Euphoria

by Lily King

  ‘Ho there,’ he said. ‘None of them on my boat.’

  I was glad I hadn’t paid him yet. ‘I’ll get Robby then.’ Robby was the more expensive driver. I began hoisting my belongings off the pinnace.

  ‘He can’t sit back there where the ladies sit.’

  ‘He’ll sit where he bloody likes.’

  Most likely Teket had understood exactly how the conversation had gone, but he didn’t let on. We sat where the ladies sat, the Black Opal laundry bag of gifts between us.

  It had been difficult to tell Teket what had happened. He’d known Xambun from visits to his cousin. I told him Fen’s explanations for why Xambun was shot and not him. Teket said he’d never heard of anyone trying to get killed—they did not have a word for suicide in Kiona—and he scoffed at the idea of a white man thinking he could be invisible. If the Mumbanyo had shot at Fen, Teket said, the whole village would have been rounded up and put in jail. Of course they had aimed for Xambun.

  Minton had never been to Lake Tam. We guided him through the canals. I’d worried that he’d balk at pushing his boat through them but he kept saying, ‘This is fucking loony, mate,’ with a tremendous grin on his face. Then we were out on the lake and his boat sped us across the black water much faster than my canoe ever had, and I wasn’t prepared to arrive so quickly.

  The lake was high, the beach only a thin strip near the grasses. The mosquitoes were much worse now. Clouds of them swarmed the minute the boat slowed. I could see the tip of their house. It seemed impossible that Nell would not be behind the blue-and-white cloth door.

  The sound of the boat had attracted attention. I helped Minton tie up while Teket was greeted warmly by his cousin and her family. She was not someone who had come to Nell in the mornings and Nell had said she was shy, conscious of her foreignness, and avoided being interviewed. I became aware of a line of older men on the road above, looking down at us. They were not armed with spears or bows, I noted with relief. Teket saw them, too. We exchanged glances, then he sent his cousin to find Malun and the others.

  It was understood that I was not welcome in the village, and Teket waited with me on the beach. After a long time, they came. They walked close together, Malun in the middle, her face stiff and grim. She and Sali were covered in mourning mud.

  We all squatted in the sand as I gave out Nell’s gifts.

  Bani pushed the silver bracelet up tight on his arm above his elbow, and Wanji ran off with his comb, screaming out to his friends as he tore up the path. Sali gasped when I pulled the dress out of the bag, as if I were pulling out Nell herself. She put it in the sand beside her, but laid a hand on top, as if it might walk away. She and Malun each had a crusted scab at the top of a finger stub, cut off at the middle knuckle for Xambun.

  I handed Malun the bag that held the shoes. After a long while she tipped her head in to see but did not bring them out. Her gaze remained hard. I was glad Nell was not here to see it. I asked Teket’s cousin to tell them that Nell was so very sorry, that she wanted to make amends in any way she could. I told Malun she was tight in Nell-Nell’s stomach. At this Malun’s face gave way but she remained still and did not wipe away her tears that cut dark lines through the dry mud.

  Bani asked to speak with me privately. We walked a few yards down the beach. With the English Nell had taught him he said, ‘ Fen is bad man.’ Then, in case I didn’t understand, he said it in pidgin, which I didn’t know he knew: ‘Em nogut man.’

  I nodded but he wasn’t satisfied so he switched back to English. ‘He break her.’

  It was true, then. I did the tally, too late, of all the broken things: her ankle, her glasses, her typewriter.

  When I left, Malun was standing in her brown shoes and Sali was wearing her dress like a scarf, and the men were still standing on the bluff above.

  Teket gave us a push out. We called our last farewells to each other. Neither of us felt like it was a real goodbye, and it wasn’t. I would return to the Kiona many times.

  Minton put the boat in reverse and we turned slowly away from the beach. I’d wire my mother for more money, I decided, and go directly to New York from Sydney. I would not wait. The boat gained speed and skimmed fast to the canals.

  ‘Not the most hospitable tribe, are they?’ Minton said. ‘Those boongs up on the embankment looked like they’d cark you given half a chance.’

  28

  3/? I have done it. Full fathom five it lies. Hiding out here in the 3rd class library for the time being. Strange how a ship was our doing and now our undoing. Let him rage. Let him rage across the oceans. But he will rage alone. I am getting off tomorrow at Aden. Doubling back to Sydney. He is wine and bread and deep in my stomach.

