Euphoria Page 10

  Just when I thought I should stop spying and return to the center of the village to find them, a little boy in the corner shifted on his hip and I saw her. She was sitting cross-legged, a little girl in her lap and another brushing her hair. She held up a card to a woman facing her. The woman, whose son was nursing vehemently on a breast that looked tapped out, said something and they both laughed. Nell made a few notes then lifted another card. The Tam had a way of holding their chin out, as if someone were holding a buttercup beneath it, and Nell was holding her chin out this way, too. After she had gone through a small stack of cards, a man came and took the woman’s place. When Nell got up to get something on her desk, I saw she’d picked up their smooth glide as well.

  The boy who’d moved was the one who saw me first. He hollered and she looked up.

  She quieted down her guests and came to the doorway. ‘You’re here,’ she said, as if she’d expected never to see me again. I’d hoped for something a bit warmer. She was wearing Martin’s specs.

  ‘You’re working.’

  ‘I’m always working.’

  ‘All your things came. And they’ve built you a house,’ I said stupidly.

  She was so small, Tam-sized, and I hung over her like a lamppost. Her hair had been brushed out by the little girl into a wild airy froth. Her wrists were too thin, but she looked rested and the color had come back to her face. I felt overwhelmed by the presence of her, which was even stronger in actuality than in memory. It was usually the reverse with me and women. I was aware now of how hard I’d tried six weeks ago not to find her attractive. I hadn’t remembered her lips and how the lower one dipped in the middle, brimming over. She wore a blouse I hadn’t seen, light blue with white spots. It made her grey eyes glow. She felt mine somehow, wearing my brother’s glasses. But she was formidable now, with her health and her work. She looked like she did not know quite what to do with me.

  ‘I didn’t want to miss the euphoria. I haven’t, have I? You said it happened at the second-month mark.’

  She seemed to stop herself from smiling. ‘No, you haven’t.’ She looked back to the man to whom she’d been showing the cards. ‘We’d given up on you.’

  ‘I—’ Every face was turned to us and to our strange way of talking. Teket told me it sounded to him like cracking nuts. ‘I didn’t want to get underfoot.’ She continued to look at me through Martin’s glasses, which made her eyes comically round. ‘Remind me how to say hello.’

  ‘Hello and goodbye are the same. Baya ban,’ she said. ‘As many times as you can stand it.’ Then she turned to face the room. She pointed to me and spoke a few brief staccato sentences, fast but with no ear for the rhythm of the language, which surprised me. She went round the room telling me every person’s name and I said baya ban and the person said baya ban and I said baya ban and Nell cut that person short with the next person’s name. After she had introduced them all, she called to someone back behind the screen in what I assumed was the kitchen area, and two boys came out, a stumpy naked one with a theatrical smile, and a more reluctant tall one in long shorts, clearly Fen’s, tied tight at the waist with thick rope, his razor-sharp shinbones below. I exchanged greetings with each of them. Several of the children were giggling at Bani’s outfit and he quickly retreated behind the screen, but Nell called him back.

  ‘What were you doing just now, with those cards?’ I asked.

  ‘Ink blots.’

  ‘Ink blots?’

  My ignorance amused her.

  She weaved, and I followed, through the tangle of legs and all her equipment to the large mosquito room. The desk closest to us was layered in papers and carbons, notebooks and file folders. There were a few books open near the typewriter, with sentences underlined and notes in the margins, a pencil resting in the crease of one of them. The other desk was empty save for a typewriter still in its case, and no chair to sit in. I would have liked to sit at the messy desk, read the notes and the underlinings, flip through the notebooks and read the typed-up pages in the folders. It was a shock to see someone else doing my work, in the midst of the very same process. As I looked at her desk, it seemed a deeply important endeavor to me, though when I looked at my own it seemed close to meaningless. I thought of how she had gone straight to my workroom in Nengai, how respectful, almost worshipful, how she’d wanted to help me solve the puzzle of the mango leaves.

