by Duff, Alan
Down the steep escape route, clinging to hand-holds cut out of rock, to planted vines and root outjuttings or deathly fall was certain, they made a line down their sunless hillside, on the south side.
Many were weeping. Some intoned with ancient chant of saddest farewell, they sang words composed by the ancestors. Others invoked those same ancestors to save them, this terrible fate, this casting out of selves from all they knew.
At the bottom, Tangiwai waited until the last was down, the last set of eyes to pay her respect the same as if she was the new chief. And none demurred acknowledging the new leadership, not one.
He, the born, inherited chief, is in a trench along with other fighting men, mostly older, as is each trench with hill-route family members now about to die to defend their name, as enemy pour in over the unguarded ramparts and smash down unmanned timber-post walls, blood-curdling yelling and screaming, worse than wild dogs frothing and foaming at the mouth, cutting down heroic women putting up first line of resistance and counter-screaming, Die then enemy women, die! Cutting down brave, chosen, heroic, weapon-flailing children, including the boy who had taken the proud slave’s life, sacrificing lives for the only belief they have known: honour. In battle. Dying for the only world they had thought existed, in this land or another. None had come to tell them that it was different. Except perhaps the reached word of the arrival of white-skinned demons people who would know the mistake of arriving here when turn came.
Enemy warriors rushed in blind triumphing fury at those in the trenches, fanning out to cover them all, seven they were, laughing that these pitiful enemy had already dug their own graves.
The invaded chief roared out vilest insult at their enemy name, he spat words of derisive contempt at the tribe, he hurled words to the air, the blue white-puffed sky, that this enemy’s ancestors were imposters, they were really slaves, they were worse than that, they were of outcast lineage, their warriors buggered men, their women fucked dogs, their children feasted on maggot-infested shit, their carvings were ridden with wood-consuming insects, their everything was deserving only now of this: as he, and all his others, broke out in howling laughter as death flew, rushing furiously at them, and so did unspeakable spittle of enemy’s outrage fly from tattooed faces, bared teeth — and then they, the invaded brave remnants of tribe, turned and rushed down the trenches that became tunnels. And enemies foolish, blood-thirsting, rushed after them.
They look upward, having to shade eyes from the sun, and against the unbearable glow they behold in the vast white-smudged blue, objects, shapes, weights, shooting out into space, like birds rapidly growing in appearance. Of bodies, of flailing limbs, of living beings fast plummeting to the rocks nearby.
Blood and human matter splashed spots and puddles around them, the witnesses, and still they fell, like huge hail of opposite warmth, screaming different lasts. A voice roared death to this hilltop tribe for this mortal trickery, as death rushed up to claim him. A village woman, they were sure it was Matakohi, made with howling laughter all the way to her final thump. Some plummeted calling out a few words of a favourite chant. But most screamed or they fell silently.
They smacked and splattered and thumped with terrific groaning outbursts that just as suddenly ceased; burst life vessels, shattered blood gourds, spilled brain, splattered over impervious rock and ground, and insects already rushing and flying in to feed on the sweet gore.
High up there, where once was home, was all of life, now just seven openings at the uppermost of cliff now spilling of one last body, enemy, which screamed its disbelief, its betrayed victory all the way down to the ground, where it gave whumping sound of all breath, all life, all point gone in the instant. When he had so much looked forward to ending lives of others.
Then Tangiwai turned and pointed at the hill-line behind them and they strained different eyes to see what she pointed at, then they saw: there silhouetted against the sky blue lovely were more human shapes, in contorted, vividly moving posture, they were stick drawings in the idle dirt alive, they were dream doings, bizarre and yet somehow so fitting. And so claiming now.
And their seemingly mad, deranged voices chattering like nothing these people ever knew except the sight itself, from a distance, from time to bothering time that warriors had beheld with angry but troubled eyes and unable to punish these outcast madmen and misfits daring to taunt them, the real people, the only people.
