Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  Amulmul will make us all rich.

  At the water’s far edge they halted, looking across occasionally at the camera crew but not otherwise acknowledging their presence, not making any sign to them. Leftie was there, his bilum strapped across his forehead, and then Belef appeared, somehow on the other side of the river, changed into a man’s filthy white shirt, and she had put her yachting cap on. She was the only one not in native dress. The people’s song changed when she appeared:

  Black Papa will come to save us.

  Black Papa will come for he loves us.

  Belef stepped into the water, her face serene, abstracted to a higher plane—though she still managed to throw a few glances at the camera. In she walked until she was up to her waist, and beckoned to Leftie, who took the shoulders of a flat-chested teenage girl wearing only a grass skirt and pushed her forward. Fearfully she stepped into the river, looked back at someone on the bank, and waded on. As she got to Belef she stumbled slightly and Belef caught her. They stood hugging in the water for a few seconds and then Belef ducked her backwards in a full immersion, like a ballroom dancer might dip his partner. She held her there for a moment and then the girl erupted, dripping, still holding her nose, her eyes opened wide. She gave a little shriek of happiness. Belef pulled a red string from under her cap and tied it round the girl’s wrist while the watchers behind on the riverbank cheered and banged sticks on the trees, and there was a scramble to be the next baptized. They pawed at Leftie and he ordered them in, one by one. After ten or so—old, young, male, female—had been transformed by the water, Belef raised her hand and the chatter stopped.

  “All our lives,” she shouted, “we give ’em to the Story.”

  She took off her cap and held it to her chest and closed her eyes.

  “We ask you Papa to open the road, to forgive our stupid fathers for their sins against you and to send us the good cargo. O Papa, we have been waiting this long time. We did what you wanted and we watched the white skins take all that you wanted to give to us. We will not forgive them their trespasses, Papa. We ask you to send Amulmul the snake to chase the rubbishmen away. We ask you to send us our things from Sydney and Heaven and Brisbane, to send us fridgerators and the motorcars, guns and bigscreens and radios. We ask in the name of Black Jesus, who will come to save us. Amen in Black Jesus. Amen in Black Jesus. Amen in Amulmul.”

  The crowd answered, “Amen in Black Jesus, Amen in Amulmul.”

  —

  It was just after lunch, but Liz had an urge to climb into her sleeping bag. She wriggled down into the bag inside the mosquito net in the back room of the rest house. She wanted to insulate herself as much as possible. A bag in a net in a box on the side of a mountain of trees. She imagined some hand reaching down from the sky and lifting the lid of the hut and finding her, exposed, squirming like a maggot. She turned over on her back and looked through the gauze at the outline of the rafters, the thatch roof. Manioc with rice, rice with manioc, taro with rice, manioc with taro, assorted non-identifiable greens—she should have brought some pasta and a jar of pesto. She lay on her back for a while and thought of Belef’s face. It seemed to be coming at her if she closed her eyes, looming out of the mind’s dark. She lifted one side of the net and looked out. A bulbous thumb-sized reddish spider negotiated its crazily long legs—like guy-ropes tied to its body’s hot air balloon—across the plastic sheeting on the floor, towards her. One leg after another was freed and waved around and refastened. She dropped the net and used one of Margo’s sandals to weight it in place. The wall separating their quarters from Paolo and Stan’s was like a world map, though not of this world. Continents of white-bubbled mold. Everything in this place grew on the back of something else—eating it, rotting it, strangling it. Everything was on the turn. Everything stank. A tropical stench, things feeding on other things. Missionaries preying on natives. This morning a dog gnawing on the carcass of another dog behind the hut.

  How did Belef know she was “in grief”? What did she mean they had both died some years ago but did not know it? Belef defied the surface of things. She resisted the men of the world. Her unwillingness to submit to Werner or Raula or Usai or whoever . . . She was an answer to a question Liz was unaware of asking, but still Belef offered her some clarification, some reply, some understanding of the world system as it really was beneath the sheen of its accepted and inequitable surface. There was a wildness in her, some terrible knowledge, a certainty, a base refusal—Liz found herself smiling up at the hanging knot of the mosquito net. All they wanted was to bring Belef into line. But she would not go. She would not.

