, her posture of compliance, but he was too sad to answer.

“Post the letter,” he said. “And when you come back, when we’re safe, everything will be ours — whatever you want.”

“What you want,” she said.

At some point in the early predawn darkness, she left. He woke to find her gone, and the envelope too. He imagined hearing the jingle of a bicycle bell, like laughter.

The activity, the stirring the next day, made him imagine that everything he’d said to Zizi, everything he’d done, lying next to her, had been seen, was known. The boys were up and about, talking louder, ranging more widely in the village. With Zizi gone, he had no ally. Even Snowdon had been lured away from him by the novelty of the three brothers in sunglasses, and the protracted bargaining with Manyenga.

They had to be talking about money. It was now over a week since they’d showed up in Malabo, and they had insinuated themselves into the life of the village, staying in one of Manyenga’s many huts in the heat of the day, emerging in the late afternoon when the air was cooler, strolling away from the compound and sauntering through the village, staring at the younger girls, murmuring among themselves, seeming to pay no attention to Hock. Yet it was obvious they were closing in on him.

In defiance, Hock used these afternoon hours to go out and capture snakes. Snakes were his only strength. The adults of the village kept their distance whenever he walked with his bag and his stick. The children followed him, jumping and screeching, daring each other to go nearer.

Hock would find the fattest snake, a sleepy black mamba or a puff adder, and flourish it, allowing it to coil around his arm as he pinched behind its head. And then he returned to his hut, depositing the snake in a basket and fastening the lid.

The day after Zizi vanished with the letter, he went on a conspicuous snake hunt and found a viper. This he carried through the village to his hut, the children following, calling out, “Snake!”

Hock listened for the bicycle bell, but there was nothing, no sign of Zizi. That was the earliest she could have returned. In his heart he did not expect to be rescued; every attempt so far had failed. But he could not imagine remaining in Malabo without Zizi; he could not imagine living without her, as her guardian. Yet she was nowhere to be seen.

Another night, another early morning, another whole day of waiting. Hock walked to the edge of the village superstitiously, to the spot where, on his arrival in Malabo, he had first seen her walking slowly into the creek, lifting the cloth up her thighs as she went deeper, until she was in the water up to her waist.

Hearing rustling behind him, the swish of legs in dry embankment grass, he turned and saw Manyenga. He was smiling — always a sign of concealment for the man. The older, cap-wearing brother approached too, not smiling, looking sullen.

“Time to talk,” Manyenga said.

As though not recognizing either of the men, Hock pushed past them and walked down the path and across the clearing toward his hut.

Manyenga called out, “Wait, father.”

Hock kept walking, his shadow lengthening.

“You are going with those boys.” Manyenga caught up with him, breathless, sucking air. “They will help you.”

“How much did they pay you for me?”

“You are making a joke, father.”

Hock said, “Never,” as he reached his hut. He unhooked the lid of a basket on the veranda and, thrusting his hands inside, snatched two handfuls of dark vipers. Bristling with snakes, he filled his doorway, saying, “We are staying here.”

HOCK STILL HELD the knots of squirming snakes, which glinted in the last of the daylight — greenish marsh snakes, hissing, contending, their throats widened, their wagging heads flattened in alarm. The villagers in Malabo were terrified of them, and told stories of battling the marsh snake they called mbovi, because it was a good swimmer, and often darted at their legs when they were bathing in the creek. But the snakes were small, harmless, they had no fangs, and perhaps that accounted for the scaly drama of their aggression.