Paul Theroux - The Lower River

She seemed to rally a little since he’d arrived. She was inert, yet she followed him with her weepy reddened eyes.

“I think she’ll be all right,” Hock said to Gala, looking for reassurance.

“With God’s help,” she said, which left the question unanswered.

Hock crouched, about to kneel, when Gala tapped his shoulder, cautioning him, and she turned, making a downward gesture of her hand, paddling the air, urging him away.

The dwarf limped from the door, seeing Gala beckoning Hock onto the veranda. Zizi became fierce, her face set in anger, her lower jaw protruding. He had never seen this expression. She was indignant, refusing to die, clearly insulted — the abuse was apparent in the welts and scratches on her body — but something else showed through: the strength of her anger. She was trying to speak to Hock through her bruised lips.

She muttered a word Hock could not understand.

“Come away, Ellis,” Gala said, tugging his shoulder.

Turning from Zizi’s pleading, Hock followed Gala to the veranda. In the distance, at the edge of the slant of light thrown by the lantern at the open window, Snowdon knelt, scratching the scabs on his arm and murmuring — Hock guessed—“Fee-dee-dom.”

Hock said, “What do you know?”

“Only what the women told me who found her and fetched her here. They knew her. Why are you surprised?”

“Because the boma is so far from Malabo.”

“She is namwali. She is known. Girls suitable for marriage are well known in the district. I was her guardian until Manyenga took her for you.”

“You didn’t mind?”

“I knew you would look after her. An elder person is a swamp that stops a fire. But she wandered off.”

“You mean to the boma?”

“Yes. And at night. On a bicycle.”

Hock wondered whether he should tell Gala the reason for Zizi’s journey. He was about to speak when Gala resumed.

“The women could not recognize her at first, her face was so bloody. Her chitenje cloth was torn.”

Hock said, “Was Zizi going toward the boma or traveling away from it?”

“What difference does it make?” she said.

Then he knew he couldn’t tell her about the letter, because it seemed so petty, worrying about a letter when Zizi was lying injured inside the smoky hut. But the question was crucial. If the attack had occurred on her way to the boma, it meant she hadn’t mailed the letter, and he would be stalled again, and have to face the brothers.

“It was a blessing that the women were there.”

He said, “Why were they there at night?”

“Because of the hunger. You know the harvest will be poor?”

That and the lack of rain were the most common complaints of the villagers who had come to him for money, so common he’d begun to think of it as an excuse, perhaps a lie, because Manyenga always had food.

“There is little rice. There is no millet. Not much flour. We are eating cassava most of the time,” Gala said. “The Agency vehicle is making deliveries of bags of flour and rice and beans, taking them to the boma. The women wanted to be early — first in the queue for free rice.”

“But it’s not safe for them either.”

“They are women with small children. They are safe. They have nothing — no money, no valuables.”

“Zizi has nothing.”

In a reproachful tone, the light flashing on her face, Gala said, “She has what all women want. She is a maiden. She was a maiden. Now she is bleeding, because it was taken from her.”

Hock said, “That’s terrible.”

“You don’t understand. You are innocent. You don’t know anything.” The words were contemptuous, but Gala’s tone was rueful, softened by her fatalism.

“What don’t I know?”

“That such girls are taken by sick men. Men with the AIDS” —she said eddsi. “They take the girls if they can find them. They also take small children.”

Hock said, “I’ve heard of this.”

“They believe that sex with a virgin is a cure.”

He was too shocked to speak. He groaned, wishing he hadn’t heard.

“That is why Zizi was taken — sure.”

“She must have fought hard,” he said helplessly.

“So hard,” Gala said. “They had to beat her, to subdue her, and then they just”—she whipped her hand, the fatalistic village gesture, snapping her fingers. “It’s a shame.”

“Tell me she’ll recover, please.”

“With God’s help. No bones are broken, but you know what happens with wounds and bruises. They go septic so fast. We must prevent it.”

Then Hock remembered. “You said the women were going to the boma to get food from the Agency vehicle?”

“Yes.”

“Did they get the food?”

“They found Zizi. They never saw the vehicle.”

“Maybe it came and didn’t drop the food,” he said.

“Why do you say that?” Gala frowned at him. “It makes no sense. The job of the Agency vehicle is to deliver the food.”

“I don’t know,” Hock said. “I think I should go, but I want to say goodbye to Zizi.”

“She may be sleeping.”

But she was awake, her eyes half closed, her jaw set in the same determined way, as though enduring pain, struggling to stay alive. All her cuts had been painted with the gentian violet, and the patches of purple made her seem like a broken doll.

Putting his face close to hers, Hock said, “Zizi, can you hear me?”

She did not speak, yet she made a characteristic tightening of her face, a slight eyebrow flash, lifting them in recognition.

“Who was it?”

She groaned, her lips were dry and cracked, she could not form a word, though she showed her teeth, beautiful teeth, flecked with blood.

“Was it Aubrey?”

She winced as if pierced with a knife blade.

Hock considered this, and he wondered whether his whisper had been heard by Gala or either of the women, who’d kept their distance, to give him some privacy.

“The letter,” Hock said, and let this word, kalata, sink in. “What happened?” When she did not react, he said, “Did you post it?”

He waited, but she only rolled her head from side to side, snared by pain, and it seemed she was saying No or I don’t know.

Shortly afterward, when he left, Snowdon led him back through the darkness of the bush, chattering the whole way, perhaps feeling frisky after seeing the broken girl and the blood.

THE HEAT OF the Lower River, trapped beneath the white sky, penetrated the dust with the steam of its stillness, driving away all energy, sapping the strength of the people, withering the leaves that dangled limp on the low thorn bush. Malabo had never seemed flatter, quieter, more colorless, the heat baking it to a monochrome, like an old sun-faded photograph of itself.

Or was it their hunger that kept the people idle? Since the news that the upcoming harvest would be meager, Hock had noticed a perceptible slackening, a greater silence. He’d become used to shouts, yelps, the loud teasing of children, the singsong of scolding women. Now there were only murmurs. Something in the screech of the cicadas, like the scrape of a knife being sharpened on a wheel, or the burr and crackle of winged beetles, made the heat seem more intense. In the blinding muted daylight and humid air, in the village of mud huts that were crumbled like stale cake, he heard despair in the whispers, and the small children had stopped running.

He visited Zizi again, tramping through the tangle of bush at midday so he could gather snakes on the way. He plucked one from a swale of drifted sand, another from near a termite mound that rose like a cracked minaret of red dirt. And when he arrived at Gala’s, calling “ Odi, odi, ” she looked out from her veranda and saw two weighty flour sacks.