Authors: Pat Barker
Hocart was sitting cross-legged on the ground, with a
pencil held sideways in his mouth, typing up his notes. 'I had to retreat
because of the midges.'
'Midges?'
'Whatever.'
Hocart was careless with quinine, careless with the
mosquito nets. Rivers threw himself down on his bed, clasped his hands behind
his head and watched him. After a few seconds Hocart pulled his shirt over his
head, and fanned himself with a sheaf of blank pages.
As always the heat of the day was trapped inside the
tent, and their bodies ran with sweat.
'You've lost weight,' Rivers said, looking at the
shadows between Hocart's ribs. '
Rakiana
, that's the word
for you.'
'Well,' Hocart said, round the pencil. 'Just as long
as your pal Njiru doesn't start trying to put me out of my misery...'
'Is he my pal?'
A quick glance.
'You know he is.'
They worked for a couple of hours, ate some baked yam
pudding that Namboko Taru had made for them, worked again, then turned off the
lamp.
An hour or so later Rivers heard the sound of
footsteps approaching the tent. Hocart had fallen asleep, one raised arm
shielding his eyes, the pressure of the pillow pushing his cheek and mouth out
of shape. Enough moonlight filtered through the canvas for the shadow of the
passer-by to stalk across the inside of the tent. A minute later another,
taller shadow followed.
Mali? Mali was a girl of thirteen who'd recently
retired to the menstrual hut for the first time. When she'd re-emerged, five
days later, arrangements for her defloration were already well in hand. A young
man, Runi—he'd be about eighteen—had paid her parents the two arm rings that
entitled him to spend twenty consecutive nights with her, and had decided—it
was his decision, the girl had no say in the matter—to share the privilege with
two of his friends.
Runi was considered a bit of a pest. Only the other
day he and his two closest friends—presumably the two he'd invited to share
Mali—had climbed some kanarium trees and pelted their unfortunate owners with
unripe nuts. Rivers had been reminded of Rag Week. The old people grumbled, and
then said, what can you expect, young men cooped up on the island sitting about
like old women, instead of being off in their canoes, as they ought to have
been, burning villages and taking heads.
Whispers, quite close by.
A startled cry, almost a yelp, then grunts, groans,
moans, a long crescendo of sobbing cries.
Hocart woke up, listened.
'Oh God,
not again.'
'Shush.'
There was a belief on the island that a girl's
defloration is never the first time, because her first bleeding means the moon
has already lain with her. The men denied they believed it, insisting it was
just a story they told the girls to reassure them, which at least implied
a certain
tenderness. He hoped so. She looked such a child.
A few minutes'
whispering,
and the grunts began again. What it is to be eighteen.
Another
cry, this time definitely male, and footsteps coming back.
'One down, two to go,' Hocart said.
'You realize for the rest of their lives they won't be
able to say each other's names?'
No reply. Rivers wondered if he'd drifted back to
sleep but when he turned to look, caught the gleam of eye white under the
mosquito net.
More footsteps.
Another shadow climbed
the far wall of the tent. A short pause, whispers,
then
the gasps began again.
Rivers sighed. 'You know, Rinambesi says when a chief
dies the last thing that happens,
used
to happen, rather,
is a great head-hunting raid, followed by a feast, and all the girls are
available
free
to all the warriors. And not reluctant either, apparently.
They run into the sea to greet them.'
'Head-hunting as an aphrodisiac?'
'Why not?'
They seem to be doing all right without it,' Hocart
said, as the moans got louder.
'No babies, though.'
The genealogies made grim reading. Families of five or
six had been common three or four generations ago. Now many marriages were
childless.
