Cousins

by Patricia Grace

  ‘There is no Anihera.’

  ‘My sister …’

  ‘There is no sister called Anihera,’ Keita said.

  Twenty

  Gloria sat sideways on the seat, shielding me from the eyes of other passengers who had begun to move up and down the train. I opened my coat and blouse, put Makareta to me and she took the milk in long, strong pulls. It was a relief to have her sucking on my full, sore breasts. I wished that other, deeper hurts could be drawn away as easily. In another half-hour we’d be in Wellington.

  The days since Makareta’s birth had been days of anxiety for me, not knowing whether Rere would come home before leaving for overseas, or whether the battalion would just sail one day, secretly. ‘There’s special leave,’ Keita said, ‘for fathers with new babies or for death in the family.’ But she was anxious too.

  After we’d sent the telegram telling Rere that our daughter had been born, Aperehama went each day to the railway station with the horses to meet the train. Each day he returned alone, but with broken pieces of news from the guards and train drivers. It was news that was not allowed to be known, so it had been gleaned from a feeling, a word, a hint of change observed by those close to the camp town, and passed on. It was news not allowed to be told, so it came under the hand, under the breath, and always only in part — there’d been a special visit, a parade, a word, there was something going on.

  One day Aperehama came home and said, ‘Any day,’ and we knew then that Rere would not be home on ‘compassionate leave’ at all but would come instead on ‘final leave’ before he left for war. The day after that he arrived, along with his cousins Hori, Nonny and someone else we didn’t know.

  Watching from the window, Kui and I saw the men and the horses as they came up the hill and round the last bend. At the fence to the home paddocks Rere, Hori and Nonny left the horses, their kitbags and their companion and came running.

  ‘Coming,’ I called as I went out into the yard. Keita and Gloria were shifting embers around the camp oven, and Wi was blocking his knives. Their heads turned towards the track where they had heard the men running.

  They came into the yard kicking up dust with their soldier boots and my Rere and I were holding each other as though everything was as it had always been between us. The cloth of his uniform was rough against the tenderness of my breasts, which were aching and hardening, and from which milk began to pour, wetting my clothes, wetting us both. ‘Where?’ he asked.

  Kui came out bringing Makareta, who blinked in the outside light and moved her head from side to side. Rere took her, unwrapping the blanket and letting her lie on his hands. Hori and Nonny came leaning in to look.

  ‘What do we call her?’ he asked.

  ‘Makareta after my mother,’ I said, ‘And Hinemate after Kui.’

  ‘The only one with my name,’ Kui said.

  ‘Beautiful then, just like you, our Kui.’

  Someone else arrived just then — a small, surprised-looking soldier with his swag on his shoulder and a ukelele in his hand. ‘Our mate Bobby,’ Nonny said. ‘Their river bust its banks and he can’t get home for a couple of days.’

  The soldier called Bobby put his things down and came to greet us all. Not long afterwards we heard other relatives coming over the hills on horses. We could hear them, calling, ‘Hori Hori, Nonny Nonny, Re Re Re Re.’

  It was not only anxiety that I felt in those days of waiting for Rere to come. Mixed with anxiety were the usual fears and sorrows that are to do with war and parting. I felt those things too even though war was something far away, not really comprehended, and parting was not yet a reality. What was real to me, what I held inside me, was the knowledge that Rere was going to war because there was a war to go to. In the excitement that he felt, in the happiness that I could see in him but could not share, I felt him becoming a stranger to me. We had shared so much, loved so much. We had dreams and plans, but even though I’d pleaded with him he hadn’t waited six months, six weeks or even six days before volunteering. He was starting out on the biggest adventure of his life, that was what I felt and what I knew, and there was hardly a thought in his head that was for me.

  That night as we held each other I tried to bring him back to me, tried to make him remember the creek, the tree, the dark, laughing paddocks where we’d grown in to each other, where we’d guessed our futures, planned our lives. ‘The manuka tree was covered in flowers the day baby was born,’ I said. ‘The grass was long and green.’ But I don’t know that he heard. He spilled and lay over me, motionless, as though asleep, and loneliness was the seed that I held. Close-to-anger sadness is what I felt. ‘One day …’ he said in his half-sleep, but the memories were eluding him. They belonged to another time.

