Euphoria (4 page)

I’d been gone three years. I thought that might be enough travel for a while, but the combination of the winter gloom, my mother’s restless bullying, and the stale cerebral self-conscious wit that bubbled like a frothy mold in every corner of Cambridge drove me to return to the Kiona as fast as I could manage.

M
y village of Nengai lay forty river miles west of Angoram. As the crow flies it would have been half that, but the Sepik, the longest river in New Guinea, is flamboyantly serpentine, the Amazon of the South Pacific, with a tendency to meander to such extremes that it has created, I learned a decade later under much different circumstances, over fifteen thousand oxbow lakes, places where the loops bent around so far they broke off. But when you are in a dugout canoe at night, even if it is motorized, you are not cognizant of the inefficient zig and zag of your route. You simply feel the river bend one way and then eventually another. You get used to the bugs in your eyes and mouth and the shiny rucked bulges of crocs and the monkeys caterwauling on high branches and the thrash and bustle of thousands of nocturnal creatures gorging themselves while their predators sleep. You do not feel the extra, unnecessary twenty miles. If anything, you wish the trip were longer.

The thin moon gave the river a thin silver skin. As I had hoped, Nell nestled in among their bags and looked comfortable. I felt relieved when her eyes shut, as if she were my own croupy child who needed rest, and I puzzled over this feeling as Fen and I talked. We spoke not about our work but about Cambridge, where he’d been for a year while I was off with the Baining, and about Sydney, where we’d first met. We talked
about football and Prime Minister MacDonald and India. The last I had heard, Gandhi had begun another hunger strike, but neither of us knew how it had ended. History hung suspended for months. I took solace in the not knowing.

After an hour or so of almost complete darkness on both banks, we came round a bend and saw fires and the flashes of festooned bodies all along a beach on the southern shore. It was the Olimbi village of Kamindimimbut, in the midst of a celebration. The smell of roasted boar reached us, and the hard drumming thudded in our chests.

It’s hard to believe, as I write this account, that the next World War was only six years away from that night, or that in nine years the Japanese would take control of the Sepik and the whole of the New Guinea Territory from the Australians, or that I would let the United States government shake me down for every bit of knowledge I had about the area. Would Fen or Nell have done the same? Anthropological contribution, they called it in the OSS. A generous epithet for scientific prostitution.

I led a rescue operation up the Sepik to this village at the end of ‘42, and afterward every man, woman, and child of Kamindimimbut was killed by the Japanese when they learned a few Olimbi men had helped us find the three captured American agents being held nearby. Over three hundred people slaughtered solely because I knew which cluster of raised houses, which strip of sand, was theirs.

‘What do you do about women then, Bankson?’ Fen said quite out of the blue, after we’d passed Kamindimimbut.

I laughed. ‘That’s a bit personal for our first canoe trip, isn’t it?’

‘Just wondering if you’ve gone Malinowski’s route. Sayers visited the Trobriands last year and said there were quite a number of suspiciously tan-colored adolescents walking about.’

‘Do you believe it?’

‘Have you seen the man in action? Nell and I picked him up at the station in New York and the only thing he said to me was “I need a martini in my hand and a girl in my bed.” Seriously, mate, it’s rough alone. I don’t think I could do it again.’

‘I’ll take a partner of some sort or other next time. More efficient, too, by half.’

‘Not sure I’d go that far.’ His spent cigarette made a brief orange arc into the river. I slowed for him to light another, then sped up again.

Sometimes at night it seemed to me that my boat was not being pushed by the engine but that boat and engine both were being pulled by the river itself, the ripples of wake just a design, like a stage set moving along with us.

‘Sometimes I wish I’d gone to sea,’ I said, perhaps simply for the luxury of being able to speak a passing thought aloud to someone who would understand what I meant.

‘Do you? Why’s that?’

‘I think I’m better on water than land. Better in my skin, as the French say.’

‘The ship captains I’ve met are tossers.’

‘It would be nice to do a job that wasn’t a big invisible knot to untangle, wouldn’t it?’

He didn’t answer, but I wasn’t bothered. I was flattered that we’d gotten to this stage already, that our minds could
wander without apology. We passed through a long swath of fireflies, thousands of them flashing all around us, and it felt like soaring through stars.