  Liz got her notepad out and tried to write up the day’s filming. She had a halfhearted idea of trying to get a book out of the trip. But she felt insufficiently rational to make proper sentences. She thought of the baptism, and tried to write out her feelings when she’d watched it. What she had sensed at the edge of her consciousness was that she too wanted to be held in the cold rushing waters and to rise again, cleansed, reborn, grinning with salvation. In her notebook she wrote, We saw—she crossed the verb out. We witnessed the mass hysteria of religion in action. Query: Immune system responses? Q: Attaining in-group status? Q: Water as process of rebir—

  Voices outside, raised, at some distance.

  —

  In front of Belef’s house a crowd had gathered. Two men hunkered on the ground—she recognized them as disciples from the river. They looked like brothers, though many of the men here looked like brothers. Between them, being loosely held by them, sat the boy with white in his hair. It wasn’t feathers or flowers, in fact, but little bits of white root, rhizomes, or pulp perhaps, which he had woven into his thick Afro. Big-eyed and fearful, he clutched his bilum in front of him and in it were little packets of stitched leafs. He talked very quickly and in a high-pitched voice, but Liz couldn’t catch anything.

  Paolo, using the smaller camera, was filming. It was a courtroom scene playing out. Belef sat up on her log, judge on her bench. Margo stood a few feet by Stan, out of shot, wearing huge insectile sunglasses. Liz whispered to them, “What’s going on?”

  “I can’t make out all of it,” Stan said, “but the boy’s called Namor, and Leftie brought him to Belef. That’s his pig.”

  He pointed to a huge pig—the one they’d seen him leading through the village—tethered now to one of the posts marking out the garden of the nearest hut. It lay on its stomach, massive head on the ground, and watched the proceedings from its tiny eyes with considerable interest.

  “Why?”

  “A lot of them have pigs. They spend their days wandering and come back at night, to be fed. They don’t usually take them round, although—”

  “No, I mean why is he here? What’s happened?”

  “I think he’s been selling relics, the skin of Amulmul.”

  Belef threw a glance at them to stop them talking and leaned back on her log, legs apart, one hand on either thigh, her flowery skirt dipping in the middle. The court was now in session.

  She motioned to Napasio, who scurried into the hut and reappeared with a few small green betel nuts and a little gourd of lime. Belef tore at the husk of betel nut with her teeth and started chewing, then after a while daintily scooped out a trace of the white powder with a little wooden spatula, wrapped it in a leaf, and popped the package in her mouth. All the time she regarded the boy, not kindly nor with any particular malevolence. She spat between her feet, chewed some more, spat again.

  “Namor,” she said finally, “raise up.”

  The boy stood and was walked forward, towards her, by his guards. He was tiny, nine or ten, and so thin his little thighs were the width of Belef’s upper arms.

  “What have you in bilum?” Belef demanded, and Namor made no move to respond, so she asked again, in pidgin or Mouk, and the boy came forward and opened the bag for her. The English was for their benefit. Belef drew out a small leaf parcel, and
then another and another, setting them in the lap of her skirt.

  She looked at Liz.

  “This boy, he found the skin of Amulmul. The skin Amulmul leaves behind.”

  Liz asked, “The snake god?”

  Belef nodded severely.

  “He is many things. He is half snake, half human, and the father of us all, father of Jesus and Manup and Moses and Dodo, of Moro and Titikolo. The world came out of the great snake Amulmul like an egg. Or he made this”—she made a motion of vomiting—“and the world came.”

  She grinned around the circle at her disciples. Her eyes were wide and Liz felt an apprehension in her presence that she hadn’t felt before. There was a sharp edge to her showmanship.

  “Ah, and here are kina. Kina and toea.”

  She tore open one of the leaf parcels and let the little copper coins fall into her hand. The boy with white hair looked at her without expression now.

  “Namor tried to steal from the Story, and he must be punished.”

