One Big Damn Puzzler

by John Harding

  ‘A landmine?’

  ‘Yes, American bomb. They is hurry after noise. Is find Managua. He is have half leg missing. He is say Pilua is be beside he with baby. They is both be kill.’ He shrugged.

  ‘You doubt what Managua said?’

  ‘I is not say anything ’bout that. But is be strange. There is be nothing left of Pilua or she baby. You see, gwanga, landmine is not usually kill. There is be no pleasure in that for you Americans. No, mine is blow foot off mostly, sometimes leg. When people is be kill is be like my wife, because they is bleed dead before help is come. Kill by boom is be plenty rare. Even then is be pieces of body all over place. They is not find even one fingernail of Pilua or she baby.’

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, each thinking his own thoughts. It was Purnu who finally broke it. ‘Now,’ he said, his voice a little husky, ‘we is start read.’

  They sat side by side on mahogany chairs at the dining table. William took paper and pencil from his briefcase and wrote something. He shoved it across to Purnu.

  ‘This is “a”,’ he said, pronouncing the sound of the letter not its name.

  ‘A,’ said Purnu. ‘Yes, of course.’ He paused. ‘What is be “a”?’

  ‘It’s a letter,’ said William. ‘Well, actually the letter is pronounced “ay”, as in “day”, but the sound it makes is “a”.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I is see is be letter,’ said Purnu impatiently. ‘Any fool is can see that. But what is “a” mean?’

  ‘It’s a sound. You put it with the sounds of other letters to make words.’

  Purnu let out a frustrated sigh. ‘Yes, this is be all plenty good, but I is ask what is “a” mean? Is be animal? Is be plant? Is be kind of fish?’

  ‘No, it’s a sound.’

  ‘Is not mean anything?’

  It was William’s turn to sigh now. ‘Well yes, it means “one”.’

  ‘If is mean “one”, what for you is not just say “one”? What for is complicate with this “a”?’ Purnu shoved the paper at William. ‘Who is need this “a”?’

  ‘It means one, but it’s not quite the same as saying one. You might say, “I see a dog.”’

  ‘You is might say, gwanga, I is not. We is not have dogs on island. How I is go see dog?’

  ‘OK, OK, pig then. “I see a pig.”’

  Purnu pushed back his chair and leaped to his feet. ‘You is see pig? Where you is see pig? You is see pig this day? If you is see pig just now we is not have time for sit here and read. We is must move plenty damn quick, is start dig bamboo pit. Is get clubs.’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t see a pig,’ said William.

  ‘You is not see pig?’

  ‘No, for Christ’s sake, I didn’t see a pig.’

  Purnu pulled his chair back to the table and lowered himself onto it, all the while staring suspiciously at William. It was the same sort of look he’d awarded William’s shit that first morning. ‘Then what for you is say you is see pig if you is not?’

  ‘It was an example. I just made it up to show you what “a” means.’

  ‘Ah!’ Purnu leaned back in the chair. He put his hands on the arm rests, fondling their smoothness. ‘I is see now. You is please carry on.’

  ‘Well, that’s how you use “a”. “I see a hut.”’

  ‘Ah! I know you is not lie this time. You is see hut. I is see you in hut so you is must see hut.’

  ‘“I see a hut.” That’s when you use “a” to mean one,’ William announced triumphantly, but then he saw Purnu shaking his head.

  ‘You is say, “I is see a hut,” but I is say, “I is see hut.” What for you is need that old “a” for? I is see hut. I is see pig. Is not be necessary. You is teach me something I is not need. What for is want waste breath with this extra word? Go straight for pig. Or hut.’

  ‘Look,’ said William, ‘I’m not sure this is getting us anywhere. Let’s move on to “b”. Just remember that this letter here makes the sound “a”. You’ll be needing it in other words.’

