Euphoria (7 page)

I shut my eyes and remembered the ceremony as I had witnessed it. It had been during my first month and I’d been sitting with the women—I was often put with the women in large gatherings, along with the children and the mentally ill. To my left was Tupani-Kwo, one of the oldest women of the village. I managed to ask her a few questions, but I hadn’t understood many of her answers. It was chaotic. The father and uncles of the boy being celebrated came out first, in dirty
tattered skirts and strings around their bellies like pregnant women wore. They hobbled along together as if they were sick or dying. The women came next, wearing male headdresses and necklaces made of homicidal ornaments and large orange penis gourds strapped around their genitals. They carried the men’s lime boxes and pushed the notched lime sticks in and out to make a loud noise and to show off the swinging tassels which hung from the end of the sticks, each one representing a past murder. The women walked tall and proud, appearing to enjoy the role. The boy and a few of his friends ran to them with big walking sticks and the women put down their lime boxes, took the sticks, and beat the men until they ran away.

I crept quietly back to get my notebook and citronella candle. Fen and Nell were dark lumps, hanging in their hammocks. Back in my spot in the doorway, I wrote about my most recent conversation with Tupani-Kwo about that day. I was surprised by the energy I suddenly had for it. The thoughts came fast, and I caught them, stopping only once to sharpen my pencil with a penknife. I thought of Nell’s euphoria and nearly laughed out loud. This little rush of words was the closest I’d come to any sort of elation in the field.

Behind me the stiff fibers of a hammock creaked and Nell came and sat beside me, her bare feet on the top rung of the ladder. She did have all ten toes.

‘I can’t sleep if someone else is working,’ she said.

‘Done.’ I closed the notebook.

‘No, please, continue. It’s also soothing.’

‘I was waiting for more words. I don’t think they were coming.’

She laughed.

‘What’s funny?’ I said.

‘You keep reminding me of things.’

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s just a story my father likes to repeat. I have no memory of it. He says at three or four I had a big tantrum and locked myself in my mother’s closet. I tore down her dresses and kicked her shoes all around, and made a terrible amount of noise, then there was absolute silence for a long time. “Nellie?” my mother said. “Are you all right?” and apparently I said, “I’ve spit on your dresses and I’ve spit on your hats and now I’m waiting for more spit.” ’

I laughed. I could see her with a round red face and a wild thicket of hair.

‘I promise that’s the last Nell Stone childhood vignette I will bore you with.’

‘Do you still amuse your parents?’ It was something I couldn’t imagine being able to do anymore.

She laughed. ‘Not in the least.’

‘Why not?’

‘I wrote a book all about the sex lives of native children.’

‘That is a bit less seemly than spitting on hats, isn’t it?’

‘A good bit less,’ she said in my accent. She put on Martin’s glasses. She’d been holding them in her hand. ‘The reactions to this book have been out of proportion. I was glad to escape the country.’

‘I’m sorry I haven’t read it.’

‘You have a pretty good excuse.’

‘I should have had someone send it.’

‘They haven’t warmed to it in England,’ she said. ‘Now go get some sleep. I’ll take this watch. Oh, look at the moon.’

It was the slightest paring, the rest of the unlit moon a faint aura behind it.

‘ “I saw the new moon, late yestereen, with the old moon in her arm,” ’ she said with a Scottish burr.

‘ “And I fear, I fear, my maister dear—” ’ I continued.

‘ “That we shall come to harm.” ’

‘ “They had na sail’d a league, a league,” ’ I said, thickening my own accent.

‘ “A league but barely three—” ’

‘ “When the lift grew dark and the wind blew loud—” ’

She joined me here, ‘ “And gurly grew the sea.” ’ I kept my eyes on the moon, but I heard the smile in her voice.

Americans could surprise you with the things they knew.

I’m not sure what we said after that, if it was a long time or a short time that went by before there was a snap and a thud behind us. We jumped up. Fen was on the ground in his hammock. I held the candle over him while Nell crouched down. His eyes were shut, and when she nudged him and asked him if he was all right, he said, ‘It’s always rough, this patch.’ And then, ‘Knock it with a shoe, yer git,’ and rolled over.

‘I think he’s trying to open a bottle of beer.’

We had a good laugh and left him be. I made a little bed with my extra clothes in the corner below my hammock. I didn’t think I’d actually sleep but I did, quite soundly, and they were packed up and waiting for me when I woke.