The last shadow came and went. Rivers supposed he must
have slept, because it seemed no time at all before the grey early morning
light made the mosquito nets as stark and sinister as shrouds. Fowl-he-sing-out
was the pidgin term for this pre-dawn hour, and the fowls had started, first a
bubbling trickle of notes, always the same bird, he didn't know its name,
rising to a frenzy of competing shrieks and cries. But this morning there was a
new noise. At first he
lay
, blinking sleepily, unable
to attach meaning to it, but then he realized it was the wailing of women,
almost indistinguishable at this distance from the sound of flutes. And he knew
Ngea was dead.
*
* *
They arrived at Ngea's hall to find the corpse bound
into the sitting position, propped up against a pillar. A stout stick had been
strapped to its back, keeping the head and
neck more or less
erect—
a sort of external spine. Ngea had been bathed and dressed in his
best clothes, the lime on his face and in his hair freshly painted, bunches of
riria leaves, a plant forbidden to men in life, fastened to his necklaces.
Beside him sat his widow, Emele, not crying or wailing with the other women.
Very calm, very dignified.
While the women rocked and wailed Njiru was
systematically destroying the dead man's possessions, with the exception of the
axe which he had set aside. One rare arm ring after another was smashed. Rivers
squatted beside Njiru, and asked, in a low voice so as not to disturb the
mourners, why they had to be destroyed.
'You make him no good he go Sonto. All same Ngea he
stink, he rotten, bymby
he
go Sonto.'
The wailing went on all day, people coming from across
the island to bid Ngea farewell. Towards evening—surely, Rivers thought, the
disposal of the corpse could not be much longer delayed—Njiru hung a bunch of
areca nuts from the rafters by the scare ghost, took down a cluster and held it
out in front of them all. He waited till the last wail faltered into silence
and every eye was on him, before he began to pray. 'I take down the portion of
the chiefly dead.' He bowed towards the corpse, which gazed back at him with
glazed eyes. 'Be not angry with us, be not resentful,
do
not punish us. Let them drink and eat, break coconuts, open the oven. Let the
children eat, let the women eat, let the men eat, and be not angry with us, you
chiefly dead, oh, oh, oh.'
The curious sound, half howl, half bark, that ended
prayers on Eddystone. Njiru put a nut in his mouth and ate it. The people kept
glancing nervously at Ngea, but Njiru went round the circle, offering the
cluster of nuts to each person in turn. Every man, woman and child took one and
ate it. Even a small child had a tiny crunched-up fragment forced into its
mouth.
Ngea, without further ceremony, was slung on to a pole
and carried off 'into the bush', they said, though in fact they took him to the
beach, where he was placed in a stone enclosure—an
era
—with
his axe and his shield at his feet. Still propped in a sitting position, his
head kept erect by the stick, he looked out over the low stone wall, westwards,
to the sunset. Food was left with him, and food for his mother and father, the
'old ghosts'. Once, Njiru said, and there was no mistaking the bitterness in
his voice, a slave would have been killed at this moment, and the head placed
between Ngea's feet. Njiru glared at Rivers, as if he held him personally responsible
for the abolition of the custom.
'Now no all same.'
Next day Rivers went to Ngea's hall to offer his
condolences to Emele, and was confronted by an extraordinary sight. A wooden
enclosure had been built inside the hall, similar in size and shape to the
stone
era
in which Ngea's corpse had been placed, but with higher
walls. Inside this enclosure, knees bent up to her chin, hands resting on her
feet, in exactly the same position as the corpse of her husband, sat Emele. She
had been there, it seemed, all night, and from the expression of agony on her
face it was clear cramp had set in.
A number of widows squatted round the enclosure,
looking like stumps of wood in their brown bark loincloths. Many of them were
his regular informants on such topics as sexual relations, kinship,
the
arrangement of marriage. Rivers mimicked Emele's cramped
position, and asked for the word.
Tongo polo
, they said
reluctantly, glancing at each other.
Tongo polo
, he repeated,
making sure he'd got the inflection right. But his efforts to speak their
language were not received with the usual maternal warmth. He thought they
looked nervous.
'How long?' he asked, crouching down again.