  It was Kui who tried to help me through those days. She would take Makareta from me saying, ‘Don’t cry, Daughter, or your milk will fill with tears. Our baby will be drinking tears.’ Or, ‘We don’t let tears fall on a baby’s head. A baby is old, a baby knows. Remember we’re the ones who wait, the mothers. That’s what this old woman has learned to do — to wait and wait, hope and wait, on and on. Otherwise how can the world turn?’ Her words didn’t comfort me. She was old. I didn’t want her life of waiting to be my life. I didn’t want a life of waiting and hoping to be my daughter’s life.

  Rere and I had little time together during that fortnight of final leave. They were days claimed by his family — days of visiting elders, attending farewell functions, listening to speeches, drinking, singing and not being allowed to sleep. At the end of it we put him and his cousins on the train with their kitbags and parcels. They were exhausted. As we waved them off, their eyes were closing. I knew they were glad to be going.

  A month later the news came that ‘the boys were packing up’ and we dressed, picked up the boxes, bags and blankets that we had ready and set out for the railway station. It was a busy road that day as people made their way on foot or on horseback to the midnight train, all anxious to know details — but there was no one who knew. We were not sure if the overnight train that reached our station at midnight would get us to Wellington in time. I needed to kiss Rere goodbye, to say something that would make things be as they had been between us, or close to it, or to pretend. People pretend in wartime.

  Also there was something else that Kui had said that was biting into me. ‘Kaua e harawene mona,’ she’d said one day. I didn’t want the words but there they were, spoken. They bit and began to eat. Don’t be jealous of him? I knew that Kui was looking into me to somewhere that I hadn’t wanted to look, at something in me that was more than sorrow and harder than anger. Rere was going to war. My brother had joined the Navy and my two older sisters were in the Red Cross learning to drive trucks. Sooner or later they would go to war too — all the ones I loved — while I was staying home to write letters and wait, to listen to the wireless, feed baby, carry wood and water, wait for a telegram, hope for it not to come.

  But if I could I’d have been off to see the war and the world too. That’s what Kui knew. Before she’d spoken I hadn’t dared to look at my sorrow, my anger, and to ask myself what it was really about. If it had been me, I’d have gone. That’s what I needed to tell Rere.

  Also I wanted him to see Makareta. She knew us all now, smiled, talked to us, and that was a memory I wanted him to take with him.

  The train entered a tunnel and the sooty engine smoke layered back through it, seeping into the carriages, stinking. Hills slanted away and up on either side as we came out, then we cut through them into a second tunnel. Coming out of it, we saw the buildings, the houses, the hills and the harbour of Wellington. At another time it could have been exciting. In the harbour were the ships that would be taking the men across the sea to no one knew where. I passed Makareta to Gloria and buttoned my clothes. ‘I’ve got a photo of me, for Bobby,’ Gloria said.

  We stood, collecting our bags and bundles, and waited in the aisle. People, crowding the platforms, pushed forward as we pulled in, then, discover
ing that this was not the train they were waiting for, moved back again. They were asking if we’d seen the troop train or if anyone knew when the boys would be in. They spoke in whispers. Out on the walls and pillars were notices and posters warning us to keep silent. Our careless words could cause ships to sink and bombs to fall, the notifications said.

  The main building of the station was crowded with people, some sitting on seats or bags, or on coats or blankets they had spread on the floor. Others stood, or wandered. All waited — for a train they knew was coming, or for the end of the war or the world, or for whatever might be. We went through to a space by a far wall, put our belongings down and settled ourselves.

  Coming. Coming. It wasn’t a shout or a whisper, but a movement that ruffled the crowd. It was like a knowing that came from the air — air that had become cold enough to show breath as we began to stir, to stand, turning first one way and then another, not knowing which way to go. There was a train coming, a sound far back, but no one knew which platform it would come into.

  Then the station began to empty. The train was coming, but not into the station.

