Both Sides of the Moon (2 page)

Wai means water. Wera means hot. Waiwera is situated on the outskirts of Two Lakes sited about the middle of the North Island, of the two islands that make up New Zealand, south of the Equator in the Pacific (this is for the tourists, you understand, who haven’t read the brochures). I don’t know about the rest of the country, let alone the world, only that it feels part of a universal state. The world is right where you happen to be, is it not, it cannot be any other?

Listen, I need ears to tell that I understand the world is but the private perception of each individual child and man and woman, but that it could be broadened. My father knows, so we his children know, that humans, all of life, are star dust. But these people don’t.
That they emerged out of the celestial ferment. They are not conscious that we were billions of years in the womb of space before we became this. Look, we’re right here and they don’t know, they don’t think of it like that, that we are where the Earth’s thin crust has cracks that let the fiery inner core of our beginnings manifest. They’re a simple people who only care that they are alive and well enough to continue as what they were yesterday. They would laugh at my struggling mind-torment with everything and them. Laugh, and then scorn me.

I am here when the former war men come to bathe, feet on the reminder war-march on the silica home surface; they were warriors once, in their hundred-years-ago-and-beyond ancestral past, then their 1940s World War II duration. Now they’re Waiwera contented, war-sated feet marching to this their peace-stationing place to relive the scenes of war sweet war, memory stained in blood, minds etched in battle happiness. But they talk about rugby a lot. The whole country does. But the Maori more; it’s where Maori man best flourishes, on the rugby field — and when chance comes along, on war fields. They say it themselves: A Maori is warrior before
anything
. A thousand years’ history has been lived in the making of them (us?). Physicality is like moving in a dream to them.

Old young men come to soak old war wounds, soak in war memories. They hardly ever talk about killed brothers and cousins and village mates; only brief emotional mentions, let grief stay deep within man, be the engraved name on the bronze plaque on the Archway of Remembrance. Ae, better to speak of slain enemies, good to speak of killed Germans, but even some of them admired. Once they came round to seeing Maori fighter men’s fighting superiority.

They remember the good times of their long, five- and
six-year
duration, on Greek soil, Tunisian, Libyan, Egyptian, even in German prison camps. But it ended and they came home and found that warrior glory does not provide, except with what he can’t feed a family on. Not even pride. For the second time in their history, they learned the lesson that warrior man is worthless in a modern world. Confused at being inside so flush with warrior pride; frustrated that such uplifted sense of self could not be valid, carries no weight. Just as they were the first time, when the white man arrived in his
growing numbers that could no longer be argued with.

But warrior men had music. They gave it and they took it. Of songs in foreign language so easily learnt by easy-flowing Maori tongues. Italian songs the best, so suited to passionate, volatile, musical, young Maori men fighting in that country. They laugh that if Maori men were born Italian they would run the Mafia. Maori men better suited to simple life, simple solutions, love and violence dispensed and despatched with simple passion and intuitive
understanding
of justice. And if no justice then bad luck, boy. Don’t mess with a Maori. It’s what they say. And laugh about in their mateship togetherness. Here in their thermal baths breaking out in Italian love songs.

Imagine: Maori men in steaming mineral water under stars singing love odes to Italian women twelve thousand miles away,
having
war-murdered their male kith and kin.

A voice cries out, Remember that time? And time stands still then; only the stirring of re-positioning bodies in the concrete tubs, big powerful arms out of the water rested on tub edge, settling back for time to be turned back. This listener in his next-door pool, the river gurgling below us, the stars glassed over by morning blue, my eyes glassed over by pretending not to be listening too hard; the landscape in choked cry. A voice stifling its own choking and changing the story he was about to tell. Too sad. Too sad. Life is for the living.

They remember the little Italian village where they killed the mayor’s pet pig. Feels just like yesterday that they solemnly carried the pig carcass under a blanket on a stretcher, and the heartfelt villagers took off their hats and lowered heads in respect to this assumed killed Maori soldier.

