The Sex Lives of Cannibals (2 page)

It was often suggested to me by concerned family members that I should get my foot in the door with a midsized newspaper. I rejected this out of hand. I was familiar enough with journalism to know that were I to cover a news-type event I would rapidly lose all my journalistic-like composure, discard all my faculties of reason, and descend into a stifling murk of uncertainty and fear. I knew this because when I lived in Prague I had been an actual journalist. An English-language weekly newspaper had generously agreed to assign me to real stories based on the masterpiece that was my analysis of the Saudi oil industry, a twenty-page, richly textured, subtly nuanced, carefully crafted display of plagiarism, which earned me a B+ during my junior year of college. These, obviously, were the glory years of the whole westerners-in-Prague era, shortly after the demise of that little experiment in social engineering known as communism, when hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans, Canadians, Australians, and other purveyors of Western ways descended upon the most beautiful city in the world and pretty much did anything they wanted to do. It was great.

My mother is Czech and as a consequence I like to think that I was not merely a seeker of the transcendently hip when I lived in Prague. I was born in the Netherlands and as a child I often traveled to Czechoslovakia to visit my grandfather, who lived in an apartment in Prague overlooking the Vltava River. The faint whiff of burning coal is enough to bring back the indolent river swans, the salty bread and sweet yogurt, the smoke-drenched rooms, my grandfather’s beer glass, and the long wanderings through soot-stained passageways in a city that for a time spoke to me only of the deeds of kings. When I was seven, just after my parents divorced, my mother had my younger sister and me baptized in a small church in South Bohemia. Seven, of course, is the age when the brain is at its most fecund, when every image and experience offers portent, and so when Prague’s many statues of beheaded saints, detongued martyrs, and gargoyles were all helpfully brought to my attention as being relevant in some way to my life and death, I pretty much stopped sleeping for a year, fearing the nightly intrusion of alarming images, particularly of a slender bearded man being put to death in a highly creative and terrifying fashion just so I could go to heaven one day. To further the potency of my imagination, Prague in the 1970s was experiencing what was quaintly called Normalization, which is Soviet-speak for the dread that occurs when the babicka next door is an informer, which leads to a somber and fearful state of being that is far more efficient in quelling deviation from the right and true path than the intimidation offered by Soviet soldiers.

That world, of course, was happily discarded, and with Vaclav Havel installed as a kind of philosopher-king in the great, looming castle above Prague, I moved to the city shortly after college, fortunately no longer palpitating at the sight of saintly relics, but aware that this city of spires and pubs had a way of getting inside you. There was something ephemeral about Prague in the early 1990s, and it is the only city I have known to truly have a spirit. I began writing for
The Prague Post
, or rather they used my name above articles that bore no semblance to the prose I submitted for their consideration. “A story is like a car trip,” tutored my editor. “You, the writer, are the car that takes readers from point A to B to C without leaving the road.” As careful readers may have already surmised, I favor the ditches of digression.

During my foray into journalism, I never really felt I knew enough about a particular newsworthy event to provide written coverage of the newsworthy event. The written word presented in a journalistic fashion is regarded by most as the indisputable truth and this just left me dumbfounded with a fear of being wrong. I am a big believer in the Law of Unintended Consequences and I imagined that my failure to capture every nuance and subtlety of a newsworthy event would lead to the collapse of governments, economic crises, and lots of hardship for the people of Eastern and Central Europe. Never mind that my stories usually appeared on page C8, and that they were written in a language few people in the region understood, and that my readership probably never exceeded four, and that those four people were, presumably, the four people I interviewed, via a translator, who would suggest—not unkindly—the questions I should be asking. Fortunately, I was both keenly interested in events in the region—march of history and all that—as well as highly opinionated, and so I began writing for the newspaper’s opinion page, providing comment on the European Union’s policies toward their Eastern brethren, the historical roots of the severing of Czechoslovakia, the West’s dithering over Bosnia, Havel’s conception of democracy, and other topics I was not remotely qualified to comment upon. This I found to my liking. It is a remarkably easy thing to do, pointing out the faults of others and suggesting remedies or courses of action in an argumentative and pedantic sort of way, and I am still amazed that there are many people in the American media who are paid very big money to do this.

