by Tamara Gray
‘What are we waiting for! Can’t disappoint those pipi today!’ Then she would shout to us to get into our bathing clothes, grab some sugarbags, don’t forget knives and take your time but hurry up! And off we would go to the reef on our truck.
If it was a sunny day the reef would already be crowded with people searching for kai moana. There they’d be, dotting the water with their sacks and flax kits. They would wave and shout to us and we would hurry to join them, pulling on our shoes, grabbing our sugarbags and running down to the sea.
‘Don’t you kids come too far out!’ Dad would yell. He would already be way ahead of us, sack clutched in one hand, a knife in the other. He used the knife to prise the paua from the reef because if you weren’t quick enough they held on to the rocks really tight. Sometimes, Dad would put on a diving mask. It made it easier for him to see underwater.
As for Mum, she liked nothing better than to wade out to where some of the women of the pa were gathered. Then she would korero with them while she was looking for seafood. Throughout the long afternoon those women would bend to the task, their dresses ballooning above the water, and talk and talk and talk and talk.
For both Mum and Dad, much of the fun of going to the reef was because they could be with their friends and whanau. It was a good time to be a family again and to enjoy our family ways.
My sisters and I made straight for a special place on the reef that we liked to call “ours”. It was where the pupu—or winkles as some call them—crawled.
We called the special place our pupu pool.
The pool was very long but not very deep. Just as well because Mere, my youngest sister then, would have drowned: she was so short! As for me, the water came only waist high. The rock surrounding the pool was fringed with long waving seaweed. Small transparent fish swam along the waving leaves. Little crabs scurried across the dark floor. The many pupu glided calmly along the sides of the pool. Once, a starfish inched its way into a dark crack.
It was in the pool we discovered the seahorse, magical and serene, shimmering among the red kelp and riding the swirls of the sea’s current.
My sisters and I, we wanted to take it home.
‘If you take it from the sea it will die,’ Dad told us, ‘leave it here in its own home for the sea gives it life and beauty.’
Dad told us that we must always treat the sea with love, with aroha*. ‘Kids, you must take from the sea only the kai you need and only the amount you need to please your bellies. If you take more, then it is waste. There is no need to waste the food of the sea. Best to leave it there for when you need it next time. The sea is good to us. If, in your search for shellfish, you lift a stone from its lap, return the stone to where it was. Try not to break pieces of the reef for it is the home of many kai moana. And do not leave litter behind you when you leave the sea.’ Dad taught us to respect the sea and to have reverence for the life contained in its waters. As we collected shellfish we would remember his words. Whenever we saw the seahorse shimmering behind a curtain of kelp, we felt glad we’d left it in the pool to continue to delight us.
As soon as we filled our sugar bags we would return to the beach. We played together with other kids while we waited for our parents to return from the outer reef. One by one they would arrive: the women still talking, the men carrying their sacks over their shoulders. On the beach we would laugh and talk and share the kai moana between the different families. With sharing there was little waste. We would be happy with each other unless a stranger intervened with his camera or curious amusement. Then we would say goodbye to one another while the sea whispered and gently surged into the coming darkness.
‘See you next weekend,’ we would say.
One weekend we went to the reef again. We were in a happy mood. The sun was shining and skipping its beams like bright stones across the water.
But when we arrived at the beach the sea was empty. There were no families. No people dotted the reef with their sacks. No calls of welcome drifted across the rippling waves.
Dad frowned. He looked ahead to where our friends and whanau were clustered in a large lost group on the sand. All of them were looking to the reef, their faces etched by the sun with impassiveness.
‘Something’s wrong,’ Dad said. He stopped the truck. We walked with him towards the other people. They were silent. ‘Is the water too cold?’ Dad tried to joke.
Nobody answered him. ‘Is there a shark out there?’ Dad asked again.
Again there was silence. Then someone pointed to a sign.
‘It must have been put up last night,’ a man told Dad.
Dad elbowed his way through the crowd to read it.
‘Dad, what does it say?’ I asked.
His fists were clenched and his eyes were angry. He said one word, explosive and shattering the silence, disturbing the gulls who screamed and clattered about us.
‘Rongo,’ Mum scolded him.
‘First the land and now our food,’ Dad said to her.
