Authors: Lily King
I
stayed away from Lake Tam for several weeks, during which time my work went well. I began inviting people to my house, not in the numbers that Nell did each morning, but in small groups. I had Teket’s whole family for a dinner of a wild pig we’d shot and pears from tins which Teket had to persuade them were safe and uncursed. His grandmother took a great liking to the pears and their sweet juice, and they carried home the empty cans as if I’d given them a hundred pounds apiece. I had Kaishu-Mwampa, the old woman who wouldn’t speak to me, and her grandniece in to tea. They didn’t like it, and I told them it was better with milk and they laughed when I tried to describe what milk was because they had never seen a cow. A few days later, Tiwantu announced there would be a full, traditional Wai for the accomplishments of his son after the next full moon. I was having my own small euphoria.
It might have gone on like this—my work in Nengai, a few short trips to Lake Tam—until July, when I planned to leave. But the day after Tiwantu made his announcement, Teket came back from trading with a note in Nell’s hand.
T
hey awoke to one long scream, followed by a barrage of others. She had no idea what time it was. The sky was black, no edge of light.
In a crisis Fen became even quicker—and feline. He disappeared in one motion down the ladder. She hurried to catch up. The turmoil came from up the women’s road. Fen said something but she couldn’t hear him.
When they turned the corner, it was as she’d feared, a shrieking mass of bodies. They stopped twenty feet from the outside edge of the crowd, which was facing inward, toward Malun’s house. In the dark she could make out the long back of Sanjo and Yorba’s thick arms and the little head of Amun, but only briefly. They were all moving, churning, and shouting so loudly it affected her vision. Many had ripped the necklaces and bracelets and waistbands and armbands and hair wraps from their bodies and thrown them on the ground as they hugged and wept and hollered and pressed toward the center, toward whatever was happening through the thicket of bodies.
Fen took her hand and inched closer. He gripped her tighter and pushed into the crowd. ‘We have to—’ he said, but she lost the rest. Then she lost his hand. Everyone was pressing inward and she was pushed and shoved and poked along with them. She tried to push back, hold her ground, but it was no use. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see whatever was
happening. But she was being forced toward it, a great muscle of Tam kneading her forward. She couldn’t understand why she recognized so few people, why no one recognized her. People were hysterical, and the breath and sweat of so many frenzied bodies was a sour buried-alive smell. She felt certain there would be a dead body in the centre. She hoped it was not a child. Please dear God no more dead children. She wasn’t sure if she was screaming this aloud. She tasted vomit and blood but didn’t think it was hers. Ahead firelight flickered. And then she saw them, Malun and a man in green trousers. They were standing but he was curled over her and she held him with great effort, his full cumbersome weight, keening as if over a dead body. But he was not dead. There were long deep scars across his bare back, fresher and far cruder than his initiation scarring, lashings without design, but he was not dead.
Come as soon as you get this, Nell’s note to me read. Xambun has returned.
O
n the fourth night of the celebration of Xambun’s return, Fen came home naked and slathered with an oil that smelled like rancid cheese, claiming he had danced with Jesus, his great-great-grandmother, and Billy Cadwallader.
Nell was at her typewriter, writing a letter to Helen. ‘Who’s Billy Cadwallader?’ she asked.
‘You see? That’s how I know it’s real. Couldn’t have made up a name like that. He was just a boy.’ He was looking out the door as if these dance partners just might have followed him home. His hair was full of painted clay beads and ash from the fires was caught in the oil on his skin. He planted his feet wide apart to stay upright, but he still swayed. He was pure muscle and bone, like a native. He would never refuse a hallucinogen; he would drink, eat, snort, or smoke whatever was offered to him. ‘You know, I think’—he jerked around, beads rattling, smiling at her as if he were just then noticing she was in the room—’I think my mum might, she might.’
‘Know who the little boy was?’
She didn’t like the look in his eye.
‘Yes.’ He came up close to her and the smell was unbreathable. He seemed to be struggling for the right word, or any word. ‘Sex,’ he said finally. ‘I like sex, Nell. Real sex.’
Fortunately his penis wasn’t listening.
