The nights here resemble nothing else.
No streetlights, no reflections, no one to assure you that what glimmers in the distance is a fire and not some creature.
On the margins where Malawi bleeds into Tanzania and Mozambique exhales through the open pores of the savanna, Emiliano Radek is not a journalist. Not in the way New York or Geneva, or even Mexico, would define it. Here, he is a man with a camera, small bills, and a passport inked with more stamps than anyone could reasonably justify.
With a translator who switches dialects as easily as conversation partners, he has paid for silence, for access, for permission to witness.
And now he watches.
At the center of the circle, a naked albino boy no older than eight trembles. A drum repeats the same beat, the rhythm of a dead heart, while a witch doctor spins in spirals with his eyes closed. Radek's voice does not surface. The camera is fixed. The audio catches breathing, murmurs, a fractured prayer. The boy does not cry. Maybe because he already knows he is worth nothing. Maybe because he was told that if he endures, the entire country will be cured.
AIDS, infertility, cancer, homosexuality, the evil eye. Everything can be exorcised with a piece of him.
The witch doctor stops.
He points with a long, dry bone marked in what looks like old blood.
A man approaches with a rusted knife.
There are no screams.
Only a silence that expands as if to cover the world.
Radek shuts the shutter. He has enough. Not because he wants no more, but because he already knows how it will end; he has heard the stories a hundred times before. Sometimes they survive—without an ear, without their penis, without an arm. Sometimes they are buried without a head, the skull sold to Saudi tourists with fake credentials. Everything cures something.
Everything has a price.
Then come the interviews. Women with extinguished eyes swearing their husbands were healed after drinking albino blood. Fathers selling one child to feed the other five. Healers reciting recipes with pharmaceutical precision: "Three fingers at dawn under the full moon. Mixed with mule saliva."
Radek does not judge. He only nods.
Records them all, even the translator who asks if in his country people believe in magic too. He answers yes, though he has no idea which "his" country even is anymore.
The border, out here, is more concept than line. You cross it without realizing. One day you are in Malawi, the next in Tanzania, and no one asks for papers as long as you bring what's needed to trade.
Radek has cash, American cigarettes, a drone the size of a fly. He has used it to track nocturnal caravans carrying stained sacks. The pattern repeats endlessly—small bodies, white skin, broken bones. Transported like fruit, like coffee, like luxury waste.
In a nameless village, a boy smiles at him. Orange hair from malnutrition, a scar in the shape of a cross carved into his forehead. Radek hands him a melted chocolate bar. The boy smells it before eating. His mother tells him not to touch it, that white men never give without taking in return.
Radek walks away. She is right.
That night he is invited to a private ritual. The head witch doctor stares at him as if sniffing his soul. He wears a black robe marked with symbols Radek does not recognize. They speak Nyakyusa.
The translator translates only what he wants.
"They say the spirit of the moon asked for your presence," he comments.
Radek switches on the camera hidden in his backpack. Records with a low-light lens. The ritual is more symbolic—there is smoke, guttural psalms, gestures that feel like theater. But at the end, the witch doctor approaches him and, as if offering a jewel, places something wrapped in red cloth in his hands.
Radek unwraps it. A small, pale human finger, perfectly severed.
"For you," the translator says, uneasy. "So you won't forget the story."
Radek does not respond. He looks on with the neutral expression he has rehearsed before mirrors, before wars, before narco killings, before human trafficking. He tucks the finger into his backpack, beside the camera.
No one says a word. No one laughs.
The witch doctor nods and disappears into the shadows.
That night Radek writes without writing. He thinks of how to title the piece. Of scandal, of reactions, of editorials. Of the voice-over in the documentary. The music. The names that will be changed for safety.
And of the irony: a culture convinced of magical healing, and the orchestrators of the myth who wield that stupid belief as a cover for the real business—organ trafficking.
Because that is what he uncovered in the encrypted emails of a Belgian medical consultant who should never have opened his laptop in a Starbucks.
All this—rituals, blood, superstition—is just the curtain.
The real business runs through Europe.
Clean extractions performed in mobile labs. Material chilled, nearly frozen. Albino spinal-plasma vaccines tested in luxury clinics. Investors know.
They pay well.
The shamans just collect their commission in fear.
Scientific magic masking the death of those who have nothing.
Radek believes in nothing. Not in evil. Not in good. He believes in the value of a story. And this story is worth a fortune.
Tomorrow he will cross into Zambia. He has an appointment with a woman who claims to have escaped an albino bone-marrow extraction network. She lost a kidney. She keeps a diary where she writes down the names of European doctors who treated her. She says one of them spoke German as he anesthetized her.
Radek wants to record her raw. Show her face. Her voice.
But tonight, he sets the finger on the hostel table. Looks at it the way one might look at an ancient relic—without faith, without disgust. Only as proof. Then he seals it in a plastic bag and freezes it in the minibar beside the vodka.
He turns off the light. Lies down with his shoes on—an occupational habit.
And dreams of a newsroom filled with applause.