Pieces of Happiness

by Anne Ostby

  —

  Was I too harsh, Lord? I didn’t know any other way to talk to Madam Kat. “You were angry at Mister Niklas when he died,” I said to her. “That’s why you stayed in the shadows and didn’t see.”

  I didn’t want to hear her answer, Lord. You know I don’t want there to be any shame between us. But Madam Kat had to say what she had to say.

  “Yes, Ateca, I was angry at him. My heart was burning with fury, and do you know why? Because he wouldn’t even look at her! Because he wouldn’t open his arms to his daughter and let her in with us. That was what I couldn’t forgive,” she said to me. “That was why. Do you understand, Ateca?”

  I understood; I’ve understood for a long time. You understand, Lord. And now Madam Kat understands too. That she has to perform bulubulu. Ask for forgiveness.

  “You’re not the one who has to forgive Mister Niklas,” I told her. “You have to ask Mister Niklas to forgive you.”

  —

  Have I done the right thing, Lord? Madam Kat is so much more than my bosso. She’s my friend who helps and protects me. But now I’m the one who has to help her.

  Bless both Maraia and Madam Kat, Lord. Let their shadows always be still in the moonlight.

  And thank you for Vilivo. Thank you for finding him work. Now he can support himself, become an adult, and start a family.

  In Jesus’ holy name. Emeni.

  54

  Kat

  Ask for forgiveness? Is that what I have to do?

  I’ve taken off my flip-flops, there’s sea foam on the water lapping across my feet. The sun is almost down, I’ll have to walk quickly to get there before dark. The doubt churns in my stomach, I feel stupid and false. A bulubulu reconciliation ceremony involves speeches and costly gifts. I don’t have a tabua, a big expensive whale tooth, to offer; I haven’t prepared a speech. There are no solemn men sitting there in ceremonial positions waiting for me at the spot under the tree where the boat lay ashore.

  It was very hard for Ateca to come out with it. She never hides her opinions, but it’s still rare that she tries to pressure me into something. I asked if she wanted me to do it for Sai’s sake.

  “Is it for Sai? For her to forgive?”

  But Ateca shook her head, and for once there was no laughter in her mouth. “Sai has nothing to forgive. She hasn’t lost anything. She has Maraia. She’s been given plenty.”

  She insisted I had to do it for my own sake: “The one who doesn’t ask for forgiveness can never find peace.” And that I had to do it for Niklas: “He can’t leave your unsettled heart, Madam Kat.”

  I don’t know how I’m going to do this. The sun has hit the horizon; it’s being swallowed by the sea in one giant gulp. A pink shimmer dances around the palm trees for a few seconds before the beach settles down in the quiet of darkness.

  Ateca was widowed long before we came here; I never met her husband. But she often has opinions about marriage and relationships. “The reasons for disagreement between man and wife are as many as there are leaves on the trees and fish in the sea. But luckily the wind blows, the waves crash, and leaves and fish are swept away.”

  The wind blows and the waves crash. I stop at the water’s edge and stand still. For a long time—until I feel the water lapping right under my knees. The ocean has turned; the tide is coming in. I retreat farther up the beach and keep walking. The moon catches up to me, hurries my footsteps, and casts white, crackling flashes in the sand.

  I didn’t know whose boat it was that night, and I don’t know now. But it’s there, the outriggers mounted on both sides like arms. Come here, they say. Come sit down. The shadow lies there waiting, a triangle of refuge between the boat and the trees. I glide into safety behind the silent hull, into a salty smell of sun-dried fishing nets.

  I haven’t brought any offerings, and the one I bear bitter thoughts toward is gone. The appeal for forgiveness must be addressed to the family members of the one who has suffered unjustly, but Niklas’s parents are long since dead. I’m not fulfilling any of the other ceremonial requirements either, and the insulted party isn’t here to give me the absolution I seek. Still, I am here to ask for forgiveness. Bulubulu means to bury. Bury resentment and put an end to bitterness.

  Should I speak out loud? Whisper? If I say it in my head, it will be no different from the endless conversations I’ve had with myself every night since it happened. I must say it out loud.

