by Alan Duff
Nor does he appear to notice the glances and looks trying to convey to him, Captain Henry Takahe now, that all is not well. She is not here to welcome you, Henry. She waits no doubt trembling with the boy to explain, when you only expected to see for the first time the daughter born of your loins, in your absence.
Poor Henry: no soldier deserves such news. Though if truth be known, it is happening in other Maori villages, and European households, imparted as the exact same shock news all over the country now the boys are home. The Yanks were here.
She waits, Henry, but not as you have every right to expect of your wife — untainted, saved only for you. No. She has another man's child to introduce, a child she could have adopted out. Everyone would have understood; she could have applied the Maori custom of whangai: given the kid to a relation, a close friend, let them bring it up. Poor shamed, humiliated Henry, war hero. A half-sibling to your daughter you've yet to see.
The women are all in black with leafy garlands in their hair, weeping and laughing and singing at the same time. Up ahead a young warrior charges towards the returned warriors of modern times, wearing only muscle armour and a flax piupiu skirt clacking and flinging its hard dried strands to his violently choreographed motion in a traditional challenge, asking are you friend or foe? Asking even of their own, since it is age-old custom from when the challenge was real and directed at visitors.
His prancing is complex and perfectly executed; he must maintain this standard or else the mana of the challenge is reduced or even lost. This is the greatest occasion of his life: every staged movement of this muscled, sweating warrior must reflect respect for these heroes and a millennium of warriors in the proud past.
He twirls the long-bladed taiaha with magnificent dexterity, at such speed it is a blur and it does not seem possible he will not drop the weapon as it flashes this way and that, stabbed, prodded, feinted, spun, action reversed, ripped from below when the emphasis was at the apex, his tongue stabbing, sunlight catching the spittle leaping from his teeth-bared mouth, all over with ceremonial hatred, a dare any take up my challenge stance, grunts and short shrieks like he is trying to convulse and vomit up objects from his insides.
On he comes this muscled warrior from another time, to the halted group of demobbed soldiers, taiaha spinning, bare feet on the hot earth, backed by the steam making its different sounds, not many clouds in the blue of a warm summer day, back-heeling, kicking up small puffs of dust, a delicate dancing designed to fool the eyes, while clouds of steam and heat belch up from nearby hot pools and drift across the warrior like the past trying to claim him back.
Then he emerges from its vapoury grasp running right up close to the lead man, Henry Takahe, who wipes not at the spit spotting his face, flinches not at the blur of deadly weapon cut across inches from his face; this is a fine challenge, one befitting returning heroes and remembering the fallen in faraway foreign soil. The people reduced to silent admiration.
Nothing though can stop them wondering: what is to follow this heroes' welcome? What will happen when Henry is informed of the illicit child, his wife's ultimate insult? Woe is she who broke her marriage vows.
Behind the warrior's back the weapon goes, makes his chest and rigid arm muscles stand out, neck sinews become taut strings, eyes bulge as last threat. Last grunts warn there be no tricks no false move as he goes to one knee, removes from his waistband a leafy twig, lays it on the thermally warmed ground not for a moment taking eyes off Henry, who in turn bends and takes up the offering, brings it to his belly to say he — they — come in peace, of course in peace for they are one people and the real war has ended in victory, the foreign enemy lies crushed, in ruins in his own invaded land. Freedom has triumphed, a majority have made it back home.
A last furious look then the warrior stands up, dances backwards, turns and prances back to a large group of similarly flax-skirted warriors young and old, the village all, ready to haka.
The mass war dance, carefully configured and much rehearsed to bring down the curtain on this momentous event, is tribute and conclusion and reminder to these returnees, you are of us we are of you. We pull you back with glad hearts into our embrace.
And yet, villagers, and yet . . .
Yet there is change in our boys. Look how their faces are different, see the dark around the eyes, the gaunt cheeks, stains of disillusion and disbelief; there's a haunting in too many eyes, a couple clearly brain-damaged. Look at the deep-furrowed brows, twitches and tics that weren't there before, see how some look disoriented, unsure of where they are, even here, back home at this unforgettable place. They may have come home the victors but a price was paid.
Now, most of the soldiers are crying, though not Henry who maintains his officer's posture, a leader of men who must set example. His outbreaks of smile have died, replaced by confusion perhaps suspicion. But maybe he has known for some time, maybe she wrote to him. His people observe closely, like plotting palace subjects keeping careful eye on their ruler, positioning themselves for his fury, his wrath to come and, one day, his favour.
Ah, but look at poor Nathan Kururangi, who left here in 1939, the searing late summer light of eager youth, brain blind to what lay ahead, and came home with the darkness forever drawn over his eyes.
Look at Barney Mutu's lips moving, yet no words issue. Fine looking still, he is reduced of the man he was, words unable to get out.
In alphabetical order Henry has committed twenty names to memory, a brother, cousins, close friends, sons, grandsons from families he knows so well, whom he played with as a child; schooled and fought with and against on the rugby fields; at school athletics; swum in the river, bathed with.
Every spoken name makes for outbreak of grief. Henry has to pause each time. Barney starts staring and people realise Henry is nearing the letter M.
