A heavy smoker of chamba, Karsten was in his mid-thirties — short, thin-faced, small-boned, but even with this scrawny physique unexpectedly strong and tenacious. He had a hard stroke, he could paddle all day. His habit was to rise early, before dawn, and push his boat out and keep at it, not stopping to eat though sometimes pausing to roll a joint. He ate fruit — oranges, bananas, and tangerines, whatever was in season — and at the end of the day made a proper meal of nsima and stewed greens and smoked fish.
Even glassy-eyed from the dope he seemed to remember me. He turned from the group and shook my hand, and called out something to the others, explaining who I was and laughing at the memory of that previous trip.
‘I want to go to Caia in your boat,’ I said.
He smiled, his expression said, Sure. He hung on to my hand as though to seal the agreement. His was a paddler’s hand, scaly, with a muscly palm and pads so hardened with calluses they seemed abrasive.
‘When?’
‘How about tomorrow?’
‘Tonight we go to my house. Sleep there. Start tomorrow morning for Caia.’
He was more eager to leave even than I was, which pleased me. But there were preparations to make.
‘What about food? I want to bring bottled water. We’ll need ufa’ — flour for nsima.
‘The shop in the market has tins. Give me money. I will buy flour.’
We went together, walking through the village to the shop. For me, this was one of the most pleasant aspects of a trip — stocking up on the necessaries, filling a box with solid food, and extras like cookies and canned cheese. Because bottled water was in short supply, I bought a case of Fanta and a case of beer. An African shop like this was perfect for such food and the basics for survival — matches, candles, rope. I wanted to buy pots and spoons and camping paraphernalia but Karsten said he had everything we needed. The plastic tarp he had for covering his contraband we could use as a tent if it rained.
On the way back to the landing (young boys following us, carrying the food boxes on their heads), we agreed on a price for renting the dugout — $100 in small bills. Karsten said we would need another paddler — his friend, Wilson Matenge. But by the time Wilson was found, the sun had dropped behind the trees and the daylight was slipping away. It was too late to go to Karsten’s. I did not mind traveling in the dusk but just at dark the mosquitoes came out in clouds. I wanted to find a hut to sleep in, and a smoky fire; to cover myself with bug spray and go to sleep early.
Village dogs barked all night outside the shed I had been assigned, probably because hyenas were lurking. It was still dark when I heard Karsten’s footfalls and his wide-awake voice, ‘We go now.’
Morning, too, was mosquito time on the Shire River. As we set off they whined around my head in bunches, as thick and busy as blackflies in Maine. But I was well sprayed, and as soon as the sun came up the mosquitoes dispersed. The dugout had been hollowed from an enormous log, about seventeen feet from tip to tip, and so wide it plowed through the marsh to the main stream. Karsten paddled in the stern and steered, Wilson and I took turns paddling in the bow.
The entry to the landing was a narrow lane of open water through the thickness of closely packed leaves and flowers of the hyacinths. Much of the time I sat on a stool amidships like Stanley in the Lady Alice, or else crouched in the bow. Karsten as master of this vessel was reluctant to surrender his paddle — even Wilson was happiest paddling and I supposed he wanted to humor me by giving me a chance. But it passed the time for me to paddle, and by mid-morning we had made it through the hyacinths and the twisting waterway through the marsh grass. We were now in the swift main stream of the Shire, riding the current south.
The recent rain had muddied the river and deepened it, but though it brimmed against some of the banks it hadn’t spilled over and flooded the plains and gardens. We moved steadily with the flow and at times we used the paddles to steer, the current speeding us.
People on the banks called out to us, and they must have been asking where we were going, because Karsten yelled, ‘Zambezi!’
In places the river twisted into bewildering marshland, dividing into many separate streams, softening, losing its riverine look and becoming slow water in a mass of spongy reeds. The Shire ceased to be a river at the Ndinde Marsh, which was so dense with high grass and reeds we could not see ahead of us, so choked with hyacinths that our progress was slowed to hard paddling. In this marsh we could negotiate only by occasionally going upstream, fighting the current. I thought that perhaps Karsten’s chamba intake had destroyed his judgement, but after an hour in the marsh we emerged, with a view of Mozambique.
I could see no villages, but here and there were clusters of huts set back from the river’s edge. Karsten stopped at one village and bought mangoes, and at another he bought dried fish. The people knew him, which encouraged my confidence in him, for he could know these half-hidden places only by being intensely knowledgeable about navigating the river.
A muddy embankment was the Mozambique border. There was no indication it was a frontier, but there were wrecked vehicles and boats on the muddy banks, always signs of civilization. The riverside settlement of Megaza consisted of two wrecked riverboats, a rusted truck chassis, a slippery ramp, some sheds that sold the usual — oil, candles, matches, crackers, raw soap, cigarettes — and idle skinny Africans sitting under another wrecked truck for the shade. The place had everything except Mr Kurtz and his human skulls. Under a mango tree a man sat at a table, the Mozambican immigration officer. We pulled our dugout up the bank and Wilson made a fire, while Karsten went in search of water.
I sat under the mango tree with the immigration official while he thumbed through my passport, which he finally stamped. Then I walked up the road to see what else was here. I noticed the immigration officer was following me. I let him catch up. We walked together in silence. Ahead were three wooden buildings. One was a government office — a single room. One was an abandoned shop — I peered in and saw empty shelves and a long bench. I liked the width of the bench. The third building was a bar — just a counter, warm beer on shelves, and Portuguese music blaring from a radio.
‘You buy me kachasu?’ the immigration official said.
It was Malawian gin, made from bananas. I bought two. We drank. I said, ‘I want to sleep next door tonight, okay?’
He shrugged, not saying yes or no. I bought him another glass and when I started to walk away he said, ‘Come. You can sleep.’
Boiling the flour with water in the blackened pot, Karsten had mixed up some nsima. He mashed the dried fish with greens. I opened a can of stew, heated it on the fire and ate that with the nsima. We squatted around the smoky fire and talked.
‘How far can we get tomorrow? Maybe the Zambezi?’
He made an equivocating face and said, ‘Mphepho’ — wind.
If there was a headwind we probably would not make it as far as the Zambezi, he said. The dugout rode so high in the water that the wind affected us more than other shallower craft.
It was hardly seven thirty when we turned in. I reclined on my bench in the shed up the road and though I could hear the idiot music coming from the bar, I fell into sleep so deep I did not awaken until Karsten came for me in the darkness of early morning.