“I’m going to the Lower River,” Hock said. “Nsanje.”
“No one ever goes there,” Gilroy said. “It’s not a population center.”
“It never was.”
“And the Sena people,” Gilroy said, swallowing, instead of finishing his sentence.
“‘Backward.’”
“Not popular.”
“Off the map, the British say,” Hock said. “To me, that was always its virtue. Even in my day we didn’t have many visitors.”
“When was your day?”
“Almost forty years ago.”
Gilroy said, “God, I wasn’t even born then. I’m sorry. I don’t want to make you feel old.”
“I don’t feel old,” Hock said. “As soon as I arrived the other day, I felt rejuvenated, as I had when I first came here. It’s strange the power a white person feels in Africa. It should be the opposite, feeling like the odd man out. But no, a kind of strength is attributed to us.”
“Because you’re rich and successful and healthy,” Gilroy said. “You can grant favors. They give you the illusion of power. I’m the PAO, so I just deal with the media and schools, but even so, I’m associated with the consulate, and that means visas and work permits. Everyone wants a ticket out.”
“Years ago, no one wanted to leave. It was unthinkable.”
“You should see the lines we have to deal with — around the block, three deep. How long are you staying in Nsanje?”
“Beyond Nsanje — a village. A week or ten days. But I want every minute to count. I’d like to buy some books and teaching materials for the school there. If I had a few boxes sent to the consulate, could you have them shipped down?”
“Like I said, no one goes there,” Gilroy said. “I could put them on the night bus. Or bring them myself — maybe an excuse to visit.”
“There was a guy who worked at the consulate here, way back, who made trips to my school — Malabo, near Magwero. His name was Norman Fogwill.”
Gilroy, chewing, said, “English guy. Lives somewhere outside town.”
“Fogwill — still around?”
“Yeah, old guy. Turns up at the consulate when there’s a guest speaker or a movie. He introduced himself to me. I knew a guy just like him in my last post — Addis.”
“You were in Ethiopia?”
“For a year. They needed me here to run the program,” Gilroy said, his expression giving nothing away, and so what he said was all the more like satire.
“How was this guy like Fogwill?”
“One of those people that stays behind after everyone else has gone home.”
“I wonder if he’d remember me?”
In the way that he did not want to leave Medford until he’d found someone to say goodbye to — Roy Junkins — someone to miss him, he realized that he’d be happier here if he met someone who’d known him, who would see him on his way to the Lower River.
“I see him playing chess at Mario’s now and then,” Gilroy said. “The coffee shop. Next to Kandodo Supermarket.”
“On the far end of Victoria Street.”
Gilroy said, “I can’t get over the fact that these streets actually have names.”
Hock said, “Haile Selassie Road. I saw Haile Selassie coming down that road in 1964—a tiny man in a brown uniform with lots of medals. The whole country was given a holiday. I came up on the train from Nsanje to see him. People watching him said, ‘He’s not an African. He looks like a colored’—mixed race.”
“Ethiopians would agree. They’re down on Africans,” Gilroy said, and smirked. “The Lion of Judah in Blantyre. It’s hard to believe that anything ever happened here.”
“That’s why I like it,” Hock said. “I’m glad to be back.”
Gilroy sized him up, eyeing him, as if assessing the remark. “Great,” he said, and gave him a gold-embossed name card: Kent Gilroy, Consulate of the United States of America. “You can use this address.” He scribbled a street and number on the back of the card. “It’s a funny thing,” he said, writing. “Lots of Americans who come here buy schoolbooks and paper and pens and stuff like that. You’d be amazed at how many. I send the boxes out and that’s the last I hear of them.”
“What are you saying — that I’m wasting my time?”
“No. You’re doing a good thing. But it’s a bottomless pit. Money, medicine, books, pens, even computers. Where does it all end up?”
“Come down to Malabo. I’ll show you.” With that he wrote the name of the village on one of his own name cards.
“Will I find it?”
“Ask at the boma. Nsanje, it’s beyond Marka and Magwero. Near the river. Near the border.”
“The end of the line,” Gilroy said, and glanced at the card again. “Cell-phone number?”
“I don’t have one,” Hock said. “I don’t want one. I never had one down there.”
Hock walked him back to the consulate so he could sign the visitors’ book, and approaching the building, Gilroy said, “See what I mean?”
The line of people, men and women, some old, some like students, nearly all Africans, a few Indians.
“They’re all dying to leave.” He shrugged. “Because it’s a failed state. Whose fault is that?”
Afterward, Hock saw clearly what he had missed at lunch — that Gilroy, like the embassy people he’d known long ago, was downbeat about the country and didn’t know it well; that he felt he’d been posted to a hopeless place and had to make the best of it; that he would be gone in a year or so and in a new country. Gilroy was fragmentary in the way of lawyers and bureaucrats, and because of that he was impossible to pin down, evasive, a man of no fixed beliefs.
Hock felt nothing but gratitude for being in Malawi, thankful that the country still existed, was still sleepy and friendly and ramshackle, that it had welcomed him. That day, walking along the street, strangers meeting his gaze smiled and said hello, and when he spoke to them in their own language they shrieked with pleasure.
The air was dense and hot, woven of many odors, and just a whiff brought it all back. He was walking down Hanover to Henderson, to the corner of Laws, to the bookshop, where he’d caught a glimpse of the sign Office Supplies. The countryside, so close, penetrated the town. You could not see the bush from the main street, but you could smell it: the wood smoke floated past the shops and seeped into the brick and stucco, the peculiar hum of scorched eucalyptus, the dustiness of dead leaves, the fields chopped apart by rusty mattocks to release the sharpness of bruised roots and red earth, all of it stinking with ripeness and decay; and on every sidewalk the sweetish feety smell of the people, the sourness of their rags. He closed his eyes and inhaled and smiled and thought, I could not be anywhere else but here.
In the bookshop, Blantyre Printery and Office Supplies, he found a young clerk and asked for the manager.
“I am the manager”—a young man in a blue shirt, red necktie, a pencil tucked into the thickness of his bushy hair.
“I want to buy a couple of these cartons and fill them with school materials. Books and things.”
“This tub?”
It was a plastic container for storing files, with handles and a clip-on lid that would keep the dust out.
“This, yes, this tub,” Hock said.
He selected readers, forty of them, and forty copybooks, some dictionaries, some picture books, an assortment of pens and colored pencils and rulers, a large-format atlas of Africa, another of the world. He chose hurriedly, pointing to shelves, thinking that anything he bought would be welcome.
“How much?” he asked when the two containers were filled.
“I will tally up the docket,” the young man said, eyeing Hock sideways, and he made out the invoice. Though this was a lengthy process, involving several pads and the shuffling and interleaving of blue carbon paper, Hock sat and watched with contentment, liking the meticulous listing of each item, the digging of the ballpoint into the softness of the pad in triplicate, the exercise of an old skill.