Nearly all the Wokup were on the beach to see us off. They yipped and hooted and the children flung themselves in the water.

‘A lot stronger on goodbye than hello, aren’t they?’ Fen said.

‘There never was a raid coming from the swamp,’ I said.

‘Probably not,’ Nell said.

Fen asked to drive the boat so I slowed and we wobbily swapped places. He opened up the throttle and we were off—fast.

‘Fen!’ Nell screeched, but she was half laughing. She turned around to face us and her knees brushed my shins. ‘I can’t watch. Tell me when we’re about to crash.’ Her hair, no longer plaited, blew toward me. The fever and loose hair, dark brown with threads of copper and gold, had brought an illusion of great health to her face.

If the Tam weren’t a good fit, they would go to Australia. This was my last chance to get it right. And I could tell she was skeptical. But Teket had been many times to the Tam to visit his cousin there, and even if everything he told me were only half true, I figured it should satisfy this pair of picky anthropologists. ‘I should have brought you here straightaway.’ I said, not entirely meaning to say it aloud. ‘It was selfish of me.’

She smiled, and instructed Fen not to kill us before we got there.

After several hours I saw the tributary we needed to take. Fen turned us toward it, letting in a little water on the port side. It was a narrow stream of yellowish brown. The sun disappeared and the air was cool on our faces.

‘Water’s low,’ Fen said.

‘You’re all right,’ I said, scanning for glimpses of the bottom.

The rains hadn’t come yet. The banks here rose high, walls of mud and coiling white roots. I watched carefully for the break Teket had told me about. He’d said it was soon after the turn. In a motorized boat it would come fast.

‘Here.’ I pointed right.

‘Here? Where?’

‘Right here.’ We were nearly past it.

The boat lurched, then slid into a tiny dark canal between what Teket called kopi, bushes that looked like freshwater mangroves.

‘You cannot be serious, Bankson,’ Fen said.

‘They’re fens, aren’t they?’ Nell said. ‘Fen among the fens.’

‘This is a fen? Jesus, help us,’ he said. The passage was wide enough for only one canoe. Branches scraped our arms and because we’d slowed down, insects came at us in clouds. ‘You could get bloody lost in here.’

Teket had told me there was only one path through. ‘Just follow the water.’

‘Like I’m going to do anything else. Fuck, the bugs are thick.’

We motored through this close corridor a long time, their trust in me weakening by the minute. I wanted to tell them everything I’d heard about the Tam, but best to have them arrive discouraged.

‘Sure you have enough petrol for this?’ Fen asked.

And just then the passage opened up.

The lake was enormous, at least twelve miles across, the water jet black and ringed by bright green hills. Fen pulled up on the throttle to idle and we swayed there for a moment. Across the water was a long beach, and, mirroring it in the water twenty yards offshore, a bright white sandbar. Or what I thought was a sandbar, until all at once it lifted, broke apart, and thinned into the air.

‘Osprey,’ I said. ‘White osprey.’

‘Oh my, Bankson,’ Nell said. ‘This is glorious.’

I
didn’t meet Helen Benjamin until 1938 when we both attended the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences conference in Copenhagen. I went to her panel discussion on eugenics, at which she was its only opponent and the only one who made sense. The way she spoke and moved her hands reminded me of Nell. I rose as soon as the discussion was over and made for the door. But somehow she got down off the stage and overtook me in the entrance hall before I could slip away. She seemed to know all my feelings, and merely thanked me for coming to her panel and handed me a large envelope. It was the kind of thing I’d grown used to, people hoping I’d help them publish their manuscripts, but from Helen it made no sense. Her
Arc of Culture
had been a great success, and whatever acclaim I had garnered by then, with the Grid and my book on the Kiona, owed a significant debt to her work.

I didn’t open the packet until I was on the train back to Calais. Such a cavalier gesture, my hand reaching into that brown envelope. It was not a manuscript. It was a booklet made of white typing paper covered by bark cloth, folded in half and sewn down the middle seam. Attached with a paper clip was a note from Helen:
She made one of these each time she arrived in a new place, and kept them tucked in the fabric liner of a trunk, away from prying eyes. I have kept the others, but I thought
you should have this one.
There were no more than forty pages, a good many blank at the end. The writings spanned three and half months, beginning with her first days on Lake Tam.