by Anbara Salam
‘It’s fine,’ Lien said, ‘it’s good – we travelled so much ground. We’ll be at Bambayot in two days, maybe even tomorrow.’ She rocked Minh. ‘It’s good, it’s fine.’ She patted his back.
Thieu reached for her hand. ‘You’re OK?’ She hadn’t mentioned the measles even once while they’d been walking. Her face was swollen with mosquito bites, and she looked exhausted.
‘Of course,’ she said, frowning. ‘I’m fine. Will you stop asking?’
Thieu didn’t remember asking her. He gave her a weak smile. ‘Nearly there,’ he said.
Lien kissed Minh on the cheek. ‘By this time next week, Marietta will wave us goodbye on the Duchesse,’ she said. ‘Will you wave back, Minh-Binh?’ She picked up his hand and waved it for him. ‘Say “bonjour, Port Vila”?’ she crooned, in a sing-song voice. Minh just squealed.
After the hottest part of the day, Thieu left Lien and Minh to nap, and followed a cackling echo to a huge banyan, where pot-bellied marmosets were scampering around the branches. He lurked at the base for two hours, and threw pebbles into the tree until he hit one of the creatures in the back of its head with his slingshot. Since they couldn’t risk a fire until they were safely deep in the forest, he tied the carcass over his shoulder with his belt, and carried it on his back. Lien shuddered to see its limp head lolling horribly on Thieu’s shoulder, and its skinny limbs trembling with his every movement. A nest of fleas evacuated the animal’s fur and bounced around on the back of his neck. When they lit a fire that evening, Thieu stuck the whole body inside the flames and its fluff singed away in a sharp blaze. Lien looked away from the tiny, scorched hands of the marmoset, and refused to eat it. Thieu took the body discreetly out of her line of sight and hacked it into less recognizable pieces, tossing its hands and feet into the earth.
The next day, they rose early, and struggled through yet another close bracket of bamboo, and broke through into another dappled clearing, but this time, there were no butterflies. Lien grabbed Thieu’s arm and pointed at a footprint baked into the clay by a shallow rock pool. He pushed her roughly behind the fringe of bamboo, and peered around them for the villager.
But Lien tapped him out of the way, squeezed her foot out of her sandal, pressed her own toes perfectly inside the print, and fell to her knees and wept.
They were lost.
11
Max was aware of Bea wriggling to the edge of the bed, and the pressure on the thin mattress lifting as she weaselled her way through the mosquito net. He stretched out his legs into the warm spot left by Bea’s body, and fell straight back to sleep. It was only a little later, when he heard her returning footsteps on the gravel, that he realized Bea had left the house.
The front door opened, and the hurricane lamp twinkled through the other side of the thatch. Max rubbed his eyes, and clicked out his stiff shoulder. He shuffled over to make space for Bea in the bed. She opened the door to the room, carrying the lamp high under her chin. She had pulled a shawl over her nightdress, but her arms were bare. Above the elbows, they were coated in rings of dark brown mud.
‘Maxis,’ she hissed, approaching the bed.
‘What on earth?’ He sat higher up on the pillows, looking at the muck smeared over her dress. ‘Please tell me you haven’t been gardening,’ he said.
Bea put the lamp on the ground, and pulled up his mosquito net. ‘Max, you need to come with me, it’s a woman.’
‘What do you mean, a woman? Is someone ill?’
‘Yes, no, yes. Please.’ She looked over her shoulder. ‘I don’t know what to do.’ She pulled the shawl around her chest, jiggling her arms up and down.
Max dressed quickly, as Bea hopped from one foot to the other.
‘Should I fetch the supplies?’ he asked, shaking a cockroach out of his sandal.
‘I already took them,’ she said. ‘But, I don’t know. I can’t help.’
Bea left before he could get both his sandals on. She began crossing the hill down towards the ocean. Max grabbed the torch from the bushkitchen, and followed her. He switched it on, but the batteries were damp, and the light kept stuttering out.
‘Bea, where are we going?’ he called, louder than he had intended.
‘Noia Saruru,’ came her voice from lower down the hill.
Max slipped over a stone as he picked up his pace. ‘Who is ill?’
