In downtown Taipei, a New Zealand girl takes a bottle
of wine into a park and drinks through the night
with friends, like any Chinese poet. She is laughing,
high on aftershock, when the phone cuts out.
By late afternoon candles begin their slow
twist in front of mirrors. Hymns.
Flames in leaf boats
set loose on the quiet Ganges,
every one a soul.
1,700 new-made ghosts (the BBC)
and more to come.
The new battlefields.
Taipei
(2000)
Elizabeth Knox, from Daylight
The day was hot and his pack heavy. The four glasses of water he had had with lunch hadn’t quenched his thirst. He stopped in a covered laverie to dangle his hands in the piped spring. The water was cold and milky blue. Underwater, Bad’s skin paled and smoothed out, his corded veins contracting. He inclined, elbows on the stone coping, and looked over his shoulder at a tree, a tree like an exhibit, protected by a low stone fence. The elm’s trunk was partly hollow and canted like a broken column, the spread of its limbs slight in proportion to its trunk. It was in leaf late, still a tufted, tender yellow. Bad read ‘1713’ on the stone fence.
He took his hands from the icy water and shook them. From somewhere hidden, above the sunny piazza, a bird began to sing, its voice like glass marbles shaken in a bag. Then in his pocket, his phone played its speedy tune.
It was Gabrielle, his girlfriend. She said, ‘Brian … look … this is crazy.’
Gabrielle said that she knew now she’d been thinking in the wrong way about their relationship. Thinking of room for improvement as a personal challenge when the operative word was room. The space she should give him, should trust him with. ‘These days we’re all just a different sort of risk-averse. We’ve gained some insights but lost others. We’ll take short chances but not take on the long. We look at one another and wonder whether we’re getting the best deal we can. We forget to factor in how things are on a day-to-day basis. The value of that.’
‘Things?’ said Bad
‘This is difficult for me,’ said Gabrielle. ‘I miss you, Brian, but I’m staying away from places I might find you because I know you’re mad at me.’
‘I’m not mad at you.’
‘You ended it, Brian. You were that mad.’
‘I couldn’t see a future for us.’ Bad hoped that, put this way, Gabrielle would understand it.
‘But you don’t see futures, Brian—that’s the issue I have with you. You wait for problems to present themselves to you. You even go looking for them—big scary problems like bombs to disarm.’
Bad though that it would be unnecessarily provocative to point out that it was his job to do so.
Gabrielle asked him if he had ever seen himself growing old with anyone.
‘I see myself not growing old with someone,’ Bad said, then laughed. He was feverishly happy.
‘Brian?’ Gabrielle said.
‘Yes,’ Bad said. ‘I’ll go into hiding with someone. We will hide from time, together.’
‘But, Brian,’ Gabrielle said, ‘it’s important to spend time together. We had that covered. I think we did. That’s what this trip was about—spending time together.’
Bad was laughing.
‘Brian, please. Where are you?’
‘A piazza off 19 Septembre 1947.’
‘Please, Brian! I’m trying to make contact, to make peace, and you rebuff me with nonsense.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Bad said. He told his girlfriend that he was their problem. ‘You can get a better deal.’
‘I’m not looking for a deal.’ Gabrielle was crying. ‘Or a return on my investment. I care about you, Brian. I want you to talk to me, to tell me what I can do to fix things between us.’