  ‘Well, I is hope so. I is sure not need in front of pigs or huts. I is not go put “a” there; is just be in damn way.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  WILLIAM SPENT THE night in a state of high anxiety. He thought he heard the tapping noise again. Perhaps it was just the animal the natives referred to as the koku-koku which as far as he could make out was something like a mongoose, some kind of rodent thing that was good at killing snakes. Or maybe it was the sound of rats. He’d never heard of a place yet that didn’t have rats. He realized that was what Purnu’s face reminded him of, a rodent. All of William’s old OCD habits were to the fore now, tooth grinding, blinking, removing objects from his peripheral vision. He’d even tried to move the mahogany table because it was not strictly parallel with the walls but it was too heavy. Of course he was frightened to be in the hotel after the blow he’d received and every one of the myriad sounds he heard in the jungle made him jump. But the fear of attack wasn’t all of it. William had been deeply disturbed by the vision of his father in the kassa house. At moments he could feel exhilarated by the prospect of an afterlife and believe in its existence. At others he felt a sense of disappointment when his logical side told him he was suffering from delusions as a result of ingesting a hallucinogenic drug. But if that were so, then how come Managua and all the rest claimed to see their dead relatives in the kassa house too? Could it be some mass hysterical reaction to the drug?

  He sat at his table transcribing some of the interviews he’d carried out with the amputees. Their stories were harrowing and their simple acceptance of their cruel disablement humbled him and made him ashamed of his country, or rather, even more ashamed than he already was. He remembered how his childhood comic-book hero Superman used to fight for ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way’. Well, if you did the first two these days, you wouldn’t be doing the third; they were mutually exclusive. He was amassing a huge amount of evidence, far more than he had hoped. It would make a strong case, although he could not help feeling it would be even stronger with the woman Pilua’s testimony. Besides, he felt a burning desire to obtain justice for this woman, whose whole life had been ruined because of the American army. Was it possible she was still alive? Managua had gone out of his way to help him and be friendly towards him, but could it be that Purnu was right, that the older man was hiding something?

  He heard footsteps and leaped up, grabbing a thick piece of driftwood he’d found on the beach. The steps were coming his way. He tiptoed over to the doorway and stood to one side of it, arm raised ready to get in the first blow this time.

  ‘Hello! Are you here?’

  It was Lucy. She came through the door, sensed his presence and turned to see him with the bit of wood raised above her head. She dropped the bundle she was carrying under her arm. ‘Good God! You scared the wits out of me.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s just because of what happened. It’s made me a little jumpy, I guess.’ He lowered his arm and tossed the wood to the floor.

  ‘Of course. You know, you could just stay in the bukumatula hut?’

  ‘You must be joking. If you had any idea what goes on in there . . .’

  ‘Yes. Well. There’s still my place. But remember what I told you. They don’t like people living together if they’re not married.’

  William grinned. He couldn’t get any kind of handle on all the rules and rituals around here. They seemed so inconsistent. He was used to a puritan tradition where sex was pretty much always wrong, not sometimes wrong and sometimes right. ‘But they just wander off into the bush and, well, um, behave promiscuously.’

  ‘Only when they’re not married. And they just have sex. They don’t have their meals together, that’s the point. If a couple had a meal together in the bukumatula hut there would be the most frightful scandal and they’d have to get married.’

  ‘But they can go at it hammer and tongs all night and they don’t have to? Crazy.’

  ‘No more crazy than some of our daft custom
s, I should think.’ She bent and retrieved the bundle and proffered it to him. ‘Anyway, I brought you this.’

  He took it and let it unfurl. It was a lightweight sleeping bag. ‘I brought it for field trips, but thanks to your compatriots there isn’t any use for it here. Nearly all the islanders live in this village. I thought it might make you more comfortable.’

  ‘God yes. It’s great. Thanks.’ William pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and smiled. It was his best Clark Kent smile. You couldn’t help liking him when he smiled like that.

  Lucy smiled back. ‘Just remember to check it for snakes before you get into it.’

  ‘Oh. Right. OK. I will.’

  Her smile broadened. ‘Would you like to check it now . . .?’

