As the due date neared, Sylvia’s checkups were upped to once a week. Her doctor was the indefatigable Dr. Brown, a Fijian doctor from the Lau Islands, one of the handful of doctors who had remained in Fiji after the coup, when many of the Indian doctors took their cue and emigrated. Her office was spare and perpetually teeming with patients. The doctors may have left, but the babies kept coming. It was like being in a Benetton ad. The women were Fijian, Asian, and Indian. One woman was even shrouded in a black burka.
We had long ago learned to ignore the can of roach spray Dr. Brown kept in her office. This was the tropics, after all. At the final checkup, Dr. Brown informed us that the baby was breech.
“Maybe he will turn,” she said. “They sometimes do. But if he doesn’t, I think we should do a C-section. If you were a large Fijian woman with wide hips, I would say maybe we could try to do it naturally, but you are a skinny kaivalangi, and breech births can be very dangerous.”
She flashed us a significant look. She knew about kaivalangis and their books, all of which seemed to state that a natural, drug-free delivery was a beautiful experience and that a woman will never truly be a woman until she pushes through a baby unaided by painkillers and preferably, doctors, accompanied only by fragrant candles, new age music, a bathtub, and someone who calls herself a doula.
“Don’t be a hero, darling,” I said.
Sylvia laughed. The only aspect of delivering a child that had appealed to her was the prospect of taking a heavy hit of morphine. She more or less sighed in relief at the idea of a C-section.
We took note of the baby’s position, calculated when he would be fully cooked, and scheduled the operation for a Monday at 1 P.M., a very civilized hour for having a baby. I was hoping to avoid a midnight dash to the hospital.
As we found ourselves far away from the wisdom of grandmothers, we thought it prudent to ask for help, for the baby’s sake as much as ours. Anna was a kindly woman who lived in the village of Wailoko, outside Suva. Like Anna, most of the residents of Wailoko were descendants of Solomon Islanders who had been brought to Fiji by the British to help build the roads. No wonder the Fijians looked so fondly upon the British. They brought in Indians to cultivate the land and Solomon Islanders to build the infrastructure, while the Fijians themselves were encouraged to do nothing more than collect the rents. Anna had four grown children of her own, and for many years she had worked as a nanny for expatriate families. She knew babies.
“Uuuueee, Sylvia,” she said one afternoon, with her customary glimmer. “You are having a baby tonight.”
What’s this?
“Anna,” I said. “If this baby has my genes, then there’s no way he’s going to be early for anything.” I myself had been born two weeks late, a fact that surprises no one who knows me.
“You are a silly man,” Anna scoffed.
And lo, at midnight, I awoke to the words I dreaded hearing.
“My water broke,” Sylvia said.
Men, I discovered, are hardwired for this moment. There is no lingering here. The sleep just dissipates. Every pore of my being was devoted to getting Sylvia out of the house pronto and into the arms of trained professionals. I was on the phone a millisecond later.
“Dr. Brown?…Is that you?…You have to wake up…Hello?…Dr. Brown? Sylvia’s water broke. The baby’s coming.”
“Well, you better bring her in, then,” said Dr. Brown groggily.
Moments later we screeched to a halt in front of the hospital, a brand-new private hospital. “First World Care in a Third World Setting,” said the brochure. Or something like that. Planned before the coup, the modest hospital—elsewhere it would be called a clinic—had been designed to lure the patients in the South Pacific who might otherwise choose to seek medical care in Australia or New Zealand.
“Hello? Anybody there?”
I shook the security guard awake from his kava dream.
“My wife’s having a baby!” Sylvia stood calmly holding her belly. “Is Dr. Brown here? Is there a nurse?…Do you speak English?”
He did not.
“Baby,” I said, pointing to Sylvia. “You know? …Waaa, waaa.”
The security guard shuffled off to get a nurse. Meanwhile, Sylvia was overtaken by a contraction. Her fingers dug deep into my arm. Oh, god, I thought. “Uh…okay,” I panted. “Um…deep breath…uh…now exhale.”