  We followed the people out on to the street and there we saw it making its way slowly along the wharf tracks. There was no sign that this was a train filled with soldiers on their way to war. It looked instead like a line of empty carriages with their shutters down being taken to a wharf shed or a side track, finished for the day.

  Then the wharf gates opened, the train went through, the gates closed. ‘It was them,’ someone said. ‘Blackouts down and guards by the doors.’ And we all hurried across the road to the gates, calling to the officials to let us through. We had gifts to give, letters, messages, photographs, keepsakes and food. We had husbands, sons, fathers to see on their way to war. But our pleas were not listened to.

  After a long while of waiting we knew that the gates were not going to be opened for us. I needed to get Makareta out of the cold.

  Kui, Gloria and I returned to the station while the others remained at the gates. We tended to Makareta then sat in our blankets to wait. ‘In the morning,’ Kui said, ‘they’ll open up in the morning.’ But I knew the men would all be on board by morning. The ships could have gone by then.

  It was early morning and still dark when we picked up our baby and our parcels and made our way back to the wharf, where the crowd still waited. As we were about to cross the road a bus arrived and turned in. We saw the gates opening and began to hurry. But the guards, keeping the crowd back, let the bus through and closed the gates again.

  People began banging on the fences then, angry that some had been let through, demanding to know who. After a while I knew who it was because through the dark I heard singing. The Ngati Poneke Concert Party had been taken on to the wharf to farewell the soldiers. Yet we had our songs too, our gifts and kisses to give.

  It was daylight when the gates were opened at last. We pressed through onto the wharf only to find that the Aquitania was already out in the stream and the soldiers were just blurred lines of khaki down the sides of it. At first we cried with sorrow and anger. Then, after a while, as the ship waited out in the harbour for another two to join it, we realised that the only hope we had to reach out to the men was with our voices. We made our way through and stood with the Ngati Poneke group joining in their songs — ‘He Putiputi’, ‘He Aha Kei Taku Uma’, ‘Me He Manu Rere’, ‘Tahine Taru Kino’.

  Later, from across the water, we heard the men’s voices singing ‘Po Atarau’ and we joined them in the singing of it. There could be no more songs after that. It was our last touching. We cheered and called as the sirens sounded and the ships drew away.

  ‘I’ll send it,’ Gloria said as we went back towards the gates, ‘the photo for Bobby.’ She was fifteen and in love. Her face was smeared and her eyes were red and the lids swollen, just as I knew mine would be.

  We were almost to the gates when we heard someone call, and as we turned Anihera came out from behind one of the wharf sheds carrying her newly born baby wrapped in a coat. She wore only a thin smock and open shoes. ‘I heard about the boats,’ she said. ‘I wanted to see Rere, wanted to see you all.’

  ‘Come home with us, Ani,’ Gloria said. ‘Bring Baby home.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Come to Keita, come and see Wi, over at the station … Ani?’

  ‘I saw Keita, saw Wi, saw them all … Just to show you my Mata, and to see you all.’ And she left us, hurrying along the quayside in the crowd. Gloria ran after her, giving her the parcels she was carrying — a packet of smoked eel and a tin of bread. ‘Don’t tell them, Glory,’ we heard Anihera call.

  We took our Makareta home. She was two months old and had a dark brown skin that pulled over tight fat and went deep into dents and creases. She had thick, black hair that covered her ears, and dark eyes that seemed small when she was that age because her eyelids were so plumped out that they wouldn’t open properly. She knew us through slits, watched us, always ready to play. We hardly ever heard her cry, but there was no need for her to cry in a household of so many adults who looked to every need.

  Two and a half years later, in a telegram that was sent to Keita and Wi, we received news of Rere’s death at Alamein. I was deeply lonely after that and unable to see an end to loneliness. Makareta was nearly three years old, a little grandmother of a girl who accompanied the old people wherever they went. She spoke Maori in the old way, like the grandmothers, and had the unhurried manner herself that the old people have. She spoke English too, but only to me. I thought it was right to speak to her in English.

