ALAMEIN What I mean is that we want to honour you because you’re heroes …
TE ARIKI You can keep your bloody talk about heroes. Don’t bother me with that label. To call us hero reduces us to paper dollies; shaped by other people’s hands. I was never a hero, just a man. I think this idea that we were all heroic, that we were fighting for some greater good, some high ideal, made it difficult for us to come home. A hero cannot weep, a hero cannot question, a hero cannot live.
Scaling us up into giants strips us of our humanity. It misses the point that we are human; that we are just men, not comic book characters to titillate bored school children. Our experience made to be like a fun park ride. Our lives frozen into dioramas.
They used to call comic books ‘penny dreadfuls’. And the things that happened to the characters could be dreadful; they could make a schoolboy gasp in horror. But it wasn’t a real experience – the characters were characters, after all, and if it became all too much for the reader they could close the pages and leave the world of the story altogether. Do you see? If our lives are presented like that, then our history is a cheap story that can be ignored when the plot becomes too difficult to stomach.
We are no longer men. We are no longer human. We are these so-called ‘heroes’.
TAIMONA But don’t you see, Dad, we call you heroes to honour you? To honour your sacrifice?
TE ARIKI We shouldn’t have had to sacrifice in the first place, darling.
TAIMONA What kind of world would we have then?
20
26 NOVEMBER 1915
Riki does some jumping jacks to warm up a bit. He and Rewai are on watch, and they are soaked through. The sky has been lit with lightning, and at times it has been difficult to tell if it was artillery or thunder that rocked the trench. Little Mo is asleep – even now, he can fall asleep almost instantly. Riki has had trouble sleeping lately. Since he’s been back, all he can see when he closes his eyes are the events of that night.
He hasn’t talked to the others about Matatau and Jack; about what happened. He blames Matatau for Jack’s death. The dude was crazy, and Riki only did what he had to. At least that’s what he tells himself – although it doesn’t stop the guilt that consumes him.
They’re both dead because of him.
The thing is if you don’t tell your story, or if you can’t admit it, then people will invent something to fill the void. Between them, Rewai and Little Mo have decided on a narrative of what happened that night. Riki got caught in the barbed wire and couldn’t get free of it. Matatau was going to use his bayonet to cut Riki’s shirt free. Jack was covering them. But the Turk’s bullets found them. First Matatau was hit, so he fell forward, stabbing Riki in the shoulder. Matatau pried the bayonet out of Riki’s shoulder, but it was driven back in by Jack falling on top of them. It is a pretty plausible story, really, much more so than what actually had happened. The madness of religious fervour, the accusations of possession: it sounds like a plot from a bad movie. Maybe Riki should tell Rewai and Little Mo what really happened, so that they know what kind of guy Matatau was.
He has a pain in his shoulder from the jumping jacks – he’s still finding it hard to lift his arm up, especially over his head. He stops jumping and holds his shoulder, hoping that he can ride out the pain.
‘Are you all right, boy?’ Rewai asks.
‘Yeah, I just overdid it a bit; trying to keep warm.’
‘At least the rain has let up.’
It was Rewai who saved him. He found Riki unconscious, still tangled in the barbed wire, with the bodies of Matatau and Jack slumped on top. Rewai hasn’t said anything about it, but Riki supposes that their bodies protected him from further injury; that they became a shield. Rewai dragged them all down to the trench, one by one, and waited with them until help arrived. Riki remembers bits of what happened as he slipped in and out of consciousness in the trench. He remembers seeing Jack’s body sat up in an awkward pose – like a marionette left behind by a puppeteer. He screamed Jack’s name again, until someone held their hand over his mouth. This was not the place for uncontrolled grief. Riki didn’t get a stretcher; he was deemed well enough to walk to the field hospital, and so made his own way down the hill, resting when he needed to, feeling hot with fever. He must have blacked out again, because his memory of the rest of his journey to the hospital ship is like flicking through photos on his phone – random images of injured men walking up the gang plank, the white of the sheets on the hospital bed, the face of the nurse, who seemed for a second to be bathed in golden light.
