He was warming to the story, doing voice parts, moving his gaunt hands like shadow-puppets.
“How about the French? At Moruroa.”
“That was later. Those bombs are safe.”
Martine came in with some slices of fried yam. The old man softened them in whisky and sucked them down, quiet a long time, recollection seeping like water into a dredged well.
“There was an Englishman here. A man who spoke English. He might have been American, Australian, who knows? He had the bearing of a military man. He arrived without papers on a schooner. He came to the gendarmerie and told us he’d been shipwrecked. We had no telephone. No airstrip. Schooners came and went with the wind. Sometimes two or three would arrive together, sometimes we’d go months with none. We didn’t worry about people who turned up as he did. Many had no papers in those days. We’d put them aboard the next boat and they’d be dealt with in Papeete.” Another silence. The gecko called again above my head, agitated, or perhaps two of them were fighting.
“We had an old motorcycle at the gendarmerie, left over from the war. British make. A BSA. I loved that thing! A moto is a fine thing when you’re young. I rode it everywhere, like a horse. Police business, naturally! It had no springs like they do now. I’d stand up on the footpegs and let it bounce, the saddle coming up to slap my bottom!”
His mind seemed to be wandering. And so was mine—back to my fathers Royal Enfield. Once or twice each summer, when we were girls, Lottie and I would brave the greenhouse spiders to rediscover the machine under its old rug. I’d stare at the great finned engine—its art deco castings had a monumental look— awed by the bike’s fossil power, by its remoteness from my memories of Jon. Lottie claimed she could remember riding pillion, clinging to his back, but I think she made that up. In 1953 she was only four years old.
We became aware that the machine was changing, aging in a way that he, frozen in memory and photographs, could not. The tyres softened and sank; oxide dulled the castings; rust lifted the maroon enamel. It became impossible to see how our fathers bike could ever have been new. I began to think of it romantically as his last passion, a hostage to time, rotting in his stead like the picture of Dorian Gray.
Suddenly Kautai gargled, yanking me back from Tilehouse Street. He spat a tarry bulb of phlegm into a jam jar he used as an ashtray.
“I remember the Englishman helped us get it working. He wanted to make friends. Always a good idea with the cops, no? That’s how he kept himself in Taiohae. Mending things. Boat engines, pumps, kerosene fridges. He hadn’t a sou to his name.”
“What name did he give?”
“Silly! I have the name of the bike but not the man.” Kautai thought the Englishman was on Nuku Hiva for about two months, between one schooner and the next. He was often seen with the doctor, a man from Raiatea who’d been in Europe, in the war.
“We thought it was because they were both military men that they became friends. Later we found out there was a connection.”
“What was his name—the doctor? Was it Henderson?”
“Faraniki. Faraniki Teraupoo.” The milky eyes turned up as he remembered. “Jim! That was the Englishman. Monsieur Jim. As for his surname, I think you’ll find it over there.” He raised his chin in the direction of the bedroom. “You can check presently. Martine will show you. Let me go on while the mind is clear.” The house was nearly dark, only a slatted pallor from the cracks, and the paleness of the old mans eyes. Now and then a match would flare, for Kautai’s cigarette or mine, and the rustic walls hung with rope and clothing would imprint themselves, a retinal flash.
Faraniki Teraupoo! I was certain now. Tiurai must have been a sister or daughter of the guerrilla chief; Frank had left her with more than a cigarette case. And Jim! My father had used his parrot’s name.
“This Monsieur Jim became well known along the beach. Tang, the Chinaman with the store, gave him an empty hut to live in. The Englishman loved walking. Every day he’d go up the ridge behind the fort, sometimes for hours. He said he was interested in Merivi, the American writer. This writer must be very famous, no? Every stranger who comes here wants to follow that mans route through the hills! Most of them give up. Some get lost. Three or four have died. They fall in the rain, they are bitten by the centipede, they have a heart attack. … But Merivi wasn’t the only reason Jim did so much walking. He was watching out for the next schooner.”