Mutu, Henry says. Harold.
Barney's eyes bore into Henry; his mouth opens and closes. Henry meets Barney's stare. Barney holds his captain's gaze for a moment then closes eyes and weeps for his late brother.
The feast will become local legend: crayfish by the score, shellfish by the sack, lamb, pork, beef, chicken, all cooked in the big steam boxes built beside the communal dining room. In a country six years rationed somehow food has been procured. The beer comes in kegs, whisky and rum by the case.
Inside a large hall set with groaning tables, individuals get up and sing, mighty natural-born tenors and baritones, big of build and raw personalities formed from growing up in this tiny community and yet influenced, subtly and without knowing it, by the host of international visitors and their broader outlook. For the Waiwera Maori boys gained renown for their excellent singing voices in that war.
The soldiers show off the Italian arias picked up while fighting, first in Egypt then in the Eyties' own backyard. More than a few could have had opera careers, with training. But mostly the whole community sings, harmonised and powerful with emotion and that part of the warrior breed's personality which turns soft and tearful on occasions like this.
The males young and old break out in haka after stirring haka, shake the ground like the tremor before a geyser erupts, as they erupt into choreographed display of chest- and thigh-slapping fury screaming the words to the enemy of days a hundred years gone but alive in their minds that they are coming for them, the hated foe.
Women take turns to sing harmonised songs. Individuals confidently do solos and miss not a note nor falter with a phrase. Love and lust shine openly in female eyes.
All day and into the night the celebrations go.
My mother could hardly turn up at proceedings with me in tow, just had to sit at home and wait for Henry.
My big sister told me he called Mum a slut that night. A fucken slut. And gave her a hell of a hiding which Mata said she'd never forget nor forgive. Mata remembered him using the word Yank quite a few times. That would be my father.
Growing up we read comics with pictures of Jap soldiers with buck teeth, wearing thick-lens spect
acles, depicted as little slit-eyed monsters getting whipped by our giant, good-looking, white American ally soldiers. I presumed my father — my real father — to be one of those Jap-killing heroes. Tall and handsome, muscular, with shining white teeth and of paler complexion than my olive. He'd have a chest adorned with medals won in the war and the proud bearing of a soldier who'd served his country well.
I imagined him confronting Henry over beating up my mother and saying, try me for size, buster. Swelled my chest to bursting with pride thinking of my dad righting that wrong. But I had times of thinking what might in fact be wrong was a man's wife having a baby to another man while he was away fighting a war for his country.
CHAPTER FOUR
MY HUSBAND. HE'S HOME — if this can be called home, the place he returns expecting a loving wife who missed him terribly, expecting to meet his daughter for the first time. Thinking soon we will fall into each other's arms, weep and laugh and claw one another's clothes off, make urgent love. I can understand how he's seeing it. He can't even smile. I don't blame him.
He's never been what you would call handsome, but he has a presence and I think it's physical, not to do with intelligence though he has that too. Something chiefly about him even though he is not of high-born lineage. His presence is more like a slab of timber than an intricate carved piece. He is strength and powerful personality in one, quite dark of complexion as if his blood line has not been diluted by white blood that runs in most Maori veins of today.
Growing up a year younger I saw him fight boys several years older and win more than he lost — the fury he fought with, even when he was only nine or ten, was a scary sight to behold. Doubtless the man fought his enemies the same.
My husband is home, and he has five years of war in his eyes and a war of right now. His hearing cannot grasp that it is two children's voices out that back door, not one.
Poor Henry, he is confused at why I was not there: what possible calamity could have happened for his wife and child to be absent from the homecoming? This day is local history, part of our nation's history, of world history. Yet where was his wife?
I am not such a hypocrite I will go to his arms. I just say hello, Henry. I'm sorry. I couldn't tell you in front of everyone. Tears won't come.
Tell me what? You should have been there to welcome me home. Where the hell were you? Jesus, these are not the first words I should be speaking to my wife after five years apart.
I take a long time to answer, realising I have not rehearsed this, it's not the sort of thing you can go over in your mind, much too big of too much moment, will happen when it does and now the moment has arrived. My God, the moment is here.
I went with another man, Henry.
You what? What did you just say?
He advances towards me, all stunned disbelief, more hurt than a man deserves to expect. I don't blame him.
I want to tell him, it didn't feel like betrayal, not in the circumstances. I want to sit down and discuss with my husband now returned to me nearly six years older with seemingly a lifetime's war experiences that things don't stay the same back home either. The candle might well still be burning in the home window but a woman — women everywhere — get lonely and we change too. We find things out about ourselves that we would never have if our husbands had not gone away and for so long. A woman learns independence, how to keep her own counsel. With time mostly to herself her thoughts change. Might be the idea of marital love has changed too.
He's gone, Henry. Three years gone and for all I know killed.
So he's a soldier?
Yes.
What, a soldier boy home on feigned injury leave? Did you and him lie in our marital bed and laugh at my letters sent from different places after or before you screwed?
Nothing happened here in this house. I would never have done that.
He has hardly blinked. I can hear Mata and Yank outside; Yank is squealing at being chased by his big sister. Their sound does not — cannot — register to the father of one of them. Rage will soon have him completely in its grip.