Gemma …
Did he really mistake a nurse for Gemma? It’s embarrassing to think that he might have professed his love in his delirium. What else might he have said? Perhaps if he did say anything they brushed it off as shell shock.
‘Hey, Riki, come and have a look at this.’
Riki’s heart beats fast – Rewai must have a sniper in his sights. He scrambles back up on the step next to Rewai, who points not at the enemy but at a patch of clear sky. There is a cluster of stars, almost swallowed by the gathering cloud.
‘It’s Matariki,’ Rewai says.
Riki looks up, but to him they’re just stars. He’s a city kid. The closest he’s ever been to star gazing was walking past Carter Observatory. Or maybe watching a sci-fi.
‘It’s upside down, but that’s Matariki all right,’ Rewai says. ‘Winter, eh? It’ll be summer at home. They said we’d be home by Christmas.’
He is just trying to make conversation, but it makes Riki think about how long he has been here. Eight months, almost nine. And then of course he realises that today might be the day – if Gemma kept their kid. He could be a father. The thought sends a shiver down his spine.
‘Someone walk over your grave?’ Rewai says, and passes Riki a bottle. ‘Have a nip of rum to warm you.’
‘We’re on duty,’ Riki says, but drinks anyway.
‘A nip won’t do any harm; it will steady you.’
‘Drunken Master,’ Riki laughs, remembering the movie.
Rewai shakes his head and takes back his bottle. ‘If you’re feeling drunk already then that’s quite enough for you.’
Riki looks up at the sky again. ‘How do you know about the stars, Rewai?’
‘I farm and I fish.’
‘What does either of those have to do with the stars?’
‘Everything. You need to know the best time to plant, or to harvest, or to set a net – you can’t just leave it to chance, not when you have a family to feed.’
‘Why don’t you just buy food?’
‘With what? If my crops fail or my net is empty, I have nothing to eat or trade. We could survive off aruhe, but these biscuits are a damn sight easier to chew.’
Riki nods. He remembers some lesson about aruhe in school; they learnt that in the old days the fern root was a source of food for Māori. But it was so tough and fibrous that people who consumed it for years wore their molars down smooth.
‘How did you learn?’
‘My father and my grandfather. My mother too – we would all go out to plant together when the time was right. I remember my mother gardening with my baby brother strapped to her chest; she must have done the same with me when I was a baby. The fishing was strictly men, of course.’ Rewai says it as if it needs no explanation, and it is one of those moments in which Riki thinks about the difference between his time and now.
‘I was a gardener and a fisherman well before I ever was a soldier, and I will be a gardener and a fisherman long after I put this rifle down. If you listen to the rhetoric of the politicians and our leaders, saying that this’ – he shakes his rifle to make his point – ‘comes naturally to us; that we are born to be warriors; that it is something innate – then you might just start believing them.’
‘You don’t think we are?’
‘I don’t think that’s all that we are. I don’t think that it is the entirety of those that do fight.’
‘But what about our
history? Before this, the Land Wars …’
‘Who wouldn’t defend their land against invaders?’
‘But that’s what we’re doing here. Invading.’
‘And that’s why I respect the Turk. A man ought to fight for his own land. I don’t have to like him to respect him.’
‘Then why did you volunteer?’ Riki says.
Rewai looks at Riki and smiles. ‘Why did you?’
Riki thinks of all the arguments he was going to make to Te Awhina when she found out about his plans to join the Army: family tradition, a way to make a life, a way to see the world … or the harder arguments about national pride, or cultural pride; that to protect peace you must use force. But none of them is convincing any more, if they ever were.
Riki has no answer for Rewai, so he just shrugs.
This is the kind of discussion that Te Awhina would love. She was always telling Riki to change the narrative. It was a phrase that would make him roll his eyes – it sounded so P.C., so university. Change the narrative, she’d say; you have the power to write your story your way. She’d say it to him if he got a bad grade – change the narrative – or if he got in trouble at school – change the narrative – or even if he dressed in a hoodie and wore his jeans low – change the narrative. She said change the narrative so many times that Riki just wanted to shout Change YOUR bloody narrative!