Finally, the nurse arrived, and soon we found ourselves in the birthing room, awaiting the arrival of the doctor.
At 4 A.M.—4 A.M. again!—Lukas emerged into this world, bawling and screaming.
“He looks like you,” said the nurse. Frankly, like all newborns, he looked like the creature from the Black Lagoon. But what a wonder he was.
THERE IS BEFORE AND AFTER. And the change is startling. One day, you go to sleep with the reliable expectation that when you next arise, a new day will have begun. And then—after—you go to sleep, having first spent a long while cooing over the little angel slumbering in the crib next to you, and suddenly, from the depths of your dreams, you find yourself hurtling toward the ceiling, shaken to the core by the ferocious wail of a hungry infant.
“Wha…who…what’s going on?” I sputtered, once I’d pried myself off the ceiling fan. After Lukas was born, Sylvia had remained in the hospital for four nights, attended by a platoon of nurses. Our boy was one of the first babies to be born in the new hospital, and Sylvia and Lukas were treated like celebrities. I had spent those first days in the hospital and my nights at home. Now, finally, the whole family was together.
“He’s hungry,” Sylvia said as she rose to get the howling baby.
“Well…what should we do?”
“Feed him, of course.”
“Okay,” I said. The baby continued to wail, a cry that pierced my soul. I wanted, more than anything, for the baby to be happy, to know that we were there for him, and to realize that while he might be out of the womb, he remained in a cocoon of love. Also, I really wanted him to stop crying. Even my bones rattled.
“What can I do?…Maybe you should hold him like…Or try…”
Breastfeeding was still a new experience for both mother and child, and while Sylvia remained serene, Lukas grew impatient. I sensed that he wanted his umbilical cord back.
“You know what you should do?” Sylvia said as I fluttered anxiously around her.
“Tell me. What can I do?”
“You should have a Nicorette.”
Unsurprisingly, the cold-turkey method had not worked for me at all. The baby’s not here yet, I had reasoned in the months since we’d arrived in Fiji, which meant that I could still…smoke. Yippee! But he was here now, and I quickly stuffed a wad of Nicorette in my mouth, seeking to get a grip on my frayed nerves.
Eventually, of course, like all parents, I grew accustomed to the midnight wail. After Sylvia fed him, Lukas would be handed over to me so that he’d have a warm shoulder to spit up on. Whereas once I had been repelled by the smell of vomit, now I took it as my natural odor. In the predawn darkness, I’d take him outside into the warm stillness of the Fijian night, and having discovered that my repertoire of lullabies consisted of little more than a line or two of dimly remembered Dutch children’s songs, I’d sing him a medley of U2 songs from the eighties as Saki, the night watchman, gazed at us approvingly.
Lukas grew to be very comfortable on my shoulder. Indeed, he was at ease on anyone’s shoulder. He took it as his natural state. This is because in Fiji, a child’s feet never touch the ground. Babies are adored on the islands. We’d enter a restaurant, and the moment we arrived, a waitress would divest us of our son. “Where’s the baby?” my mother asked in a panic when she visited a couple of months later.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I think the bartender took him,” Sylvia said.
My mother looked at us oddly. “You’re going to have a hard time when you return to the U.S. As a general rule, in the U.S. we don’t let strangers walk off with babies.”
“
But we’re in Fiji,” I said.
“I know,” my mother said. “Couldn’t you at least wear something nice, though? What happened to the clothes I sent you?”
It was astonishing how warm Fijians were with children. No matter if we were in a village or at a resort, soon Lukas would find himself shepherded from shoulder to shoulder. Sweet songs would be sung in his ear. Rugby players would coo and play peekaboo. In response, he’d gurgle appreciatively.
At home, Anna taught us everything we needed to know. Bewildered at first by our son’s mysterious ways, we had simply listened attentively as she explained the nuances of burping and what, precisely, constituted a good poop. Whenever we had a question, she was there for us.