‘Nothing to do with—’ He strained for the word and could not find it. Children, she supposed he meant.
He turned away as if she were the one with the putrid smell. Then he whipped back around, noticing her all over again.
‘Working, Nell Stone? Typing typing typing, so much to type, so much to say. It must be exhausting being Nell Stone all the time.’ He seemed to have struck a vein of words. ‘The sound of that fucking machine is the sound of your fucking brain.’ He slammed his fist onto the keys. The letters flew up and twisted together. Before she could assess the damage he shoved the typewriter off the desk. It fell on its side. The silver arm snapped off.
He spun and left the house, his movements not his own as he went down the ladder jerkily, as if someone were pulling him with strings. Once in their first month together in the field an Anapa elder had come to her and told her it was not safe for her to be alone with just her husband, and he offered to be her brother. At the time she and Fen had laughed about this. But she had needed a brother, it turned out. She had needed one with the Mumbanyo. She might still have her baby if she’d had a brother there.
She turned off the lamp and tried to sleep. Her heart was beating too fast. She took long breaths but it wouldn’t slow. She was scared he’d come back.
She got up and pulled on her filthy clothes. Wanji had not done the laundry since three days before Xambun arrived. There were fewer people on the beach than she had thought,
only about fifty, some twenty people dancing and another thirty sprawled out around them. All the dancers were men, beads in their hair like Fen’s and special, ceremonial, elaborately curved penis gourds strapped on. The dance was all about these gourds, about making them leap and turn and thrust at the women, who lay about in groups half watching, bemused but sated, like men who’d been in a strip club too long. And there was Fen, in full costume, gyrating, clacking his gourd against his partner’s, his movements lacking the fluidity of the others. All the flute players had gone to bed, and the one man with a drum was listing to one side and slapping it only occasionally. A few women chanted or kept time with stones or sticks. Most lay with their heads close together talking, barely watching. Xambun was not there anywhere in the crowd.
The mood Fen had brought up to the house was magnified here. The celebration had turned. The men were tense, doped, some barely upright, others flinging themselves around as if trying to escape their own bodies. There seemed a muted desperation, not the building fury of a Mumbanyo ceremony when she feared they were seconds away from stabbing each other, not homicidal like that but suicidal, as if the women’s lack of interest and Xambun’s disappearance and the lack of rain were all their fault.
She sat beside a woman named Halana who passed her some kava and taro. She opened her notebook. It was the fifth night. She’d seen it all by now. There was nothing more to add. She heard Boas scolding her: Everything is material, even your own boredom; you never see anything twice—never think you’ve seen it before because you have not. I am working, she
told herself, one of her tricks to re-see, see better, see beyond. Halana stared at her. She imitated Nell holding the pencil, chewing on its end, then pretended to eat the whole thing, which sent her friends into gales of laughter.
The dance went on and on, with no sense of form, of beginning or end. At one point Fen gave her a smile. His anger had passed. She felt herself falling asleep with her eyes open. And then she noticed, off to the left beyond the dancing and close to the water, a flicker of light. She looked hard. It was a tiny orange glow just above the rock that jutted out from the shore. A cigarette? She got up and moved toward it casually, as if she were heading up the path to her house, then she turned into the bushes toward the rock. Through the leaves she could see she was right: it was a cigarette, and hunched over it was the barely discernible shape of a man.
Alone was not something you saw among tribes she’d studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil. The culture often had proverbs against it.
Not even a monkey walks alone
was the Tam’s most repeated one. The man on the rock was Xambun, not squatting the way another Tam would be, but sitting, knees drawn up slightly and his torso curled over them, eyes fixed on a point across the water. His body had grown fleshy and pear-shaped from the rice and bully beef they fed mine workers. Shoes were louder than bare feet—he would know it was her—but he did not turn. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth. He was still wearing the mine’s green trousers, but no adornments, no beads or bones or shells.
An informant like this in the field, a man who has been raised in the culture but removed for a time so that he is able to see his own people from a different angle with the ability to contrast their behaviors to another set of behaviors, is invaluable. And one who has been exposed to a Western culture—she couldn’t think of anyone who had ever accessed that kind of informant in as remote a place.