“To get away?”
“On the contrary. He wanted to make sure he was off in the hills when she anchored. So we couldn’t deport him to Tahiti! That’s when he vanished. While a schooner was in port.”
Martine came in from the porch with a hurricane lamp, bathing the house in saffron light. The old Typee took a swallow of his Scotch and looked at me beseechingly.
“Monsieur Jim walked out of the village when the schooner came and he was never seen alive again. I am sorry, Mademoiselle. This is why I asked you to reflect.…” He strained to hear how I was taking it.
“Can you be sure he died?” An old hope returned: Jon stowing away to another island; or hiding in the hills, living like a hermit, perhaps for years. It was soon dashed.
“We expected him to turn up in a day or two, once the ship had sailed. When he didn’t we were puzzled. Unfortunately, as time went by, suspicion fell on Faraniki, the doctor from Raiatea. There was talk in the village that the two men had been fighting shortly before Jim disappeared. Teraupoo could get unruly when he drank. He was a big man. Heavy and tall. He used to make liqueur with his medical equipment, his glass tubes. Good stuff—better than the schooners sold. I drank plenty myself. Against the law, of course!” He shrugged. “But as Tang used to say when we’d catch him selling opium, ‘Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.’ Poor Faraniki! His face was always sad. But he looked happy when he drank.”
Teraupoo had been taken prisoner by the Germans after the fall of France. Held been forced to work in a concentration camp, or several camps. Kautai thought only his medical skills had saved him.
“Who knows what a man has inside him after such an experience? He never looked well. But how he worked! Always helping people, neglecting himself. Everyone loved him.”
I asked why the doctor had come to Nuku Hiva instead of his home island. Kautai said he’d been posted here by the government. In those days, still reeling from the war, Paris was thinking of letting its ocean colonies go. Islanders were being given white mens jobs.
“If I alone had heard that story about a fight, I wouldn’t have acted on it, Mademoiselle. Teraupoo and I were friends. No one wanted the police bothering him. But the sergeant was French—they usually are—a man named. …” He stopped and thought. “Rivard. Sergeant Rivard. All spit and polish. For him the disappearance of a European was a very serious matter. When the Englishman failed to return, Rivard and I searched his hut. Because of what we found there we had to question Faraniki. I still regret what we put that poor man through. It was very hard on him. I can still see it in his eyes—the fear of being locked up again! He was never charged, but never exonerated either. Not until it was too late. He died before we learnt the truth.”
Kautai paused, and after a minute or so I noticed a regular sound, like a boat engine on the wind. But it was the old man. He’d fallen asleep. The temptation to wake him—to bump his chair, drop my glass, strike a noisy match, was almost irresistible. After a battle with myself I got up quietly to leave, but I was hardly on my feet before he gave a snort. Then came a rustling sound, like a mouse in a kitchen drawer. He was tearing off a square of newsprint and rolling another smoke.
“It was plain that Monsieur Jim had left in a hurry. In his hut was a long letter. We found another letter with it, on the table. One he was writing. Not finished. The sergeant’s English wasn’t too good, and I have only three words: Anuzzer beer please!” The old Typee chuckled, then coughed respectfully, recalling the gravity of his tale.
“Rivard took the papers to the schoolteacher. A nun. A woman of educati
on, naturally. She had difficulty with the first letter, which was in a bad state. But she translated the other. There was still much we didn’t understand. To read strangers’ letters.…”
He began speaking in Marquesan to Martine, who went to the bedroom, retrieving an old tin box.
“Now, Mademoiselle, you can read the rest for yourself. I haven’t looked at these things in twenty years. Not since my eyes started going. Often I’ve wondered whether someone like you would come to me before I die. I thank God that you have!” He toasted the Almighty. Martine fossicked in the box, following his instructions. She handed him a brown envelope. He took out the contents carefully, caressing each item in the same way he’d touched my face.