‘What does it say?’ I asked again.
His fists were unclenched and his eyes became sad. ‘It is dangerous to take seafood from the reef, son.’
‘Why, Dad?’
‘The sea is polluted, son. If we eat the seafood, we may get sick.’
My sisters and I were silent for a while. ‘No more pupu, Dad?’
‘No more, pupu.’
I clutched his arm frantically, ‘And the seahorse, Dad? The seahorse, will it be all right?’
But he did not seem to hear me.
We walked back to the truck. Behind us, an old woman began to sing a tangi to the reef. It was a very sad song for such a beautiful day. ‘Aue… Aue…’
With the rest of the iwi*, we bowed our heads. While she was singing, the sea boiled yellow with liquid waste gushing out from a pipe on the seabed. The stain curled like fingers around the reef.
Then the song was finished. Dad looked out to the reef and called to it in a clear voice.
‘Sea, we have been unkind to you. We have poisoned the land and now we feed our poison into your waters. We have lost our aroha for you and our respect for your life. Forgive us friend.’
We started the truck. We turned homeward.
In my mind I caught a sudden vision of many pupu crawling among polluted rocks. I saw a starfish encrusted with ugliness.
And flashing through dead waving seaweed was a beautiful seahorse, fragile and dream-like, searching frantically for clean and crystal waters.
* Maori word for Seafood.
* Aroha is a Maori word with many layers of meaning. The light translation is love or a quality that is essential to the survival and total well-being of the world community.
* Maori word for people/tribe/clan.
Camp K 101
by William Boyd
It’s ironic, Jurgen Kiel thought to himself—and then wondered if “ironic” were the right word. It was “unusual”, certainly; “unforeseen” definitely. Because, when Jurgen Kiel joined the German army he never expected to be posted to Africa, far less the medium-sized provincial town of Min’Jalli in the Democratic People’s Republic of Douala. Yet here he was sitting in a watchtower five metres above the beaten earth compound of Camp K 101, three clicks out of Min’Jalli, guarding, to the best of his ability, some 5,000 tonnes of rice, powdered milk, millet seeds and assorted other cereals. He sighed, took off his pale blue UN helmet, and rubbed his short hair vigorously. Of course he was not alone: the squad of UN German soldiers was supported by squads of UN Spanish and Pakistani soldiers. They took turns to guard the camp and provided armed escorts for the convoys of NGO lorries that went out to the food distribution centres in other parts of the DPR of Douala. They were well fed, the civil war was taking place many hundreds of kilometres away and the local population was more than pleased to have a UN base in their town. He was doing good, he supposed, in a vague kind of way, though guarding sacks of rice wasn’t exactly the main reason why he had joined the German army. Perhaps it was ironic,
after all.
The African dusk was beginning its short but spectacular duration, the light becoming first a heavy, tarnished gold and then swiftly a muddy orange before the darkness arrived like a door slamming. Already the perimeter lights of Camp K were glowing brightly in the gloom. Jurgen stood and switched on the powerful searchlight in his watchtower overlooking the main gate and the road to Min’Jalli. The road ran alongside a small creek that also formed the boundary to the forest. Jurgen swung the beam across the creek and ran the white circle of light along the treeline. If anyone was coming to pilfer they would arrive from the forest. The creek was low—you could wade across it, cut the barbed wire, slip into the camp, steal a sack or two of rice. It didn’t happen very often but as Colonel Kwame, the commandant of Camp K 101, regularly insisted, it was the ‘ostentation of vigilance that is our best defence.’ Hence the two watchtowers with the .50 calibre machine guns and powerful searchlights. Hence the randomly-timed intraperimeter patrols through the night. Sometimes they caught pilferers—a terrified boy from the bush, naked and starving; three women with their babies looking for powdered milk—but Camp K 101 was new, the barbed wire fence was dense, taut, tall and well lit. It was very hard to get into.
Jurgen ran the searchlight beam back again. This banal vista of a little corner of African landscape had become as familiar to him as the view from his back bedroom in his mother’s house in Waldbach: there was the bamboo grove, there was the footbridge, there was the giant Mungu fig tree, then trees, more trees, more trees. He switched his light off and called up Stefan in the other watchtower at the other end of the camp on the walkie-talkie.