  She’d realized her hair was floating in the humid human air, and she hurried to plait it back behind her, tying it off with a rubber band in one quick gesture. I could now see the tall stalk of her neck. She handed me the top card in a small stack. It was exactly that, a blot of ink, a mirror image of nothing in particular on either side of the center, though it was not homemade and there was no crease down the middle.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘They’re Fen’s, from when he studied psychology.’ She smiled now at my confusion. ‘Sit.’

  I sat on the floor and she sat beside me and pointed to the big black smudge with its identical sides. ‘What does this appear to be?’

  I didn’t think ‘nothing’ would earn me high marks so I said, ‘Two foxes fighting over an urn?’

  Without comment she flipped to the next one.

  ‘Elephants in large boots?’

  And the next.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to refrain from smirking at your patient?’ I said.

  She forced her lips down. ‘Not smirking.’ She jiggled the card at me.

  ‘Hummingbirds?’

  She put the cards down. ‘Holy crow. You can take the man out of biology but you sure can’t take the biology out of the man.’

  ‘That is your complete diagnosis, Herr Stone?’

  ‘That is my observation. The assessment is a bit more unsettling. Highly and disturbingly abnormal. Elephants in large boots?’ She laughed, hard. I laughed too, and a lightness came over me. I felt as if I could float up to the ceiling.

  ‘How could these possibly be useful here?’ I said.

  ‘I find that most anything can shed a little light on the psyche of a culture.’

  The psyche of a culture. I nodded, but I wondered what she thought that meant. I wished we could sit alone with a cup of tea and discuss it, but her work was through the mosquito net and I didn’t want to disrupt her morning any more than I already had. ‘May I observe you with them?’

  ‘Bani is preparing us food. You must be hungry. I’ll do two more interviews then we can go find Fen. He’ll be glad for a proper lunch.’

  She sat back down in the same corner spot beside her notebook and called a woman named Tadi over. I settled against a beam a few feet away. The cards were like everything that has spent time in this climate: faded, fraying, damp, and molding. Each card had the same dent at the bottom in the middle where she held it between her thumb and first two fingers, waiting for a response. And it was a long wait. Tadi stared hard at the card with the foxes holding the urn. She had seen neither a fox nor a Greek urn, so she was stumped. She stared with exaggerated concentration. She was a large woman, a mother of many children by the look of her long nipples and stretched stomach skin, which lay in neat folds like a stack of bedsheets in my mother’s linen closet. She had only three fingers on her left hand and four on her right. She wore little decoration, just a thin tulip bark ribbon around a wrist with a single cowrie shell strung through it. Like the other women, she had a shaved head. I could see the quiver of her pulse in a vein on her crown. And when she caught me looking at her, she held my gaze for several seconds before I looked away. The only Kiona females who had ever looked me in the eye were the very young and the very old. For the rest it was taboo. Nell lowered the card and Tadi blurted out something, koni or kone. Nell wrote it down and held up another.

  After Tadi came Amun, a boy of eight or nine with a wide smile. Amun looked all around to see who was watching and then he said a word that made his friends laugh and the elders scold him. Nell wrote down the word but was not pleased. Even before she lifted t
he next card he shouted out another naughty word and she quickly called over a woman who was smoking Fen’s Dublin pipe to take his place. Amun crossed the room and draped himself in the lap of a girl who shifted but did not stop her mending of a fishing net to receive him. Nell had the woman, just like the rest, sit right beside her, and she showed her the cards like they were looking at a magazine together.

  Their boy Bani brought me a cup of tea and a mound of biscuits. I thought it was far too many until nearly every child in the room leapt up and hovered round me making identical moaning sounds. I broke the biscuits in as many pieces as I could and passed them around.

  When she was done, Nell stood up and shooed them all out quite unceremoniously, paddling her hands toward the door. On their way out they put everything back in boxes and the boxes back on the shelves, and within minutes the house was put to rights and the floor was shaking from all the feet going down the ladder.