  The words flicker uncertainly around me in the dusk. “Do you understand that I could hardly see anything?” I begin. “It was dark and chaotic and the beach was full of people, and I thought you were out in a boat. The shadows in the mangroves kept moving, and everything was a blur.”

  I wait a moment, but Niklas doesn’t respond.

  “You know who I was focused on, right? My eyes, my mind, I had everything fixed on your daughter? Your daughter, Niklas. The Star of the Sea glowed and sparkled right in front of you, and you turned your back on her. Couldn’t you see that you were turning your back on me too? On the joy and the magic we could have shared with her?”

  I pause, hearing my own voice. How it chops and carves angrily at the silence. This is all wrong, I didn’t come here for demands or accusations. I bury both of my hands in the sand, let the damp ashes of the sea cool my palms.

  “Ateca says you can’t get to where you’re going if I don’t ask you to forgive me. For being blind to everything but my own disappointment and resentment. For not catching you when you fell.”

  The wind makes the wooden boat creak with a dry, wailing sound.

  “I wanted you to hurt. I wanted you to feel the pain that you had caused me. The betrayal, that you didn’t honor your daughter. That you didn’t celebrate her and have her join our journey.”

  I raise my hand, remembering the feeling of Maraia’s hair under the thin skin on my palm. Maraia’s head, for Fijians the most sacred part of the body, so warm under my fingers. Tulou, I said to her. Forgive me. For my big rough hand touching your inviolable head. A breath of light against my life line.

  “Forgive me,” I say to Niklas—I need to say it, and I try to mean it. If I don’t, I’ll never get out of the shadows. “Forgive me for letting you die.”

  Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

  —

  Ingrid is sitting alone on the steps when I return.

  “You were gone some time,” she says.

  I nod. “I had something I needed to do.”

  “Maraia’s mother was here.”

  Maraia’s mother.

  “What did she want?”

  “I’m not sure. She said Maraia’s going to start school after Christmas. She was asking for you.”

  I make a sudden decision. “I’m going over there to see her.”

  Ingrid stands up. “Do you want me to come?”

  “If you want.”

  —

  “She’s big now,” Sai says when we’ve taken a seat outside her house. A small bowl of mussels sits at her feet; she opens them with a knife as she talks. “She’ll be seven in August, when the ivi tree blooms. She has to go to school, to learn things.”

  I feel the sadness settle in my stomach, flat and gray.

  “Yes, I guess she has to,” I say.

  No open atlases and shiny shells, no tiny footsteps across the floor: “I’ll help you, Nau.”

  Ingrid asks the question before I realize it’s on the tip of my own tongue. “And the school fees, Sai? Are they…will they be a problem?”

  A pair of brown eyes settles on mine. “I think it will be fine. There are many people who love Maraia.”

  I understand right away. Ateca has been here. Ateca has spoken to Sai and told her that everything will be okay. Told her that Madam Kat has done her bulubulu and is moving on.

  “I’d like to help with the school fees,” I hear myself say. I take a deep breath and make the words come out. “It’s what Mister Niklas would have wanted.”

  Onl
y a memory, deep in Sai’s gaze. No bitterness. No sorrow, only a past.

  “Star of the Sea,” she says. “He was the one who said it. That night. He held a blue starfish in his hand and said it bore the name of the Holy Virgin. So I named her Maraia.”

  I wait; there’s more.

  “He didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she says. “He was just searching.”

  “For what?” My voice is a whisper. Do I want to know? But now I’ve asked.

  Sai takes her time to answer. Meticulously she wipes the knife blade clean against her sulu without looking at us.

  “A place to pull his boat ashore,” she says. “A beach.”

  A koki bird twitters hysterically behind the house. Sai plunges her hand into the bucket and pulls out a new mussel, twists the shell open with her knife. A laugh clucks in her chest and trickles out in bubbling giggles.

  —

  We take the long way home. Past the school, up to the chief’s bure, and down past the rugby field, where the dust has settled for the day. Just three or four teenagers sit in a clump under a tree, their laughter rolling toward us. Ingrid looks over at me: “You know, I still don’t get it.”

  “What?”

  “Why they laugh.”

  “Why they laugh?”