‘You don’t know her,’ Bea said abruptly, half turning her face towards him. ‘You wouldn’t know her. I don’t know her. Santra’s friend. Or cousin, or something.’
‘Bea,’ Max grabbed her elbow from behind so she had to stop and look at him. ‘Bea, calm down. Tell me what’s wrong, and we can talk about it on the way.’
Bea gulped. ‘The baby is coming,’ she said. ‘But it’s stuck. I don’t know what to do.’ Tears were running straight down her cheeks. She sniffed and wiped her face with her forearm. The lamplight swung drunkenly as its frame clattered against her elbow.
Max felt himself flinch. ‘The woman is pregnant?’
Bea nodded.
‘Ah, Beatriz,’ he grimaced. ‘In that case, I’m not sure I’ll be able to help much.’
Bea sniffed. ‘I know,’ she said, nodding. ‘I know, I know. But I don’t know what to do, and I couldn’t do nothing.’
‘Sweetheart, don’t worry. It probably looks worse than it is.’ Max put his arm around her shoulder. She was shaking slightly. He pinned the torch under his arm and took the lamp from her.
They walked carefully towards Noia Saruru. As they approached the village, Max saw one of the houses was lit, and its bushkitchen was smoking.
They stopped by the doorway, and Max gestured Bea to go in ahead of him. She ducked under the low beam, and Max wavered by the threshold. The room was full of people. Even from the doorway, he could smell coppery blood. A woman was squatting in the right-hand corner of the room, braced either side by two other women. Despite her dark skin, Max could see her lips were grey, her eyelids pale. Her head was drooping to one side, and her face was covered in spit and mush. Another woman was sitting on the floor, with her hands between the woman’s thighs, her forearms covered in blood. She was talking to the pregnant woman quietly in Language.
A man he didn’t recognize was sitting cross-legged to the left, holding a small white bag, turning it over and over in his hands, humming. As Bea entered, a couple of women turned and noticed Max standing in the doorway. There was an exchange of voices. Max recognized Santra as she crossed the room. An older woman with short grey hair and wiry bristles on her chin came over, blocking the doorway with her tiny frame. She started saying something to him in Language.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said in Bislama. A conversation was still going on in the back of the room.
Bea gently eased the older lady out of the way, nodding at her, as if she understood what she was saying. She looked over her shoulder at Santra, then back at Max. ‘I guess you can’t come in. No men, she says.’
‘But he can?’ Max pointed at the man on the floor. ‘I’m the Pastor, did you tell them that?’
There was another exchange between Bea and Santra and the older woman. Santra came to the front of the door. ‘He is very skilled in leaf magic,’ she said.
‘A leaf doctor? Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ Max wiped his hand over his face.
‘Call the whitewoman,’ Santra said, taking the lamp from Max’s hand.
Max pointed into the hut at Bea, but Santra rolled her eyes. ‘The old one,’ she said.
‘Marietta?’ he asked.
Santra nodded.
About half an hour later, Max brought Marietta back to the hut. She coughed and panted and wheezed the whole way. The torch had completely died, and without any lamp to guide them, he had been forced to take her warm hand in his to guide her over slippery roots and pebbles. The grey-haired woman was squatting outside the hut now, ready to ward him away before he even drew close. She stood as soon as she saw them, and, turning one shoulder in his direction, held out her han
d for Marietta. She started saying something, and Marietta answered her. They both looked into the hut. Max tried to catch a glimpse of Bea. Marietta went inside, directly to a bucket in the corner of the room, and began to wash her hands with a slab of soap. The grey-haired woman turned around in the doorway and fixed Max with a look. He sighed, and sat down in the wet grass. From outside the hut, he could hear a low moaning, mixed with the humming of the witch doctor. After maybe forty minutes, Marietta came back to the doorway.
‘Go home, Max,’ she said, wiping her hands on a pink handkerchief.
‘Absolutely not.’ Max stood up.
Marietta sighed. ‘Look, honey, it’s not going to do any good you being here. Go light a candle in the church, and pray. You can’t help us.’
‘Perhaps not, but I can wait for my wife.’ Max crossed his arms.
‘I’ll bring her back to you, I promise.’ Marietta gave him a faint smile.