We consigned that beast to our God of food with barely a squeal, eh boys? Like night action against Jerry. He departs this mortal coil without right of even a last cry. That’s what they get when they go to war with a Maori. (And I, the spy-child in witness to this, wondering what it made of them that otherwise should not have been. Maori village boys, wholly unsophisticated, marching war boots over Italian soil in town-to-town, village-to-village battle with the German army. Maori boys discovering their genetic sophisticated understanding of war. Maori boys becoming big hero boys in the
arena of war.) But Maori boys, still boys at heart, clear of the village and free to fall over themselves with laughter.

1941/2 Italian pork cooked in a Maori hangi earth oven of olive firewood heating Italian stones to be covered by Italian soil, cooking three hours tender in the ground. So far from Maori
homeland
, but smell senses take boys back home.

Maori laughter echoing across ancient landscape. Maori warrior thinking lasts forever. Bad mistake. Thinking is a changing thing, always growing. But can’t tell a warrior man that, can’t tell him anything. Too strong in what he believes he is.

Yes, and Maori (universal) man-eyes on untouchable Italian women, so beautiful they take breath away, make him promise death most final for Italian man who sides with German enemy and nestles with such delectable flesh. Maori soldier with English-made bayonet pushing into Italian flesh, same as enemy German flesh, eh Mapu?

Yeah, all the same, Hemi, like women, eh? Yeah, about the same: soft flesh yielding to irresistible hard object. Cock into cunt, pote into tore. Italian soldier-flesh easily punctured by Sheffield-fired steel rammed by tough Maori hand fighting under New Zealand flag on behalf of Great Britain allied to many countries: war such a great complex agreement of violent, hardly ever noble, chaos.

Hear it: Maori war cry echoing over vineyard and olive grove landscape. See it: sun-baked picture like paintings like best chosen depictions of themselves. Maori war cry bellows through narrow cobbled village streets of crumbling plaster walls, in tones of age and aesthetic missed by Maori fighterboys, here to fight, not to be sightseeing tourists.

But some did notice the village fountains, the sitting places in pools of cool shadow, the superior architecture and that mysterious presence of a more complex culture. The scent of creative flowering caught up with the tempered and reforged rage; some of the Maori fighter boys did notice the angles of cut shadow and the contrast between light and its opposite against aged white-stone column and chiselled building edge. None did miss the handsome, skilful,
confident kids appearing and reappearing in the up and down of streets like crazy corridors and haphazard maze of cellar doorways and narrow alleyways, this spectacularly, different long way from home.

Watch the young local boys show off soccer skills in their streets. But this is war. And men, grown-up boys, died. So now watch the change, of all innocence going, at word reaching that these
brown-skinned
, powerful-legged invaders have wrought death and mayhem to their own because they chose to side with the pushed-back German would-be conquerors of the world. Watch them.

Watch classical young innocence turn to age-old, glisten-eyed loathing as different brown of skins in khaki uniform, Polynesian feature, march below flowered balconies dripping with colour and washing, below classical architecture and clever wrought-iron railings. Wailing Italian widows and grieving mothers, grandmamas, aunts, sisters and hatred-filled fathers, and old men still young with hatred, and the village cripples and physically forsaken with the worst hatred in this land of terrible beauty, even the mad, the mentally defective, all watch with Gorgonian stare as their Maori murderers dance warrior victory ritual on their streets, slapping muscle-hard chests pounding with murderers’ proud hearts driven by genes of an ancient murderous culture. As if these people have never known murder nor heard their streets echo with the victory cry of other invaders.

See the hatred dare not speak itself even in its own tongue, as brute brown warriors guzzle back wine like downing Italian blood.

And now their still-fine surviving bodies lift out of warm home waters blessed by undersoil nature, blessed by copper and brown skin and the muscle of a thousand years’ warrior breeding, the ready eruption of warrior like their natural surroundings. Even in laughter and smile it simmers: the instinct to fight, the inherited memories of felled enemies, strewn murdered bodies like so much storm debris washed up on to a shore. Warriors cleaving open enemy chests, twisting the cleverly designed hook of bone club up under the
ribbones 
to pull apart the heart’s caging, and thereupon tear the heart from its muscle-holding and hold it, with beat left, triumphant to the new dawn sky.

