Paul Theroux - The Lower River

“Those boys will tend to you,” Manyenga said. “And one day you will be released to your people.”

“I want to be released now.” Hock heard the gulp of a whimper in his own voice.

At this, perhaps maddened by the whimper, Manyenga screamed and lost his British accent. “You mzungu can go anywhere! You people can do what you like. You are free to just come and go because you have maahhnee! This is a little holiday for you, but this is our whole life, as we are condemned to live on the Lower River forever!”

Hock said simply, “I’ve given you all my money.”

“Because you hate us and demand us to stay here,” Manyenga raged, bug-eyed, obstinate in his evasive temper. “You insult us with food, you throw it to us like animals. We are not your monkeys now. Take him away!”

“Help me,” Hock said to the women standing near him.

Manyenga laughed, and with a bleak fanatical stare he put his sweaty face against Hock’s. “They will do nothing for you. If my people do not obey me, their paramount chief, it will mean a lifelong infamy for them.”

Seeing Manyenga’s defiance, the women began to jeer at Hock, and the children took up the cry. Hock remembered his fever, the time he’d fallen in the clearing, severely dehydrated. Then, the women had laughed so hard that Snowdon was emboldened to kick him in the face, occasioning more laughter. And oddly, with that memory present in his mind, Hock believed he saw Snowdon hurrying into the darkness with his lopsided gait — the way you might be thinking of a person for no reason and then, coincidentally, the next moment you see him walking down the street.

As he was led to the van — again he felt like a condemned man — Hock heard cursing, a deep serious denunciation, its helpless abuse in great contrast to the hilarity and the speeches and the children’s laughter. He heard Manyenga conferring, and Manyenga’s consternation.

“You are a devil,” Manyenga said, drawing his lips back from his big teeth.

Hock was too weary to react, but if he’d been able to summon the strength, he would have jeered at Manyenga as the villagers had jeered at him.

“Someone has slashed the tires,” Manyenga said with venom. “One of your people. It was done with your knife. We have no knife sharp enough.”

The cheap knife from Blantyre, with the serrated edge, had been stolen from his hut. Had it been Snowdon, whom he’d almost certainly just seen in the shadows near the van? And now, though it was an effort — he wanted them to know how he felt — Hock did laugh.

“This is bloody stupid,” Manyenga said. In his anger, he lost all his guile.

So the ceremony of farewell ended as many of the ceremonies in Malabo ended, in confusion and disorder, and with an air of exhaustion, around a dying fire of black skeletal embers.

As the disappointed villagers vanished into the darkness, Hock returned to his hut. He wasn’t saved — he knew that — but he was reprieved for the night. He was being watched: the brothers glared at him as he left. He went to bed and, wearied by fear, slept soundly.

In the morning, nothing had changed. The village was no different from the first morning of his visit months ago — hot, passive, with the burned-toast smell of wood smoke, the thick damp air under the white sky, the sight of scarred mopane trees and dusty leaves and the perimeter of elephant grass, and a sepulchral suggestion of decay from the latrine. Malabo had felt like this forty years before. It was why he had come back. It was why he now waited, hopelessly, to leave. But he had been sold to the brothers. He would probably be transported to the village of children on the riverbank and confined until he was ransomed. He became aware, with alarm, that the only sound he heard was the gasp and catch of his own breathing.

The white Agency van was still parked at the edge of Manyenga’s compound, on flat tires. Another day of heat and hunger, another day of his thinking, This is my life now. He knew he was living like a sick man. But nearly everyone in Malabo lived that way, either sitting or lying down, and the tone of every remark, even the lies and the sour hopes, was part of the sickness. He smiled at the thought that the long Agency van looked like an ambulance or a hearse.

A number of villagers — the women who would have been hoeing the gardens, the men who usually lolled under the mango tree, and many children — gathered at his hut, knowing that he was soon to be taken away. In the foreground, Snowdon squatted, gnawing the fingers of one hand with a befuddled smile, his fool’s license. In the other hand he held the knife with the serrated blade.

Standing in his doorway, Hock held up two of the bulging sacks that he’d removed from the veranda to the shadows under his bed. He shook them to prove that they had weight.

“Tell Festus Manyenga that I still have money and food in these sacks in my hut. And there are more,” he said. “After I’m gone, he can have them. You can all have them.”

He had spoken in Sena, so even the children understood, and some of them ran to inform their chief of this good news.

And when, in the middle of the hot morning, lying in his string bed, he heard an engine straining, he knew the van had been repaired, the tires patched and pumped up. He guessed that Aubrey — the rapist — was at the wheel of this van, which had been paid for by donations from sympathetic people all over the world. The van, emptied of its food, for which he had been traded, food that was now Manyenga’s, would carry him away to be kept as a hostage.

The engine sounded querulous as the van maneuvered in the clearing, being put into position so he could be loaded into the cargo hold where the boxes had been. He was a reasonable swap for the food stolen from the Agency; he’d be held and haggled over and sold again. He was no more than a carcass, but he knew they’d have to feed him and keep him alive if they were to sell him. That gave him a flicker of comfort.

Yet in his heart he believed he would die. He had felt that for some time — that he’d returned to Africa to die. In his months in Malabo he’d had intimations of death; in an African village, death was ever present. He had lost the strength to object, and not even his anger could rouse him to resist.

But looking out through the patched screen of his hut window, expecting the van, he saw instead a sleek black Jeep. Accustomed to being subverted, he felt a greater despair at the sight of the newer, more powerful vehicle, probably another from the Agency. This one was a sinister intimidating size, with fat unslashable tires.

Just then, as he faced the Jeep, a quacking American voice was raised across the clearing, a disbelieving voice, harsh in its contradiction, saying, “But we know he’s gotta be here somewhere!”

Repeating its complaint, the quacking carried all that distance, from near Manyenga’s compound — stern, scolding, full of authority.

Hock stepped out of the hut for a better look, and saw, crossing the stony ground near the baobab stump, a pink-faced man in a shirt and tie. The man caught sight of Hock and walked faster. Then, all business, he turned and called out behind him to his driver.

“Bring up the car!” He wiped the perspiration from his face with a neatly folded white handkerchief. He was near enough to offer a handshake. “You must be Hock — almost didn’t recognize you. Quite a letter. Where are your things?”

A kick of hope in his gut made Hock tearful. “I don’t have any things.”

“Take it easy, sir,” the man said. Hock knew him from Blantyre but in his muddle could not think of his name. He was young, dependable, with a good shirt, a silk tie, a linen jacket. “You’ll be all right.”