  29

  When I reached Sydney, I found there was no boat coming in for a fortnight, so I kicked around there impatiently, setting up an office of sorts at the Black Opal, but getting no work done. I frequented a pub called the Cat and Fiddle far too early and too often. My mother cabled more money, though I didn’t tell her that I would see her only for the two days the boat was docked at Liverpool, that I was going to go on to America.

  The day before I sailed, I worked up the courage to go back and see the bark paintings at the Art Gallery. I simply wanted to walk where we had walked, stand where we had stood. She would have nearly reached the Continent by now, I calculated. On the way I passed the shop where I’d gotten the plasters, and the New Yorker restaurant. Across the lobby of the museum I heard my name.

  ‘My, my, someone’s taken a bath.’

  It was Mrs. Swale, my dinner partner at the Iyneses’. She took my arm and never looked back at the group she’d come in with. I was aware of the scent of her, not the humid root smell of Kiona women or Nell by the time I met her, but an inorganic smell meant to cover it all up.

  We went up the stairs to the exhibit. She began her questioning: How long had I been here, when would I leave, not tomorrow, couldn’t I change my ticket? And then just before we entered the hall, she looked at me quite gravely, more gravely than I expected her face to be able to look. ‘I was so sorry to hear about your friend’s wife.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ My lips went all rubbery in an instant. In fact my whole body seemed to be pulling away from me.

  She covered her mouth and shook her head and with an intake of breath she said she was sorry, she thought for sure I’d know.

  ‘Know what?’ I said loudly into the vast room.

  Hemorrhaging. Just before they reached Aden. Mrs. Swale put her hand over mine and I wanted to swat it away.

  ‘Did you know she was pregnant?’

  ‘Twins,’ I said before I turned away from her. ‘She thought it might be twins.’

  I went to see Claire directly from the museum. She wasn’t home and I waited for several hours in her enormous house, listening to clocks chime and dogs bark and servants hustle about as if the world were on fire. When she did arrive and saw my face she dropped her parcels and called out for whiskey. I’d held out a faint hope that Isabel Swale, with her poor aptitude, had gotten it all wrong, but Claire doused it within seconds. They couldn’t stop the bleeding.’ She paused, guessing how much more I could handle. I held her gaze and took in a steady breath. ‘The ghastly thing is, Fen insisted on a sea burial. Her parents are apoplectic. Think he’s hiding something. They’ve started proceedings against him and the ship’s captain. It’s all been such a drama.’ She sounded quite bored by Nell’s death.

  She poured me another drink and in the light breeze of her movements I smelled again the manufactured smell of these women. Her husband, she told me quite pointedly, was away for several days.

  All I wanted was to call a cab and be delivered to my room. But I could not seem to ask for that, and sat in silence, willing my glass to stop shaking as I lifted it to my lips. I couldn’t seem to pull air into my lungs. I thought of Fen and Nell meeting on the boat: I’m having trouble breathing, she’d said. And then I broke down. No Southerner, Claire did her best to comfort m
e with palaver and awkward pats on the arm, but as soon as I could stand, she put me in a car that took me back down to the city.

  30

  On my ship, the SS Vedic, I walked the decks, stood at the rails, spoke to no one except the sea. There were times when I thought I saw her out there on the water, sitting cross-legged, surprised and grinning as if I’d just walked into the room. There were other times when the water was black as space, sinister in its enormity. She was out there. I did not know where. Fen had dumped her in the sea. She couldn’t even swim. Facts I still only half believed. I leaned over the rail and hollered out at the emptiness. I didn’t mind who heard. I’d hoped John and Martin, whose voices had always come to me when I was cracking up, would chime in but they were silent, too sorry for me, or too appalled, to make their usual fun.

  We crossed into the Java Sea. The moon swelled to full.

  Once, Nell had told me, there was a Mumbanyo man who wanted to kill the moon. He had discovered his wife bled each month and accused her of having another husband. She laughed and told him all women were married to the moon. I will kill this moon, the man said, and he got in his canoe and after many days he came to the tree from which the moon, tied to the highest branch by raffia string, jumped into the sky. Come down here so I can kill you, the man said to the moon, for you have stolen my wife. The moon laughed. Every woman is my wife first, he said. So in fact you stole this wife from me. This only made the man angrier and he climbed the tree to the highest branch and pulled at the raffia string. It would not move so he began to climb the string toward the moon. Soon his arms grew heavy and though he had climbed far from the tree he still was no closer to the moon. Let go now, the moon said. And the man, who had no more strength left, let go and fell directly into his canoe and paddled home to share his wife, as all men did, with the moon.