It was his fault. Bad knew he should try to explain to Gabrielle that, owing to his reticence, she had never known who she was talking to. Gabrielle believed in personality types. She’d run tests for employers who wanted to find out what they had in their staff, what each employee’s work habits and stress strategies might be, according to type. Bad had done Gabrielle’s tests, for fun and from vanity. He was a politician, an extrovert, the tests said. Bad concurred, could see himself in the results. But none of it had helped his girlfriend, to whom he never gave his full history. What good did it do her to see a positive, politic, extroverted Brian and not to have pictured that same man as a boy who, despite teasing, was confident enough of his judgment to step back off the platform at Dart Ridge? Bad had never told her about that. He hadn’t said, ‘I was alone on a mountain path. Suddenly, utterly alone—though there was a girl behind me shaking a stone from her shoe, and a boy nearby jammed into a thornbush and hanging on for dear life.’ He hadn’t said, ‘I’m still alone on the mountain path. I’m still looking at the air.’ Or: ‘I’m still alone at the foot of the crester run, staring at the black air above a waterfall at the top of a fifteenmeter pitch.’ It was too late to tell now, to explain, because he wasn’t alone any more, and the cave’s system lay open to him now, an animated cross section full of figures and lights. There were cavers in the Salle de la Nef, shawled in sleeping bags, waiting for the water to recede. Dawn and Jacques Palomba were lying in a cozy cavern, full of paintings and candles. The rescue teams pushed their threads of light through dark tunnels, Gino with them, his face warm behind his cold lamp. The Pilgrim’s Way was visible for all its length, vined with cable—speakers and monitors like fruit on those vines—crowded with pilgrims, the bishop at their head, in his purple and gold. Bad had found a different mountain path, too. A path that wasn’t the work of Alpine guides, Parks and Reserves, or the Department of Conservation and that didn’t have a viewing platform above a glacier. It was a mule track, part of a network of tracks around the nexus of the Salt Route, the pass into Piedmont. Bad was standing on that path, watching a vampire, who was watching a soldier, who was watching a snake and watched by a butcher with a billhook. There was blood on the glacier still—but there was blood everywhere. Dawn’s eye fell out, and she put it back in.
Gabrielle continued to cry, and Bad held her to his ear. He apologised again, then pressed the button that ended the call.
(2003)
Lloyd Jones, from Mister Pip
Around dawn we heard the redskins’ helicopters pass over the village and then return. They hovered in the air like giant dragonflies, peering down at the clearing. They saw a line of abandoned houses and an empty beach because we had cleared off. Everyone. The old people. Mums and dads. The kids. And those dogs and chickens that had names. We hid in the jungle and waited. We waited until we heard the helicopters beat over the tree-tops. We could feel the breeze their blades sent down. I remember looking around our huddled group and wondering where Mr Watts and Grace were.
We kept under the trees and followed a bush track back to the village. The dogs that had been too old and skinny to move from their favourite place lifted their snouts. The roosters strutted around. Seeing them made you feel human, because they didn’t know anything. They didn’t know about guns and the redskins from Moresby. They didn’t know about the mine or about the politics or of our fears. The roosters only knew how to be roosters.
The helicopters had gone but we were left with our fear. We didn’t know what to do with it. We walked around. We stood in doorways. We stared off into space. Then, one by one, we realised there was nothing else to do but return to our normal routine. That meant school.
Mr Watts stood at the front of the class as we filed in. I waited until the last of the kids had slid in to their desks before I stuck up my hand. I asked him if he had heard the helicopters and if so where had he and Mrs Watts hidden themselves. It was the question we had all brought to school.
Our faces seemed to amuse Mr Watts. He jiggled a pencil in his palm. ‘We didn’t hide, Matilda,’ he said. ‘Mrs Watts wasn’t up to an early morning excursion. As for myself,
I like to use that hour for reading.’ And that was that.
‘Will we have the pleasure of your mother in class today, Matilda?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, and tried hard not to sound so unhappy about it.
As it turned out, another mum got the times confused and turned up. She was married to Wilson Masoi, a fisherman, and their son Gilbert only came to class if his father decided he wouldn’t go fishing. She was a large woman. She came through the doorway side-on. The boy with the big woolly head who sat in front of me was Gilbert. Today I could see right over the top of him because he was slumped over his desk, ashamed to see his mother in class.
It didn’t escape Mr Watts’ attention. He looked towards the back of the class as if he had forgotten something.
‘Gilbert. Would you like to introduce your mother to the class?’
Gilbert winced. He bit the insides of his cheeks. Slowly he gathered himself up. He managed to stand, but with his chin attached to his chest, his eyes trying to poke through the top of his eyelids. We heard him mutter, ‘This is Mum.’