“It wasn’t my job to keep these things, but if I hadn’t. …” Another shrug. “Anything that goes to Tahiti vanishes. They demand everything, but they pay no attention to what happens on faraway islands. Nobody cares about us here. I think we sent them the schoolteacher’s translation. These should be the originals.” He added that Sergeant Rivard left Nuku Hiva in the early sixties, shortly after the mystery of the Englishman was “solved.” The letters sat in a drawer at the police post, along with one other piece of evidence: a silver cigarette case.
“For a while after Rivard left I was on my own at the gendarmerie. I confess, Mademoiselle, that I had my eye—I had sharp eyes then!—on that pretty étui à cigarettes. I ask myself, Why surrender this to Papeete when everyone concerned is dead? So I take it into my own custody, and for the sake of my conscience, I keep the letters with it. ‘Tari Kautai,’ I tell myself very sternly, ‘if a rightful owner ever turns up, you must give them back.’ They are yours now.”
Martine trimmed the wick on the lamp, but I could hardly read a word. One of the letters was disintegrating, little more than papier maché, salty and damp to the touch. This had to be my mothers letter, the one that went “in the drink” when Jon crashed. I poured out the last of the whisky and gulped mine down. My eyes were wet and stinging. I couldn’t read here. I wanted nothing more than to be away, alone.
“There!” said Kautai, unwrapping a flat silver box from a square of cloth, his ropemaker’s hands still nimble. He held it out. “Inside the lid. The Englishman’s name, no? We sent Papeete that name. Never heard anything more.”
Sea air had turned the outside gunbarrel black, but the tarnish inside was a light tan. When my hand steadied I could make out the engraving:
To “Jackdaw” Henderson on his birthday, from his shipmate “P.E.” Two years aboard Bacchante and twenty-two aboard this world August 6th, 1881.
Eddy, Henderson, Tiurai. It was as if the case’s owners had entered and sat down. A hundred years collapsed into a rectangle of blackened metal in a dim house. Perspiration stung my face. When I felt calm enough to make myself understood, I thanked the old man warmly, enfolding a hand like a birds foot in both of mine. These letters, I said, and all he’d remembered, were gifts beyond price. But I couldn’t accept the pretty silver case.
I had no desire for it. All I wanted was to go and read.
“Keep it, my dear. What use are pretty things when one no longer has eyes to see them?”
“Martine should keep it. I insist.” Then I asked how my father’s disappearance had been “solved.” The old man began wheezing alarmingly, quite angry with himself. “Forgive me. This is the most important!
“It was by chance. A few years after Monsieur Jim’s disappearance, the authorities decided to bring us electric light. A team of surveyors and engineers came to inspect the Taipivai waterfalls for a generating plant. Do you know Teuakueenui, the Two Big Eels?” I told him I did. “That’s where they built it in the end. But they also examined the other one. The one called Vaiahu.” His chin pointed across Hapaa towards Muake, to where I’d seen the Vaiahu River make its leap into the Typee gorge.
“I was their guide. There were no roads like today. Only old paths and animal trails. The Big Eels weren’t so hard, but Vaiahu took us days, cutting in with knives. Nobody had been up that fork of the valley in my lifetime. Not in fifty years. No one goes there even now! The rain and the flies were terrible.” He swallowed noisily. “At last we reached the bottom of the falls. We made camp there. Every day I cleared bush for the survey. One morning I am cutting and I find a human skull. This doesn’t surprise me. The old people used to make. …” He lowered his voice, a mix of awe and shame, the shadow of the mission school. “Offerings. They made offerings there. That’s what Vaiahu means in our language. Vai is water or river, ahu is an altar. Soon we found more bones from the same body. All together, not like a sacrifice. Scraps of clothing. A belt buckle. And this silver case. Clearly these were the remains of an unfortunate who had fallen from the cliffs in recent times. I had never seen the cigarette case before but I thought I recognized the buckle. So did others in Taiohae. It was the body of the Englishman, Monsieur Jim. He must have gone walking up there while the schooner was in port.” A papery arm reached out and touched my knee. “Mademoiselle, I am so sorry to bring you this news. But at least you can be certain that your … your father was not killed by Teraupoo. The doctor would never have climbed up there. He wasn’t well enough.”