Max woke up in the vestry. The sun had risen, and a cockerel was scratching in the dirt outside the window. The candle had burned out. Max walked up to Mission House to clean up, but when he opened the door, he saw Bea boiling water in the kitchen.
‘Is that for the baby?’ he said, pausing in the doorway. Didn’t they always need boiling water for babies?
Bea gave him a look he couldn’t decipher. She turned back to the pot. ‘No,’ she said. There was a bowl of rice on the side, and beside it was a small pile of rat droppings. ‘It died. They both did,’ she said.
‘Oh, Bea.’ Max walked to her, and embraced her from behind. She leant her head back into him and closed her eyes.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Bea nodded silently.
‘Why don’t you go and get some sleep. I can do this.’ He breathed into her hair, pressing his cheek against her forehead.
‘It’s fine.’ Bea slipped from his grip, and recommenced picking through the bowl of rice.
Marietta came back to Mission House around noon. Her tunic was dark brown with mud, or blood. She sat on her stool with a sigh, sliding her feet out of her sandals and putting them up on the tablecloth.
‘How was it?’ Max whispered, not wanting to wake Bea. He wasn’t sure what ‘it’ was, but there was bound to be something gruesome.
‘It’s done,’ Marietta said. ‘The funeral was just starting as I left.’
‘What, now?’ Max stood up. He looked towards his room, regretting he would have to wake Bea.
‘Oh, sit down, Max,’ Marietta said, blowing the hair off her face.
He did not sit down. ‘Shouldn’t we be there? Who is doing the service?’
Marietta chuckled. ‘They’re not Christian, Max. There is no service.’
Max sat down.
‘They’re burning the body. The bodies. There’ll be something with the bones up top, once the fire has died down.’ Marietta stretched her arms upwards and pointed her breasts towards him.
Max suddenly felt exhausted. ‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘Oh, the child was stuck sideways in the birth canal. We couldn’t turn it around.’ She mimed a twisting motion with her hands. Max looked away.
‘Masineruk lost too much blood, so, that was that. It’s not as if there’s anything we can do for blood loss,’ she said.
‘I suppose not.’ Max watched Marietta as she inspected the grime streaked across her smock. ‘How is Santra?’ he asked.
‘Santra?’ Marietta wrinkled her brow.
‘The young girl with the tattoo.’ Max made the sign of a cross over his forehead.
‘Oh, she’s quite all right.’
‘She’s not upset?’ Max asked.
Marietta scratched at a bite on her ankle. A tiny fragment of scab dropped to the floor. ‘Everyone cried for an hour. But she’s not unwell or anything.’
‘But wasn’t Matambe –’
‘– Masineruk –’ Marietta corrected.
‘Yes, well – wasn’t it her cousin, the woman who died?’
‘Ah,’ Marietta nodded her head, inspecting the open sore on her bite, ‘yes. But she said she has plenty of other cousins.’
‘Good grief.’ Max rubbed his forehead.
The next day erupted with such fierce heat that the underbrush was quivering. When the morning service had finished, Max and Marietta stood outside the church, receiving their usual line of feeble handshakes and averted eyes. He had left Bea to sleep late, but when they went back to Mission House for lunch, she was nowhere to be seen. Max thought she might have gone to the waterfall at Noia Saruru to cool off. After a handful of peanuts and three warm slices of papaya, Max tried to convince Marietta to walk up to Masineruk’s village to pay their respects.
‘No one walks at this time of the day, Max.’ She picked up Bea’s little wooden fan from the table and began fanning herself.
‘I don’t know where it is,’ he said. ‘Please?’
Marietta sighed. But still, she put on her hat, and they started walking. It took around two hours to reach the village. It was a steady climb uphill, made even slower because Marietta’s feet were swollen from the heat. Max’s fingers were plump and tender, and he had to curl and uncurl them every few minutes, holding his hands upright to drain the blood. The path wound through fringes of manioc between allotments, and in and out of tiny villages. The mud was so dry that, as they walked, they kicked up red dust that settled on their clothes. Half a kilometre from the village, the sound of crying could be heard.
‘Is somebody else ill?’ Max asked, rubbing dust out of his left eye.