  A tall brooding slightly unhinged Englishman is bound to capture the romantic imagination of some girl, and there was one from Shropshire who followed me around for a week or so, but she came to understand that my dark silences were never going to bloom into confessions of love, and took up with an Irish soldier.

  My boat pulled in and out of Colombo, Bombay, Aden. A day out from Suez, I discovered the notes from our Grid stuffed into a corner of one of the suitcases. I had no memory of putting them there. In fact I was certain I hadn’t. I smoothed them all out on the walnut desk in my stateroom. It was the work of madness, the oily crumpled pages covered in three different scrawls, but I was mad still, and set to work. I wrote the monograph quickly, faster than I’ve ever written anything. They were both there with me as I wrote, both of them, advising me, heckling me, contradicting me, mocking me, and, finally, approving. I wrote with more conviction than I’d ever had in my life about anything. I wanted to get it right for her, wanted to hold on to those moments on Lake Tam in any way I could. I thought the writing would last the rest of the journey, but I was done by Genoa and posted it from there. I had signed all three of our names to it.

  Oceania took it for their next issue, and it was included in several anthologies published the following year. The Grid, for a time, became a staple in classrooms in several countries. In 1941 though I learned that Eugen Fischer in Berlin had included its German translation in the reading lists he created for the Third Reich. He had added a coda, claiming Germans to be Northern, the unyielding Northern temperament to be superior, and our Grid to be further proof of the necessity of the Nazi racial hygiene program. That the monograph was in the company of works by Mendel and Darwin was cold comfort. If I had not known of this list, perhaps I would not have been so willing to offer up my knowledge of the Sepik for the purpose of war when the OSS contacted me, perhaps I would not have helped to rescue those three American spies in Kamindimimbut. And perhaps that entire Olimbi village would not have been slaughtered. So much, in the end, for all my attempts at amends.

  After Genoa we stopped in Gibraltar and, finally, Liverpool.

  Strange how you can pick out in a crowd, from a distance of eighty yards and two and a half years, the one familiar shape, the slant of white hair, the hands covering the mouth.

  All those tough, no-nonsense letters, threats of disinheritance, lectures on the necessity of hard science, and my mother was heavy and sobbing in my arms.

  ‘She never thought you’d make it back,’ her friend who’d driven her up to Liverpool explained. ‘She had terrible dreams.’

  I wasn’t much better than a pole, holding my mother up on that packed quai as all those passengers I never met bumped past us on their way into other arms. I had spoken only to the ocean for forty-seven days, hadn’t slept since Sydney. My mother took ahold of herself, told me I looked awful, and led me to her friend’s automobile, where she sat with me in the backseat and held my hand. I hadn’t written her a word of what had happened, yet she seemed to know it all. The tar and soot smell of England was back in my nostrils, the cold damp already settling in my bones. The SS Vedic was lit up now in the dusk. Morning after next it would begin its passage without me across another swath of emptiness to New York. Through the windscreen I had a last look at the sea, which was rumpled and agitated, a thick muscle that would hold on tight to everything it swallowed.

  31

  I have only been to America once. It is not easy to avoid the place, but for years I managed it. I declined invitations, turned down teaching posts. But when they sent me the announcement of the opening of the Peoples of the Pacific Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in the spring of 1971, which had a photograph of a ceremonial house on the front and a quote from my most recent book about Kiona below it, I felt obliged to make the journey.

  I was given a private viewing before the event. Viewing me and my responses as we padded along on carpeted floors were the director of the museum, the president of its board, and several big donors. There were Balinese shadow puppets, a Maori pataka, Moro armor. There was a diorama of a Solomon Island village with a copy of The Children of Kirakira on a shelf behind it, overlooking the scene like a god.