I’d noted his hesitation. Your father. He remembered something in the letters.
“What was done with the remains?”
“They were respectfully removed, Mademoiselle. By myself. We buried him in the old Protestant cemetery. We assumed an Englishman would be a Protestant. By then poor Faraniki was dead two years himself. He’s there too, not far away. Tahitians are also Protestants.”
“Did Faraniki leave any children, any kin?”
Kautai started at this.
“Not here. Not here on Nuku Hiva.…” He halted, on the point of telling me what I was going to read. “He never spoke of any. Perhaps there are kin on Raiatea or Tahiti, but I don’t believe so, none that are close. You must understand, Mademoiselle, that if he were alive today he’d be nearly my own age. We who were born back then are very few. Women gave birth, but the babies died. Or they grew to fourteen, fifteen, and coughed blood. Ours was the smallest generation. The whites said we would be the last. We thought this too. So many ghosts, so few alive. When I was a boy in Taipivai only twelve people were living here. And three of them were French! I was the last one of my family. I believe it was the same with Teraupoo.”
The old Typee went silent, as if falling asleep again, but it was just his way of letting me know he’d finished and I could leave.
I slipped the letters gently into my bag and got up. I gave Martine the cigarette case. How else could I repay them? Perhaps I still feared that the case might prove to be tainted by jealousy and anger. What was it doing on Jon that day, when it must have belonged to Faraniki?
Taiohae, November 11, 1953.
Dearest Vivien:
Armistice Day and I’m still on Nuku Hiva. Did you get my last letter? I sent it the moment I got here. A lot’s happened since then. Afraid I still don’t know what I’m doing from one day to the next. But first, yes—I forgive you.
You’re right about the Marshalls. I didn’t have to go. We were all volunteers. Though it wasn’t only allies. Some Yanks got fried as well. Everyone believed the range was safe. I have a confession of my own, Vivien, something I should have admitted years ago. I stayed up a bit longer than my orders, to get a few snaps. At the time it seemed nothing. Later of course, when they warned us about genetic damage, I rued it bitterly. I asked myself countless times whether the price of those pictures might be Livvy turning out a freak. On this score it’s a relief to know she isn’t mine.
That cloud was magnificent, macabre, mesmerizing—I can’t find words. At the time I kept thinking of what Oppenheimer said: that physicists have known sin. And his pithy bit of Sanskrit: I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. (Everyone wondered how long he’d practised that.)
If you didn’t want risk in life, Vivien, you shouldn’t have married a pilot. But understand I didn’t go to
Enewetak lightly Overflying those clouds was necessary. Someone had to get readings. We believed these weapons would make war as obsolete as witchcraft. Our weapons have outgrown us. Of course, we may not have outgrown our weapons. There lies the danger, but it’s a chance we had to take.
Mole used to say there weren’t a First and Second War, just one long war that lasted thirty-one years, with half-time in the middle. He was right. Without the A-bomb it might have gone on and on, with Russia after Japan. The bomb was the lesser evil—the alternatives a shambles like the Somme or Stalingrad every twenty years. Or so I believed then. After Korea I’m not so sure. We seem to have the worst of both worlds. We’ve got the bomb, and we’ve still got the meat-grinders. We did things in Korea that no one should ever do. I can’t speak about this.
As for who Livvy’s father is, I didn’t want the details. That’s the hardest thing about your letter. I know you meant well, but now I can’t think of you or her without seeing you in his arms.
So if I didn’t want to know about Frank Henderson’s grandson, what am I doing on Nuku Hiva, helping him drink his moonshine? Fair question. Not sure I can answer, but I’ll try.
What I wanted—the opportunity coming along so unexpectedly it seemed providential, though most schooners put in here on their way to Tahiti—was to see what sort of man he was. In my finer moments I hoped I’d like him, as you suggest, that I’d find him worthy of being my daughters father.
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