‘Oh come now, Gilbert,’ said Mr Watts. ‘Does Mum have a name?’
‘Mrs Masoi.’
‘Mrs Masoi. Thank you, Gilbert. You may sit down.’
Mr Watts conferred with Gilbert’s mum. As he did so he took a light hold of Mrs Masoi’s elbow. She had a big head of black cotton hair. She was barefoot and her shapeless white dress was filthy. As they ended their private conversation I heard Mr Watts say, ‘Jolly good.’ And to the rest of us he announced, ‘Mrs Masoi has some cooking tips to share.’
Gilbert’s mum turned to face us. She closed her eyes and recited: ‘To kill an octopus bite it above the eyes. When cooking a turtle place it shell down first: She looked across to Mr Watts who nodded for her to continue. She closed her eyes a second time. ‘To kill a pig, get two fat uncles to place a board across its throat.’
After the pig recipe she opened her eyes and looked to Mr Watts. He tried to make a joke and asked how big those uncles should be. Mrs Masoi answered, ‘Fat ones. Fat is good. Skinny no bloody good.’ Poor Gilbert. He was wincing, and shuffling his big behind in the desk in front of me.
The next morning we woke to the helicopters again. My mum was bent over me, her face pinched with panic. She was yelling at me to hurry. I could hear people shouting outside, and the beating of the blades. Dust and bits of leaves flew in the open window. My mum threw my clothes at me. Outside, people were running in all directions.
I reached the edge of the bush with my mum pulling me deeper and deeper into the trees. We knew the helicopters had landed because the sound of their blades was even. Everywhere in the shadows I saw sweating faces. We tried to blend in with the stillness of the trees. Some stood. Others crouched; those mums with little ones crouched. They stuck their teats into the mouths of their babies to shut them up. No one spoke. We waited and waited. We sat still. Our faces dripped sweat. We waited until we heard the helicopters beat overhead into the distance. Even then we waited until Gilbert’s father came back to give the all clear. Slowly we picked our way out of the jungle and walked back to our houses.
In the clearing the sun beat down on our dead animals. Chooks and roosters sprawled on their swollen sides. Their heads lay elsewhere in the dust, and it was hard to know which head went where. The same machete blows that took their heads cut down washing and garden stakes.
An old dog had its belly ripped open. We stared at that dog, and thought about a story Gilbert’s father had brought from further up the coast where most of the fighting was going on. Now we knew what a human being split open would look like. There was no need to wonder anymore. To stare at that black dog was to see your sister or brother or mum and dad in that same state. You saw how disrespectful the sun could be, and how dumb the palms were to flutter back at the sea and up at the sky. The great shame of trees is that they have no conscience. They just go on staring.
Mabel’s dad picked up the dog, and while he held it dripping in his arms he yelled at a boy to come and help stuff the insides back where they belonged. The two of them walked to the edge of the jungle and turfed it into the shadows. The dog’s name was Black ….
Our prized possession—a goat—had disappeared. If she’d been chopped up we’d have found her entrails. We looked in the jungle. One or two promising paths ended in waterfalls or screens of jungle. The redskins must have taken her with them. In our heads we worked out how this would have been done.
We saw a rope, no, two ropes—hindquarter and forequarter—slung around the beast. We saw it airlifted. We saw its big eyes fill with wonder for the tree-tops it had never seen suddenly appear below. We tried to imagine what it would feel like to be a goat and have the skittery feeling of lightness tickling its hooves.
The blockade was imposed in the first half of 1990. We thought it would be just a matter of time before the outside world came to help us. Patience was the word we heard whispered. But now look at what had happened. The wrong people had found us.
We didn’t care about the chooks and roosters so much. We could eat fish, and the trees dripped with fruit. It was Black and his insides exposed to the harsh sun that we thought about.
My mum came and spoke to the class later that same day. She didn’t warn me. I had no idea what she would talk about. She didn’t know anything outside of what she knew from the Bible.
