Euphoria (9 page)

2/16 Sali’s baby died. He wouldn’t suck.

2/17 Fen is being insufferable. He cuffed Wanji for taking a few elastic bands without asking and now Wanji is wailing and Fen is shouting and Sali’s boy is still dead.

S
he dreamed of dead babies, she wrote in her bark cloth book. Babies on fire. Babies caught in webs of trees. Babies covered in ants. She lay in her bed and counted the number of dead babies she had seen in the past two years. The Anapa boy was the first, cut out of his dead mother’s womb so that he would not haunt them. The girl Minalana, nearly a year old, bitten by a redback spider. With the Mumbanyo there was often no death ceremony for infants. You stumbled on them half buried or caught among reeds in the river. Any baby that was an inconvenience or thought to be another man’s. And a man could avoid the six-month postpartum taboo against intercourse by disposing of the child. There had been five with the Anapa, seventeen with the Mumbanyo, and now Sali’s. Twenty-three dead babies. Twenty-four if she counted her own, a dark clump wrapped in a banana leaf and buried under a tree she’d never see again.

She heard them below the house, waiting for her. Sema’s hiccoughy nine-year-old giggle and her little brother’s whine, probably for more of the sugarcane that his mother was dangling over his head. She heard the words for eat and sweet and their name for her, Nell-Nell.

She was surprised they still came. They had not attributed the death of Sali’s baby to her presence at the birth. Not yet, anyway. When she had visited Sali the night before, she had rested her head on Nell’s shoulder for a long time. Her child had been buried two days earlier in a clearing a half hour’s walk away. Sali carried him, his tiny body painted with red clay, his face with white, his little chest decorated with shells. In one hand they’d put a piece of sago cake, in the other a child’s miniature flute. His father dug a shallow grave. Just before Sali lowered him in, she squeezed a few drops of milk from her full hard breast onto the painted lips and Nell ached for those lips to move but they did not and then they covered him with brown sandy soil.

Fen came in through the mosquito net with a cup of coffee for her. He sat on the bed and she raised herself to take the cup from him.

‘Thank you.’

He sat sideways to her, crushed a pale blue weevil with his shoe, stared at the cloth that covered the window. He had a small head, considering his length and girth. It made his eyes and shoulders look bigger than they actually were. His beard grew fast and dark. He had shaved the night before but already it had sprouted back up, not the midnight blue that appeared after a few hours like a storm cloud but real hairs that grew two or three to a pore. Women everywhere thought him good-looking. She had thought him beautiful at first, on that boat on the Indian Ocean.

He knew she’d been crying and wouldn’t look at her.

‘I just want to keep one child alive.’

‘I know,’ he said, but did not touch her.

Below they had begun to whap sticks at the supports.

‘Where are you off to today?’ she said.

‘I’m going to help with the canoe.’

Working on the canoe, which he had been doing for the past five days, meant digging out the insides of an enormous breadfruit tree so that eight men could travel inside it. It meant another day without note taking, another day of failing to gather hard information.

‘Luro is going to Parambai today, to help settle the dispute about Mwroni’s bride price.’

‘Who?’

‘Mwroni. Sali’s cousin.’

‘I’m going to help with the canoe, Nell.’

‘We just don’t have any idea about how they negotiate—’

‘It’s not my fault you aren’t pregnant.’

The lie of it hung between them.

‘I keep doing my part,’ he said.

I would be seven months along now, she thought. He knew it too.

Behind the scrim she heard Bani fixing Fen’s breakfast and singing. She couldn’t understand the words. Songs always came last. Often they were strings of names, a line of ancestors, with no breaks between words.
Madatulopanararatelambanokanitwogo-mrainountwuatniwran
, he sang, high alto and with tenderness. He could be so serious it was hard to remember he was just a boy.

Bani had told her that he was not a Tam by birth. He was a Yesan, stolen by the Tam in a raid in retaliation for the kidnapping of a Tam girl a Yesan man was in love with. He
thought he was less than two when it happened. She asked who raised him and he said many people. She asked who was his family here and he said she and Fen.

‘Do you see your mother?’ she asked.

‘Sometimes. If I go with the women to the market. She is very skinny.’

Nell hadn’t understood tinu, skinny, until he sucked in his stomach and pressed his arms to his sides. He had initiation scars from shoulder to wrist and down his back, raised bumps they created by deliberately infecting the cuts.

‘What do you feel when you see her?’ she asked.

