Second Half First

by Drusilla Modjeska

  In the morning I lingered on my sleeping mat, and when at last I went onto the veranda, there were three policemen outside in the sun talking to a group of curious people. What’s going on? I asked David. A pep talk about keeping the village clean, it seems, he said. Odd. Oh well. When the police finished, David invited them into the guesthouse to join the large group squeezed around Andrew’s table for a breakfast of sweet potato and the last of the instant coffee we’d bought in Moresby.

  Well, David said, getting up from the table, conferring with Andrew about the schedule that had been organised, putting his hand out to farewell the police. We’d better get started. It was then that the atmosphere changed; we felt it at once, a breath taken in, silence, as the senior of the three police handed David a sheet of paper. David turned pale and sat down. He handed it to Grahame, who passed it to me. It was a warrant for our arrest on charges of Phonography. Pornography, David translated. I laughed. David and Grahame didn’t. Later, when we were back in Moresby, I asked people why such a ludicrous charge? We were all in our fifties, for goodness sake, and if we were into pornography, which obviously we weren’t, we’d have been better off staying comfortably in Sydney. The answer, which made a certain sense, was that there had been trouble in the past with white men going into villages with cameras and using the girls, and boys too, in ugly ways. The mere presence of a camera could lead to suspicion. So the charge was plausible, which was all that was necessary for a shakedown. Shakedown? I’d never heard the term until naïveté and good intentions walked us slap into an ambush. Pornography was irrelevant – it was a means to a different end, and that end – which should have been obvious that morning, but wasn’t – was money, a lot of it. Maybe David knew, but I didn’t, and I don’t think Grahame did, when his camera was confiscated and our bags inspected. We were told to pack up; we were to leave with the police right then that morning and walk down to the village at the junction with the Kokoda road, where a police van was waiting.

  In some strange way I wasn’t afraid; it was so off-the-wall ridiculous, I couldn’t think it would be taken seriously by anyone anywhere. I was still thinking in terms of justice and evidence. Patrick, I suppose. I am fifty-seven, I told the sergeant who was searching my bag, and a Fellow at the University of Sydney, as if that had anything to do with anything. He shook his head and apologised, polite as he riffled through my notebooks with their diagrams of designs from the barkcloth, names and measurements, charts of families and clans, stories from Lila and Dapene. It was a bad way to leave the village, with everyone upset, the women weeping, the duvahe remonstrating with the police – Good spirits all, these white people tahua – to no avail. We were under arrest. Everyone wanted to lift our hands to their faces, the women clasping my arms as I breathed into them, children watching with astonished eyes. David looked terrible, pale, lined, as if he’d aged ten years in a morning. Andrew was beside him, and the security guards with their yellow labels and bush knives, carrying sheets of paper, exercise books filled with diagrams and agendas. Evidence. Proof of our innocence. Pauline walked with me every step of the way, five hours down to the road, silent through the village of Náapa, holding me steady in the river we had to cross, and that was running fast that day. When we were ushered into the police van and the doors were closed, her hand was on the outside of the glass beside my head. It was the only time I shed a tear, and that was a great deal more to do with her than the van we were squeezed into. Sister-friend.

  There’d been storms down on the plain while we were on the mountain; rivers were swollen, chunks of road collapsing, bridges precarious. It was a slow return to Popondetta. Thompson got out of the police van at the edge of town, and we continued on to the hotel with the bed bugs where we were to stay until we were charged, the sergeant said. The hotel had few vacancies with only two rooms available. David took the one that would fit him and Andrew with space on the floor for the Ömie accompanying him. Grahame and I took the small room with narrow single beds, which compared to the cage at the police station looked positively luxurious.

