‘I really dragged it out. I acted out the balcony scene, the stabbings. Of course I set it all in a village much like theirs, with two rival hamlets and a healer instead of a friar, and that sort of thing. It’s a tribal tale to begin with, so it wasn’t hard to make it familiar to them.’ She was on her side and I was on my side facing her and Fen was on his back between us so I could only see half her face. ‘So finally — and it took me well over an hour in that stinking language; six syllables a word! — I got to the end. She’s dead. And do you know what the Kirakira did? They laughed. They laughed and laughed and thought it was the funniest joke ever told.’
‘Maybe it is,’ Fen said. ‘I’d take a pigman story any day over that rubbish.’
‘I think it’s the irony they’re responding to,’ I said.
‘Oh, no doubt.’
Ignoring him, Nell said, ‘Funny how irony is never tragic to them, only comic.’
‘Because death is not tragic to them, not in the way it is to us,’ I said.
‘They mourn.’
‘They feel sorrow, great sorrow. But it isn’t tragic.’
‘No, it isn’t. They know their ancestors have a plan for them. There’s no sense that it was wrong. Tragedy is based on this sense that there’s been a terrible mistake, isn’t it?’
‘We’re sort of big dramatic babies in comparison,’ I said.
She laughed.
‘Well, this baby’s got to take a piddle.’ Fen got up and went down the ladder.
‘Please use the latrine, Fen,’ Nell called.
But he must not have moved more than a foot from the house before his stream hit the ground with great force.
‘This will go on for a while,’ she said.
It did. We were facing each other on the bed.
‘And then there’s going to be—’
Fen broke wind.
‘That.’
‘Togate,’ Fen said quietly, which was Tam for excuse me.
We laughed. My head felt clear. Our hands were a few inches apart on the warm spot where Fen’s body had been.
14
3/3 Bankson went back today so we had 2 days with him in decent health. We took him to the other Tam hamlets — or he took us in his boat that zips around to the astonishment of all the fisherwomen wading in the water. In the hamlets we were able to cover a lot of ground. Bankson’s Kiona is understood by many. He is trying to adopt our ethnographic ways but they don’t come naturally to him. You get the sense he would have a hard time asking for a light in a pub. But he’s an excellent theorist. We talk & talk. Topics that are sure to cause tension between Fen & me become productive discussions with B there. Fen is more reasonable around him, and maybe I am too. Bankson agrees with my assessment of where the power is accruing — with the Tam women — and we are able to have useful conversations about it, all 3 of us. B is intuitive about F’s possessive nature so that I haven’t had to say a word, like last night when we were talking about sex roles in the West and B & I fell perfectly in step and I could sense how much further we could take our thoughts, but B rerouted it back to Fen’s Dobu at just the right moment. He navigates it as if I had given him a bamboo & shell chart to hold up to us.
Last night he pushed us out the door for a hike. The moon was nearly full and everything lit up silver and the stars at the edges of the sky were whirling & dropping so fast and even the bugs looked like chips of meteorites falling through the air at us. A few people were out and followed us down the road but when we veered up the path into the hills they whispered a warning to us and turned back. The Kirakira weren’t scared of the night but the Anapa, Mumb., and Tam are all wary of the spirits in the bush who will steal your soul if you give them half a chance. Bankson collected some rotten branches covered with something he called hiri, a fluorescent fungus that cast a pale light on the ground as we climbed. F & B got into a little male one-upmanship and we went higher and higher until we discovered a small nearly perfectly round lake and the moon bathing right in the center of it. F and B plunged in. I felt I should hide my inability to swim from Bankson — he’d be shocked and want to teach me on the spot and somehow F would take it both as a criticism and a threat — so I splashed around in the shallows and we looked at the stars and talked about death and named all the dead people we knew and tried to make a song out of all their names.
Bankson told us what he has learned about the old Kiona raids, how the killer at the end of a battle stood in his canoe and held up the head of his enemy and said, ‘I am going to my beautiful dances, to my beautiful ceremonies. Call his name,’ and the vanquished on the beach called the name of their dead man then cried out to all the victors as they pulled away, ‘Go. Go to your beautiful dances, to your beautiful ceremonies.’ Bankson said he once tried to explain the war and the 18 million dead to Teket, who could not comprehend it, the number alone, let alone that many killed in one conflict. B said they never found the whole of his brother’s body in Belgium. He said surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions. We were standing very still in the water then and I would have liked to hold him.
It is a bit of a dance we three are in. But there is a better balance when B is here, too. Fen’s demanding, rigid, determined nature weighs heavily on one side of the scale and Bankson’s and my more pliant & adjustable natures on the other, equaling things out. I can’t help but think I can use this inchoate theory in my work, that there is something about finding the balance to one’s nature — perhaps a culture that flourishes is a culture that has found a similar balance among its people. I don’t know. Too tired to think it through any further. Maybe it’s just we’re both a little in love with Andrew Bankson.
15
Upon my return to Nengai, Teket greeted me on the beach with a note. I knew by the shape of it, the three sideways folds, that it was from Bett. He handed it to me with great relief, as if he had been standing near the water for the entire week I’d been gone. Responsibility weighed heavily on Teket. It wasn’t hard to imagine him at Charterhouse, an earnest prefect, a stellar student. He asked me a great number of questions and, because the Kiona elders pass down their knowledge as secret family heirlooms, he treated the information I shared with great care. When an argument broke out between his clan and another about the nature of night, he’d asked my opinion. I told him what I believed about the earth’s diurnal rotation and its orbit around the sun. Afterward he coyly referred to it as ‘that matter we both know about,’ and whenever the sun or the moon came up in conversation among others, he always shot me a special look.
I took the note, but much to Teket’s disappointment I put it in my pocket without reading it. From its swollen edges I could tell the page had been folded and unfolded many times and it amused me to think of him studying Bett’s small Scottish scratches.
I asked for news, and he told me that Tagwa-Ndemi’s baby was a girl so little she fit in a coconut shell, and that a thief greased in palm oil so no one could get hold of him ran through Teket’s aunt’s house in the middle of the night, stealing three necklaces and a Turbo shell. Both Niani’s sons were ill, but Niani sat up all night negotiating with their ancestors and now they are better. I headed toward my house, but Teket was not finished. The night after I left, he said, Winjun-Mali tried to enter the mosquito bag of his brother’s wife, Koulavwan, but her mother heard him and shouted and Winjun-Mali tried to hide among the pots in the house but the mother caught him. He was brought to a ceremonial house where he argued his case. He claimed that he had seen Koulavwan give a betel leaf to her sister’s husband and that he was just making sure she was remaining faithful while his brother was away. He said that Koulavwan’s vulva was too wide for his taste. When he said this, all of the women who were listening under the house began shouting and Winjun-Mali picked up his spear and jammed it through the floorboards, nicking his own mother’s ear and disrupting the proceedings. Then Winjun-Mali’s father got in an argument with Koulavwan’s father about her extravagant bride price. Koulavwan’s father reminded him that when they were boys Winjun-Mali’s father had taken the glory for the killing of a man Koulavwan’s father had killed for him. He pointed to the tassels on Winjun-Mali’s father’s lime stick and asked if any of them were for real murders. Before it turned violent, Teket’s father cried out that their blood had made the baby in Koulavwan’s belly and they must not fight. So, Teket said, we all exchanged areca nuts and went back to bed.