‘I feel I am happy I am not skinny and ugly like she.’

‘And she? What does she feel?’

‘She feels our Tam women ask too much for fish. That is what she says every time.’

Fen’s gong signal rang out.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said, scooting off the mat. ‘Why is he so damn slow?’

‘Don’t be hard on him.’

She heard him tell Bani to put his food in a basket. ‘Hurry.’

The noise below swelled as he went down the ladder. She heard their greetings and Fen’s
Baya ban
many times. Good day, good day. The children would be reaching to touch his arms and put their fingers in his pockets. His gong beat sounded again and she heard him call in a gorgeous accent she would never possess,
Fen di lam.
Fen is coming.

She got up and put on the shift she’d worn all week, a once white sundress she’d bought on 8th Street for a nickel.

‘Meni ma,’ she called as she rolled up the window shades.

‘Damo di lam,’ several called back. We are coming.

‘Meni ma,’ she said again, for it rarely sufficed to say things just once. The Tam used an operatic repetition when they spoke.

‘Damo di lam.’

The house began to shake as people headed up the ladder.

‘Damo di lam.’

Luquo came in first. ‘Baya ban,’ he muttered and only once as he hurried to reach the crayons and the paper and drop into his corner with them. His uncle would come get him within the hour, and scold him for coming here when he was expected to help mix pigments down on the men’s road. But Luquo was bored by the years of apprenticing that a boy must put in. He liked to come to the white woman’s house. He didn’t squat like the others but got on all fours with the paper beneath him, his muscles taut and his naked body swaying slightly as he pressed the crayons hard into the paper. He liked his colors deep and lush and he ground down a crayon as van Gogh was said to flay a brush. She wished she could show him a van Gogh, the self-portraits, for Luquo always drew a portrait, a fierce man in feathers and bones and paint, not a mask, not a head, but the full body of a man. My brother, he said whenever she asked. Xambun, he hollered.

Others liked to talk. Amini, a girl of seven or eight, tried to come up with as many questions for Nell as Nell had for her. Amini wanted to know why she wore all that cloth, why she used a fork to eat, why she wore shoes. And she wanted to know how Nell made all these things she had. Today, as Nell was handing her her favorite doll, Amini asked something
she could not understand. Amini repeated it then pointed to Nell’s fingers. She wanted to know why she had them all. Few adult Tam had all their fingers. Cutting off fingers was a ritual of mourning a close relative.

‘We do not cut our fingers,’ Nell said, using the other pronoun for we—nai—she had learned, which did not include the person being spoken to.

Despite this grammatical flourish, Amini smiled the way they all did when she spoke. ‘Who do you mourn?’ she asked brightly, as if asking Nell her favorite color.

‘My sister,’ she told her. ‘Katie.’

‘Katie,’ Amina said.

‘Katie,’ Nell said.

‘Katie.’

‘Katie,’ said a few others, some squatting, chewing, drawing, weaving. The old man Sanjo had found one of Fen’s cigarettes and chewed on it slowly. Katie, the room murmured. It was like breathing life into something long inert. No one had ever said her name in their house afterward.

There were no women visitors today. There were not often many, as they fished in the morning, but today there were none. And the men who’d come were agitated, scowling, full of complaints.

Old Sanjo pointed to her typewriter in the big mosquito room. His skin stretched across his armpits like a bat’s, so thin it was nearly transparent.

She had promised him she would show him how it worked.

‘Obe,’ she said to him. Yes.

Nearly everyone got up.

‘Only Sanjo,’ she said.

She took him into the room. He poked at the netting, firm in its wooden frame. He drew back to poke harder.

No, she told him.

He looked all around, tracing the lines of this ten-by-ten frame of netting they were in. He looked like he wanted to leave. Everyone else was peering in, noses against the screen.

She ripped a piece of paper from her notebook and spun it around the platen.

Sanjo
, she typed quickly. He stepped back at the noise. Several children screamed. She pulled out the paper and handed it to him. ‘You. Sanjo. In English. In my talk.’

He touched the letters she’d typed. ‘I have seen this before,’ he said. He pointed to her books. ‘I did not know it could be my name.’

‘It can be anything.’

‘They are powerful?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I do not want them.’

She realized he saw the letters as part of his ‘dirt,’ a piece of him like hair or skin or shit that enemies could steal and put a hex on.

‘It is not your dirt.’

He handed it back to her.

‘I will keep it here,’ she said. ‘Then it will be safe.’

