by Lily King
7
I didn’t meet Helen Benjamin until 1938 when we both attended the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences conference in Copenhagen. I went to her panel discussion on eugenics, at which she was its only opponent and the only one who made sense. The way she spoke and moved her hands reminded me of Nell. I rose as soon as the discussion was over and made for the door. But somehow she got down off the stage and overtook me in the entrance hall before I could slip away. She seemed to know all my feelings, and merely thanked me for coming to her panel and handed me a large envelope. It was the kind of thing I’d grown used to, people hoping I’d help them publish their manuscripts, but from Helen it made no sense. Her Arc of Culture had been a great success, and whatever acclaim I had garnered by then, with the Grid and my book on the Kiona, owed a significant debt to her work.
I didn’t open the packet until I was on the train back to Calais. Such a cavalier gesture, my hand reaching into that brown envelope. It was not a manuscript. It was a booklet made of white typing paper covered by bark cloth, folded in half and sewn down the middle seam. Attached with a paper clip was a note from Helen: She made one of these each time she arrived in a new place, and kept them tucked in the fabric liner of a trunk, away from prying eyes. I have kept the others, but I thought you should have this one. There were no more than forty pages, a good many blank at the end. The writings spanned three and half months, beginning with her first days on Lake Tam.
1/3
1/4 Stitched up this new book yesterday then was too intimidated by all these fresh empty pages to put down any words. I wanted to write about Bankson but felt I shouldn’t. Wrote Helen instead & managed not to mention him once. My body feels better. Pitiful that a great amount of my pain disappeared when someone paid a bit of attention to it.
This temporary house they’ve given us is called the House of Zambun. Or maybe I should spell it Xambun—more Greek sounding. From the way they say it, Xambun, low & hopeful, as if its utterance could bring something powerful closer, I am certain it’s a spirit or ancestor, though I can’t feel anything in here the way I have in other houses reserved for the dead. And if it is a spirit, why would they let us desecrate its house?
I want to write more but too many feelings are bottlenecking somewhere near my collarbone.
1/6 But what was all the fuss about him anyway? If he was ever cold or arrogant or territorial his 25 months with the Kiona must have knocked it out of him. Hard to believe the stories about the string of broken hearts he’s left back in England. Plus Fen says he’s a deviant. What I saw was a teetering, disheveled, unaccountably vulnerable bargepole of a man. A skyscraper beside me. I’m not sure I’ve seen such height & sensitivity paired before. Very tall men are so often naturally removed and distant (William, Paul G., etc.). I am wearing his dead brother’s glasses.
We were standing in the shallows yesterday waving him off and I remembered a fall day when I was about 8 or 9 and my brother & I had played with some new children in our neighborhood for the first time and we were being called to dinner and we stood in the yard with them chilled by the sudden evening but warm from running and I had a terrible fear that we’d never play like that again, that it would never be the same. I don’t remember if my premonition proved true. I just remember the stonelike weight in my chest as I went up the back steps.
I am tired tonight. Trying to learn another language—3rd one in 18 months—probing a new set of people who but for the matches & razors would rather be left alone—it has never felt more daunting to me before. What was it B said? Something about how all we’re watching is natives toadying to the white man. Glimpses of how it really was before us are rare, if not impossible. He despairs at the deepest level that this work has no meaning. Does it? Have I been deluding myself? Are these wasted years?
1/10 I think I have made a friend. A woman named Malun. She came by today with some lovely little coconut shell drinking cups for us, a few cooking pots, & a full bilum bag of yams & smoked fish. She speaks several local languages but only a small bit of pidgin so we mostly flapped our arms and laughed. She is older, past childbearing, head shaved like all married women here, muscular & stern until she breaks into giggles which seem against her strong will. By the end of the visit she was trying on my shoes.
I went down this afternoon to see how our real house is coming along. I like the spot we chose, right at the intersection of the women’s & men’s roads (the men of course have the best water views) where we will be able to keep an eye on the action. There are about 30 people on the job at this point and Fen bossing every last one of them around with only a handful of Tam words but a big barking voice when he needs it. So glad it is not directed at me.
Slowly winning over a few children. I go up to the field behind the women’s sleeping houses where they play or down to the lake where they swim and I squat on the ground and wait. Today I brought a bright red toy train and pushed it through the sand, making it rumble. Their curiosity was stronger than their fear and they approached until I said “Toot toot!” and they scattered and I laughed and eventually the train lured them back. I added at least 50 new words to my little lexicon while I sat with them. All the body parts plus landscape terms. They don’t tire as adults do explaining things. They like to be experts. And these are little kids 3 to 8 maybe. They’re an independent bunch, so different from the Kirakira with their protective adolescent guardians. Here those older girls are meant to start fishing & weaving by 9 or 10 it seems, and the boys apprenticing in the pottery & painting trades. So the little children roam free. Oh little Piya & Amini with their round bellies & tulip bark belts. I just want to scoop them up and carry them about, but for now they keep several yards between us, wary, looking up the beach, making sure there is an adult within sight.