But this is what she must’ve meant. A story has been told about how these men are, and it has been told so many times in so many ways that everyone believes it. And the funny thing is, when Riki was growing up, part of the Māori warrior myth was fuelled by the actions of men like Rewai, the Mos, Jack, and even Matatau. They were heroes, living up to their warrior whakapapa. But Riki is beginning to see that their actions are more heroic if you know their doubts and their fears; if you know that their bravery was not inherited but willed.
Is this why he is here? To learn the great truth about history? He’s heard the saying that the victors write history; but he never really thought about how that affects the lives of those who read it. He always thought of history as a record of the truth, but it is easy to forget that history is made by human hands. History is as slippery as fiction. Riki closes his eyes. In every fairy tale it is the same. Now that he’s had his epiphany; now that he has learnt the moral of the story, he can break the spell and return home. But when he opens his eyes again he is still standing in the trench, his feet squelching in mud.
He stamps his feet. His toes are getting numb from the cold, and he’s tired. Rewai steps down and sits to roll a cigarette while Riki covers them.
‘Will you make me one too?’ Riki asks.
‘I thought you didn’t smoke?’ Rewai says, as he pinches and rolls, though his hands must be freezing without his gloves on.
‘I guess it won’t kill me,’ Riki says.
‘It’s good for you. Mind you, it won’t be good for you up there; the Turks will see you a mile off.’
‘Should I stand down?’
‘It’ll be time for the both of us to stand down soon, I’d imagine.’ Rewai lights his cigarette. ‘It’s almost dawn.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘By looking,’ Rewai laughs. ‘You can’t be at the ready with your eyes closed, boy.’
21
28 NOVEMBER 1915
There is snow on the ground when Riki wakes. Rewai and Little Mo are already trying to clear the dugout. They’ve filled their billies with snow so that there’ll be water to wash with; perhaps even to shave with, without having to use the dregs of their tea. Riki is colder than he has ever been. Sure, he’s been in snow before – he’s gone boarding a few times up in the mountains – but here he only has his greatcoat and an itchy balaclava for protection, not the comfort of a down-filled jacket and thermals. To top it off, their rations have been meagre for days – a loaf of bread between them. Riki has been dreaming of when they first landed here – he’s nostalgic for the heat, and bully beef and biscuits seems like a feast now. And Jack, of course Jack, but he doesn’t want to think about him again.
They seem to spend most of their time trying to make the dugout more comfortable. Someone is always leaning into their shovel and filling sandbags. It is only a couple of days since one side collapsed from the driving rain. Riki and Little Mo hurried to shore up the wall before they lost the light, as luck would have it under heavy Turkish fire. Even then, the water had continued to pour in. They wrung the blankets as best as they could and huddled together, all three of them, to try to keep warm.
Digging is harder for Riki now – his shoulder aches because of the cold, or because of the work, or both. The ground is either mud or frozen solid.
‘Careful,’ Rewai says now. ‘We don’t want any more snow on our roof.’
The dugout has a thin piece of iron for a roof. Rewai is worried that it will collapse if it keeps snowing; he’d like to clear it off, but anyone clearing it would be right in the line of fire. The snow makes it easy for the enemy to spot them, their dirty khaki against the pure white. They’ll just have to deal with the collapse, if or when it happens.
‘I said careful, Little Mo …’
Little Mo is still Little Mo, even though there is no need now to distinguish him from his brother. It could be just habit, but Riki likes to think it is a kindness; a way of acknowledging Big Mo even if he is not here.