Fen did not return for lunch, so she was able to get out early on her rounds to the women’s houses. She had been visiting these twelve houses for six weeks now. They each contained
several families, minus the men and the initiated boys, who slept in the ceremonial houses closer to the lake. Despite her daily progress with the language, she felt she’d reached an unexpected plateau with the women. The men, though harder to access because she was not allowed into their houses, were free with their words, included her in their talk of who would marry whom, and what would have to be paid, and to whom, while the women had far less patience for chatter. She had never known a tribe where the women were more reticent than the men.

Because the rains were late, the road was a desiccated crust, hard as marble underfoot. Ripe fruit exploded when it hit the ground. Hot air blew down from the high trees, their dry fronds cracking against each other. Bugs aimed for her eyes and mouth, looking for moisture.

At the turn in the road she found Fen with a few men, scraping out the last bits of wood pulp from the hollowed trunk with flat rocks. As usual, even for manual labour, the Tam men wore many strings of round yellow shells around their neck, armbands of bamboo fiber, and fox fur pubic covering. Their hair was curled and festooned with parrot feathers. The shell necklaces clacked rhythmically as they worked. Three skulls, leather-brown with age, were propped up against a tree nearby to oversee and bless the work of the descendants of their clan. One skull was missing its jaw. Nell looked for it and sure enough, it hung around the neck of Toabun, the clan elder.

‘Good day, Fenwick.’

‘Good day to you, mum,’ he said, straightening up.

The other men stopped their work to watch them.

He peeked into her basket. He’d taken off his shirt, and his chest was shiny with sweat and stippled with bugs and flecks of wood pulp. ‘Ah, the usual bribes, er, enticements, I see.’

‘They like a sweet canned peach at this hour.’

He was an athletic man, so unlike the men in her family. He’d been a rugby player at school. His father told her, the one time they’d met, that Fen could have played for the Wallabies if he’d wanted to.

‘Don’t we all,’ he said, leaning in and peering down her dress. ‘A nice round white peach.’ He reached in, but she blocked him. The men behind him wheezed with laughter.

He had begun to do this lately, perform for them in this way.

‘What’s going on today?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Something’s going on. Have they said anything?’

He didn’t know and didn’t care. He kissed her and the men slapped the canoe and cackled.

‘Get some work done, Mr. Show-off.’

She took the turn up the women’s road and when she turned back, he was bent over the canoe again. There was no notebook nearby. He hadn’t even brought it.

Fen didn’t want to study the natives; he wanted to
be
a native. His attraction to anthropology was not to puzzle out the story of humanity. It was not ontological. It was to live without shoes and eat from his hands and fart in public. He had a quick mind, a photographic memory, and a gift for both poetry and theory—he had wooed her with these qualities night and day for six weeks on the boat from Singapore to Marseille—but they didn’t seem to give him much pleasure.
His interest lay in experiencing, in doing. Thinking was derivative. Dull. The opposite of living. Whereas she suffered through the humidity and the sago and the lack of plumbing only for the thinking. As a little girl in bed at night, when other girls were wishing for ponies or roller skates, she wished for a band of gypsies to climb up into her window and take her away with them to teach her their language and their customs. She imagined how, after a few months, they would return her home and after the hugs and tears she would tell her family all about these people. Her stories would go on for days. The pleasurable part of the fantasy was always in the coming home and relating what she had seen. Always in her mind there had been the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.

In
The Children of Kirakira
she described for a Western audience the way one tribe in the Solomon island of Makira raised their children. In the final chapter, she made a few brief comparisons between Kirakira and American child-rearing customs. She submitted her manuscript not to a university press but to William Morrow, where it was quickly accepted. Mr. Morrow suggested she expand those comparisons into a couple of chapters at the end, which she did, and happily, for it was what interested her most, but it became the sort of opining that hadn’t been done in ethnographical writing before. Americans, she discovered upon publication, had never considered the possibility of another way to raise children. They were astounded by Kirakira children paddling in boats alone at age three, still sucking on their mothers’ breasts at age five, and, yes, disappearing into the forest or down onto the beach with a lover of either sex at age thirteen. Her research had
been a bit too graphic for a general readership, and her theory that adolescence didn’t have to be full of the misery and rebelliousness it was in America got lost in the uproar. Fen liked the money the book brought in, but he had planned on
his
name becoming a household word, not hers. But he hadn’t written anything more than a short monograph about his Dobu.