The dark shapes on land became increasingly familiar: the tall narrow blackboard tree I called Big Ben, the jut of blueschist rock, the high mud bank of the most western Kiona hamlet. I must have slowed for Fen said, ‘Are we nearly there?’

‘Mile or two more.’

‘Nell,’ he said in a regular voice, not so much a question as a test. Satisfied she was still asleep he leaned over and said to me quietly, ‘Do the Kiona have a sacred object, removed from the village, something that they feed and protect?’

He’d already asked me many questions along these lines in Angoram. ‘They have sacred objects, certainly—instruments and masks and skulls of old warriors.’

‘That are kept in ceremonial houses?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean something bigger. Kept apart. Something they might not have told you about, but you sense exists.’

He was suggesting that after nearly two years they were withholding some vital aspect of their society from me. I assured him that I had been shown every totemic object in their possession.

‘They told me theirs was a descendant of a Kiona one.’

‘The Mumbanyo told you this? About what?’

‘Do me a favor and ask them again. About a flute. One that’s sometimes kept in isolation and has to be fed.’

‘Fed?’

‘Could you ask while I’m there? Your informant might not tell you the truth, but at least I’ll have a look at his reaction.’

‘Did you see it?’ I asked.

‘I only found out about it a few days before we left.’

‘And you saw it?’

‘They sort of presented it to me.’

‘As a gift?’

‘Yes, I think so. As a gift. But then this other clan—there were two rivalrous clans in our village—took it back before I got a full look at the thing. I wanted to convince Nell to stay longer, but there is no rerouting her once she puts her mind to something.’

‘Why did she want to leave?’

‘Who knows. They didn’t fit her thesis statement. And she calls the shots. We’re on her grant money. Will you ask your man for me? About a sacred flute?’

‘I’ve already shook them down hundreds of times about such things, but all right.’

‘Thanks, mate. Just to see his face, really. See what it reveals.’

My beach appeared around the bend.

‘Do you still have the butterfly net?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Haddon gave it to you in Sydney. Remember? Made me jealous.’

But I had no recollection of it.

I cut the engine and paddled in so as not to wake the village.

This time Fen shook her. ‘Nell. We’re here. We’ve reached the famous Kiona.’

‘Hush. Let’s not wake them,’ she whispered. ‘Lest we get shot by the arrows of the Great Warriors of the Sepik.’

‘Princes,’ Fen said. ‘Princes of the Sepik.’

My house stood apart from the rest, and hadn’t been lived in for many years. It was built around a rainbow gum tree, which came up through the floor and went out the roof. Many Kiona had come to believe it was a spirit tree, a place where their dead relatives gathered and made their plans, and some kept their distance, making a wide curve around my house when they passed by. They had offered to build me a house closer to the center of the village, but I had heard stories of anthropologists waiting months for their houses to be finished and I had been eager to settle in. I worried that Nell would have difficulty with my ladder, which was steep and nothing more than a wide pole with shallow notches for steps, but she climbed up, torch in hand, with ease. She didn’t notice the tree until she was inside and the flame lit the room. I heard her let out a big American ‘Wow.’

Fen and I hauled up their duffels, and I lit my three oil lamps to make the place seem more spacious. The gum tree took up a good bit of room. Nell stroked it. Its bark had shed and the trunk was smooth and streaked with orange and bright green and indigo. It wouldn’t have been the first rainbow gum she’d encountered, but it was a striking specimen. She ran her palm down a swath of blue. I had the odd feeling that they were communicating, as if I had just introduced her to an old friend and they were already getting on well. For the truth is I had stroked that tree many a time, spoken to it, sobbed against it. I busied myself, gathering my medicines and looking for
my whiskey, because I was tired and a bit raw from the long night and long ride, and I could not be certain I wouldn’t well up right then if she asked me a single question about my tree.

‘Ah, just what I was dreaming of,’ Fen said when he peered into the tin cup I handed him.

The two of us sat on the little sofas I’d made from bark cloth and kapok fiber while Nell wandered about. My body felt like it was still skimming across the water.

‘Don’t snoop, Nellie,’ he called over his shoulder. And then to me: ‘Americans make such good anthropologists because they’re so bloody rude.’

‘You’re admitting I’m a good anthropologist?’ she said from my workroom.

‘I’m saying you’re a nosy parker.’

