The People in the Trees (23 page)

Only once did I hear Tallent’s voice change, and much later I would wish that I had been watching him more closely at that moment, that I had thought to seize the image in my head and preserve it in wax, so that I might always be able to look upon it as one of those rare moments in which one senses the plates of the world shift beneath one and life is forever altered: on one side of the buckling earth is the past, and on the other side the present, and there is no soldering the two together ever again.

“I’m going to ask Mua when his father died,” Tallent murmured to me, his eyes still on Mua. “Mua, e koa huata ku’oku make’e?”

Mua responded quickly, tossing his arm toward the group, and as he did, I saw Tallent grow absolutely still, and in that instant—as strange as it will sound—I had the sense that he was trying to
shrink into himself, to pitch himself backward into the soft floor of the jungle, which might open like the mouth of a great beast and swallow him, gently, whole.

“He’s still alive,” said Tallent, and then he looked at me, and in the night—we had been interviewing Mua for at least an hour by then—his face, under the copper of his skin, was as pale as bone. “Vanu is his father. Mua says we can speak to him if we like.”

It took an entire day of Esme and Tallent talking—to each other, to me—to make me fully comprehend the implications of Mua’s story. By this time we were moving again, the dreamers (as I had come to think of them, for their somnambulists’ drool, their dopey half-glaze of clarity, as if they were slogging through a thick sediment of sleep) separated into three groups, bound together by their wrists with a long string of vine which was fastened to the waist of one of the guides. We were headed—again—uphill, but in no particular direction, for Mua was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to explain to us where his village was. But uphill seemed the only possibility; to our left and right, the forest had once again closed in, the tree trunks nudged together so tightly that only the faintest ringlets of ferns could penetrate the millimeters between them.

Of course the first thing I had done after Tallent had finished translating was to pluck Vanu from the group (he had been sleeping and flicked away my hand several times, grouchily, before I was able to rouse him) and bring him over to Mua. I watched him as Tallent tried to negotiate a conversation between the three of them. Did he look—even as I was thinking it, I couldn’t believe I was even entertaining the question—older than Mua? Maybe, I thought; if Mua looked sixty or thereabouts, Vanu appeared maybe five or six years older. And was there a resemblance? Perhaps—both had the same flat cheekbones, the same jutting lower jaw, the same low forehead carved up with horizontal grooves like a bit of bark. But on the other hand, they all looked the same to me, and had I brought over Ika’ana instead of Vanu, would I not have been able to see a similarity as well?

But later, when I was speaking with Tallent—or trying to, at any rate; Esme, who had been so slow throughout most of our ascent,
was now trotting after us like a small white dog—and telling him of my observations, I was informed that I had missed the more important information, information that, as Esme seemed pleased to tell me, I could not have understood the significance of.

The first thing was, apparently, the matter of the king. “Do you remember when Mua said that his father was twelve in the year the king died?” asked Tallent.

“Of course,” I said. “But that could be any king, right? The current king’s father, perhaps?”

“It could have had he just said ‘the king.’ But he didn’t. He used a particular honorific, ma, which is used only in association with one particular king—King Vaka I, the king to unite the islands. And when did King Vaka I die?”

I said nothing. Of course I didn’t know.

“In 1831,” chirped Esme from nowhere.

“Right,” said Tallent. I had the distinct sense then that he and Esme had been practicing this call-and-response the night before, and I resolved right then that I would not participate in their little theater. “And do you remember, Norton, how Mua spoke of the ka’aka’a healer?”

“Yes,” I said, and had again a vision of the healer holding the stone baby aloft in his hands, his chants and the women’s cries filling the close, tiny hut.

“Well, ka’aka’a was outlawed by King Vaka I’s son, King Maku, in 1850, upon penalty of death. So—”

“Actually, 1849,” said Esme, all but panting with excitement.

“Sorry, 1849. So that means—”

“Yes, but surely there were people who disobeyed. If this was a tradition—”

“You don’t understand, Norton,” said Esme, and so intense was the effort I expended to keep from slapping her that I felt myself grow dizzy, “U’ivuans do not disobey the king. Ever.”

“So what are you saying?” I hurried on, before Tallent could chime in with his agreement and the two could remind me how stupid I was. “That Vanu was born in 1831?”

“Actually, he’d have been born in 1819,” said Tallent peaceably.

I stopped then and looked at them. “Please,” I said. “Please don’t tell me that you believe him.”

“Why not?” asked Tallent in the same calm, reasonable tone.

For a moment I did not trust myself to speak.
Oh god
, I realized,
I have made a terrible mistake
. I thought of Sereny, his gusting, benign presence, the sad and resigned look he had fixed me with when I had told him—without any thought!—that I would be delighted to fly off to an island I’d never heard of, with an anthropologist I’d never heard of, for almost half a year. I felt myself gripped by an intense desire to get off the island, followed almost immediately with a dull sort of ache—I would never escape. I was aware then of how lonely I was, here with the dreamers and the guides and Tallent, who was frustratingly out of my reach, and ugly, charmless Esme, with her round, shiny face and her khaki shorts that bunched at her crotch.

“Well,” I said, as calmly as I could, “the turtle, for one.”

“Oh,” said Tallent, waving his hand as if I were a waiter offering him a dish he did not care for. “Forget the turtle for a minute. What’s important is—”

“The stone baby,” I continued.