She wanted to move toward him. She might never get this opportunity again. And yet she felt his need for this solitude. She felt she knew his story already: the child hero, the false promises of the blackbirders, the slavelike treatment at the mine, the perilous escape back here, and the exhaustion of trying to hide it all from his family, to whom he was returning in glory. But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one. She wanted his real one. What would he say about it all? She could imagine writing a whole book on him alone.
She hadn’t moved but he turned suddenly, looked directly at her, and told her to go away.
It wasn’t until she was halfway up her steps that she realized he’d said it not in Tam or in pidgin but in English.
3/15 The celebration of Xambun’s return does not end. Each morning I think surely they have fished out every fish & shot every fat bird & wild pig, surely they have exhausted their own bodies if not their food supply. And each night I think surely tomorrow everything will return to normal, the women will go out on the lake at sunrise, my morning visitors will come back, the traders will go off trading, but it never happens. They sleep all day because they have been up all night. Just before sunset the drums start up again and the fires get lit and it all goes on for another night: feasting, drinking, dancing, screaming, singing, weeping.
Someone from the next hamlet just returned from the coast having brought several new beach dances. Until now beach dances had been forbidden by the elder generation here but everyone has learned them this week. Given that their standard dance includes swinging the penis hard & fast & imitating copulation with precise & lengthy accuracy, the new dances seem to be as harmless as the Hokey Pokey. The men have painted each other in an intricate design that I haven’t seen on their most expensive pottery. Everyone is festooned in their fanciest shells, strings & strings of them, and you have to shout over the din they make.
I have gone through about 50 notebooks in 5 days and yet I feel on the cusp of death by boredom. I know I am a strange bird, fatigued by frenzy, visions, and public fornication. I know as an anthropologist I am supposed to live for these opportunities to see the symbolism of the culture played out. But I don’t trust a crowd—hundreds of people together without cognition and only the basest impulses: food, drink, sex. Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain you find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is my point exactly.
Not to mention my impatience to get to X, to talk to him, to assault him, as Bankson would say. Malun promises she will secure me an interview as soon as the ceremonies are over. She keeps thanking us, and I can’t seem to convince her that we had nothing to do with his return.
I wish B hadn’t left before X arrived. I could use someone to talk to, someone who is not a mile high on morning glory seeds & something called honi & who knows what else. I have given Tadi a note to give to the Kiona when she goes to market, but she has not gone. No one has left the lake for over a week.
I have come to think of this celebration for Xambun as a wild animal that shifts & eats but might never go away.
I
t was over by the time I got there. I cut my engine and heard no celebrating from any quarter of the village. On the beach crows and buzzards fought for position on the ribs of a wild boar and flies marauded taro skins and fruit rinds nearby. The fire pits were cold, beads and feathers lay half buried in the pounded sand, and the air itself felt exhausted.
The lake was a good bit lower than the last time I was here and the heat had a new density. I dragged my canoe up to the grasses and carried my engine and an extra tank of petrol up the path.
I ran into no one on my way to their house. I recognized the silence, the spent stillness of a village having depleted itself in every way. I wasn’t bothered that I had missed the festivities. I was certain Nell had taken impeccable notes. It was the interviewing of Xambun that would yield the most important information.
Out of the opening of one of the men’s houses hung a pair of legs, as if the fellow hadn’t been able to make it all the way inside before collapsing. It made me aware of my own stores of energy. I felt fitter than I had in a great while, and chuckled at the memory of crashing to the ground the last time I was here. I stashed the engine and petrol below their house and went back down to the beach for the large suitcase I’d brought. At the foot of their ladder I called up softly, not
wanting to disturb them if they too were sleeping. No response, so I climbed up. They were both at their typewriters in the large mosquito room.
None of the photographs taken of Nell Stone, the ones you find in textbooks and the two biographies, even the ones taken in the field, ever captured the way she really looked. You cannot see her energy, her quick brimming joy when you came through the door. If I could have any picture of her at all, it would be then, at the moment she saw me that day.
‘You came.’
