by Pat Barker
Whispers, quite close by. A startled cry, almost a yelp, then grunts, groans, moans, a long crescendo of sobbing cries.
Hocart woke up, listened. ‘Oh God, not again.’
‘Shush.’
There was a belief on the island that a girl’s defloration is never the first time, because her first bleeding means the moon has already lain with her. The men denied they believed it, insisting it was just a story they told the girls to reassure them, which at least implied a certain tenderness. He hoped so. She looked such a child.
A few minutes’ whispering, and the grunts began again. What it is to be eighteen. Another cry, this time definitely male, and footsteps coming back.
‘One down, two to go,’ Hocart said.
‘You realize for the rest of their lives they won’t be able to say each other’s names?’
No reply. Rivers wondered if he’d drifted back to sleep but when he turned to look, caught the gleam of eye white under the mosquito net. More footsteps. Another shadow climbed the far wall of the tent. A short pause, whispers, then the gasps began again.
Rivers sighed. ‘You know, Rinambesi says when a chief dies the last thing that happens, used to happen, rather, is a great head-hunting raid, followed by a feast, and all the girls are available free to all the warriors. And not reluctant either, apparently. They run into the sea to greet them.’
‘Head-hunting as an aphrodisiac?’
‘Why not?’
‘They seem to be doing all right without it,’ Hocart said, as the moans got louder.
‘No babies, though.’
The genealogies made grim reading. Families of five or six had been common three or four generations ago. Now many marriages were childless.
The last shadow came and went. Rivers supposed he must have slept, because it seemed no time at all before the grey early morning light made the mosquito nets as stark and sinister as shrouds. Fowl-he-sing-out was the pidgin term for this pre-dawn hour, and the fowls had started, first a bubbling trickle of notes, always the same bird, he didn’t know its name, rising to a frenzy of competing shrieks and cries. But this morning there was a new noise. At first he lay, blinking sleepily, unable to attach meaning to it, but then he realized it was the wailing of women, almost indistinguishable at this distance from the sound of flutes. And he knew Ngea was dead.
They arrived at Ngea’s hall to find the corpse bound into the sitting position, propped up against a pillar. A stout stick had been strapped to its back, keeping the head and neck more or less erect – a sort of external spine. Ngea had been bathed and dressed in his best clothes, the lime on his face and in his hair freshly painted, bunches of riria leaves, a plant forbidden to men in life, fastened to his necklaces. Beside him sat his widow, Emele, not crying or wailing with the other women. Very calm, very dignified.
While the women rocked and wailed Njiru was systematically destroying the dead man’s possessions, with the exception of the axe which he had set aside. One rare arm ring after another was smashed. Rivers squatted beside Njiru, and asked, in a low voice so as not to disturb the mourners, why they had to be destroyed.
‘You make him no good he go Sonto. All same Ngea he stink, he rotten, bymby he go Sonto.’
The wailing went on all day, people coming from across the island to bid Ngea farewell. Towards evening – surely, Rivers thought, the disposal of the corpse could not be much longer delayed – Njiru hung a bunch of areca nuts from the rafters by the scare ghost, took down a cluster and held it out in front of them all. He waited till the last wail faltered into silence and every eye was on him, before he began to pray. ‘I take down the portion of the chiefly dead.’ He bowed towards the corpse, which gazed back at him with glazed eyes. ‘Be not angry with us, be not resentful, do not punish us. Let them drink and eat, break coconuts, open the oven. Let the children eat, let the women eat, let the men eat, and be not angry with us, you chiefly dead, oh, oh, oh.’
The curious sound, half howl, half bark, that ended prayers on Eddystone. Njiru put a nut in his mouth and ate it. The people kept glancing nervously at Ngea, but Njiru went round the circle, offering the cluster of nuts to each person in turn. Every man, woman and child took one and ate it. Even a small child had a tiny crunched-up fragment forced into its mouth.