Churning out 750 words on what American policy toward Slovakia should be rarely takes more than an afternoon, and so I spent a lot of time falling in love and traveling and living the life I wanted to live. I saw things that both pleased and horrified me, and in comparison America seemed a sedate and frivolous place. I traveled wherever my meager funds allowed and saw history unfold. On a trip to Poland I had the train connection from hell—arrive at Frankfurt an der Oder at 1:30
A.M.
, depart for Warsaw at 5:45
A.M.
—and while curled asleep on the train platform I was suddenly awakened by the Russian Army. Thousands of Russian soldiers passed through the station on their way from Eastern Germany, which was once again one with Western Germany, on their way back to Russia, which I thought was just the niftiest piece of history I had ever seen. A few months later, I too boarded a train for Russia, where I had a very exciting encounter with a bear on a bridge in St. Petersburg, and where I discovered that everything one has read about vodka consumption in that part of the world is true, and now that I think about it, the bear on the bridge was probably the only sober creature I encountered during my three weeks in Russia. I took a ferry to Dubrovnik, on the stunningly beautiful Dalmatian coast, where my friends and I were accosted by a Croatian soldier who charged out of a bar upon our passing, exclaimed “Tourists!” and when we nodded, said “You are the first since the war,” and then hustled us into the bar, where we spent the hours after curfew descending into a sublime melancholy on a verandah overlooking the shell-scarred old town while listening to the staccato crackling of gunfire. In Turkey, I slipped while rock climbing above a waterfall and fractured three vertebrae, which really hurt, though I did find great happiness when, lying crumpled in a gorge, I told my toes to move and they did. I also went to Bosnia-Herzegovina. I obtained press credentials through
The Prague Post
and soon found myself in Mostar, where I was deeply, deeply in over my head and utterly dependent upon the kindness of English mercenaries, and I learned there that the distance between civilization and savagery is exceedingly small and this has scared me ever since.

The point of this little excursion into events and happenings that have nothing whatsoever to do with the South Pacific is simply that I had grown accustomed to life being interesting and adventure ridden and, rather childishly, I refused to believe that this must necessarily come to an end and that the rest of my life should be a sort of penance for all the reckless, irresponsible, and immensely fun things I’d done before. Being a data-entry clerk, even though I was very, very good, just didn’t compare to being an incompetent war correspondent. In Washington, I never quite knew what my ambitions were. I sensed that I should move on from waiting tables and housepainting and temping and clerking, but the idea of working in an office and doing office-type work in a committed fashion seemed like a quiet little death to me. Fortunately, with no prodding from me, Sylvia was also inclined to make a few changes. She had begun working for a nongovernmental organization that focused on international development. Suffice it to say that the Washington end of such work can be a mite dispiriting and Sylvia soon began to yearn for the field, which is international development–speak for Third World hellhole. And so we both began applying for jobs in the most miserable places on Earth.

I should perhaps pause here for a moment and mention something of my courtship with Sylvia. It was a night of possiblity. The air was redolent of wheat, hops, and barley. A kindly gentleman, his dreadlocks flowing, made polite introductions. I suavely filled her plastic cup with Budweiser. Her eyes sparkled. Soon, a few dates, some soulful conversation, several well-timed romantic gestures, a stirring hike in the Appalachian Mountains, up where eagles soared, and we moved in together, sharing a charming apartment with an enormous deck shaded by an ancient elm, on a narrow street illuminated by gaslights in Washington’s hip, predominately gay neighborhood of Dupont Circle. We were smitten. We pledged to follow each other to the ends of the Earth. (“
Pphhhttt
,” said Sylvia, upon reading, over my shoulder. “What drivel.”)

Sylvia got the first potentially interesting, exciting, possibly dangerous job nibble. Sarajevo beckoned. She was being considered for a position as a program officer with a refugee agency. She had a phone interview and I watched, standing in our living room, silently cheering
yes, good answer!
, but, in a loss for Bosnia, she was passed over for lack of experience. Then I got the call. Tanzania this time. I was being considered for a position as a press liaison for a refugee agency that operated a camp for 500,000 Rwandan refugees. I am pretty good at compartmentalizing and I figured that I could balance the wretchedness of the camps, and the dismal fact that they contained the Hutu perpetrators of genocide, with safari-type excursions and remain sane. But the guy who had the job decided that one year of liaising between the Rwandan refugees and the world press was not quite enough and so he decided to stay for another year, which upon reflection was probably just as well. And then nothing, just a few letters thanking us for our interest in the program coordinator position in Sudan, or Angola, or Cambodia, but unfortunately, et cetera, et cetera. A change of strategy was called for. If no one was going to send us to an exotic locale then we would just go ourselves and make the best of it.