Men in wet shine and dark sheen glisten, their laughter moves to the changing shed, in deeper shadow there, so now they giggle about a kind of loving — kind of, since it has my mother’s name on it, and my shame is unable to protect nor stop it, their half-whispered utterances, in the back-echo of men’s laughter.

Do they think I don’t hear each whispered breath and shushing warning that it’s her son out there, the kid in the end pool who’s always here, Henry Te Amo’s nephew, the half-caste, yeah him. (Yes and her. It’s my mother you talk about — of your
knowing
her, or knowing what she is.)

Spends half his time at his uncle’s, strange little fulla you don’t know what he’s thinking — no, he’s all right, it’s from his old man, the Pakeha she married — Married? You mean did the vows in church? She’d take on a whole football team. She’d — I have heard every description of her and still they hurt.

Warrior men of now-lessened respect for being what all men are, talking in laughing voices at that. They’d never dare talk of any of Uncle Henry’s flesh and blood in his presence, not their former sergeant who rose to the rank of captain and came home the village general now after ten, fifteen years of peacetime. He’s a prince amongst men, he’d knock over any man uttering his slut sister’s name like this; only
he
can call her what she is, let every other man hold his tongue.

Give a kid a wink in passing after they’ve just finished chuckling about his mother’s most private being (Oh, come on now, don’t kid yourself. You know her by now. Half the town does). A mother should be up there above your eye level, sitting on a cloud smiling down on you, a concept, an actual, above reproach. Not laying on her back with spread-eagled legs with yet another man panting over and in her, and she doing her share of gasping ridiculous
lost-animal
sounds back. How lost can a woman be when she’s fucking? (So where do sweet little innocent children come from, kid? Only blind Catholics believe a virgin can give birth. Only fools believe
every
mother is a saint.) But did I have to get the slut?

The men depart. See you, boy. Watch you don’t turn into a shrivelled-up prune in there. Yeah, see you, men (you mongrels, laughing like that about my mother). But not their fault, they’re only commenting. Must be my fault, better my fault, take away some of her blame, her guilt. It’s only sex. And can’t all be faithful in marriage.

Sitting there until my hands are what they warned of, shrivelled and old, an elderly kid with heart too damn heavy for his own good.

I’m about to get out when a real elderly figure shuffles out of the steam playing with golden light shafting down from high over the eastern hill. And to her left the geyser Te Huia, carrying the name of an extinct bird, is playing too. She is my friend, kuia Mereana, this apparition shuffling pink-slippered feet across her landscape. Even though we are from different thinkings, she understands me.

Time is tattooed in permanent purpleblue stain on her chin and lips, markings of her displaced time: one generation after the one who were warriors thinking their tribal reign ruled forever … till the British put swift end to their presumptions in mid-clash; arrogantly imposed the laws and punishments of another culture, another civilisation on a not-then-very-noble, war-entrenched
disarray
of tribal savages; gave them central government, to a tribal people who weren’t a race. It is Mereana’s choiceless burden to carry the dignity on behalf of the lost warrior race. But she is in private despair for her people.

Who’s that? she asks. Oh, it’s you, Jimmy-boy, Henry’s neview, in the same breath. The same squint-eyed enquiry and
self-answered
question, nephew with a v, like everything is softened out on her inked lips when Maori is her first language.

In the changing shed getting undressed, coughing her irritation at the change required to converse with me since I am the only one to talk to at this stage. I know she prefers to start her
conversational
day in her own tongue, speaking of her own more simple, untroubled outlook.

She comes out of the shed, hardly bothering about a towel to cover her nakedness, slides into her blessed waters and starts to hum
in half-tone Maori chanting style. Like she is casting a spell on me. Or giving out warning that we are different of thinking, even though we are friends.