He better not be from here. Henry means mortal threat in those glistening eyes.
I shake my head, bizarrely relieved. No, not from here. Not even from this country. And I can see the relief in his face, too: he does not have to go to war again against my lover, against a fellow citizen.
He's American.
Except it swings back at me, my lover's nationality, like a heavy pendulum since it has already slammed into my husband's face.
He's what?
Can't repeat it. Henry heard clear enough, he's trying to adjust.
I'm sorry. It just . . . happened.
You're sorry? For being a married woman going with a Yank while I was fighting for your country, for the honour of our family, our village, our Maori race, our nation? And you say sorry, like you spilled the fucken milk or something?
I had his child.
His what? To a Yank? You have a kid . . . here . . . in this house? No? You adopted it out? Where is it?
In the thunderstruck features I see another man I don't know. Not a monster, who will come soon enough; this is a confused child, like a bullying kid who finds the tables have been turned on him so now he's hurt and confused and knows not what to do next.
Can he be blamed for feeling like this? For what I have done is an outrage. But not, as Father O'Sullivan up the road tried to insist, a sin needing time in the confession box owning up to a God I don't believe in. For surely sin is wicked intent or a deliberate ignoring of moral responsibility?
I committed no sin, even though I broke the marriage vow of fidelity. There was a war going on. And I was caught by surprise, finding deep dissatisfaction I had no idea existed within me.
All this way, thirteen thousand miles he's sailed. He's gone through the unimaginable, taking countless enemy lives, seeing indescribable things, just surviving the war a miracle when millions were killed. He has so looked forward to coming home to me — the pure me, who has known no other man — to see his daughter for the first time; he never stopped saying so in his letters.
If he'd first asked to see his daughter, who is peeping through a gap in the door in fear at this her first sight of her father; if he'd put his anger aside for long enough to embrace her, sit her on his knee, I might just accept him ignoring my son.
Not when he marches up and grabs a handful of my carefully brushed hair and drives his fist into my face and throws me all over the room he and his father laboured to build, for us, the newly married couple, a home for our children. Hitting me, hitting me, when he must know his child and my child are present.
I am not wearing a German uniform: I am in civilian clothes of 1945, a skirt seven years old of tiny floral pattern in but two colours, hardly worn because it has been saved for special occasions though of ordinary material and cheap price.
So why would a husband, on his first day home after more than five years, be beating his wife black and blue with two children right outside the door?
Welcome home, husband. How wonderful to have you back. This is your daughter. We called her Mata, after your grandmother. And when this beating is over you'll meet the kid the village call Yank, the reason why you're doing this to us.
Welcome home, husband, to your unfaithful wife, your first-born child. And the child of a soldier just like you.
CHAPTER FIVE
MUM HAD TOLD ME FOR as long as I remembered: you get used to anything.
I told her for just as long, I didn't want to live in the house with a man who never spoke to me yet smothered my two sisters with love. And why don't you leave, Mum? You and me can live near town, you can take Mata and Wiki. We can come and play here on weekends.
Where will I work? Not many jobs your mother can do, just factory work and the wages are too low to support a family on my own. Besides, we just live different lives under the same roof. You should be grateful he hasn't kicked us out.
Henry would rise early to get the coal range
going, liked the kitchen to himself to cook breakfast for everyone including me. A big eater in the mornings, he sometimes roasted a piece of mutton and the family enjoyed plates of hot meat slices with roast potatoes and slices of white bread. I didn't eat at the table same time as him and so mornings my mother separated herself out to eat with me; Henry ate with his two daughters, later on Manu too when he got old enough. If it was roast mutton we were allowed to have what we wanted of it but not the knuckle, that was his.
Pig-headed man of pride against an innocent child — I never stopped seething inside.
At nights he arrived late, around eight or nine o'clock, almost always partly or totally drunk, we became a wider family at the meal table before he got home. Talked and laughed and joked as a normal family. So not as if I was isolated out on my lonely little island. But still, it would always hurt. Mum was wrong, you don't get used to it.
Every morning Henry would go for a bath up at the row of concrete tubs. Our house had a bath but we never used it, not when just a few yards from our house was Falls Bath, named for its waterfall feed from a larger and hotter pool at a higher level. On weekends, no matter what the weather, he and the girls would go to the top baths, where most of the community bathed.
How I used to envy them, the trio in winter morning dark huddled under two large umbrellas. I would watch them out the bedroom window wanting to be with them, feeling my life had been predestined differently to my sisters'. And I did very much wish Henry would talk to me. Didn't even have to treat me like a son, just say something normal. Say anything. A hug wouldn't have gone astray either, must admit.
Mum said he'd get over it, one day. But he never did. The years of silence between us just kept rolling by. I learned to keep my own company, to go into my imagination, discover my musical bent; I tried out dance steps to music either on the radio or in my head. Dancing came naturally to me. I could have hours of conversation with myself as I practised roles and conversational styles, like the women guides, like different American tourists, adopted the voices and attitudes of older kids. I lived where Henry could not hurt me with his ignoring: in my head. Or else in my mother's all-embracing love.