We decided to move to Hanoi. We would do this by moving out of our apartment and into the basement of my mother’s house, where we would live for three months and save enough money to get going in Vietnam. My mother, inexplicably, was not opposed to this and we were about to give notice to our landlord when Sylvia called me at work and asked if I would be inclined to move to a small atoll in the Equatorial Pacific and whether I would be able to do so in about three weeks’ time. She had been offered a position as country director for the Foundation for the Peoples of the South Pacific–Kiribati Office. Five seconds later I quit my job. Then I called Sylvia back.

“Kiri-what?”

CHAPTER
2

In which the Author reveals the Fruit of his Research into the Strange Island Nation he has declared his new Home (which leaves much unknown), compensates for his Ignorance with his Lively Imagination (which is inadequate, very much so), and Packs (inappropriately).

T
he word
Kiribati
, pronounced
kir-ee-bas
on account of the missionaries being stingy with the letters they used to transcribe the local language, is derived from the word
Gilberts
, which is the name of one of the three island groups that comprise this improbable nation. Located just a notch above the equator and five thousand miles from anywhere, Tarawa is the capital of this country of thirty-three atolls scattered over an ocean area as large as the continental United States. The total landmass of these islands is about three hundred square miles, roughly the size of the greater Baltimore metropolitan area, though I believe it halves at high tide. Most of Kiribati’s landmass is found on Kiritimati Island (Christmas Island), several thousand miles away from Tarawa. What remains is not much.

To picture Kiribati, imagine that the continental U.S. were to conveniently disappear leaving only Baltimore and a vast swath of very blue ocean in its place. Now chop up Baltimore into thirty-three pieces, place a neighborhood where Maine used to be, another where California once was, and so on until you have thirty-three pieces of Baltimore dispersed in such a way so as to ensure that 32/33 of Baltimorians will never attend an Orioles game again. Now take away electricity, running water, toilets, television, restaurants, buildings, and airplanes (except for two very old prop planes, tended by people who have no word for “maintenance”). Replace with thatch. Flatten all land into a uniform two feet above sea level. Toy with islands by melting polar ice caps. Add palm trees. Sprinkle with hepatitis A, B, and C. Stir in dengue fever and intestinal parasites. Take away doctors. Isolate and bake at a constant temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The result is the Republic of Kiribati.

Of course, I didn’t know all this at the time. Despite insinuations otherwise (“Imagine a littered, stinking sandbar in the middle of nowhere,” relayed a prior visitor to the island, “That’s Tarawa”), I knew, just knew, that distant Tarawa would be the proverbial tropical paradise, where the natives were kind and noble, and the setting, undoubtedly lush and languid, would prove inspirational for ambitious endeavors of an artistic and edifying nature. I knew this because I had little else to go on, and when unaware I tend to be buoyantly optimistic. There is only so much research one can do on a place like Kiribati. It appears that for some reason no one goes there. Not even Paul Theroux bothered stopping by on his journey through the Pacific, which he wrote about in
The Happy Isles of Oceania
. When one considers how much territory Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, Jan Morris, and the other superstars of the travel-writing genre have covered, there really isn’t much left for others to scribble about, except maybe Kiribati and Buffalo, New York. I’ve been to Buffalo, but I will graciously leave that commentary for someone else and instead present a few interesting tidbits about Kiribati. Henceforth, the facts, as gleaned from the Internet, the Central Intelligence Agency, and random sources:

Population (1996)—79, 386

Life Expectancy (male)—52.56 years

Life Expectancy (female)—55.78 years

Infant Mortality Rate—9.84%

Religions—Roman Catholic, Protestant, Seventh-Day Adventist, Baha’i, Church of God of North Carolina, Mormon

Number of Islands—33

Number of Inhabited Islands—21

Ratio of Sea to Land—4000:1

Natural Resources—Phosphate (production halted in 1979)

Independence—July 12, 1979 (from the United Kingdom)

Foreign Missions—Australia, New Zealand, the People’s Republic of China

Arable Land—0%

Terrain—Low-lying coral atolls with extensive reefs

Currency—Australian dollar

Per Capita GDP—A $800 (US $450 approx.)