  “Yes—at all kinds of things. Where you and I would cry, or apologize, or whatever, they laugh. They roar with laughter and slap their thighs. What is that?”

  Humility, I want to say. Everything we don’t know how to express, what’s bigger and mightier than any words we dare put in our mouths. What embarrasses us because it exceeds what we know or what we see. That’s what they laugh at, or laugh about. There’s no denial, no mockery. Instead of analyzing or discussing the unmentionable, they’ve united around a way to express it that neither wounds nor offends.

  Words, words, words. They don’t provide any answer that I can give Ingrid. My babble of words is the opposite of Ateca’s belly laugh, of Sai’s soft mussel-cleaning chuckle.

  “They laugh about what life brings,” I say instead. “The things that are too big. Too beautiful. That words are too small to convey.”

  Ingrid gets it. “Yes,” she says. “What we think we can conquer by talking about it. But it’s not about winning, is it?”

  No. It’s not about winning.

  —

  On the porch at Vale nei Kat, the largest wicker chair is pulled up next to the hammock, where Sina’s foot dangles over the edge. Lisbeth sits in a light blue sulu, flipping through a pile of papers. I crane my neck over her shoulder. Fish and shells. Boats in colorful brushstrokes. Waves in daring surges over the edge of the page.

  Lisbeth looks up. “They’re Maya’s. I thought we could frame a few of them.” She hands me the pile.

  “Yes, of course.” I take them from her, slightly overwhelmed. “I didn’t know she painted so many.”

  “I was keeping them safe.” The voice comes out of the shadow between the chair and the hammock.

  I’m startled. “Maraia, I didn’t see you there!”

  Her brown eyes glitter like golden grains of sand.

  I flip through the pictures, stopping at one where the paintbrush has dripped out a mosaic of green and brown dots. “What’s this?”

  Maraia reaches out her hand and points. “She painted this one for me. We were playing ocean. Can’t you see what it is?”

  Two dark oval shapes in the middle of the page; hard, glittering shells. Two turtles stretching their heads toward the shore. The translucent sea above the flickering seabed. Brownish black mangrove trees against warm sand. The figures on the beach are tiny, with long, flowing hair. The song floats away from them, out over the ocean; in gold and lurid pink it strikes the dark shapes of the creatures in an extravagance of light.

  “Those are the princesses,” I say.

  Maraia nods. “The big song is taking them up into the light.”

  She gets up and stands right in front of me.

  “I’m going to go to school,” she says. “But not for a while. First I’m going home. And then I’ll come back.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Then you’ll come back.”

  Epilogue

  Between a Moon and a Sea

  “Madam Kat!” Ateca’s voice is loud and excited. “It’s happening now! The time has come for Nunia! Can Vilivo take the truck to the hospital?”

  I stand up so quickly I feel a pang in my lower back—that damned hip!

  “Of course! Go right ahead! And good luck!” I call after Ateca as she scurries down toward the gate. “Let me know as soon as anything happens!”

  I carefully shift my hip back into a comfortable position in the wicker chair on the porch. It’s finally happening. Ateca’s dream of becoming a grandmother is coming true. The young woman her son brought back from the Drokadroka Valley six years ago is mild-mannered, with a sweet smile. She’s worked alongside him as they built their house on the vacant lot behind the sweet house and cultivated a small but fertile patch of cassava and sweet potatoes. Along the side wall of the house, a paradise of colors: tender pink hibiscus, fiery flamingo flowers, delicate purple orchids, and plump, juicy red protea. On their knees by the flower beds, Nunia and Sina haven’t needed many words to get to know each other over yellow pincushions and speckled heliconia; their hands in the damp earth have done most of the talking. Sina advised, encouraged, and admired, and the flowers from Nunia’s little garden are now in high demand all the way to Rakiraki, Ateca says.

  But there haven’t been any children. Vilivo and Nunia had been living in Korototoka as man and wife for less than a year when Ateca came to Sina with the problem. Sina consulted me in turn.

  “Ateca wants me to take her daughter-in-law to the woman doctor. For goodness’ sake, just because I had that surgery…” She didn’t finish her sentence, but the meaning behind her words was clear: “Because I had that surgery, there’s someone who thinks I can help. Someone who needs me. I’d be happy to take Nunia to the doctor, but I need your approval.”

