‘Just wondering if you’ve gone Malinowski’s route. Sayers visited the Trobriands last year and said there were quite a number of suspiciously tan-colored adolescents walking about.’
‘Do you believe it?’
‘Have you seen the man in action? Nell and I picked him up at the station in New York and the only thing he said to me was “I need a martini in my hand and a girl in my bed.” Seriously, mate, it’s rough alone. I don’t think I could do it again.’
‘I’ll take a partner of some sort or other next time. More efficient, too, by half.’
‘Not sure I’d go that far.’ His spent cigarette made a brief orange arc into the river. I slowed for him to light another, then sped up again.
Sometimes at night it seemed to me that my boat was not being pushed by the engine but that boat and engine both were being pulled by the river itself, the ripples of wake just a design, like a stage set moving along with us.
‘Sometimes I wish I’d gone to sea,’ I said, perhaps simply for the luxury of being able to speak a passing thought aloud to someone who would understand what I meant.
‘Do you? Why’s that?’
‘I think I’m better on water than land. Better in my skin, as the French say.’
‘The ship captains I’ve met are tossers.’
‘It would be nice to do a job that wasn’t a big invisible knot to untangle, wouldn’t it?’
He didn’t answer, but I wasn’t bothered. I was flattered that we’d gotten to this stage already, that our minds could wander without apology. We passed through a long swath of fireflies, thousands of them flashing all around us, and it felt like soaring through stars.
The dark shapes on land became increasingly familiar: the tall narrow blackboard tree I called Big Ben, the jut of blueschist rock, the high mud bank of the most western Kiona hamlet. I must have slowed for Fen said, ‘Are we nearly there?’
‘Mile or two more.’
‘Nell,’ he said in a regular voice, not so much a question as a test. Satisfied she was still asleep he leaned over and said to me quietly, ‘Do the Kiona have a sacred object, removed from the village, something that they feed and protect?’
He’d already asked me many questions along these lines in Angoram. ‘They have sacred objects, certainly — instruments and masks and skulls of old warriors.’
‘That are kept in ceremonial houses?’
‘Yes.’
‘I mean something bigger. Kept apart. Something they might not have told you about, but you sense exists.’
He was suggesting that after nearly two years they were withholding some vital aspect of their society from me. I assured him that I had been shown every totemic object in their possession.
‘They told me theirs was a descendant of a Kiona one.’
‘The Mumbanyo told you this? About what?’
‘Do me a favor and ask them again. About a flute. One that’s sometimes kept in isolation and has to be fed.’
‘Fed?’
‘Could you ask while I’m there? Your informant might not tell you the truth, but at least I’ll have a look at his reaction.’
‘Did you see it?’ I asked.
‘I only found out about it a few days before we left.’
‘And you saw it?’
‘They sort of presented it to me.’
‘As a gift?’
‘Yes, I think so. As a gift. But then this other clan — there were two rivalrous clans in our village — took it back before I got a full look at the thing. I wanted to convince Nell to stay longer, but there is no rerouting her once she puts her mind to something.’
‘Why did she want to leave?’
‘Who knows. They didn’t fit her thesis statement. And she calls the shots. We’re on her grant money. Will you ask your man for me? About a sacred flute?’
‘I’ve already shook them down hundreds of times about such things, but all right.’
‘Thanks, mate. Just to see his face, really. See what it reveals.’
My beach appeared around the bend.
‘Do you still have the butterfly net?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Haddon gave it to you in Sydney. Remember? Made me jealous.’
But I had no recollection of it.
I cut the engine and paddled in so as not to wake the village.
This time Fen shook her. ‘Nell. We’re here. We’ve reached the famous Kiona.’
‘Hush. Let’s not wake them,’ she whispered. ‘Lest we get shot by the arrows of the Great Warriors of the Sepik.’
‘Princes,’ Fen said. ‘Princes of the Sepik.’
My house stood apart from the rest, and hadn’t been lived in for many years. It was built around a rainbow gum tree, which came up through the floor and went out the roof. Many Kiona had come to believe it was a spirit tree, a place where their dead relatives gathered and made their plans, and some kept their distance, making a wide curve around my house when they passed by. They had offered to build me a house closer to the center of the village, but I had heard stories of anthropologists waiting months for their houses to be finished and I had been eager to settle in. I worried that Nell would have difficulty with my ladder, which was steep and nothing more than a wide pole with shallow notches for steps, but she climbed up, torch in hand, with ease. She didn’t notice the tree until she was inside and the flame lit the room. I heard her let out a big American ‘Wow.’
Fen and I hauled up their duffels, and I lit my three oil lamps to make the place seem more spacious. The gum tree took up a good bit of room. Nell stroked it. Its bark had shed and the trunk was smooth and streaked with orange and bright green and indigo. It wouldn’t have been the first rainbow gum she’d encountered, but it was a striking specimen. She ran her palm down a swath of blue. I had the odd feeling that they were communicating, as if I had just introduced her to an old friend and they were already getting on well. For the truth is I had stroked that tree many a time, spoken to it, sobbed against it. I busied myself, gathering my medicines and looking for my whiskey, because I was tired and a bit raw from the long night and long ride, and I could not be certain I wouldn’t well up right then if she asked me a single question about my tree.
‘Ah, just what I was dreaming of,’ Fen said when he peered into the tin cup I handed him.
The two of us sat on the little sofas I’d made from bark cloth and kapok fiber while Nell wandered about. My body felt like it was still skimming across the water.
‘Don’t snoop, Nellie,’ he called over his shoulder. And then to me: ‘Americans make such good anthropologists because they’re so bloody rude.’
‘You’re admitting I’m a good anthropologist?’ she said from my workroom.
‘I’m saying you’re a nosy parker.’
She was bent over my desk, not touching anything, but looking closely. I could see there was a sheet of paper in the typewriter, but I couldn’t remember what it said.
I pointed to the box of medical supplies I’d set on the trunk between us. ‘Those wounds of hers need treating.’
Fen nodded.
‘I’ve never seen how anyone else works in the field,’ she said.
‘I guess I don’t count,’ Fen said.
‘Is that mango leaves? You have a question here about mango leaves.’
‘And now she’s going to solve your problem, having been here a full five minutes.’
I feigned confusion and joined her in the workroom.
She was looking at the great mess of notebooks and loose papers and carbons.
‘This makes me miss the work.’
‘It’s only been a few days, hasn’t it?’
‘I never settled in with the Mumbanyo like this.’ She looked at my clutter of papers as if it had value, as if she were certain something substantial would come out of it somehow.
I saw the note she’d been referring to.
mgo Ivs again on grv.??