1/11 This afternoon Fen brought home a houseboy, a shoot boy & a cookboy. He had his pick down at the construction site, though the shoot boy seems too delicate to bring us much more than a duck or a shrew and the houseboy Wanji tied a dishrag on his head and raced off to show his friends and never came back. But the cookboy saw the yams & the fish and got to work without a word. His name is Bani and he is serious & quiet and I think a bit of a misfit here among the loud chatty men. If he were a little older he’d make a good informant, but I don’t think he’s more than 14. Fen & I haven’t had the informant battle yet. I told him today at lunch that he could have first pick. He said it didn’t matter who he picked because he’d just want who I had in the end. So I said he could choose then I’d choose then he could choose again. We had a laugh about it. I told him that my next book would be How to Handle Your Man in the Bush.
I have found a language teacher. Karu. He knows some pidgin from a childhood spent near the patrol station in Ambunti. Thanks to him my lexicon has over 1000 words in it now & I quiz myself morning & night though part of me wishes I could have more time without the language. There is such careful mutual observing that goes on without it. My new friend Malun took me today to a women’s house where they were weaving & repairing fishing nets and we sat with her pregnant daughter Sali & Sali’s paternal aunt & the aunt’s four grown daughters. I am learning the chopped rhythm of their talk, the sound of their laughter, the cant of their heads. I can feel the relationships, the likes & dislikes in the room in a way I never could if I could speak. You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.
1/13 Have just spent 4 hours typing up 2 days’ worth of notes. Completed census today, 17 houses, 228 people. Had to pry Fen away from housebuilding to get the numbers from the men’s houses, which I cannot enter.
Every now and then, if I am not careful, I think of B patching me up that first night and everything goes a little w
obbly inside me for a few seconds. It is probably good that he has not come back as soon as he promised he would.
1/17 Malun came over today with an enormous basket and a very serious expression on her face. Xambun, she explained, is her son. She opened the basket and showed me hundreds of lengths of knotted palm fronds, a knot for every day he’s been gone. I felt like I grew 4 new ears trying to piece together what she was telling me. It took a while, but I learned that Xambun is not dead. He was lured away by blackbirders to work in a mine, Edie Creek is my guess. He is a big man, a tall man, a wise man, a fast runner, a good swimmer, an excellent hunter, she told me. (Both Bani & Wanji have since confirmed these things and more. Xambun seems to be their Paul Bunyan, George Washington, & John Henry all in one.) Malun wanted to know if we knew the men he went off with. I’m starting to think this is why they took us in so readily, they thought we had information about Xambun. I wish we did. What a treasure trove a man like that would be, what perspective he would have on his own people. Malun believes he is coming home very soon. I didn’t have words or the heart to tell her what I know of those gold mines. I didn’t tell her he might not be free to leave. Oh the love & fear in her eyes as she stroked her basket stuffed with knots.
8
I had three objectives when I sat down to write my mother every week.
1) Provide proof that I was still alive
2) Convince her that my work had value and was moving swiftly in the right direction
3) Imply without directly stating that I would rather be in her house in Grantchester than anywhere else on earth.
The first objective was, of course, the easiest. I accomplished it as soon as I typed ‘Dear Mother.’ The other two required deceit, and she sniffed out duplicity in me like a hellhound sniffs death.
But now there was a fourth objective: Do not mention Nell Stone. Easy enough, you might think. And yet I found it impossibly difficult. Three letters I had already yanked from the typewriter. I crumpled them and tossed them out the window and little Kanshi and two of his pals were knocking them around with cane sticks. I tossed out a fourth and the boys shouted with pleasure and Kanshi’s grandmother called out from her mosquito bag that she was napping and could they please go and drown themselves.
I twisted in another sheet of paper.
Dear Mother,
Today I believe is the first of February. Three months left. Perhaps this letter and I will arrive at your door at the same time. The garden will be in full flourish then, and we will sit for tea beneath the lilacs and juneberries and all will be right with my world once more.
I hope this letter finds you in sound health, and that no winter ’flu has reached your door. Has it been a mild winter?
I feared I’d asked this very question in my last two letters, but plugged on.
By the time you receive this, winter will be a distant memory at any rate, and we will scheme about how to keep the aphids off the Felicia roses and the Russian vine from climbing too far up the south side of the house. Summer problems.
As I’ve mentioned, my focus these past weeks has been on Kiona death rituals. Yesterday I went to a mortuary ceremony in which the skull of a long-dead man was dug up then covered with clay and refashioned back into a fleshy face with nose and mouth and chin. The poor artist was heckled terribly about his rendition of these features, but finally a portrait was agreed upon and the mintshanggu was performed. The head was set on a stage and the men crawled beneath the platform and played their flutes for the women, who listened stoically, almost trancelike. And then the women rose and hung up food for his ghost and sung the name songs of the man’s maternal clan. When I asked how long he had been dead no one could tell me. There was crying, not the loud theatrical sobbing of the men at funerals but a more natural weeping. Natural. I find I use this word indiscriminately. What is natural to an Englishman might not be at all natural to, say,
I paused here. I was like a schoolboy in my need to just type the word.
an American, let alone a tribe in New Guinea.
Her antennae would twitch. She would detect something.