“I can’t figure out why he’s crying,” I said one day. I had ruled out food, a heavy diaper, and sleep.
“It is because someone is thinking bad thoughts about him,” Anna informed us. The three of us exchanged looks. “Not in here. Someone out there,” she said, gesturing beyond the house.
The bastard, I thought. Now why would someone do that?
The months passed, and they were happy months. Here and there, we had our worries. Lukas’s doctor was a Hare Krishna, and during the exams, the baby would take an inordinate interest in the poster of Lord Krishna. This will require close watching, I thought.
“You should massage the skull,” the doctor told us, “to make it nice and round.”
This we declined to do. Indians, apparently, prized round skulls, just as the Malekulans once favored elongated heads. As far as we could tell, Lukas’s head was perfect as it was. And if he grew up to have a Winnebago head like his father, I was sure he’d get used to it.
By the time Lukas had passed his sixth month, we had come to conclude that Anna had the strength of Atlas. It is one thing to spend your day traipsing about with a seven-pound baby. It is altogether different when he is twenty pounds. Indeed, I myself grew weary after an hour. Sensing that he was sound asleep on my aching shoulder, I’d gently lay him in his crib, and the moment he touched the sheet, he’d let me know in that voluble way babies have that he didn’t think this was a good idea. In a Fijian household, of course, there would be an endless supply of well-rested arms to take turns carrying a slumbering child. But we didn’t quite live in a Fijian household. Thoughtlessly, we had failed to bring a village of cousins and aunties of our own to the South Pacific.
Lukas soon adjusted to the two worlds he inhabited. Eventually, we had our way of doing things while Anna had hers. We’d try to teach him Western ways, to become independent, while Anna coddled him island-style. “Babies shouldn’t cry,” she said, swooping him into her arms. Meanwhile, stopwatch in hand, Sylvia and I would stand just outside his door and spend long, wrenching minutes listening to him cry until, finally, he learned that not only could he nap in his crib; he could even sleep soundly through the night. Anna, however, insisted that he snooze on her shoulder. When we fed him pureed mango, he sat in a high chair. When Anna fed him, he sat in her lap. Anna sang Fijian lullabies. Concerned about what “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” might do to his psyche, I moved on to the ABC song.
We had come to believe that nothing was more revered in Fiji than a baby. I had begun to refer to him as our little ratu, or chief, and when, one evening, we were invited to attend a party at the neighbor’s house, I looked forward to introducing our ratu to the other ratus who gathered there each evening to drink kava. In Fiji, kava is pounded, rather than ground, as it is in Vanuatu, and in the afternoons, throughout Suva, the air carried the clang-clang of kava being prepared. That night, while the kava was being pounded, a fleet of high-end SUVs arrived at the neighbor’s house to deposit some of Fiji’s highest-ranking chiefs. Our neighbor was a commoner, but as the owner of the country’s largest shipping company, he was wealthy and clearly well connected.
With Lukas in my arms, I ambled next door.
“Come,” said our jovial neighbor. “The ladies are inside. And the boys are over there, watching the game.” He gestured to what appeared to be a shed. “I’ll introduce you to the boys, and you can have a few shells.”
Social occasions in Fiji, we found, often had a time-warp feel to them. The 1960s had never happened here; the men would gather around the kava bowl, and women were expected to cluster among themselves and talk about whatever it is that women talk about—casserole recipes, presumably.
“Do you want me to take the baby?” Sylvia asked.
“No, it’s all right. I’ll take him to meet the boys.”
Inside the shed, the chiefs were gathered around a television. A rugby game was on. New Zealand versus Australia.
“A shell?” offered a rotund man in a formal sulu.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the proffered kava. Lukas immediately reached for it. “Not until you’re at least two years old.”
“This is Ratu V,” said my neighbor. “And that is Ratu I, and Ratu S, and Ratu T, and, of course, Ratu L.”