  ‘And here,’ said the director as we turned a corner, ‘is your particular part of the world.’ It surprised me, a whole large annex devoted to the Sepik River tribes. Years earlier I’d donated my few Kiona-made possessions to the museum, never expecting to see them again, and there they all were now, pinned and labeled and under glass like Aunt Dottie’s beetles: my painted coconut cups, my stick and snail navigational chart, my shell money, the few clay figures given to me upon my departure. The pages from a November 1933 issue of Oceania containing the monograph about the Grid was under glass as well, torn to shreds as I had requested. Beside it was a placard noting the serendipity of the monograph’s three authors having met in Angoram on Christmas Eve, 1932, our theory’s misappropriation by the Nazis, my subsequent refusal of all reprinting requests, and my entreaties that it be permanently removed from all syllabi around the globe. According to the synopsis, those efforts had only enhanced its popularity. Beside the shredded Oceania article were my books and the book Nell’s publisher had shaped from Nell’s New Guinea notes, which was even more successful than her first. Another placard gave an account of Nell’s death at sea, Fen’s disappearance, and my long career. Though the museum had no Sepik artifacts directly from Nell or Fen, a young anthropologist had recently retraced their steps and brought back a number of items from the Anapa, Mumbanyo, and Tam.

  Fen had indeed vanished. No one I know has heard from him in all these years. The only person ever to claim a sighting was Evans-Pritchard, who thought he saw him on the Omo River in Ethiopia in the late thirties, but when he called out Fen’s name, the man flinched and moved swiftly away.

  Tears are not endless, I repeated to myself. That was how I made the long walk past these display cases, past an enormous blowup of the photograph Fen had taken of Nell and me with my big suitcase and his pipe and hat and sago fronds across our shoulders. I kept us moving swiftly. It was the only way to get through it. I paused, however, when I got to a Ta
m death mask. Mud had been smoothed on top of the bone to refashion the face, hair taken from a living head and glued on top. The mud had dried beige, and white warrior stripes were painted down the nose and across the cheeks and around the lips. In the socket of each eye was a small oval cowrie shell, underside up, the long slit with its toothed edges making an excellent likeness to a shut eye with lashes. Five more cowrie shells were placed across the forehead like a crown. It was this line of shells that caught my eye. Something irregular. The one in the middle was bigger, not a shell in fact but a button, a perfectly round ivory button embedded in this mud forehead. I reached for it. My hand slammed into the glass. It did not shatter, but it made a loud bang, which was followed by a sudden silence all around me.

  ‘See someone you know in there?’ one of the donors said, and the others laughed nervously.

  Caught in the holes of the button were tufts of pale blue thread. I forced myself on to the next display. It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone.

  Acknowledgments

  While this is a work of fiction, it was initially inspired by a moment described in Jane Howard’s 1984 biography Margaret Mead: A Life and my subsequent reading of anything I could locate about anthropologists Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson, and their few months together in 1933 on the Sepik River of what was then called the Territory of New Guinea. I have borrowed from the lives and experiences of these three people, but have told a different story.

  Most of the tribes and villages here are fictional. You cannot find the Tam or the Kiona on a map, though I have used details from the real tribes Mead, Fortune, and Bateson were studying at the time: the Tchambuli (now called the Chambri), the Iatmul, the Mundugumor, and the Arapesh. The book I call Arc of Culture is modeled on Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture.

  The following books helped me immeasurably in my research: Naven by Gregory Bateson; With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson by Mary Catherine Bateson; Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict; The Last Cannibals by Jens Bjerre; Return to Laughter by Elenore Smith Bowen; One Hundred Years of Anthropology edited by J. O. Brew; The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler; To Cherish the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead edited by Margaret M. Caffrey and Patricia A. Francis; Sepik River Societies: A Historical Ethnography of the Chambri and Their Neighbors by Deborah Gewertz; Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences edited by Peggy Golde; Margaret Mead: A Life by Jane Howard; Papua New Guinea Phrasebook by John Hunter; Kiki: Ten Thousand Years in a Lifetime; An Autobiography from New Guinea by Albert Maori Kiki; Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women by Hilary Lapsley; Gregory Bateson: The Legacy of a Scientist by David Lipset; Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski; Rain and Other South Sea Stories by Somerset Maugham; The Mundugumor by Nancy McDowell; Blackberry Winter: My Early Years by Margaret Mead; Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead; Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples edited by Margaret Mead; Growing Up in New Guinea by Margaret Mead; Letters from the Field, 1925–1975 by Margaret Mead; Sex and Temperament: In Three Primitive Societies by Margaret Mead; Four Corners: A Journey into the Heart of Papua New Guinea by Kira Salak; Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality edited by George W. Stocking Jr.; Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork edited by George W. Stocking Jr.; Village Medical Manual: A Layman’s Guide to Health Care in Developing Countries—Volume II: Diagnosis and Treatment by Mary Vanderkooi MD.