‘I’m only staying three months,’ I joked, holding up the large case, which seemed even bigger inside the house.
Fen was watching her now, and her face lost its unguarded expression. She gave me a kiss on the cheek, which was over before I could register it. Then she stood back. She smelled somehow like the back garden of Hemsley House, of juniper and laburnum.
‘You look quite the gentleman anthropologist. All you need is a—wait! Wait!’ She jumped up, flashed out of one mosquito room and into the other, and returned with hat, pipe, and camera. ‘Come on. Too dark in here.’
‘Nell, he’s just arrived for God’s sake,’ Fen said by way of hello from his chair. He looked awful, blue-black rings under his eyes and his skin papery as an old man’s. His shirtfront clung to his chest, sopped in sweat.
‘It’s a classic,’ she said. ‘He can put it on the cover of his memoirs.’
She had me go back down the stairs with my suitcase and stand up against the tamarind tree facing their house.
She picked up a long frond from the road and draped it over my shoulder.
‘Now bite the pipe.’
I clenched down on it and grimaced, my best imitation of a wizened old master I had at Charterhouse.
‘That’s it!’ But she was laughing too hard to take the photograph.
‘Oh Christ, I’ll have to do it.’
Fen came down and took three pictures of me. Then we put Nell in the hat with the cases and the pipe and took a few more. A man hurried past us and Fen called after him to borrow his digging stick and heavy necklaces. He handed these items over reluctantly and then looked on with concern as Fen posed with them.
Nell was in full health. From what I could see her lesions had healed, her limp was less pronounced. Her lips were the deep red of a child’s. The Tam diet clearly suited her; she was rounder, and her skin looked smooth as soap. The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.
‘How are your warriors?’ Fen said as we went back up into the house. I recognized it as an idle question, a question posed by someone who was thinking of something else, the way my father might have asked me about school when I came home for a holiday, his mind on a set of cells or tail feathers.
I told them that the Kiona had promised me a Wai.
‘Fantastic,’ Nell said. ‘Can we come?’
‘Certainly.’ It had been so long since I’d had something to look forward to.
‘Party’s over here,’ Fen said.
‘Have you managed to interview him yet?’ I said.
‘Fen thinks we should play it cool with him, let him come to us.’
‘Really?’ This surprised me. There was nothing about their style of ethnographic bullying that allowed for ‘playing it cool.’ They played it hot and fast, and my first thought was to suspect they were lying to me, and I was ashamed of this.
We were inside now, and Fen was pouring us drinks, a fermented cherry juice. He let out a laugh. ‘It’s not like we have a choice.’
‘He told me to go away.’
‘We need to give him time,’ Fen said. ‘He associates us with the mine right now.’
‘He needs to talk about it with us, with people who understand what he’s been through.’
‘Nellie, you don’t know what he’s been through.’
‘Of course I do. He’s been an indentured servant to Western greed.’
‘Where? Which mine? For how long? He could have been there three months for all we know. And that chap Barton who manages Edie Creek. He’s a good sort. I bet he runs a decent operation, if Xambun was there.’
‘By my calculations he’s been gone over three years. Malun has all her fronds—’
‘Her fronds!’ Fen turned to me. ‘When we first got here she had half the fronds she does now. There is no way to know how long he was gone.’
‘Barton is not a good sort. He hosts crocodile parties, Fen.’ I didn’t know what she meant. ‘He bets on the croc and his houseboys die.’
‘That’s rubbish and you know it. What’s in that thing anyway, Bankson? Not sure you even brought a rucksack last time.’
‘Minton came by with the post, and he had a few things for the two of you.’
I popped the clasps. I’d put Fen’s five letters in the fabric of the side pocket. Nell’s post—one hundred and forty-seven pieces of it—filled the rest of the space.
‘Schuyler Fenwick.’ I handed Fen the thin packet of letters. ‘Sorry, mate.’
‘No worries. I’m used to it.’
So was she, it appeared. With none of the shock or celebration I had anticipated, she took the suitcase and set about sorting her mountain of correspondence with a businesslike air: family to the left, work to the right, and friends in the middle. She barely paused over any of them, just checked the return address and placed it on a pile. Occasionally a name brought a small smile, but she seemed each time to be hoping for someone else. Fen took his into the workroom and opened them at the desk.