Underemployment Rate—70%

Exports—Copra, fish, shark fins

Radio—AM 1, FM 0, Shortwave 0

Television—None

Military—None

From this I discerned that if I wanted to live for longer than 52.56 years I’d best get my shots; that solid bowel movements might become worthy of some celebration; that there is something about the Church of God of North Carolina that gives me the creeps (ditto the Mormon church); that the end of phosphate production and the beginning of independence is perhaps not entirely coincidental; that China is probably up to no good in Kiribati; that with 70 percent of the country underemployed I would fit in just fine, professionally speaking; that shark fin exports suggest the presence of sharks; and that despite some snobbishness vis-à-vis my relationship to American pop culture, I might, just might, start yearning for
The Simpsons
and televised professional football games.

In those frantic three weeks, I learned little else about Kiribati and so I relied upon my imagination, which was no longer boyishly unformed, but conditioned by experience. I knew that Tarawa was a thin island and that it curved around an expansive lagoon and since I had never actually been on a thin island with a lagoon I visualized something very like Cape Cod, which technically is not an island, nor is a bay a lagoon, but that’s neither here nor there. Naturally, I began to assume that we would live in a wood shingle house with white window frames just beyond sand dunes with tall grass and that the natives would be drawn toward plaid and complaints about summer people. I also knew that there were villages on Tarawa. Islands with villages conjure up the Mediterranean for me and so I imagined that there would be village squares with charming little cafés occupied by people looking fabulous in Armani and passionately arguing about coconut varieties, revealing that despite years of multicultural awareness training I still remained an ethnocentric dunderhead.

Regarding the South Pacific generally, I had seen pictures of Bora Bora and the like and knew that the South Pacific was deemed pretty and that the words
tropical paradise
were often tossed about in reference to islands in the South Pacific. I knew that the Brando kids had not thrived in Tahiti. I knew that while I was exceptionally literate in matters of geography, I had never heard of Niue, Tuvalu, or Vanuatu. I knew that periodically an island was nuked. I knew that Pacific Islanders were either Polynesian, Melanesian, or Micronesian and that I had a pretty good idea which was which. I knew that James Michener’s
South Pacific
didn’t tell me much about the South Pacific, but lots about the mores and predilections of Americans in the 1940s and ’50s. I knew that the islands were both good and bad for Paul Gauguin. I knew that Robert Louis Stevenson had spent some time in the region and that Amelia Earhart didn’t quite make it out. (And neither did RLS, which I did not know then.) I knew the significance of Pitcairn Island and suspected that there were many bars in the South Pacific called The Bounty. I knew that the South Pacific was where anthropologists went to prove that Pacific Islanders were somehow
different
, in a fundamental violent way, only to be refuted later, though the cannibalism thing kind of lingers. I knew that the first westerner to touch upon many of the islands was Capt. James Cook. I knew that during World War II battles in the Pacific were inevitably described as “bloody,” and if I had to choose, I would rather land on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 than on Tarawa in 1943. I did not know anything else.

We began packing. It was like a high stakes game of
If you were stuck on a deserted island
. . . Our only guidance was Kate, the woman Sylvia was being sent out to replace. Her advice was to bring nothing we valued. Everything will rot, she said. Nothing of value was easy enough. More difficult was my inability to imagine equatorial heat. “I don’t think you’re going to need those,” Sylvia said, observing the wool sweaters I was packing.

“I’m sure it will be a little cool in the evenings,” I replied. “Particularly in the winter.”

“I see. I think, perhaps, you might be having a little conceptual trouble with the idea of living on the equator.”

This was true. I’d spent my formative years in Canada. I was hard-wired for seasons. We discussed what Kate had said about the weather on Tarawa.

“Hotter than Washington in August?” I inquired.

“Hotter.
Searing
was her word.”

“It’s not the heat, you know. It’s the humidity.”

“Like a wet blanket,” she said.

I decided that this was wrong, inaccurate, an exaggeration. It is well known that the stultifying weather conditions predominant in Washington, D.C., in August are the result of unique topographical and climatic conditions having to do with the jet stream and the gulf stream and the pollen situation and that it is unique to the MidAtlantic region and could not possibly be worse anywhere else on Earth.

I packed a sweater. “And I’m taking my jeans too,” I said, defiantly.

The last few days were spent saying goodbye to friends and family. Do try to visit , we told everyone. Yes, we’ll try, they said, but when they envisioned the trip we could sense the skepticism. Finally, there was only one thing left to do. I proposed to Sylvia. The proposition was accepted. And then we left, in the darkness of night, beginning the long, long journey—as such journeys should be—to Paradise.