Ngea, without further ceremony, was slung on to a pole and carried off ‘into the bush’, they said, though in fact they took him to the beach, where he was placed in a stone enclosure – an era – with his axe and his shield at his feet. Still propped in a sitting position, his head kept erect by the stick, he looked out over the low stone wall, westwards, to the sunset. Food was left with him, and food for his mother and father, the ‘old ghosts’. Once, Njiru said, and there was no mistaking the bitterness in his voice, a slave would have been killed at this moment, and the head placed between Ngea’s feet. Njiru glared at Rivers, as if he held him personally responsible for the abolition of the custom. ‘Now no all same.’
Next day Rivers went to Ngea’s hall to offer his condolences to Emele, and was confronted by an extraordinary sight. A wooden enclosure had been built inside the hall, similar in size and shape to the stone era in which Ngea’s corpse had been placed, but with higher walls. Inside this enclosure, knees bent up to her chin, hands resting on her feet, in exactly the same position as the corpse of her husband, sat Emele. She had been there, it seemed, all night, and from the expression of agony on her face it was clear cramp had set in.
A number of widows squatted round the enclosure, looking like stumps of wood in their brown bark loincloths. Many of them were his regular informants on such topics as sexual relations, kinship, the arrangement of marriage. Rivers mimicked Emele’s cramped position, and asked for the word. Tongo polo, they said reluctantly, glancing at each other. Tongo polo, he repeated, making sure he’d got the inflection right. But his efforts to speak their language were not received with the usual maternal warmth. He thought they looked nervous.
‘How long?’ he asked, crouching down again.
But they wouldn’t answer, and when he looked round he saw that Njiru had come into the hall and was standing just inside the door.
Before Ngea’s death Njiru had agreed to take Rivers and Hocart to see the cave at Pa Na Keru. It was situated near the summit of the highest mountain on the island, and it was a morning’s walk, the early stages through thick bush, to get there. Rivers was inclined to think Ngea’s death would lead to the postponement of the trip, but when he emerged from the tent the following morning it was to find Njiru, surrounded by a much larger retinue than usual, waiting for him.
He gave them leaves to wear to protect them from the spirits of the mountain, and the whole group set off in good spirits, laughing and chattering, though they fell silent in the late morning as the ground sloped steeply upwards and the muscles of thighs and back began to ache. The path up the mountain, like all the paths on the island, was so narrow that they had to go in single file.
A solemnity had settled over the gathering. Rivers watched the movement of muscles in the back ahead of him, as they toiled and sweated up the slope. Before them was a massive rock-wall with a cave set into it, like a dark mouth. They slipped and slithered up towards it, sending showers of small pebbles peppering down behind them. The final slope was encumbered with big rocks and boulders, and other, flatter stones, some of them sharp. It was near noon, and their shadows had dwindled to ragged black shapes fluttering around their moving feet. One of the men picked up a stone and threw it at the cave mouth to scare away the ghosts. Rivers and Hocart were the only people there never to have visited the cave before, and they were not allowed to approach until Njiru had prayed that they might be protected from disease. While the prayer went on they watched the others bob down and disappear under the hanging wall of rock.
The cave was low but surprisingly deep, deep enough for the far end to be hidden in shadow. A flat stone near the entrance was called the ghost seat. This was where the new ghost sat and occasionally
, to pass the time, drew on the walls. Further in, on the cusp of darkness, was another boulder where the old ghosts sat. ‘All old tomate come and look new tomate,’ they were told.
Rivers turned to Njiru and pointed to the seat of the old ghosts. ‘Man he stink, he rotten, bymby he go Sonto. Why him no go Sonto?’ he asked.
Njiru spread his hands.
Various marks on the wall were interpreted as being the drawings of the new ghosts. Hocart started sketching the marks and recording the identifications he was given. A man, a spirit, pigs, a war canoe.
Njiru wanted to pursue the matter of the old ghosts. He did not himself believe, he said, that there were ghosts in the cave. It was a, a … His patience with pidgin ran out. A varavara, he concluded. As nearly as Rivers could make out, this meant a metaphor, a figure of speech. Increasingly now, when they were alone, they tried to understand concepts in the other’s language, to escape from the fogged communication of pidgin. The language barrier was more formidable than Rivers had initially supposed, for in addition to the ordinary dialect there was the ‘high speech’ of ritual, myth and prayer. There was also, though he had not been permitted to hear it, talk blong tomate: the language of ghosts.