I settled on the sofa and plucked a magazine from Nell’s pile.
The New Yorker
, which I’d never seen. On its front was a drawing of tourists at a café in Paris. It was dated August 20, 1932, and the perspective was flattened, with the tables nearly floating in the air, the faces geometric, Picasso-like. Smoke came off a cigarette in a black curlicue. The seven-hour trip in the sun caught up with me and though I meant to open the magazine, my hands were heavy and held it closed. It was a lovely drawing, though perhaps I felt that way because I had not seen a piece of Western art in so long. It filled me with
longing, too: the menu, the carafes of wine, the red-and-white checked tablecloths. A waiter came up behind me. He took my order. Squab, I said. Then he turned to Nell, who said squib, and we laughed and I jerked awake.
I worried I’d laughed aloud, but Nell was reading a letter and did not hear me in any case. I could still feel it in my chest and throat, a great bubble of warmth that wanted to escape. Squib and squab. I had a small erection beneath the magazine.
‘Bankson!’ Fen nudged me. ‘I want to show you something.’
I stood woozily and followed him out and down.
‘Best to steer clear, really, when she reads all that,’ he said.
‘Why?’
He shook his head. ‘She gets letters now from every crazy person in America. Everyone wants her advice, her approval. Her name on anything is suddenly some magic golden seal. Then there’s Helen.’
Fen had stopped below the ceremonial house with the enormous villainous face looming above us, its black prickly snake tongue hanging six feet out of its mouth.
‘Who’s Helen?’
‘Another one of Papa Franz Boas’ disciples. Mentally imbalanced. Black, black moods. I had to tell Nell to stop seeing her. Nell writes thirty letters to her one. But she never learns. She always fears the worst. Did you see her pawing through that suitcase for letters from Helen? I don’t think there was even one this time.’
But there was a package, I wanted to say. A heavy rectangle with Helen’s name and address in the top left corner. ‘I’m sorry I brought the post then.’
‘Best to get it over with,’ he said, and called up to the men inside.
After we climbed up and passed under the mouth of the hideous face, there was a second entrance, narrower than the first, red on both sides. I saw that it was the lower part of another carving, this one of a woman with a shaved head and large breasts that towered above us. Her waist tapered and her legs split and the opening we were about to pass through was her enormous scarlet vulva. Fen stepped through it without remark.
I took my time, examining how it was constructed.
‘Look,’ he said to me, ‘I respect their rules of secrecy. No woman has ever entered this house. So don’t tell Nell about anything you see here. It will get her all worked up over nothing.’
The inside of a men’s ceremonial house is not all that different to a dining club at Cambridge. There is the same low talk, the same clustering, the same ease. But not for nonmembers. Even Fen, for whom fitting in seemed the least of concerns, who behaved as if the world should conform to him, walked uncomfortably down the middle of the long room, his eyes adjusting, looking for a man named Kanup. Kanup was the manager of Tam art, the one who decided what would be kept and what would be sold, who set the prices and packed the canoes and oversaw the returns. He had lived with a Kiona woman for a time and as soon as Fen found him Kanup began to speak in great grandiose terms of Tam art and why it was superior to Kiona art and to the art of every other tribe in the region. Kanup was the kind of fellow who wanted your attention and made sure he got it. His Kiona was excellent, and I
was compelled as much by his utter bilingualism as I was by his knowledge. I made my notes as I had made all my notes in the field, with full concentration and complete uncertainty as to whether they would be of any use at all. Fen disappeared quickly somewhere in the dim back of the vast room. After a while I was aware of voices escalating into argument behind me. I worried it was my presence in their house that was causing the trouble, but when I was able to break away from Kanup’s steady stare on me, I saw their focus was at the back of the room, in the dark alcove where Fen was. I could not see what he was doing or whom he was with.
‘What was going on back there?’ I asked him on the path home.
‘Nothing.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘Nothing. Resting. Waiting for you.’ But he was lying, and not going to great pains to hide it.