  David had said nothing in the van. I’d put my hand on his knee, a gesture of sympathy, and he’d smiled, that’s all. At the hotel, while Grahame was on the phone to Sydney, he and I sat in the small, hot bar, and he apologised. When I said it wasn’t his fault, we couldn’t have predicted it, he said he’d brought me here, I’d trusted him, and by that logic he was responsible; he had endangered me. Not you, I said. The situation has endangered us; not you. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t – at that stage – frightened. We’d ring the Australian High Commission in Moresby; they’d sort it out, I said. We’re in PNG, he said, his voice sad and low, his eyes glistening – tears perhaps? – and I saw that for him who’d given so much, it was an assault on his honour, his good name, though he didn’t use those words: they are Patrick words. A random hold-up on a street in Port Moresby – when young men from a settlement had tried (unsuccessfully) to stop the car he was in – had not diminished him; nor the wrangle with the man from the Popondetta tourist office over the price of a dinghy ride. But this sudden loss of control – of which David had so little experience – had humiliated him.

  And what did I feel? Protective of course, as I had so often of Patrick, shielding him against knowledge of his own fragilities. I could stand up to David when he was being boorish and unthinking, but when I saw him reduced, that perverse feminine instinct to protect kicked in.

  When Andrew’s crew, barred from riding in the police van, turned up, they joined us in the bar. Grahame was off the phone, and there were beers all round. The Ömie men were certain the arrest was a stitch-up, the work of some men from Náapa who had married into a family in Popondetta. When the delegation had come to protest their exclusion and to bargain with Andrew that night of the disturbance, they’d been sent away empty-handed and shamed. Why had Andrew not told us? Would it not have been better to settle it then? Useless questions. One of the Náapa in-laws, Andrew now said, was in the police. Which? Not one of those who’d come to arrest us, it seemed; I never did work out who, or which, or whether. I ordered a bottle of Australian red, and hang the expense.

  By then we had rung the Australian High Commission. A consular official, a woman with a calm voice, was reassuring in a general kind of way, but said they couldn’t interfere in PNG’s justice system. On no account, she warned, were we to offer any money, for that way we could legitimately be charged with bribery. The High Commissioner, she said, would ring the provincial police chief the next day. All we could do was wait. After that long walk down the mountain, and the wine, at least we slept; no night terrors – at least not for me – no dreams, nothing.

  In the morning we were escorted back to the police station and told to wait outside. We joined a group of men under a mango tree, the only shade in the scorched yard. Whatever troubles had brought them there, it seemed they knew all about us. No good, they said, shaking their heads and filling ours with stories of malfeasance of one kind or another. Were there police involved in this shakedown, if that’s what it was; and if so which? If not the ones who’d come to arrest us, then who? No one could, or would, say, though the sergeant we were taken to see that morning was the obvious choice, or would have been were it not that in Papua New Guinea the obvious is almost always not. The police station was curiously quiet as we were taken down a long corridor of closed doors to this sergeant’s room where, in the course of the next hour, we were asked questions, which David answered, or Andrew. What were we doing on the mountain? Why would we be interested in the barkcloth? It was tapa, that’s all, we could buy it in Popondetta. He offered to bring some, to show us; we could buy from him. Another hour, another set of questions until the talk went back and forth only between Andrew and the sergeant. Were they negotiating a price? It was too fast to follow, too much in language we didn’t have. David was asked to hand over his passport. No. Not his passport, and not his wallet either. Andrew’s explanation of his exchange with the sergeant was evasive. An
d still there was no sign of the officer who had assigned Thompson to us. The police chief was not available. No, there was no one who could speak to us but this sergeant, with his patchy English and rapid Tok Pisin, who sent us back outside to the yard.63 A crowd had gathered on the street to watch. The prisoners in the cage were turned our way. Under the mango tree, with no water, nothing to drink, it was hot, and the stories kept coming, none of them reassuring. How much was mauswara – a vivid word that means mouth-water: bullshit.

  It was well into the afternoon when we were taken back, yet again, to the sergeant’s room. This time he was beaming, and on the desk in front of him was a pornographic magazine from 1996, chewed by cockroaches and stained with betel-nut juice. Evidence, he said, his own teeth red and black from chewing betel. At that moment Roma, Thompson’s wife, came into the room. Come, she said, looking at me. Where? Why? Better you come, she said, and David nodded. Looks like we won’t be going anywhere, he said. So I let her lead me up the stairs to her office in another silent corridor of closed doors. This is not true, I said. Mauswara. The evidence is serious, she said. What does Thompson say? I asked. He knows it’s not true. Evidence, she said again, shrugging off her husband. Where else could it have come from but us? If we’d brought it, I said, wouldn’t we have brought a more recent magazine, not one eight years old and covered in betel stains? She was unconvinced, and of course she’d have had no idea what was available on the shelves of newsagents in Australia and would have been shocked if she had. Very bad, she said. If she weren’t in the police she couldn’t have looked at it. Bad, yes, I said, but it did not come from us. Not you, she said. It is David they want, not you. But I was there, I said. I am the same as David. She shrugged. Evidence.