She gets me to run up and pull out the rag stopper for the channel feeding our bath from the lake. She comments on my skinny white legs and my bum whiter than a boiled sheet. On my frontal return, she looks away as though it is improper to gaze on my pubertal boy’s nakedness. Then says how glad she always is that we can share these waters like this, as God began us.

She stares out to the pined hills, seeing them in her mind as her parents did with their eyes: a soaring native forest alive with a million edible birds and cultural meaning and signs and spirits and omens and memories, when the trees were centuries-old stalks and men stalked one another in ten centuries of practising unceasing, unquestioning war.

A tattooed chin, tattooed mind, casts down to the river tumbling below. Around us: coughs, hisses and sighs. And she sighs and says, Your mother, aeee, poor child, poor children of hers, your mother. So I know we are thinking the same. On this we are. But she has rules and loyalty owings and deeply entrenched love for her people. She would die for them. I must be careful with her feelings, her inherited centuries of ways.

She used to be suspicious of me, for a long time she was. Ask me questions in Maori, and when I couldn’t answer back she’d pour out a stream of, presumed, curses. But she got used to seeing me. In the bath. Or around. And one morning I’m humming a tune I know from my Uncle Henry’s constant singing, and she arrives shuffling across that soil and silica ground in slippers, and naturally I stopped humming but she took up the tune when she got in. With words. Love’s Roses, in English.

Now I’m what she calls her sight familiar. Just me and her, that old naked form below the surface, those fallen breasts that once gave life to child after child and vitality to her man’s touch and pleasure to his eyes, but not on Fridays and Saturdays, she said, they were his drunk days. Legs long gone of their child-bearing strength and loving power, only the mind in more or less prime condition; that dark patch of tattoo imprint gaining definition, the sky spread all over
with light. The air rent with sulphur and Sunlight soap. She asks me to wash her back. And I know she’ll show me a little more of the days of her Maori understanding.

I see a village of a people sublime in their savagery, violently supreme of their times; a race of war-culled powerful physiques born into their fighting way — and yet of a crude nobility come of other cultural practices outside of war. Of carving art taken to high, abstract form. Of deep-meaning chants surrounding the carving being carried out.

There is tapu, placed on object and man and site and deed, of meaning so untouchably sacred it fulfills the prophecy of its own power.

I sit and idle with them in long periods between wars; see them play spinning-top games, stick games, knuckle bones with human knuckles. I hear their wooden flutes, the warbling chanting tones blown through large sea shells. And there is poetry escaping the fierce fighter mouths, eloquently shaped air bellowing from muscle-swollen chests, there are moments of philosophical thought and times of tenderness. (But not enough.) There is finest oratory. I see language revered for itself, how it plays off a man’s tongue, how it is a weapon but can be a flaw in a man’s exposed character, too.

I see weaving patterns of much intricate complexity, even the stars depicted and in different times of season of their changing position. I hear tales told of seafarers crossing the vast ocean to this land, and the stars that guided them, and the ancestors who looked over them crossing the great unknown ocean.

But then I see a people with too much of themselves on the dark side of the conceptual moon, like hapless animals in a deep forest trap, with daylight (and freedom) all around them — no, not entrapped animals, since none knows what is light, not true light of the mind; they are self-perpetuated to a state of permanent darkness. They have no written word, thus no means of looking at themselves.

I see a tiny world within the whole world it has no conception of as existing — no influences thus, for better or for worse, of wider cultural contact. I see everything of group perception lumped as one,
bound within the oral records of mighty orators; I hear secret thoughts drowned out by orator’s thunder and village’s echoing acquiescence and fierce assent and ferociously choreographed dances of war. I hear men tell and decree of other men that they must think thus. And I feel sad for the thinking person born into those times. Sad for the person born with too much sensibility in a culture of war. Sad and afraid for those whose fate that was, knowing they would have been young corpses put to death by their own as considered mad or misfit or possessed. At best the thinking person would be of little mana amongst their peers.