  “Of course, it would be great if you could take her to the doctor,” I told Sina back then. “It would put Ateca’s mind at ease. Nunia’s too.”

  But the woman doctor found nothing wrong, and Nunia waited. We all waited. At one point the hope was lit and her stomach grew, but something went wrong. So when Nunia got pregnant again last fall, Ateca didn’t say anything. She went about her work as usual, but I’m sure she said her prayers even more intensely, asking that the baby live this time. She often visits the grave of the little girl who didn’t survive the last month in her mother’s womb. After the funeral, she and Vilivo both kept watch at the cemetery for several nights; no one talks about it, but everyone knows there are practitioners of black magic about. This time it has to go well! Nunia and Vilivo would be outstanding parents, and Ateca longs for this grandchild so much. She deserves it. We all deserve it. A baby, the icing on the cake.

  —

  If something happens in the maternity ward today, we’ll have to call Lisbeth tonight, when it’s morning in Gothenburg. She won’t be back for another couple of months; her split lifestyle, with a long summer in Scandinavia and the rest of the year in Fiji, suits her well. She still looks ten years younger than the rest of us, but not because of the makeup. It’s her role as chocolate ambassador that makes her skin glow and puts a spring in her step, I’m sure of it. That, and the time she now has with Joachim and his family. I’ve never seen a more nervous grandmother than when they were coming to visit the year after Maya died. And I’ve never seen a stranger welcoming committee than the one that stood waiting for the car with the two white-haired twin girls from the other side of the world: a suspicious Sina in the shadowy far corner of the porch, an excited and worried Ateca in the window, Ingrid on the stairs with a huge grin. And Maraia. On the bottom step, holding a basin of water with a blue starfish glittering on top of a bed of sand and shells and stones.

  Linda and her boyfriend have visited us too. They stopped by Vale nei K
at for a brief afternoon before traveling on to the Denarau Hilton in their rental car. Maraia was part of the welcoming committee then too, walking forward to greet them when Lisbeth waved her over: “Maraia, this is my daughter. Her name is Linda. That means beautiful.” The sun glinting on the gold necklace around Maraia’s neck, Linda’s surprised glance at her mother: “Isn’t that…?” Lisbeth’s calm reassurance: “Maraia is the Star of the Sea. She shines for all of us in Vale nei Kat.” Linda’s sharp mouth softening into a smile.

  Lisbeth and her daughter have worked out the best relationship they could have: personal enough to enjoy seeing each other, professional enough to ensure respect. Linda is competent; it’s largely thanks to her that our chocolate is now being sold not only in the B FIT chain but also in health-food stores in both Norway and Sweden. Sometimes I listen at the door when mother and daughter meet on Skype: they’re efficient and to the point, but every so often you can hear them indulging in small talk and even in cackling laughter of Fijian caliber. Perhaps something loosened a bit for Linda when Harald died a few years ago? A tricky game of loyalty she no longer has to play? Lisbeth went home for the funeral as the widow, since they were never actually divorced. And to give Harald some credit, all the money went to her, not to anyone in the series of younger female companions who came and went in the years before his high cholesterol and narrowed arteries got the better of him. And there was nothing for Armand. When she got back, Lisbeth announced to no one in particular that there was no will and that everything would be divided among the known heirs. Sina didn’t even blink. Armand and Harald were never part of each other’s lives. The only thread that linked them was spun here in Vale nei Kat, and it never stretched out the door.

  —

  Sina hasn’t gone back to Norway. Armand hasn’t been back here either. But they keep in touch, and the last news Sina told us about him was a catering project operating from the home kitchen of a woman he’s seeing. Sina has mentioned her name several times with hope in her voice. Could this be a decent, down-to-earth girl at last? Someone who could love the Armand who might be there somewhere behind the silken smile, and still stand up for herself. Someone who could keep an eye on the money he got from the sale of Sina’s apartment, which she had entrusted to a real estate agent. A portion of Armand’s inheritance had been paid out in advance, and Sina’s frown lines grew a little softer when she transferred a sum into my account as well. “Overdue rent,” the bank reference read.