A lot of ratus. I recognized a few of them. They were ministers in the caretaker government. I had, apparently, stumbled across the proverbial backroom. There was a lot of power in this room. If I were a Fijian commoner, I would have been trembling. One wrong word, an inopportune gesture, and I could shame my family’s name forever. But I wasn’t a Fijian commoner. I was just a regular commoner.
“Nice to meet you. And this is Lukas,” I said, raising the baby. He warbled and drooled his acknowledgments. “He’s my ratu.”
Silence. Cold, hard glares. The chiefs regarded me with undisguised hostility. Lukas drooled some more.
I had apparently made a faux pas. I hadn’t meant to cause offense. Come on, guys, I thought, it was just a little joke. Lighten up. But they didn’t lighten up. No doubt, if this had happened in the past, they’d be sharpening their cannibal forks. Instead, they turned their attention back to the game. The ratus had homes in Australia and New Zealand, and they followed the game with interest. The kava was generously dished out. But not to me.
Well, I thought as I slipped back outside with Lukas. It was true what I said. “You are my chief,” I said to him.
He grunted magnanimously.
When I told Anna about the encounter, she laughed mirthfully.
“Ratu Lukas,” she chuckled, taking the baby. “I do not think you will be drinking kava with the ratus again.”
ONE MORNING, I FOUND MYSELF IN THE OFFICES OF Consort Shipping. Our house had become a temporary refuge for Sylvia’s colleagues from around the Pacific. FSPI was holding its annual meeting in Suva, and for a week or so we found ourselves surrounded by people we had known since we first arrived in the South Pacific years ago. Work and family life blended easily on the islands, and it was heartening to watch the country director of FSP Kiribati give us news about our old dogs on Tarawa—still alive!—while Lukas dozed contentedly in her arms. Since our house was spilling over with people, and the little ratu’s feet rarely touched the ground as he was passed around like a giggly talisman, I thought I’d spend a few days exploring some other corner of Fiji, and so I bought a ferry ticket to Savusavu on the island of Vanua Levu.
It occurred to me, as I made my arrangements for the fourteen-hour ferry voyage, that my aversion to flying on small aircraft had reached pathological proportions. Nevertheless, if there was a way to get to where I wanted to go without having to leave the Earth’s surface, then I would choose that rather than fly. Even a raft would do.
“And how old is the boat?” I asked the ticket agent. I had seen some of the ferries that plied the waters of Fiji, shepherding people to the outer islands.
“Only nine years old,” she said brightly.
As I soon discovered, she meant that it had been in Fiji for only nine years. The Spirit of Fiji was at least forty years old. “Be there at 10 A.M. sharp,” the ticket agent had told me. The morning of our departure, I boarded the ship in industrial Walu Bay, and as I walked across the steel deck I noticed that the ship was deeply corroded. The paint peeled. Mechanics
emerged from below deck carrying rusty machine parts, which they studied with considerable interest. Belching trucks rumbled aboard.
I handed my ticket to someone I presumed was a ship employee; no one was wearing a uniform. “First class,” he said. He took a stamp, dipped it in ink, and stamped my forearm. FIRST CLASS, it said. This pleased me enormously. It was my first time traveling anywhere first class, and the stamp on my arm made it seem extra special. First class entitled me to a berth in a four-bunk cabin, an indulgence that cost $10 more than a standard fare. The lower classes, those not graced with stamps on their arms, were consigned to the deck. I found my cabin, deposited my backpack, and read the notice informing me that breakfast would be served between eight and nine, lunch from noon to one, tea from four to five, and dinner between seven and eight. Very civilized, I thought. As far as I could tell, I was the only passenger with a first-class stamp.
I spent a few minutes getting lost deep within the bowels of the boat. There were signs on the walls, but alas, they were in Greek. There was even a map of the Greek Isles. Eventually, I emerged on the upper deck and mingled among the commoners. Most of the passengers had settled on the benches and were busy eating their lunches. Soon the water below was marked with a confetti of plastic bags and wrappers.
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