There, figures on the hill-line, hear their cackling, see their posturing, now see them in disarrayed haka that no self-respecting tribe would display in such disorganised ill-discipline, yet hear it echo the chilling same, of atavistic cry, down into this valley of death. As Tangiwai, the lover of Kapi, urged her people to get ready their minds for another existence but yet to keep alive, secretly burning, that which they had just departed. And Hariana, torn naked of upper garment from earlier gesture, lifted her skin-saggy arm aloft in tentative greeting to the figures on the hill-line, as if to long-absent cousins who had not been missed.
And they started the trek towards the silhouette line-up, giving no more backward glance at their dead and broken behind them nor the deceived dead enemy, not even at their own chief. His huia feather cloak fluttered in the breeze, one creature, one fine man, but so quickly turned to memory. Ants swarmed through the garment, other insects too, feeding on lice on each other, how it has always been. Flies fed on his blood. Birds sang impervious. And the people trudged hillward, feeling a different kind of gladness at being alive. Thinking not of the chief back there, gloriously giving his life to all the noblest of causes, nor did they think even of the home left behind, not when Tangiwai exhorted, urged them: That is what we once were but are no longer. Put it away now, bury it a hidden treasure deep in your minds, what we can be again but first we must endure being this other people. And lighter then were the hearts who trudged towards yonder hills.
22
And they, in another time but of battle remembering, in sight of their steaming acres, sang other songs, not all of them movingly sad; and speeches were made and names read out, of those who had passed on to become names on the memorial archway bronze plaque, and the sun’s rising did not register until it defeated the threatening rain cloud and broke free like a benign smile.
The minister intoned end to the ceremony, then they were with lighter sense of being as they made way over to the wharekai, a rustic building with a sophisticated heart, so said the knowing townsfolk who had done this before, many times they had, in compliment to the hospitality of food and welcome and a good people still true to their culture, or what they believed a continued practice of their culture, the hospitable side, where the tables were laid out with feast finest even though it was only a breakfast. There were meat and vegetables and bowls of shucked shellfish and raw fish, and they had made it look dazzling. And at which men would make early rum toast to remembered comrades and take turn to stand and recall in speech, in anecdote, that of note or importance or just plain humour of the war they had fought in.
The room would be a din of talk and laughter, how time flies when you’re enjoying it, how it flew from those young men war days, God how it has flown. The pub up the road would open, a little earlier than legal, but this day was not one for upholding law so much as the dignity of men who have done their share, their dues for country and King; the public bar would open and so would men’s hearts and expressiveness open the more, men returned to fighter boys of back then, and now as much a laugh as it was then deadly serious, but war must have a funny side or it is even more horrifically pointless and mad; all the same fighter boy men carry tears of joy and certain sadness in their eyes, downing the good amber liquid that sets men’s souls free when it is right for men to be so.
And the town’s tribal groups would compete in friendly rivalry their best haka displays of ancient warriorhood culture, but still alive in the heart of every man, Maori or other, of simple male wanting fight, wanting to do battle, test himself, become (he believes) his best self.
The timber-panel walls, the beer-sloshed wooden floorboards, the timbered ceiling would shudder with the stamp of strong men bringing haka-ing feet down as one, slapping pride-swollen chests as one, roaring their call of defiance to the imagined enemy as one, and all would be proud to be New Zealanders. They would be of sense pure, that: These are our boys, they are us. We are one together.
And the Waiwera men would sing again Come Unto Me like no others can sing — oh how they sang. And men would gladden at being alive and being one people and in hearing of song such as this.
We were outside the pub, the kids of Waiwera, some kids from town joined up with us, listening to the songs, enough in appreciative disbelief that we were connected, related by blood and culture to this. (How we wished most of life could mean like this.)
Many times throughout that Anzac Day the singing group answered the call to sing it again, Come Unto Me. And the cheer each time no less than before. Happiness spilled like best flowing beer from that hotel bar to the people gladdening outside.