But they wouldn't answer, and when he looked round he
saw that Njiru had come into the hall and was standing just inside the door.
* * *
Before Ngea's death Njiru had agreed to take Rivers
and Hocart to see the cave at Pa Na Keru. It was situated near the summit of
the highest mountain on the island, and it was a morning's walk, the early
stages through thick bush, to get there. Rivers was inclined to think Ngea's
death would lead to the postponement of the trip, but when he emerged from the
tent the following morning it was to find Njiru, surrounded by a much larger
retinue than usual, waiting for him.
He gave them leaves to wear to protect them from the
spirits of the mountain, and the whole group set off in good spirits, laughing
and chattering, though they fell silent in the late morning as the ground
sloped steeply upwards and the muscles of thighs and back began to ache. The
path up the mountain, like all the paths on the island, was so narrow that they
had to go in single file.
A solemnity had settled over the gathering. Rivers
watched the movement of muscles in the back ahead of him, as they toiled and
sweated up the slope. Before them was a massive rock-wall with a cave set into
it, like a dark mouth. They slipped and slithered up towards it, sending
showers of small pebbles peppering down behind them. The final slope was
encumbered with big rocks and boulders, and other, flatter stones, some of them
sharp. It was near noon, and their shadows had dwindled to ragged black shapes
fluttering around their moving feet. One of the men picked up a stone and threw
it at the cave mouth to scare away the ghosts. Rivers and Hocart were the only
people there never to have visited the cave before, and they were not allowed
to approach until Njiru had prayed that they might be protected from disease.
While the prayer went on they watched the others bob down and disappear under
the hanging wall of rock.
The cave was low but surprisingly deep, deep enough
for the far end to be hidden in shadow. A flat stone near the entrance was
called the ghost seat. This was where the new ghost sat and occasionally, to
pass the time, drew on the walls. Further in, on the cusp of darkness, was
another boulder where the old ghosts sat. 'All old
tomate
come and look new
tomate
,' they were told.
Rivers turned to Njiru and pointed to the seat of the
old ghosts. 'Man he stink, he rotten, bymby he go Sonto. Why him no go Sonto?'
he asked.
Njiru spread his hands.
Various marks on the wall were interpreted as being
the drawings of the new ghosts. Hocart started sketching the marks and
recording the identifications he was given.
A man, a spirit,
pigs, a war canoe.
Njiru wanted to pursue the matter of the old ghosts.
He did not himself believe, he said, that there were ghosts in the cave. It was
a,
a...
His patience with pidgin ran out. A
varavara
, he concluded.
As nearly as Rivers could make out, this meant a metaphor, a figure
of speech.
Increasingly now, when they were alone, they tried to
understand concepts in the other's language, to escape from the fogged
communication of pidgin. The language barrier was more formidable than Rivers
had initially supposed, for in addition to the ordinary dialect there was the
'high speech' of ritual, myth and prayer. There was also, though he had not
been permitted to hear it,
talk blong tomate
: the language of ghosts.
While talking, they had unconsciously wandered deeper
into the cave. Now Rivers touched Njiru's arm and pointed to a narrow slit in
the back wall. They had to clamber over fallen rocks to reach it, and when they
did, it seemed to be too small to admit even a very thin man. Once, Njiru said,
the cave had been 'good fellow' right into the centre of the mountain, but then
an earthquake had dislodged part of the roof. Rivers knelt down and peered into
the darkness. If he crawled he was sure he could get through. And he'd brought
a torch with him, not knowing whether the cave would be dark or not. He turned
on his back and wriggled
through,
catching his arm,
feeling a wetness that he thought might be blood. On the other side he stood up
tentatively, and then stretched his arms high above his head. He had a sense of
immense space around him. The cave was big. He was reaching in his back pocket
for the torch when he realized Njiru was following him through. He put his hand
into the hole, trying to shield the other man's deformed back from the jagged
edge of the rock.