  ‘You have quite a system.’

  Though she was looking at me, she hadn’t heard. She was still with her work. She was wearing a tulip bark ribbon, too, just above her elbow. I wondered what they made of this woman who bossed them around and wrote down their reactions. It was funny how it all seemed more vulgar watching someone else do it. I felt like my mother, with this sudden distaste for it. And yet she was good at it. Better than I was. Systematic, organized, ambitious. She was a chameleon, with a way of not imitating them but reflecting them. There seemed to be nothing conscious or calculated about it. It was simply the way she worked. I feared I’d never shake my Englishman Among the Savages pose, despite the real respect I had come to feel for the Kiona. But she with only seven weeks under her belt was more of the Tam than I ever would be of any tribe, no matter how long I stayed. No wonder Fen had grown discouraged.

  ‘Let me just put these back,’ she said, holding up the cards and her notebook. I followed her, wanting to see her workroom again, not wanting to miss a step of her process.

  She put the cards on a shelf and the notebook beside it. ‘Sorry. Hold on,’ she said, and flipped open the notebook to add a few more thoughts.

  Behind her, on the bottom shelf, were over a hundred of these notebooks. Not fresh ones, but battered ones. A record of all of her days since July of 1931, I imagined. For some reason I felt ill again, hot, with a spray of lights dancing at the edge of my vision. I didn’t want to vomit onto her notebooks. I stepped back and heard myself ask a question.

  ‘In the mornings,’ she said, but I was no longer sure what I had asked. She described her afternoons visiting all the houses on the women’s road. She said she also visited two other Tam hamlets nearby. I asked if she went alone.

  ‘There’s no danger.’

  ‘I’m sure you heard about Henrietta Schmerler.’

  She had.

  ‘She was murdered.’ I was trying to be delicate.

  ‘Worse than that, I hear.’

  We were outside by then, on the road heading away from the lake. The nausea had passed but I was still not quite myself. The sweat that had covered my body a few minutes ago was now ice cold. ‘A white woman is confusing to them,’ I said.

  ‘Precisely. I don’t think they think of me as entirely female. I don’t think rape or murder has ever crossed their minds.’

  ‘You can’t know that.’ Not think of her as female? I wished I could manage that. ‘And murder is one of the first natural impulses any creature has to the unknown.’

  ‘Is it? It’s certainly not mine.’

  She had fashioned a walking stick for her ankle. It struck the ground beside my left toe with particular force.

  ‘You seem as interested in the women here as in the children, maybe more interested.’ I was remembering how quickly she had dismissed Amun.

  She and her stick stopped abruptly. “Have you noticed anything about them? Has Teket said anything?’

  ‘Nothing. But I did notice that woman Tadi was free to hold my gaze, and that boy—’

  ‘Didn’t have the usual self-possession that you see in boys of that age?’

  I laughed at the speed with which she finished my sentence. She was looking at me fiercely. What was I going to say about the boy? I could hardly remember. The sun seared the road, no shade, no wind. The curve of her breast through her thin shirt. ‘I suppose so, yes.’

  She tapped her stick rapidly on the hard dry earth. ‘You saw this. In less than an hour you saw this.’

  It had been two and a half at this point, but I didn’t quibble.

  Someone shouted out to her from down the road.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, racing on. ‘You have to meet Yorba. She’s one of my favorites.’