‘K2 all clear,’ he said.
‘Copy that,’ Stefan said. Jurgen could imagine him writing it down in the log book for Colonel Kwame. Operation Ostentatious Vigilance was underway.
Two hours later, Jurgen climbed down from the watchtower, unslung his Koch-Noedler PMG and flicked off the safety, and wandered through the camp amongst the sack-mountains and the corrugated-iron warehouses. When he reached the fence he flipped down his night vision device on his helmet and looked out at a world turned green. The open ground between the camp and the creek glowed a fuzzy pistachio, the creek was olive and the trees of the forest beyond were dark, shadowy emerald, shifting and pulsing as the branches moved in the night breezes. Jurgen clicked on his walkie-talkie and reported in to Stefan. All clear.
Jurgen walked up the wire to the western corner of the camp—ostentatiously—and thumbed-up the cover of his PMG’s night-sight. Arms had to be carried visibly, practically flourished, Colonel Kwame had insisted. Yeah, yeah: flourish, brandish, waggle, show… Jurgen froze. Something was moving in the trees on the other side of the creek. He ran to the watchtower and climbed up. He had powerful night-vision binoculars there, mounted on a tripod. He swivelled the lenses, focussed. There, flitting amongst the pale lemon branches of the bamboo grove, was a figure, crouched over, hesitant. Jurgen zoomed the lenses, and chuckled. A goddam monkey! Jesus!
He watched it for a while as it searched the leaves under the Mungu fig. Too large for a monkey—this was a chimpanzee. A chimp with a limp, Jurgen said to himself, as he noticed that one leg was shorter than the other, minus a foot, in fact—no right foot, just a short stump under the knee. The chimp slung itself up into the fig looking for fruit. Jurgen thought about switching on the searchlight and frightening it away but, what the hell, he thought, if he can find any figs left in that tree good luck to him.
He kept the binoculars on zoom and after a minute or two watched the chimp lower itself to the ground. He was a big shaggy beast, Jurgen saw, and the hair on his chin was lighter, as if it was grey. A grey goatee. Like Ludger, his mother’s fat boyfriend. So he christened the chimp ‘Ludger’, there and then. It made him smile—he’d look forward to telling Ludger this story when he went back home to Waldbach at Christmas on leave. Hey Ludger, I called a big old chimpanzee in Africa after you. Why? I wonder: perhaps something about him reminded me of you, fatso…
The next night, Jurgen watched as Ludger the chimp returned to the Mungu tree. There must be the odd fig remaining or fallen, Jurgen thought, to draw him back. Ludger spent hardly any time in the tree, he seemed to find a few figs or remains of figs in the leaf-fritter on the ground. Jurgen zoomed in on the leg-stump. How did you lose your foot, Ludger? A snare? Maybe he stood on a mine? The rebels had laid the odd minefield around their forest camps when they held the territory here a couple of years ago. Jurgen noticed Ludger never put his weight on the stump—maybe it was still sore.
Two days later, when Jurgen knew the rota had come round again for him to be on guard all night in the watchtower, he took six bananas and an old enamel cooking pot and crossed the creek by the foot bridge, making for the Mungu tree. He put the bananas on the ground and upended the cooking pot on top of them, checking that he would have a clear sightline from his watchtower. Ludger was in for a treat tonight.
And sure enough, an hour or so after dark, he saw Ludger limp out of the bamboo grove and head for the Mungu tree. He went straight for the cooking pot—it must have smelt good—and threw it brusquely away. Jurgen zoomed in, watching him eat the bananas, skin and all. You’ll be back, Jurgen thought, now you know how to play the game.
And so it progressed, nightly for the next ten days, whether Jurgen was on watch or patrol or not: at some stage in the day he placed a cache of bananas under the cooking pot beneath the Mungu tree and each morning the bananas would be gone. Jurgen didn’t see Ludger retrieve his bounty every time he was on duty in the watchtower but each day’s return to the Mungu tree made it obvious that the nightly bounty had been discovered.