While talking, they had unconsciously wandered deeper into the cave. Now Rivers touched Njiru’s arm and pointed to a narrow slit in the back wall. They had to clamber over fallen rocks to reach it, and when they did, it seemed to be too small to admit even a very thin man. Once, Njiru said, the cave had been ‘good fellow’ right into the centre of the mountain, but then an earthquake had dislodged part of the roof. Rivers knelt down and peered into the darkness. If he crawled he was sure he could get through. And he’d brought a torch with him, not knowing whether the cave would be dark or not. He turned on his back and wriggled through, catching his arm, feeling a wetness that he thought might be blood. On the other side he stood up tentatively, and then stretched his arms high above his head. He had a sense of immense space around him. The cave was big. He was reaching in his back pocket for the torch when he realized Njiru was following him through. He put his hand into the hole, trying to shield the other man’s deformed back from the jagged edge of the rock.
They stood together, breathing. Rivers shone his torch at the floor and cautiously they moved deeper into the cave. He put a hand out and touched something that slithered away under his fingers, then swung the torch round, a weak sickly ring of yellow light that revealed what for a second made him doubt his sanity: the walls were alive. They were covered in heaving black fur.
Bats, of course. After the first jolt of fear, it was obvious. He directed the torch at the ceiling where more bats hung, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands perhaps, little sooty stalactites. As the torch swept over them, they raised their heads, frenzied little faces, wet pink gums, white fangs, all jabbering with fear.
Moving very slowly and quietly, not wanting to disturb them further, he again shone the torch at the ground, so that they stood, disconnected feet and legs, in a pool of light. He shouldn’t have been startled by the bats, because he knew – Njiru had mentioned it – that in the old days it had been a regular outing for the men of Narovo to go and hunt bats in the cave at Pa Na Keru. But then one day, or so the legend said, a man took the wrong turning and, while his companions wound their way out of the mountain, his every step was leading him deeper into it. At last he stumbled upon another exit, and made his way back to the village, but, though he’d been missing less than a week, he returned an old man. He stayed with his mother for three days, but then his face turned black and he crumbled away into dust.
Nobody had followed them into the inner cave. Hocart was busy with his drawings and the islanders were presumably afraid of the legend. Was Njiru also afraid? If he was, he didn’t show it. They could hear talk and laughter only a few feet away, in the outer cave, but their isolation in this hot, fur-lined darkness was complete.
This was the first time he’d been alone with Njiru since Ngea’s death, and Rivers wanted to talk about Emele: partly because any ceremony connected with the death of a chief was important, but partly too because he felt concern for the woman herself.
‘Tongo polo,’ he said.
He felt Njiru withdraw.
‘How long?’ he persisted. ‘How many days?’
Njiru shook his head. ‘Man old time he savvy tongo polo, now no all same.’
The last words were accompanied by a dismissive chopping movement of his hand, not intended to make contact with anything, but his fingers clipped the end of the torch and sent it clattering to the ground, where it continued to shine, a single yellow eye focused on them in the darkness. Then the walls lifted off and came towards them. Rivers barely had time to see the beam of light become a tunnel filled with struggling shapes before he was enclosed in flapping squeaking screaming darkness, blinded, his skin shrinking from the contact that never came.
He stood with eyes closed, teeth clenched, senses so inundated they’d virtually ceased to exist, his mind shrunk to a single point of light. Keep still, he told himself, they won’t touch you. And after that he didn’t think at all but endured, a pillar of flesh that the soles of his feet connected to the earth, the bones of his skull vibrating to the bats’ unvarying high-pitched scream.
The cave mouth disgorged fleeing human beings; behind them the bats streamed out in a dark cloud that furled over on to itself as it rose, like blood flowing from a wound under water. Eventually, shocked into silence, they all turned to stare, and watched for a full minute, before the stream thinned to a trickle.
Inside the cave, Rivers and Njiru opened their eyes. Rivers was not aware of having moved during the exodus, indeed would have sworn that he had not, but he discovered that he was gripping Njiru’s hand. He felt … not dazed, dazed was the wrong word. The opposite of dazed. Almost as if a rind had been pared off, naked, unshelled, lying in contact with the earth. Wonderingly, in the intense silence, they gazed round the grey granite walls, with here and there in the vastness black squares of baby bats hung upside-down to await their mothers’ return.