  She was nearly five by the time I decided I should leave. I thought that there could be more for her than a life with old people, and thought there could be more for me to do in the city. At first it was the letter from Cissie that gave me the excuse I needed, but after Keita had spoken to me of her plan, and later when I had spoken to Aperehama, I knew I had to leave. There was no longer a choice.

  Twenty-one

  Aperehama leaned forward with his forehead resting in the cow’s flank. Two streams of milk criss-crossed into the bucket. He was eighteen, just as Rere had been when we first met, like Rere to look at, broad-featured and dark with wavy, black hair. But he was taller than Rere, and quieter. Sad, I thought.

  He shifted the bucket, undid the legrope and stood. The cow walked off and he tipped the milk from bucket to billy. As I watched I wondered if he had any idea of Keita’s plans for him and me. If he had guessed, I wondered how he felt. It was loneliness that suddenly made me want to know. ‘It used to be Rere’s job, milking, when I first came here to live,’ I said. ‘You were thirteen.’ I noticed his hesitation as he wondered where my words were leading. He was wearing old army trousers tucked into gumboots, and a grey jersey that was too small for him. Looking at him, I could see a loneliness that matched my own, and at that moment I wanted to put my arms round him and love him and be with him always. One step forward and it could have happened, whether it was Aperehama who took the step or whether it was me.

  It was the thin wrists and the long child hands extending from the too-small sleeves that shocked me, that prevented me from taking the step and kept my feet on the spot where I stood. He hadn’t finished growing yet, and looking at him I could see his thirteen-year-oldness looking back at me from puzzled, lonely eyes.

  We turned away from each other and began walking back across the paddock. ‘I miss him,’ I said, as though there was something that needed explaining. ‘I miss him, but those days are gone.’

  ‘And now you’re a prisoner of war, like me,’ Aperehama said. He understood more than I thought.

  When we reached the track that led to Gloria’s I told him I was leaving. I saw that he was relieved and realised that he did know something of Keita’s plan. ‘One day soon,’ I said. ‘Makareta and me.’

  ‘Makareta?’ He was thinking of Kui Hinemate.

  ‘I’ll get Gloria’s milk and take it to her each day. Sometimes I’ll take Makareta with m
e. One day Makareta and I will leave Gloria’s, head for the railway station and take the train to Wellington. I have to do it that way. Keita won’t let me go and take Makareta with me.’

  ‘It’s my mother … why I stay,’ Aperehama said. ‘But if the war keeps on I’ll be going.’

  ‘You don’t blame me?’

  ‘You’re my big sister, like Anihera.’ It was an answer to something else rather than to the question I’d asked, an explanation, perhaps, why a step that could have been taken was not taken. Big sister? Even if I had wanted to stay I couldn’t, now that it had been said.

  Twenty-two

  Makareta wrote her name on the window and underneath it wrote her school words — mother, bird, bed, hop, little. Today at school they’d read a story about a germ who lived in a rubbish tin. You had to fight against germs. She thought it might be something to do with the war. There were more words that she could’ve written but the pane was full.

  There was another window in the bedroom but it was already dark in there and she thought it could be past four o’clock by now. Her mother was supposed to be home at four. From where she was sitting she could see the dark doorway and the dark space behind it, but couldn’t go in and turn the light on because the blackout curtains weren’t drawn. There could be parrots in there too, she thought, watching from the dark ceiling — red, green, blue, white, orange, pink — with glassy, glinting eyes, ready to drop down. The ones in her dreams filled rooms, walked the footpaths and roads, picking and pecking.

  She left the window and sat in a chair with her feet drawn up under her. Now that she’d remembered the parrots, she thought there could be one under the chair, its long leg and heavy claw reaching out to snatch her.

  On the table was the piece of bread that she’d taken from the cupboard when she came home from school. She’d had two bites from it then noticed the steamy window, so she’d left the bread and gone to write her name. Now she wanted the bread but she was afraid to put her feet on the floor, because of the parrot under the chair that was pretending to be dead. Any movement would wake it and out it would come, clawing, waddling, cracking its beak, hunting her with its bead eye. She made herself as small as she could in the dark and sat without moving.