She was bent over my desk, not touching anything, but looking closely. I could see there was a sheet of paper in the typewriter, but I couldn’t remember what it said.

I pointed to the box of medical supplies I’d set on the trunk between us. ‘Those wounds of hers need treating.’

Fen nodded.

‘I’ve never seen how anyone else works in the field,’ she said.

‘I guess I don’t count,’ Fen said.

‘Is that mango leaves? You have a question here about mango leaves.’

‘And now she’s going to solve your problem, having been here a full five minutes.’

I feigned confusion and joined her in the workroom.

She was looking at the great mess of notebooks and loose papers and carbons.

‘This makes me miss the work.’

‘It’s only been a few days, hasn’t it?’

‘I never settled in with the Mumbanyo like this.’ She looked at my clutter of papers as if it had value, as if she were certain something substantial would come out of it somehow.

I saw the note she’d been referring to.

mgo Ivs again on grv.??

I explained that I’d been to the burial of a boy in another Kiona hamlet and mango leaves were carefully placed over the grave.

‘You’d seen the pattern before?’

‘No, a different leaf pattern each time. But I can’t find the pattern to the patterns.’

‘Age, sex, social status, mode of death, shape of the moon, position of the stars, birth order, role in family.’ She stopped to take a breath. She looked like she had about forty-five other ideas for me.

‘No. They keep telling me there is no pattern.’

‘Perhaps there isn’t.’

‘The same old woman quietly gives the instructions.’

‘And when you ask her directly?’

‘Leave it alone, Nell,’ Fen said from the sofa. ‘He’s been here twice the time you have, for Christ’s sake.’

‘It’s all right. I could use some help. She’s the one woman in the area who won’t speak to me.’

‘Not even indirectly, through a relative?’

‘A white man killed her son.’

‘Do you know the circumstances?’

‘There had been some fighting downriver and the kiaps came in for a roundup. They calaboosed half the village. This young man had been visiting his cousin—nothing to do with the fight—resisted arrest, and died from a blow to the head.’

‘Have you made amends?’

‘What?’

‘Have you made offerings to this woman for the mistake of your kin?’

‘Those pigs are hardly my kin.’

‘To that woman they are. They don’t think there are more than twelve of us in the whole world.’

‘I’ve given her salt and matches and tried to charm her in every way I can think of.’

‘Is there a formal amends ritual?’

‘I don’t know.’

She looked exasperated with me. ‘You can’t afford to have someone so set against you. Everyone will know it and measure their response to you against it. She’s skewing all your results.’

Fen cackled behind us. ‘Didn’t take you long this time. I think that might be a record. Shall we make a pyre of all his notes?’

All her face could muster was a pale peach flush. ‘I’m sorry, I—’ She put her hand out halfway to me.

‘I’m sure you’re right. I should find out how to make amends.’

She didn’t seem to believe my tone of voice or the expression on my face, and apologized again. But I wasn’t put out by what she’d said. Quite the opposite. I was eager, desperate
for more. Ideas, suggestions, criticism of my approach. Fen might have had too much of it, but I had had too little.

‘Let’s see about treating those battle wounds.’

I went to the back of the house to fetch the medicines I’d collected.

I heard Fen say, ‘Well, you gave him a right sheep-dipping, didn’t you?’

I didn’t hear Nell respond. When I came back, she was sitting beside him and her face had returned to its eerie yellow.

Fen made no move to do it himself, so I asked for her left hand first, the one with the gash across the palm. I couldn’t understand how they’d been so cavalier about these cuts. Sepsis was one of the greatest risks in the field.

Fen must have seen something in my face. ‘Our medicine disappears in a week,’ he said. ‘Every time we get a shipment Nell uses it up on the scrapes and sores of all her kiddies.’

I doused the cut in iodine, swabbed it with boracic ointment, and wrapped it in a cotton bandage. Her hand at first was weightless in mine but soon it gave in and grew heavy.

I confess, I worked slowly. After the hand I addressed the lesions, two on her arm, one on her neck, and—she rolled up her pant leg—another on her right shin. They seemed to me to be small tropical ulcers, not yaws. I suspected there were more, but I could hardly ask her to remove her clothing. I gave her aspirin for her fever. Beside her Fen watched until his eyes closed.