A shaft of sunlight struck his eyes.
‘Sorry,’ Miss Irving said, and pulled the curtain a little way back. ‘What sort of night did you have?
‘So-so.’
He seemed to have spent the entire night between hot, fur-lined walls and the fur had got on to his teeth.
‘Here’s your tea,’ she said, putting the tray across his knees.
He drank it gratefully, sending out messages to various parts of his body to find out what the situation was. Ghastly, seemed to be the general response.
‘Don’t you think you should have a doctor?’ She smiled at him. ‘Doctor.’
‘No. All he’d do is tell me to stay in bed and drink plenty of fluids. I can tell myself that.’
‘All right. Ring if there’s anything you want.’
‘Would you mind drawing the curtains?’
The darkness reminded him of the cave. All night he’d had bats clinging to the inside walls of his skull. But now at least there was a breeze, the curtains breathed gently. But he was still too hot. He kicked off the covers, unbuttoned his jacket and flapped the edges, ran his tongue round his cracked lips. Hot.
The sun beat down the moment they left the cave. It was past noon, but the hard bright white rocks reflected heat into their faces. They walked more slowly on the way back, Rivers intensely aware of Njiru walking just ahead of him, though they did not speak. Near the village they began, by mutual consent, to lag behind the others. Hocart turned to wait, but Rivers waved him on.
They sat down on an overturned tree trunk covered in moss. The sun crashed down, beating the tops of their heads, like somebody hammering tent pegs into the ground. And yet even in these sweaty clothes, the shoulders of his shirt thickly encrusted with bat droppings, Rivers had the same feeling of being new, unsheathed.
They sat tranquilly, side by side, in no hurry to begin the mangled business of communication. A slight breez
e cooled their skin.
‘Tongo polo,’ Rivers said at last, because that’s where they’d left off. How long? he asked again. How many days?
A bright, amused, unmistakably affectionate look from Njiru. There was no fixed time, he said, though eighteen days was common. His grandmother had observed tongo polo for two hundred days, but that was exceptional because Homu, his grandfather, had been a great chief. The men of Roviana blew the conch for her.
Blew the conch? Rivers asked. What did that mean?
A short silence, though not, Rivers thought, indicating a reluctance to go on speaking. At that moment Njiru would have told him anything. Perhaps this was the result of that time in the cave when they’d reached out and gripped each other’s hands. No, he thought. No. There had been two experiences in the cave, and he was quite certain Njiru shared in both. One was the reaching out to grasp each other’s hands. But the other was a shrinking, no, no, not shrinking, a compression of identity into a single hard unassailable point: the point at which no further compromise is possible, where nothing remains except pure naked self-assertion. The right to be and to be as one is.
Njiru’s grandfather, Homu, was famous for having taken ninety-three heads in a single afternoon. Through his grandmother he was related to Inkava, who, until the British destroyed his stronghold, had been the most ferocious of the great head-hunting chiefs of Roviana. This was his inheritance. Rivers glanced sideways at him, close enough to see how the white lime flaked on the taut skin of his cheekbones. Njiru was speaking, not out of friendship – though he felt friendship – but out of that hard core of identity, no longer concerned to evade questions or disguise his pride in the culture of his people.
The blowing of the conch, he said, signifies the completion of a successful raid. He turned and looked directly at Rivers. The widow of a chief can be freed only by the taking of a head.
Eleven
Monday, 16 September 1918
We live in tamboos – a sort of cross between a cowshed and an outdoor privy. Corrugated iron walls and roof – bloody noisy when it rains, and it’s raining now – carpeted with straw that rustles and smells and gleams in the candle-light. Fields outside – perfectly reasonable fields when we arrived. Now, after last night’s heavy rain and the constant churning of boots and wheels, there’s a depth of about eighteen inches of mud. The duckboards are starting to sink. Oh, and it gets into everything. The inside of my sleeping-bag is not inviting – I was tempted to sleep outside it last night. But. Mustn’t complain. (Why not? The entire army survives on grousing.) In fact mud and duckboards are about the only familiar things left.