  Yorba was hurrying, too, pulling a female companion with her. When we all met up, Nell and Yorba spoke loudly, as if they were still separated by the length of the road. Yorba had the unadorned look of Tam women with her shaved head and one armband, but her friend wore shell and feather jewelry and a hairband of inlaid bright-green beetles. Yorba introduced her to Nell, and Nell introduced me to Yorba, and then the friend, whose name was Iri, and I were introduced, all of which required saying baya ban about eighty-seven times. The friend did not look up at me. Nell explained that this was Yorba’s daughter, who had married a Motu man and was visiting for a few days. We were still in the full sun and I assumed we would move on to find Fen, but Nell drilled them with questions. The daughter, who could not have been a real daughter as she looked several years older than Yorba, did not conceal her delight in Nell’s abuse of the language, her long pauses as she searched for words, then the cascade of them in her toneless accent. Nell was most interested in Iri’s perspective on the Tam now that she had lived outside the culture for many years. But both women were carrying large ceramic pots in bilum bags on their backs and pleasure soon gave way to impatience. Yorba pulled at Iri’s bracelets. Nell ignored their growing discomfort until Yorba raised both hands as if she were about to push Nell straight to the ground and shrieked what seemed like expletives at her. When she was finished, she took Iri’s arm and the two women slid away on their bare heels.

  Nell pulled a notebook from a large homemade pocket stitched onto her skirt, and without even moving to a shady spot made four pages of her small hieroglyphs. ‘I’d like to get over to the Motu sometime,’ she said after she put the notebook away, completely unbothered by the way the conversation had ended. ‘I never knew Yorba had a daughter.’

  ‘That couldn’t possibly have been her child.’

  ‘It’s surprising, isn’t it? I had the same feeling.’

  ‘They must use the word indiscriminately, like the Kiona. Anyone can be a daughter: a niece, granddaughter, friend.’

  ‘This was her real daughter. I asked.’

  ‘You asked if she were a blood daughter?’ Even the words real or blood relation didn’t always have the same meaning for them.

  ‘I asked Yorba if Iri had come out of her vagina.’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ I said finally. I had never heard the word vagina spoken aloud before, let alone by a woman in my presence.

  ‘I did. The words I make sure to learn on the first day anywhere are mother, father, son, daughter, and vagina. Very useful. There’s no other way to be certain.’

  She began walking again, and we turned up a small path and she thrashed her stick through the brush, which I felt would anger the snakes more than scare them off. When I walked through the brush I tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible.

  We came to a small clearing, the last piece of flat land before the jungle began. Fen was sitting up against a stump watching some men whitewash a freshly made canoe with seaweed juice. No notebook, knees bent, twisting and untwisting a stalk of elephant grass. The men sensed us first, and said something to Fen, who scrambled to his feet and bounded over.

  ‘Bankson.’ He’d grown a thick black beard. He hugged me as he had done in Angoram. ‘Finally, man. What happened to you?’

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve come unannounced.’


  ‘Footman’s got the day off anyway. You just get here?’

  ‘He did,’ Nell said. ‘Bani is making us a nice lunch. We’ve come to fetch you.’

  ‘That’s a first.’ He turned back to me. ‘Where have you been? You said you’d be back in a week.’

  Had I? ‘I thought I should give you some time to settle in. I didn’t want to—’

  ‘Listen, we’re the ones in your territory, Bankson, not the other way round,’ he said.

  This business of the Sepik being mine infuriated me. ‘We need to put an end to this right now, an end to this nonsense.’ I was aware that my voice was coming much harsher than I meant, but I couldn’t manage to modulate it. ‘I have no more right to the Kiona or the Tam or the Sepik River than any other anthropologist or the man on the moon. I do not subscribe to this chopping up of the primitive world and parceling it out to people who may then possess it to the exclusion of all others. A biologist would never claim a species or a wood to himself. If you haven’t noticed, I have been desperately lonely here for twenty-seven months. I did not want to stay away from you. But nearly as soon as I left here I felt that my use to you had been exhausted and that you did not need me lurking around. My height can be disturbing to certain tribes. And I am bad luck in the field, utterly ineffective. I couldn’t even manage to kill myself properly. I stayed away as long as could, and it is only now I see I have been rude by not coming sooner. Forgive me.’

  The spangles returned at that moment from all sides, and my eyeballs ached suddenly and painfully.