And then on the tenth day Jurgen lifted up the cooking pot and saw that last night’s bananas had been untouched. He frowned, added the new supply and moved the pot to a slightly more prominent position, kicking away the leaves around it so that it sat in a patch of clear ground. That night he was in the watchtower but saw nothing. The next morning he checked—the bananas had been untouched again. He left them there, just in case. He and some of the Spaniards had been assigned a two-day NGO run up to the northern provincial town of Kitali. Maybe Ludger was unwell—or had moved on. He found himself obscurely troubled, as if the relationship had been unwittingly compromised in some way. Maybe Ludger had become sick of bananas and had been hoping for some figs…?
All the way up to Kitali and back he found himself wondering vaguely what could have happened, running through various uninformed scenarios. Was Ludger part of a nomadic tribe of chimpanzees? Had his injured leg made him a pariah figure? Had his leg become worse…? It was pointless speculating. The empty convoy stopped in Min’Jalli before returning to Camp K and the soldiers were allowed to go to the market. Jurgen was looking for some carvings or nick-knacks he could take home to his mother and his sister in Waldbach – souvenirs of his African tour of duty. The six UN soldiers, big in their packs and helmets, their PMGs slung across their fronts, wandered grandly through the market stalls handing out sweets and chewing gum to the hordes of kids who surrounded them. Their interpreter, Jean-Francois, swore at the children, spat in their faces, slapped and kicked them away, but the crowd never diminished, and the soldiers kept giving away sweets.
Then Jurgen stopped. He was in the butchery area of the market. Hacked thin boney joints of meat hung from the rafters of low shacks. Mammies waved palm fronds to keep the flies off. Three kids in ragged shorts sat in front of some liana and cane cages containing small deer and in another cage was a large potto, blinking uncomprehendingly in the sunlight. Jurgen called Jean-Francois over. This was another problem. The lingua franca of the PDR of Douala was French—you had to speak English to Jean-Francois (nobody spoke German, let alone Spanish) then he would translate into French for the locals.
‘These boys they go catching this animals?’ Jurgen said in his best English.
Jean-Francois asked the boys and they replied.
‘This bush-pig,’ Jean-Francois translate
d. ‘He tasting very good. Yum-yum. For you one dollar.’
An idea was forming in Jurgen’s mind.
‘They catch him?’
‘Yes,’ came the eventual reply. They were experts at catching wild animals. Very, very good hunters.
‘Tell them,’ Jurgen said, drawing Jean-Francois to the side. ‘They go catch me one chimpanzee. Bring him to Camp K.’ He pointed to the cage containing the potto. ‘Put him in cage like this.’
Jean-Francois explained. The boys all nodded eagerly. ‘Pas de problème, chef,’ one of them said, giving Jurgen two thumbs up.
‘I give them ten dollars,’ Jurgen added, and then explained about Ludger, the bamboo grove, the Mungu tree, the bananas and the nightly visits. Jurgen watched Jean-Francois relate the key details to the raggedy boys. He was thinking: there was a small zoo in Victoireville, Douala’s capital, a day’s journey away. He could ship Ludger down to the zoo on one of the NGO convoys, his wounded leg could be examined and treated and he could spend the rest of his days in captivity, true, but in comfort and safety. He conjured up to himself an image of the label set on the bars of Ludger’s capacious cage: “Ludger”. Male Chimpanzee. Pan Troglodytes. Gift of Mr Jurgen Kiel. He would have done something good, Jurgen reckoned, pleased with himself, pleased with his initiative—his three months in Africa would have amounted to more than just guarding sacks of rice.
Three days later he was shaving in the wash-house when Severiano said that Jean-Francois was asking for him at the service-gate. Jurgen sauntered over to the small gate on the west side where the camp-workers came and went. Jean-Francois had been charged by Jurgen to purchase him 4000 American cigarettes on the Min’Jalli black market—twenty cartons of two-hundred cigarettes—the price was unbelievably low if you paid in American dollars. He was heading back home on leave in a week and he planned to hand out these cartons around Waldbach as Christmas gifts to his friends and acquaintances. Jean Francois was standing by the checkpoint with his hands in his pockets. He gestured him out with a covert twitch of his chin. No cigarettes, obviously, Jurgen reasoned, displeased. He followed Jean-Francois a few yards down the path. Three kids stood there with a wheelbarrow, a coloured cloth thrown over the contents.