The Lower River by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux [Theroux, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780547746500
Publisher: Harcourt
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

They left him alone the rest of the day, and the whole of the following day. He heard the children laughing—screeching. He sat in the space they had given him, hoping that they were ignoring him and not plotting against him. He had no way of telling. At intervals the children crept near to watch him. Hock took some consolation at the sight of fire finches in the branches near his hut and the metallic call of the tinkerbird, which he heard but could not see. As for the children, they were the youngest, the dirtiest, and they simply stared at him with hungry faces.

In retrospect, he was afraid of the children, and when he saw two of the big boys approach him in the dusk he felt a fluttering of fright in his heart like a trapped bird.

“Your friends are coming, this boy says.”

“What do you mean?” He backed away. He didn’t want the boy near him.

“This boy”—a lean, exhausted-looking boy in ragged shorts lurked behind him—“he says they are coming.”

“I don’t know what you mean. Who is coming?”

“Your people.”

The boy seemed at once milder, kinder, much less of a threat. He was holding bananas, a cluster of four. These he gave to Hock.

“My people?” Hock took a breath but could not calm himself. “When?”

“Just wait,” the boy said, and pointed casually at the last of the sunset—shreds of purple, layers of darkening velvet lit by glints of gold, sinking under the darkness, making Hock sadder. “We will see them.”

On the third day, the boy wearing the Dynamo Dresden cap and sunglasses kicked through the small gathering of watching children and said, “You, mzungu.”

“Don’t call me mzungu.”

“I will call you Old Man.”

Hock glared at him, then gestured to the children. “What do they want?”

“They want you to go.”

Hock took a stride to come abreast of him and said in a heated whisper, “I want to go. Let me go. You said you don’t want me here.”

But the boy wouldn’t look at him, or if he was looking at him Hock couldn’t tell, because the sunglasses did not reveal his eyes. All he saw was the sour disapproving mouth.

“That was the other day. That was previously.” He spoke the syllables separately like a whole sentence.

“I’d like to know where you learned English,” Hock asked again.

“From your people.”

“I don’t have any people.”

“Yes, yourself you are having. They are coming. That is why we want you to stay.”

“They’re coming here?”

“We will see.”

“When are they coming?”

“We will see.”

Hock had often been frustrated by Sena-speaking people, with all their euphemisms and evasions, but much worse was his trying to make sense of conversing with someone like this Sena boy, for the fact that the boy spoke English reasonably well was a barrier to any understanding and only maddened him more. There was a point where a reasonable command of English made someone like this punk in sunglasses incomprehensible.

“I’m hungry,” Hock said. “I’ll need food.”

The boy said nothing, only raised his face to the sky,

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