  A woman holding a baby stepped forward—young, maybe twenty-five, but clearly Namor’s mother. She said something desperate sounding in Koriam, then spoke in halting English. “Belef, please. Namor is such young’un. He not know—”

  “We love our children, Mosling. All us love our children. But the gods we must love more.”

  She raised a hand to prevent further interruptions and opened another of the small packages in her lap. She drew out a transparent scrap of something, and rubbed it between her fingers. She smelt it. She touched it with her tongue. Then she held it against her ear, narrowed her eyes in an expression of intense listening, and finally she nodded.

  “Truly, this is his skin. Amulmul has returned to us, to open the road for cargo.”

  While Belef held the tiny clear fragment to the light, the onlookers murmured and sighed and a few of them clapped.

  “See. Leftie, bring it to ’em.”

  Delicately Leftie took the relic, pinching it in a large rubbery leaf. He walked among the crowd, the faithful, his eyes darting from the object to the faces of the flock. When he got to them, Margo said, “May I?” and Leftie had not time to object before she’d lifted it and pursed her lips and handed it to Liz. The relic was a tiny piece of bubble wrap—a tiny piece of Paolo’s missing sheet, with the bubble popped. Liz set it back on the leaf and looked at Margo, who was refusing to meet her eye. The relic was returned to Belef, resealed in its leaf. Napasio went into the hut and came out with an empty tin can. The rest of the little leaf packets, each presumably containing a scrap of bubble wrap, were ceremoniously transferred from Namor’s bilum into the can.

  “And where you find it?” Belef asked, “Yu gatim we?”

  “Tractor Rock,” the small voice said.

  “The snake needs to rub itself against a stone to loose up the old skin. We have all seen this.”

  A few of the onlookers nodded at the truth of this.

  “And you did not want the Story to have it? Amulmul returns, and behind him leaves this to tell us. And you take it and you hide it? You try to stop the Story? You have made my stomach hot. You have made all our stomachs hot.”

  Namor said nothing.

  “And more again you sell the skin for kina for your pockets.” She shook her head sadly, and addressed the circle. “Namor tried to keep the return of Amulmul for himself. He tried to turn profit on it.”

  She looked back at the boy and shook her head.

  “You forget that Amulmul means riches for everyone. It means the road is open, but you sell his skin for these coins that have no use, that make rubbish. What work have we for coins? We will receive the treasure Amulmul has in store for us. The rivers will get wide and deep and the land flatten out and ships will come up them and they will be loaded with cargo. The sky overhead will be full of planes coming to give us cargo.”

  She made a sucking sound through her teeth.

  “You all know me. You know that I have been up to certain places. I have spoken on the telephone to Amulmul, father of you and father of me and father of all the birds and pigs and creepy-crawlies. Our old ones chased Amulmul away and he went to the whites, and gave them the cargo. But he wants to come back. He wants to come back to us. But the whites will not let him.”

  She clapped her hands once, hard. An electric thrill passed through Liz, through the crowd.

  “And we are still punished for the longlong stupidness and bikhet and pighead of our fathers. And Namor shows Amulmul more of this longlong work. And now Namor must be punished.”

  The boy’s head was downcast. His body went limp, and the two men at his side had to hold him up.

  Belef brought a finger to her cheek and held it there, then pointed it at the boy.

  “Five strokes and lime in the cuts.”

  Napasio nodded and went inside the hut, reappearing with a lithe switch the length of the boy. His yellow T-shirt was yanked up by one of his guards and his little brown back looked so smooth. He made a little puppet dance of resistance but went nowhere. Liz started to move forward, to explain, to stop it, and Margo took hold of her arm. She gave it a hard pinch, and added a warning look.

  “Shouldn’t we—”

  “No,” Margo hissed, “we should not.”

  Leftie stepped forward and took the sapling. He looked at Belef, who nodded her sad assent. Efficiently the strokes were administered. When the first lash connected, the boy’s body jerked forward and he gave a little yelp. From then on he made no movement or noise. Paolo stealthily moved round the circle to film him from the front and he zoomed in for a close-up on his face for the last two strokes. Could they even show this? Leftie paused for Paolo to get back in position.