“But those do exist,” Esme interrupted.

“And are
exceedingly
rare,”
³¹
I finished. “But Tallent,” I pleaded—I needed to know, and I feared his answer—“you’re not implying that you really believe Vanu to be
one hundred and thirty-one years old
, are you?”

Tallent looked at me for a long moment before answering, and when he spoke next, his voice was gentle again. “I know it seems improbable, even impossible, Norton,” he said. “But I can find no other conclusion. And besides”—and here he swept his arm out, indicating everything that was around us: the trees with their microscopic monkeys and massive sloths, the stones bearded with green and the rocks stubbled with moss, and, ahead of us, Eve and her people, shuffling behind the guides in a slow, ragged line—“what about this place is
not
impossible?”

And to that I unfortunately had no answer. Even Esme was silent. After a while there was nothing left to do but continue walking, and for quite some time none of us spoke and the sounds of the jungle stepped in to supply the conversation we could not have.

So there I was, a scientist (presumably), a doctor (allegedly), and a colleague (regrettably) of two people who were convinced that a man who appeared to be 65 was actually 131.

I knew that they thought I was being rigid and intellectually incurious and boringly conservative, and I knew too that they knew I thought them ridiculous and undisciplined and dangerously fanciful. The difference was that only one of us was bothered by this. Esme, in fact, seemed overjoyed, cleaving to Tallent like a flake of fungus to a damp sapling.

It was difficult not to sulk. Even Tallent, whose ability to notice the everyday shifts of emotions normal people experienced was rather less than stellar, swung into step with me for a minute. “Don’t worry, Norton,” he said, handing me a manama fruit (bruised, bulging, busy with hunonos), which I by this time felt confident enough to admit I really didn’t like.

It was also difficult to admit that in my desire to introduce some scientific rigor and logic into the process, I had unintentionally given Tallent and Esme even more fodder for their fairy tale. I had made us reinterview all of our foundlings in a process I had hoped would help us determine their true ages. This, however, had proved more challenging than I’d hoped, chiefly because it seemed that there were very few recorded events on Ivu’ivu: they had here no notion of the king, no notion of time, no notion of history. They had never seen a ho’oala before—they continued to stare at us, alone and in groups, in silence, the bolder ones plucking at our wrists and trying to peer up our shorts in an artless echo of our examinations of them—but this piece of ignorance was of no help, as no ho’oala had ever set foot on Ivu’ivu before. Indeed, one of the most memorable events of the past decades (I couldn’t bring myself to say the word
century
) was Vanu’s arrival, a day that Ika’ana and Vi’iu, Ivaiva and Va’ana all claimed to remember. Each told the story a little differently, embroidered and embellished in various ways (Vi’iu’s rendering had Vanu arriving
like a Micronesian Vishnu on the back of a monstrous, trudging opa’ivu’eke), but they all remembered it: skinny little Vanu, his funny, torn tava-cloth bloomers, too young even to have earned his first spear. The twins both claimed that they had been in the midst of their wedding ceremony when suddenly, disrupting the celebrations, there was Vanu, unable to move his eyes from the side of pork roasting over the fire for the feast that would follow.
³²
Only Ukavi said that she had not yet been born to witness Vanu’s entry into her life. But then she did remember being a young girl and watching Vanu get married. Like the others, her memories grew more complete and assured the deeper into the past she reached.

“He’d have been about seventeen when he was married,” said Tallent later, his pen bobbing over his notebook. “So Ukavi was born shortly after he arrived, which means she’s approximately—what? A hundred and nine? A hundred and eight? Around there.”

But it was Ika’ana’s story that really made him and Esme excited. For Ika’ana, it emerged, had been born five years before the great earthquake, the one event that everyone on Ivu’ivu seemed to remember. This was a terrible catastrophe for the islands, felt as far away as Fiji to the west and Hawaii to the north. U’ivuan mythology explained it as a passionate lovers’ quarrel between Ivu’ivu and A’aka (over what, no one seemed to know), a war in which the gods, each determined to destroy the other, assaulted one another with all the weaponry they had, A’aka enlisting his siblings, the gods of the skies, to storm and rage on his behalf and Ivu’ivu riling the waters into towering waves, ones that reached so far into the sky they almost scraped the sun. After it was over, the two never fought again, in part (so the story went) because they realized their powers were evenly matched and one would never be able to overwhelm the other, and in part because their old and long-suffering friend Opa’ivu’eke had begged them to stop, and neither god could bear to see him made unhappy by them. In U’ivuan, the earthquake was known as Ka Weha: the Fight.

“I was a small child during Ka Weha,” said Ika’ana to Tallent. “But I remember how the ground beneath me split and cracked
like a no’aka fruit,
³³
and how my mother ran with me into a nest of lawa’a ferns and held me until the gods stopped their arguing. And I remember how when we made our way back to the village, the cooking fires had spread and the male’es were on fire, and how my mother said we were lucky it was the beginning of ‘uaka because the rains would soon be coming and we would be safe. That night we prayed and danced to the gods and their happiness, and there has never been another fight since.”

He said a great deal more, and although Tallent leaned forward, asking questions and writing and writing, he translated nothing else for me, and when I asked him what else Ika’ana had said, he only looked thoughtful and said he needed to think about it for a while.