‘It was just this last five months, this last tribe.’ She could not think how to describe them. She and Fen had not agreed on one thing about the Mumbanyo. He had stripped her of her opinions. She marveled now at the blankness. Tillie was looking at her with a drunk’s depthless concern. ‘Sometimes you just find a culture that breaks your heart,’ she said finally.
‘Nellie,’ Fen called at her. ‘Minton says Bankson is still here.’ He waved his hand upriver.
Of course he is, she thought, but said, ‘The one who stole your butterfly net?’ She was trying to be playful.
‘He didn’t steal anything.’
What had he said exactly? It had been on the ship coming home from the Solomons, in one of their first conversations. They’d been gossiping about their old professors. Haddon liked me, Fen had said, but he gave Bankson his butterfly net.
Bankson had ruined their plans. They’d come in ‘31 to study two New Guinea tribes. But because Bankson was on the Sepik River, they’d gone north, up the mountains to the Anapa, with the hope that when they came back down in a year he’d be gone and they’d have their pick of the river tribes, whose less isolated cultures were rich with artistic, economic, and spiritual traditions. But he was still there, so they’d gone in the opposite direction from him and the Kiona he studied, south down a tributary of the Sepik called the Yuat, where they’d found the Mumbanyo. She had known that tribe was a mistake after the first week, but it took her five months to convince Fen to leave.
Fen stood beside her. ‘We should go and see him.’
‘Really?’ He’d never suggested this before. Why now, when they’d already made arrangements for Australia? He had been with Haddon, Bankson, and the butterfly net in Sydney four years ago, and she didn’t think they had liked each other much.
Bankson’s Kiona were warriors, the rulers of the Sepik before the Australian government had cracked down, separating villages, allotting them parcels of land they did not want, throwing resisters in jail. The Mumbanyo, fierce warriors themselves, told tales of the Kiona’s prowess. This was why he wanted to visit Bankson. The tribe is always greener on the other side of the river, she often tried to tell him. But it was impossible not to be envious of other people’s people. Until you laid it all out neatly on the page, your own tribe looked a mess.
‘Do you think we’ll see him in Angoram?’ she asked. They could not go traipsing after Bankson. They’d made the decision to go to Australia. Their money wouldn’t last much more than half a year, and it would take several weeks to get settled among the Aborigines.
‘Doubt it. I’m sure he steers clear of the government station.’
The speed of the boat was disorienting. ‘We need to get that pinnace to Port Moresby tomorrow, Fen. The Gunai are a good choice for us.’
‘You thought the Mumbanyo were a good choice for us, too, when we headed there.’ He rattled the ice of his empty glass. He looked like he had more to say, but he walked back to Minton and the other men.
‘Been married long?” asked Tillie.
‘Two years in May,’ Nell said. ‘We had the ceremony the day before we came out here.’
‘Swish honeymoon.’
They laughed. The bottle of gin came round again.
For the next four and a half hours Nell watched the dressed-up couples drink, tease, flirt, wound, laugh, apologize, separate, reintegrate. She watched their young uneasy faces, saw how thin the layer of self-confidence was, how easily it slipped off when they thought no one was looking. Occasionally Tillie’s husband would raise his arm to point out something on land: two boys with a net, a sloth hanging like a melting sack from a tree, an osprey coasting to its nest, a red parrot mocking their engine. She tried not to think about the villages they were passing, the raised houses and the fire pits and the children hunting for snakes in the thatch with spears. All the people she was missing, the tribes she would never know and words she would never hear, the worry that they might right now be passing the one people she was meant to study, a people whose genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers, a people who had a way of life that made sense to her. Instead she watched these Westerners and she watched Fen, speaking his hard talk to the men, aggressively pressing them about their work, defensively responding when they asked about his, coming to seek her out then punishing her with a few cutting words and an abrupt retreat. He did this four or five times, dumping his frustration on her, unaware of his own pattern. He was not through punishing her for wanting to leave the Mumbanyo.
‘He’s handsome, isn’t he, your husband,’ Eva said, when no one else could hear. ‘I bet he cleans up well.’
The boat slowed, the water glowed salmon pink in the sunset, and they were there. Three dock boys, dressed in white pants, blue shirts, and red caps came running out from the Angoram Club to tie up the boat.
‘Lukaut long,’ Minton barked at them in pidgin. ‘Isi isi.’
To each other they spoke in their tribal language, Taway most likely. To the disembarking passengers they said, ‘Good evening,’ in a crisp British accent. She wondered how far their knowledge of English extended.
‘How are you this evening?’ she asked the biggest boy.
‘Fine, thank you, Madame.’ He reminded her of their Anapa shoot boy, with his easy confidence and willingness to smile.
‘It’s Christmas Eve, I hear.’
‘Yes, Madame.’
‘Do you celebrate it?’
‘Oh yes, Ma’am.’
The missionaries had gotten to them.
‘And what are you hoping for?’ she asked the second biggest.
‘A fishing net, Ma’am.’ He tried to keep the sentence brief and dispassionate like the other boy’s, but he burst out, ‘Like the one my brother has got last year.’
‘And the first thing he catched were me!’ the littlest cried out.
All three boys laughed, their teeth bright white. At their age most Mumbanyo boys no longer had many teeth, having lost them to rot or fights, and the ones that remained were stained scarlet by the betel nut they chewed.
Just as the big boy began to explain, Fen called to her from the ramp. The white couples, already up on the land, seemed to be laughing at them, at the woman in the filthy men’s pajamas, trying to talk to the natives, at the gaunt bearded Aussie, who may or may not clean up well, teetering with their bags, calling for his wife.
She told the boys to have a merry Christmas, which they thought was funny, and they wished her the same. She would have liked to squat on that dock with those boys all night.
Fen, she saw, was not mad. He shifted both bags onto his left shoulder and offered her his right arm as if she too were wearing an evening dress. She slipped her left arm through and he clamped down. The lesion she had there stung from the pressure.
‘It’s Christmas Eve for Christ’s sake. Must you always be working?’ But his voice was teasing now, almost apologetic. We are here, his arm tight around hers said. It is over with the Mumbanyo. He kissed her and this too made the pain flare but she didn’t complain. He didn’t like her strong, nor did he like her weak. Many months ago he’d grown tired of sickness and sores. When his fever rose, he took forty-mile hikes. When he had a thick white worm growing beneath the skin of his leg, he cut it out himself with a penknife.
They were given a room on the second story. Music from the club’s dining room below vibrated in the floorboards.
She touched one of the twin beds. It was made up with stiff white sheets and a fat pillow. She pulled the top sheet from its tight bind and got in. It was just an old narrow army cot but it felt like a cloud, a clean smooth starched cloud. She felt sleep, the old heavy kind, the kind of her childhood, come for her.