My father had attended the service and the breakfast, but he declined the pub, maybe because of the reduced respect coming from other men’s eyes at his former wife, my mother, maybe because of his crippling shyness. But he gave me money and a promise to be good and permission to stay a night at Uncle and Auntie’s. I felt kind of ridiculous, too long in the tooth of sexual experience, getting pocket money and a behaviour notice when I thought of what I was doing with that now oppressive man, and several times now the woman my father knew as one of his neighbours, the good and plain Mrs up the top of our street, the married Edith Dover.
All afternoon, vehicles arrived and men went into the bar so that it could take no more, and wives congregated in groups outside on the quite wide avenue-like street centred by grassed islands that had cabbage trees and public toilets and a covered sitting place included by wise planners for old people to sit and contemplate; and the men who could not get in drank beer poured from wooden-crated flagons into glasses, with one eye out always for the police, who will take away this drinking alcohol in a public place, it is their duty to uphold the law, but then again they might just as likely throw a blind eye and listen along with these ordinary decent folk to the harmonised Waiwera Maori voices and join those outside in exclaiming appreciation; a town united by a war fifteen years over, fought on faraway foreign soil.
Few noticed that a group had arrived by vehicle and placed down rugs and blankets at the top end of the farthest road island — hidden by tree trunk and thrown leaf shade — and sat down and started playing cards, and drinking from beer bottles obviously concealed in brown paper bags.
But I saw Mereana sitting in the open shelter, she had head almost inordinately, proudly high and her eyes were closed. And I thought: this could be her in the traditional upright posture of how the Maori used to bury their dead, facing the sun except the sun wasn’t in her face, rather it was the glory of song being made, just then, a sad hymn of western composition in Maori, exhibiting those long-ago school years of preposterously hopeful, and far-sighted, harmony training by their old Pakeha teacher.
And I’m walking toward this apparition from the past, her tattoo design is clear, two curvings like a flower opened, a centre stem, she’s a window on my Maori past, she’s my friend. She’s some considerable part of the explanation, even though she remained true, essentially loyal, to her differently thinking own.
I see her mouth is two almost black movements of singing instrument along with the song. And I could hear her as I closed. Quite a voice herself, she had taken a harmonised higher octave, her end notes she hung on to in that way of her (our) race, and her head moved slightly from side to side, and her eyes stayed closed.
They stayed closed until the song finished and her lips kept moving in another verse. That tattooed chin, those darkly inked lips, I could have touched, could have kissed, could have asked to give me advice, information of my ancestor. Or just a few words that she had kind of love for me, not love love of a kind a mother has for her son, just affectionate love, for someone you’ve known for a long time and yet not really known. Not really.
For that’s what she said when she opened her eyes: You know, I never did know you, did I, child? Not really. Not really. (No, not really. But then who does know another person not their child, not their spouse? Even lovers don’t necessarily know each other.)
I told her: Kui, I’m too young and you’re too old, that’s why we never really knew each other. And she said: And now it’s too late, eh? With a distinct sadness in her eyes. Which encouraged me to answer: It doesn’t have to be. If you don’t want it to be. Remembering she had told me that about my own existence, my uncertainty of who and what I was, my place here in Waiwera in the scheme of things — their scheme, their things. But my explanation, by and by. My explanation, with a little help from friends.
She said, help me home, I’m so tired from standing around this morning, oh wasn’t it good, didn’t it make you proud to be of these Waiwera people, even one young like you? In a long, continuous sentence of gushing happiness.
But on the way we came across the taken-up inhabitants of road island and they were playing cards, and they passed the beer in brown bags with no attempt to hide from a happening-along policeman, so they’d been going a while.
Their coins shone on the spread-out shawls and central grey blanket, and the cards made familiar crisp slishing sound being dealt, and each player had a weight of a tobacco tin, an empty beer bottle, a paua shell doubling as an ashtray, on her small pile or singular of money notes, like guarded special children, like best weapons, like last desperate clinging hopes. And always with eyes hoping for luck.