Just as he had with Gilbert, Mr Watts hunted me out with his large eager eyes. ‘Matilda, would you like to do the honours?’
I stood up and announced what everyone already knew.
‘This is my mum.’
‘And does Mum have a name?’
‘Dolores,’ I said, and slid lower into my desk. ‘Dolores Laimo.’
My mum smiled back at me. She was wearing the green scarf my dad sent in the very last package we received. She wore it tied tight at the back of her head which was the same way the rebels wore their bandanas. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun. It gave her an air of defiance. Her mouth clamped down, her nostrils flared. My father used to say she had the blood of righteousness running in her veins. She should have been a church woman, he’d say, because persuasiveness for my mum was not an intellectual exercise. Quality of argument was neither here nor there. It was all about the intensity of belief. And every part of her—from the whites of her eyes to her muscular calves—rallied on her behalf.
My mum didn’t smile enough. When she did it was nearly always in victory. Or else it was at night-time when she thought she was all alone. When she was thinking she tended to look angry as if the act of thinking was potentially ruinous, even ending in her humiliation. Even when she concentrated she looked angry. In fact, she appeared to be angry much of the time. I used to think it was because she was thinking about my dad. But she couldn’t have thought about him all the time.
She knew the contents of what she called the Good Book. She thought about those contents a lot. And I wouldn’t have thought there was anything in that book to make her angry, but that’s how she appeared, and why a lot of the kids found her scary.
She must have anticipated this because she used her softer voice, the one I used to hear in the night before Great Expectations came between us.
‘Children, I have come to talk to you about faith,’ she said. ‘You must believe in something. Yes, you must. Even the palm trees believe in the air. And the fish believe in the sea.’
As she cast her eye around the room she began to empty her mind of the only subject she trusted, and knew and cared anything about.
‘When the missionaries came, we were taught to have faith in God. But when we asked to see God the missionaries refused to introduce us. Many of the old people preferred to stay with the wisdom of crabs, and the file fish that is shaped like the Southern Star, because if you were to swim with your head down you could swim from one island to another just by taking your bearings from the file fish. What do you kids think of that, eh?’
She leaned forward. Mr Watts might as
well not have been present.
‘It’s better to have the company of file fish, don’t you think? If you did, then you could say your survival was simply a matter of faith, which is what one old fisherman, rescued from his sunken canoe, told my father when I was a girl. At night he knew where he was by the stars. During the day he kept his face in the water and followed the file fish. This is true.’
None of us was about to dispute it. The others sat rigid in their desks. The fear I felt from them made me a little embarrassed.
My mum gave a satisfied grunt. She had us where she wanted us. We were that shoal of petrified fish that a shark circles. She slowly straightened up out of her lean, as if taking care not to disturb her effect on us all.
‘Now listen. Faith is like oxygen. It keeps you afloat at all times. Sometimes you need it. Sometimes you don’t. But when you do need it you better be practised at having faith, otherwise it won’t work. That’s why the missionaries built all the churches. Before we got those churches we weren’t practising enough. That’s what prayers are for—practice, children. Practice.’
‘Now, here are some words to learn off by heart. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth …. And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’ My mum’s face opened to a rare smile. She found me in the desk up the back and held my eye. ‘And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.’
There is no sentence in the world more beautiful than that one.
I was aware of several heads turning my way, as if I might beg to differ. Fortunately I was saved by Violet who had her hand up. She wanted my mum to talk about the wisdom of crabs. At last my mum turned to Mr Watts.
‘Please he said.’
‘Crabs,’ she said, and raised her gaze to the geckos on the ceiling. But she did not see them. Her mind was fastened to crabs and, in particular, the sort of weather we can expect by looking at the behaviour of crabs.
‘Wind and rain are on the way if a crab digs straight down and blocks the hole with sand leaving marks like sunrays. We can expect strong winds but no rain if a crab leaves behind a pile of sand but does not cover the hole.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 136