At the hospital in Lemnos, Big Mo gave Riki a note to give to Little Mo when he got back to Gallipoli. Big Mo wanted his brother to know that he was all right and in good spirits – as people tend to say in this time. So that’s what Riki told Little Mo; hardly making eye contact. What Big Mo didn’t want Little Mo to know was the extent of his injuries: that the doctors could not repair the part of his jaw that was missing, and that he had a hole in the side of his cheek so that you could see into his mouth: you could see the teeth that were left, and his tongue. Big Mo had trouble speaking, too; his speech was punctuated with a sucking sound as he tried to stop his saliva running out of the hole. He sounded like Darth Vader. The comparison made Riki feel guilty.
Riki’s shoulder is throbbing. He rests on his shovel, trying to will the pain away.
‘Are you all right, boy?’ Rewai pats Riki’s shoulder, and Riki winces. Rewai snaps his hands back. ‘I’m sorry, Riki.’
‘I’ll be all right.’
‘Little Mo and me can finish this.’
‘No, I’m fine.’
Riki doesn’t want to stop. The work, the pain, takes his mind off that night. He doesn’t know why his brain insists on torturing him by replaying it over and over again.
Rewai takes the shovel from Riki’s hands. ‘You let us do this, eh? Maybe put the billy on for a cuppa?’
Riki knows that it is pointless trying to argue with Rewai. It’s as good as an order to rest.
He watches Rewai and Little Mo dig. He feels truly alone. Jack was the closest he had to a confidant, and he wouldn’t have told Jack everything anyway. And of course whenever Rewai and Little Mo speak of that night, of Jack and Matatau, they’re incredibly respectful. Riki’s the only one alive who knows what Matatau was really like.
He called me a demon, when it was like he was the one possessed. Riki can’t help but think of Matatau’s face again now. It was made more horrifying by the flash of rifle fire – lit as if by a strobe that contorted it and made his features monstrous. He had meant to kill Riki; he had said as much. What was it? This time you’ll stay dead …
And then Riki understands what Matatau said – this time you’ll stay dead. Matatau was so certain that Te Ariki Mikaera was dead. The only way that he could have been so certain was if he …
Riki holds his hand to his mouth, trying to suppress the urge to vomit. Matatau knew what had happened to Te Ariki Mikaera – maybe Matatau had caused it, and that’s why he hated Riki – why he tried to kill him. Was it over that stupid scarab? Did they fight over a silly little thing that neither of them had a right to? Maybe something they did brought Rik
i here. God, was Matatau the key to getting home?
This time Riki cannot stop the retching. He crawls out of the shelter and vomits. He has killed his only chance of getting home.
Rewai leans over him. ‘What’s wrong, Riki? Are you ill?’
‘I just …’ It would be crazy to admit the real cause of his sickness. ‘I feel useless.’
‘You’re still recovering. You’ll pick up the slack later. Why don’t you read that letter?’
Riki received a letter from Matatau’s sister shortly after he arrived back at Gallipoli. He’s had it folded in his pocket and never opened it. Sometimes he was tempted to throw it in the fire, because it made him feel so guilty. What could she possibly have to say to him?
Maybe Matatau told her about what he planned to do that terrible night. Maybe he had it all worked out, and wrote to tell her why he was going to kill Riki. Or worse, what if Matatau’s sister is asking him what happened? Asks Riki for Matatau’s last words? What could Riki tell her? The truth? You’re going to stay dead this time.
‘I don’t understand why she bothered writing to me.’
‘I told her what happened when I wrote to her,’ Rewai says. ‘I told her how Matatau probably saved your life …’
Riki rolls his eyes.
‘Then why would she write to me?’
‘I expect she wants to know how you’ve fared. Wants to make sure that Matatau’s sacrifice was not in vain.’ Rewai really knows how to lay the guilt on thick.
‘I don’t know what to say to her – I’ve never met her.’
‘You could tell her we’ve got her brother’s things in safekeeping.’
‘What things?’
‘His bible, a letter, that scarab he found …’
The scarab?
‘Where are they?’
Rewai pats his breast pocket. ‘I have the scarab and Jack’s brass ring. Little Mo has the other things.’
‘Can I look after them?’ Riki reaches out his hand. ‘Can I have them, for luck?’
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