  Afterwards, Lucy’s first mistake was not to disentangle her short limbs from the long limbs ofWilliam Hardt and to allow herself to fall asleep in his embrace. Her second error was not to make a quick getaway when she woke but to grant herself permission to watch him sleeping. When you watch someone sleeping you discover how you feel about them. If you register the lack of elegance in an open mouth and the absence of anything resembling harmony in their whistling snore then your heart (or kidneys depending on your culture) is probably safe. If, on the other hand, you see a hitherto unsuspected boyishness in the way a man’s blond hair flops over his forehead and notice in the unaccustomed stillness of his eyelids an innocent absence of his normal anxiety and find in both these things a vulnerability that makes you want to protect him then you are almost certainly lost. This is what happened to Lucy, only she didn’t know it yet. She watched for a while and then she slipped from his arms and out of the sleeping bag and because he was still asleep thought she was safe. Like any woman over thirty who doesn’t have a partner, Lucy was a veteran of several failed relationships. She had even been married, briefly. Her marriage had been a big mistake; she knew that now. She had fallen for her husband the instant she first looked into the black pools that were his eyes. One moment she had been free, the next in love. It had happened like magic, looking up from a book in the university library, seeing those eyes and plunging in. Lucy was determined that magic would never again play such a part in her life and that is why, as she hurriedly pulled on her clothes, she turned her back on the unconscious American as if the sleeping bag contained not a single snake, but a whole Gorgon’s head of serpents.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  FROM ‘THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE: THE SEXUAL LIFE AND CUSTOMS OF AN UNSPOILED PEOPLE’ BY L. TIBBUT (UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT)

  MAGIC PLAYS AN integral, indispensable part in the lives of the islanders. They believe, as we have seen, that it alone is responsible for birth. It determines the weather, the tides, the number of fish in the sea (and the amount of these that can be caught), how dark is the night, how bright the sun, sexual attraction, love and death. No-one dies on the island except by the ministry of magic.

  It follows that they seek to control the magic they find all around them. There are two ways in which they do this. The first is by ritual, that is by a set of regulated actions the strict observance of which they believe will ward off ambient bad magic and in some cases, they hope, attract ambient good magic. There are rituals for all the staging posts of life: birth, coming of age, courtship, marriage, pregnancy and death, as well as very practical ones for planting vegetables, catching fish, etc. As with the rituals of our own Christian church those of the natives have mainly become a matter of rote. This is not to say they are not strictly observed, for they are, but rather that the practitioners have no knowledge of why these particular sets of actions are necessary. If you ask them what walking around a newly-wed couple’s home seven times clockwise then seven times anticlockwise chanting a prescribed formula of words is for, they will tell you it is to bring the marriage good magic. If you persist and say, Yes, but how will walking around the hut help and why seven times? they simply shrug and say it is what one does. When I suggested that if seven times brought good magic then eight times would bring even better, everyone laughed derisively as if what I’d said was a mixture of ignorance and stupidity. Perhaps it is! Anyway, enough of these rituals which are not the subject of the present discussion. They will be dealt with more fully in a later chapter.

  The other method practised to combat or encourage ambient magic is sorcery which can be used to ensure a good fishing catch or to cure illness. More than that the aid of sorcery is enlisted on an individual basis for every activity of any importance in the islanders’ lives. If a boy wishes to make a certain girl love him, he will visit a sorcerer. If she rejects him he will not take the snub personally but will console himself with the knowledge that a rival has used a more potent spell. If a woman is barren, she consults a sorcerer. If you have a dispute with a neighbour you may ask a sorcerer to kill him. If he dies then the magic has worked. If he remains hale and hearty, he has had recourse to a practitioner of magic superior to yours. The islanders do not believe that death is something that simply happens from illness, accident or old age. It is thought always to have been brought about by the use of magic against the deceased.