  “He’s bleeding quite badly.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Margo whispered.

  The boy stood shaking and giving out little bleats of sadness. There was a stony satisfaction in some of the onlookers’ faces, but others were twisted in upset. Belef nodded at Leftie, who, grimly unsmiling, retrieved a clump of white lime powder from the gourd on the ground and smeared it on the boy’s back. Released, the boy fell on his knees and began coughing out angry tearless sobs. Napasio took the baby now, so Namor’s mother, Mosling, could go to the boy and fall on her knees and embrace him. Belef strode towards them—Liz thought she was about to pull them apart and remonstrate with the woman—but she crouched and hugged both of them, and all three of them were in a huddle crying together. Belef looked up, her face lit with grief and righteousness, and shouted at Liz, “But it is good news! Amulmul has returned. The Story has beginning.”

  —

  Sarah sat outside the rest house on the log bench, an unopened book balanced on skinny brown knees. Her blond hair was tied back and she wore black sunglasses. She might have been a Valley girl on the bleachers at the local high school—but the valley she was staring down into was the Wahgi, a vast earth wound of a hundred miles of rumpled green jungle and mosquito swamps haunted by hunter-gatherers who’d never seen a white man, who lived now as they had lived for millennia.

  “That’s a fat book,” Liz said in greeting.

  “Oh, hi.” She held it up. “Same one. Great Expectations. I don’t know that I’ll ever finish it.”

  “You like it?”

  “I do. I mean he does go on.”

  “He does.”

  She stood up, and took a step towards Liz then stopped and folded her arms, holding the book across her chest.

  “So Mum thought you might want to, like, think about moving into our storeroom.”

  Liz laughed.

  “Your mother’s a wise woman.”

  “It was so wet last night.”

  “It was wet, it was cold, it was sort of frightening. Are you sure it would be all right? I’m not great with bugs, I’ve realized. Or rain.”

  —

  A real glass
window with a metal grille. Real plaster on the walls. Malour, their head porter, and his little toothless buddy in the orange woolly hat carried their bags up to the compound and Liz and Margo sat on camp beds in the storeroom, absurdly delighted to be beneath a bare electric bulb and this corrugated iron roof.

  In the Mission’s washhouse, even though the water pressure was feeble and the little drizzle just warm enough to stand in, it became almost impossible to get out of the shower. After days of sweat and dirt, the water took on epic properties; she felt it as ritual, as rebirth. She lifted her face up to it, let it thrum against her forehead, against her eyelids and cheeks, stream down her nose and gather in the little hollows of her collar bones . . . Finally she ratcheted it off and saw that on the pipe behind the showerhead a little frog sat watching her contentedly with completely black eyes.

  She was writing up her notes, trying to describe some of what had happened: Belef’s movement clearly embodies a wish of the people of the Slinga district—of New Ulster, I suppose—to be liberated from forms of control. We might cite the late-stage colonialism of the New Truth, the imposed nationalism of the country of Papua New Guinea on eight hundred or so different language groups, the insidious pressures that capitalism takes, even here. But we also see in Belef’s Story, the people’s desires being co-opted and integrated into NEW forms of social control—disciplinary practices like the whipping of Namor, his public shaming, the enacted rituals of forgiveness, etc. . . . It is only by strict adherence to these new edicts that she claims the cargo will come. But how long can you enforce belief based on some future event occurring? How long can Belef promise and not deliver? Here Liz drew a little asterisk, then, at the bottom of the page, its twin, and wrote: Of course, Christians have been waiting for two thousand years for their own cargo! The trick is to keep them on edge—on red alert—“one cannot know the hour.” The event is always just around the corner, always just about—

  Writing quickly in a notebook is like whispering furiously into someone’s ear; anyone else in the room assumes you’re talking about them, and Margo sat up suddenly and said, “Look, I know completely where you’re coming from on this, but all I was trying to say was we have to remain neutral. It had nothing to do with us. We’re observers. What Belef does is up to her. I mean it’s fly on the wall, and that tradition of reportage is not—you know—it’s not inherently a bad tradition.”