In facial appearance they could have been ordinary Maori women sitting around in a long-ago village passing the time of day, and yet with a certain awareness, a hard-edged wariness that then could have been of war wariness, and here was on the lookout for what the other had as card weapon in her hand.
One of them was my mother. She didn’t recognise me. I was coming right up on her and she looked at me and did not know her own son. For she looked to her left, at the player beside her, a big woman I’d seen her brawl with — but then who hadn’t she brawled with — and informed her as crisply as a card dealt: Your bet, bitch. But with a smile, a show of white teeth you could use as lights in a cave. And the woman sniggered and said, Yeah, yeah, I’m betting, bitch, just don’t hurry me.
And they all chuckled and looked at their hands, at each other’s eyes, into each’s own weighing-up mind, of how far to gamble on oneself, what the risk factor was, how much it weighed or didn’t weigh — a good hand is light, it is buoyant air in one’s tight grip, a poor hand the opposite — and the whole pub was singing behind our backs just then, or maybe it had only just registered. And some of these women card players started to move their lips, to sing along with it, silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright, and they seemed so happy and bright too, as I passed those unseeing, unnoticing, uncaring eyes of hers and saw she was singing too.
When they saw Mereana, several jumped up and kissed her with overdone, fawning respect, which she hated, as she did their beer-breath; but it was her burden to accept this without complaint. And I’m hardly daring to glance at her down there, my mother, at our interrupted passing feet, like a Maori female Buddha (she’s put on weight, unless she’s pregnant), cross-legged on a colourful tartan shawl with yellow tassles and strong yellows in its overlayer of squares and criss-crosses, the complicated pattern of clannish Scottish thinking, white tribes come to these shores, carrying baggage of stultified clan thinking, so our father told us when assuring that narrow tribal thinking is universal, Maori, Scottish, African, anyone.
Then a voice went: Hey, isn’t that one of your sons? And another went, Whoo, where’d he get his looks from? And another piped up: You mean which one did he get his looks from? And they laughed.
Well, Mereana coughed and clicked her tongue, and she turned and said
something sharp to them in Maori, then in English: Shame on you for drinking and gambling out in public like this! You think we don’t have the shame enough already? And don’t be talking like that about the boy — what, you think he’s a monkey in a cage, doesn’t understand what you’re saying? Trouble with you, none of you stops to think because you got no brains to think!
She stabbed a finger at them all; I saw my mother’s eyes narrow, of a proud bitch not used to taking insult or home truth kindly. Except not even her bounds crossed to this tattooed picture of angry old veneration.
None of you think! Nothing occurs to you — nothing! You win or you lose at this card game, you lose every time for your children! But you, you count it only in pounds, shillings and pence. In lost pride for being bluffed. In lost pride in bad play. When you don’t know pride, not true pride. I say, shame on you. Shame!
Then her grip and hurried walk moved us on. But I still heard my mother call out, Son? Son, it’s me! (Son? That’s a statement of loving fact, woman. In this instance a stated lie.) As if Mereana’s lecture hadn’t occurred. I was anyway being walked against my will, in the tight grip of prouder past and prideful present. I heard her say then: Oh, well, don’t say hello then. Moira bet ten bob. You raising or folding, Girlie?
Mereana didn’t speak until we had crossed the bridge into her territory direct, below us local children in the river calling and diving for coins thrown by tourists, other-world visitors to our world but less mine than this old woman’s beside me, muttering in her language, her flowing tongue, she could be reading from the Bible. I’m more shaken by sight of my mother than I should be, not as if I’d never seen her there before or her activity was any different from when she was at home officially nominated as our mother; maybe it was her happiness, maybe it was answer right in my face that she is what she is and I won’t be changing it, dare anyone to try. Maybe that definition back there finally stuck.