‘Really, Max,’ Marietta raised her eyebrows, ‘you haven’t been to any local funerals?’
‘I absolutely have,’ he said.
Marietta wiped her face with her pink handkerchief. ‘You clearly haven’t, if you can’t tell the difference between illness and grieving.’
Max thought back to the first night he had heard the dark prayer in the church. How he had thought then someone had taken ill. He didn’t say anything.
As they approached Natsulele, Max saw a small crowd gathered by the fallen log in the centre of the village. They had linked arms, and were wailing softly in unison. It almost sounded like a song. Chief Bule was standing on the far side of the log in the shade of a lime tree, wearing a red kastom mat tied around his waist, instead of his trademark pink blouse. Aru stood further back in the shade behind Bule. He was rocking someone’s baby gently back and forth in his arms. In his navy serge trousers and collared shirt, Aru looked distinctly out of place, like an accountant at a rodeo.
Marietta began talking to a young boy who ran from one of the huts to greet her. He pointed to a large earthenware pot in the centre of the clearing in which, Max assumed, were the ashes of the deceased. Max wiped a sticky red paste of sweat and dust from the back of his neck, and went to join Aru in the shade. He skirted the nasara by a wide margin – one never knew about tabus. As he passed by, he discreetly peered into the pot sitting in the centre, and was horrified to see two skulls sitting in a pile of coal and black wood. The bones were a waxy yellow colour, with fragments of dark tissue stuck all over in patches.
Max climbed over the log, and shook Chief Bule’s hand.
‘Now we have all the whitemen together,’ said Bule, grinning.
Max smiled. He took a long slug of warm water from his canister, resisting the urge to splash it all over his face. He nodded at Aru.
‘Good afternoon, Pastor,’ Aru said.
‘Who is your friend?’ Max asked, smiling at the sleeping baby.
‘This is Abel. But he is a child, not my friend,’ Aru said.
Max suddenly felt tired. ‘Yes, fine,’ he said, lifting his hat off.
‘Mrs Anlon,’ Aru said, ‘she has become much better at making simboro.’
Max nodded vacantly.
‘It is a shame, though, Santra Matan is the one to teach her.’ Aru gestured towards one of the huts, and Max followed the direction of Aru’s nod. And there was Bea, squatting in the doorway of a hut at the b
ack of the village.
Max immediately approached her. ‘Beatriz?’
She looked up, and gave a small wave. Max felt uneasy – he hadn’t even noticed her. Her skin was so tan now, she barely stood out in a crowd.
She stood. ‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello?’ Max repeated weakly. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘This is Santra’s hut,’ Bea said, picking her sandals up from the ground. ‘Look –’ she pointed into one of the trees, where a half-dressed man was knocking fruit out of the branches with a bushknife. ‘There’s Charles,’ she said.
‘Hello, Pastor,’ came a voice from the tree.
Max muttered something polite towards the tree. Was she casually hallooing him from across the charred skeleton of a baby? ‘How long have you been here?’ he asked quietly.
‘Not sure,’ she said. ‘I came up to help Santra make simboro. Also, they have to cook this sort of stew, or potion or something. It smells awful –’ She wrinkled her nose.
‘You couldn’t have mentioned this?’
Bea’s eyes widened. She put her hand on his arm. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you would have church duties today.’
‘This is a church duty, Beatriz,’ he said.
When the wailers had tired of crying, the men started to walk to the nakamal in Rangiran, an hour north. The women were congregating in Santra’s bushkitchen, to stir the soup which was to be sprinkled over the place of her cousin’s death. Santra would walk Bea back to Bambayot before conducting any vodou, so Max reluctantly left Bea to her potion-making. He began the walk back down to the coast with Marietta and Aru.
‘Is that normal? With the skulls?’ Max asked.
Marietta thought for a moment. ‘No, not really. It’s probably to ward off bad luck. Although for a revenge killing, the person is buried sitting up with their skull sticking out of the ground. Now I think of it, when I lived in New Guinea, often Bubu funerals –’
‘But we can help,’ Max interrupted. He was not in the mood for a lecture on Bubu rituals.
Marietta looked at him. ‘Help with what?’
‘With this situation. This is awful.’