I find I am more and more interested in this question of subjectivity, of the limited lens of the anthropologist, than I am in the traditions and habits of the Kiona. Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.
Why not just mention them?
I have had some visitors, fellow anthropologists who have been, unbeknownst to me, in the region for nearly as long as I have, a married couple. He’s from Queensland, a broad strapping fellow I met in Sydney that time, and she’s American, quite well known but a sickly, pocket-sized creature with a face like a female Darwin.
There. That couldn’t put her in much of a state, could it? Yes, it would. It absolutely would. I clutched the top of the page and pulled hard, ripping it in two. Blast her. I dragged out the other portion then wadded them together and tossed the ball out to the boys who, when they saw it, sent up another cheer. Direct violation of objectives #2 and #4. After a certain number of sentences, my letters to my mother now became letters to Nell. My mind was stuck in conversation with her and the feeling of talking to her rang through me, disturbed me, woke me up as one wakes from sudden illness in the middle of the night.
Before I left them, I’d slipped a copy of her book in my bag. I read it as soon as I got back, without stopping. And then again the next day. It was the least academic enthnography I’d ever read, long on description and sweeping conclusions, short on methodical analysis. Haddon, in a recent letter, had mocked the success of The Children of Kirakira in America, and joked that we should all bring a lady novelist along on our field trips. And yet she wrote with an urgency most of us felt but did not have the courage to reveal, because we were too beholden to the traditions of the old sciences. For so long I’d felt that what I’d been trained to do in academic writing was to press my nose to the ground, and here was Nell Stone with her head raised and swiveling in all directions. It was exhilarating and infuriating and I needed to see her again.
Several times I’d set out toward Lake Tam but turned back within an hour, having convinced myself it was too soon, they wouldn’t be expecting me, they couldn’t afford the disruption of a visitor yet. I would be a lurking nuisance lumbering along after them as they tried to do the work of twelve months in seven. If they were closer, I could stop by, have a pretext. Fen had spoken of wanting me to go on a hunting expedition with him within a fortnight, but he would have sent word already if he’d been serious about it.
I suspected Fen didn’t have Nell’s discipline, but he had a sharp mind, a gift for languages, and a curious, almost artistic way of seeing things. On the beach he’d noticed the way the Kiona turned their canoes sideways, with the fishing gear together in front. They look like pews before an altar in a country church, he’d said, and now I could not see the arrangement any other way.
I felt I loved them, loved them both, in the manner of a child. I yearned for them, far more than they could ever yearn for me. They had each other. They could not know what twenty-five months alone in this hut was like. Nell had been in the Solomons for a year and a half, but she’d lived with the governor and his wife, and had all their friends and visitors for company. Fen had been alone with the Dobu, but hadn’t he mentioned going to Cairns for his brother’s wedding in the middle of it? Home for him had been within a thousand-mile reach.
Outside the boys had switched to bows and arrows, practicing their shooting on a fast-rolling paw paw. One of the boys’ strings snapped and he ran into the bush, pulled up a bamboo stem, and, using only his hands and teeth, stripped out a thin fibre, tied it to his bow, and ran back to the game.
Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable.
9
1/2
0 Watching the women out fishing, barely any light in the sky yet. Their boats gliding on the flat black water, silver blue columns of smoke from fires in pots at the stern rise thick and taper to nothing. Some of the women are still wading around up to their chests in the cool water, checking their traps. Others are back in their canoes warming themselves at their small fires.
We got our slit gong beats yesterday. They surprised us with a little ceremony. Fen’s is 3 long wallops followed by 2 quick ones. Mine is 6 beats very fast like footsteps, they said, imitating my swift walk. Men from Malun & Sali’s clan performed the dances, an old woman beside me complaining that the younger generation hadn’t learned the steps properly.
1/24 Our house isn’t done yet but the children come to me now in the morning, along with anyone else who wants to draw or roll marbles while suffering my halting interrogations. They laugh at me and imitate me but they do answer my questions. Thankfully Tam words are short—2 & 3 syllables, nothing like the 6-syll. Mumb. words—but I didn’t bank on 16 (and counting) genders. Fen writes none of it down, absorbs words like sunlight, and somehow innately understands the syntax. He is making himself perfectly well understood and people are much less apt to laugh at him as he is a man and taller than all of them and the dispenser of most of the salt & matches & cigarettes.
1/30 Our stores have arrived from Port Moresby as well as our mail. One solitary letter from Helen. She probably had 30 from me in the same amount of time. Two pages. Barely worth the postage. Mostly about her book, which is nearly done. At the end she slips in: ‘I have been spending time with a girl named Karen, in case Louise has already told you.’ Which of course Louise had. A very cool letter. And mine to her still so full of apology & regret & confusion. Sometimes I wake up in the night with the thought: She’s left Stanley for me. My heart starts racing—and then I remember that it has all already played out and I see her standing at the quai in Marseille in her blue hat and I see me coming off the ship with Fen. That night at Gertie’s when she asked me if I preferred to be the one who loved slightly more or loved slightly less. More, I said. Not this time, she said in my ear. I am the one who will always love more. I didn’t say, But I love without needing to own. Because I didn’t know the difference then.