  The islanders have no chiefs. The people they listen to and take notice of are the sorcerers. Some of these have formidable reputations although it is hard to see why one should be esteemed above another, other than through a record of successes brought about by a series of serendipitous coincidences. Of course, there is the character of the sorcerer. The reason the man Purnu is held to be the most powerful sorcerer on the island may have much to do with his guile. He is a crafty man who can see, for example, when a boy takes a fancy to a girl and comes to him for a love potion, what the lovesick boy cannot, that the girl is already besotted with him, which is often the way with young people. He performs a spell and lo and behold the boy’s advances are accepted. On the other hand, if he knows from gossip (he is a great one for gossip!) that the girl’s affections lie elsewhere, he will tell the boy it is impossible she should love him because he has already performed a spell for his rival. He may even, for all I know, add something to his spiel about it being unethical for him to have two clients with conflicting interests.

  Managua is respected as a less powerful but nevertheless extremely effective magician. I suspect this is because he always talks such good sense and that things others do not see are obvious to him; this gives him a high success rate in the matter of predictions. Moreover, since he is the only islander who can read, Managua has gained enormous additional kudos from his literacy. The islanders see being able to make a meaning, or indeed a story, from a jumble of apparently meaningless symbols on a piece of paper – or more especially on a Coca-Cola can – as demonstrative of the highest order of magical prowess. (Incidentally it is not true to say the natives are wholly illiterate. All of them, down to the younger children, can recognize the Coca-Cola logo, even when it is upon a printed page rather than a can.)

  Many special powers are attributed to sorcerers, although the most superior of these belong only to the greatest proponents of the magical arts. They can see in the dark; they can walk through fire; they are prodigious lovemakers; they can fly.

  Purnu once offered to take me on a flight around the island with him, an offer I declined, although I did ask him why, if he could fly, he didn’t go on a Coca-Cola run to the big island, which is 300 miles away.

  ‘Is be too far,’ he told me. ‘Is use up too much magic.’

  When I asked Managua if he could fly he replied, ‘Is not be so easy any more with this damn leg.’

  Ludicrous though the idea of men flying seems to Westerners, many of the islanders insist they have observed various sorcerers in flight.

  Even magic has its price and sorcerers earn good yams for their spells. Purnu is one of the wealthiest men on the island thanks largely to his reputation and is treated like a good orthodontist; you go to him if you can afford it; if not, you settle for second best.

  TWENTY-NINE

  AFTER THE DEBACLE of the OCD self-he
lp group, William decided he needed professional help. He’d tried many times to discuss his problem with his doctor but the man didn’t seem to understand what he was talking about and sent him away with some pills. So William found a therapist who specialized in OCD. Jean said his problem was the result of magical thinking.

  ‘Early in your life you formed the belief that the coincidences which are part and parcel of everyone’s life were more than that, that completely separate events had a causal connection,’ she told him. They were sitting in comfortable armchairs almost within touching distance in her office, which was in a quiet city street. The walls were a cool pastel shade of blue and on each hung a single painting of a pastoral scene. Not that William actually took in the subjects of the pictures; he was more interested in whether they were hung straight and was relieved that they were. It gave him the feeling he was in the right place. He imagined that Jean made sure her pictures were straight before each consultation.

  ‘For example, suppose, as a child, you were anxious, as is common among small boys, that your father might suffer an early death. Perhaps you might have said to yourself, “If I walk on all the cracks between the paving stones on the way home from school, Daddy will be safe.” And you did, and lo and behold your father remained alive and well. That’s magical thinking.

  ‘Now of course, most people indulge in such thoughts. We say knock on wood. We avoid walking under ladders. It’s part of our primitive make-up to do this. It comes from a time when the world seemed chaotic and uncontrollable. Everywhere there were natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, storms, twisters and so on. It appeared a malevolent magic was at work over which we had no power. For this reason primitive man created his gods. As long as we appeased these higher beings, usually by performing rituals in an established way, they would prevent the natural magic of the world from harming us. You have created your own set of rituals, a system of magic to combat the one that threatens you in the macroworld. You have, for whatever reason, possibly a trauma otherwise too insignificant to worry about, come to disbelieve in coincidence and to see instead cause and effect. You can ward off bad magic by means of practising a certain ritual. Conversely, if you neglect the ritual, the bad thing will happen.’