  Oh Patrick, daddy-oh, it was happening, just as I feared; an arrest in a foreign jail and you’re dead. Gone.

  No, the consular official told us that evening, they had not managed to get onto the police chief. My student friend, the foreign minister, had they contacted him? No, they said, it was too soon; the High Commissioner would be seeing him the next week, he might be able to mention it then. Next week! There was the matter of interfering, she said. That’s when we rang Ros Morauta, who’d had us for dinner that night in Port Moresby, a friend of David’s, now a friend of mine. I don’t know why we didn’t ring her first up, as soon as we arrived at the hotel. A classic shakedown, she said. The man we needed was an Australian lawyer who worked weeks in Moresby. She gave us his name. Ring him now, she said. He’ll be going down to Brisbane for the weekend on Friday. So David rang, and within the hour the fax in the hotel juddered into action with a letter addressed to the arresting officer, informing him that he, this lawyer, was acting for the three of us. His advice, he said in the letter, as well as to David on the phone, was that if we were not charged, we should leave Popondetta on the morning plane. If we were charged, he would be on the lunchtime plane over to Popondetta. He was known in the town, we heard, having recently won a high-profile corruption case there.

  Oh Jeremy, I said on another expensive call to Sydney. I thought I wasn’t afraid, but I am. Of course I’ll still come, Jeremy said, and it was one of the few times he got on a plane without having to fight the countervailing impulse to stay at home.

  ‘And Oliver?’

  ‘I’ll speak to him when we know more,’ Jeremy said.

  The next morning, within twenty minutes of handing the fax to the sergeant – who smelled of home brew; I suppose for him too it was a dangerous situation – Grahame and I were told we could leave. There would be no charges. David insisted that we go straight into town and change our tickets. I accepted, and agreed, and wished I hadn’t. I felt it as a failure of courage. So much for protecting David; there I was saving my own skin when he and so many others were left unprotected. Andrew had seen men from Náapa in another room that last time we’d been taken into the sergeant’s office. He knew exactly who was in town, and what it meant, even if we didn’t. More Ömie men had arrived, bringing news from Ömie women who’d married into Náapa, their loyalties not so much divided as earthed in their birth clan. Yes, the women had said, it was all true, and worse; it was pay-back. Ömie honour was at stake, the men said, and yes, it was this sergeant, he was the relative. Up it ratcheted, true or not, who was to know, certainly not us. Out under the mango tree, where Grahame and I were saying goodbye, all was heat and rumour and warrior shoulders raised. I was leaving, leaving David to the prospect of that cage; what would become of him with that out-of-time moustache I’d become accustomed to, even fond of? Strange what you can come to like in a man. He held my hand in his. I want you to go, he said. And I want Grahame to go with you. It’s my decision, not yours.

  We were about to walk back to the hotel, collect our bags, when a car drew up outside the police station. Several men got out, among them – finally − the officer we’d seen the day before we’d left for Ömie. They walked into the building without a glance in our direction, and some minutes later a well-spoken official in a yellow mufti shirt came across the bare yard towards us. He was so sorry, he said in perfect English. It seems you’ve been caught up in a land dispute. He handed Grahame his camera and congratulated him on the work he’d done, documenting traditional art. David, too, he said, was free to go. The police van was ready to take us to the airstrip. But David had no ticket. Even if he had, he said, he’d have stayed. There was Andrew to consider, and the Ömie; their honour. He couldn’t walk away and leave this fight brewing; was it not due to us, to him? he said, taking on the responsibility. No, he’d stay, talk to the senior officers, to the police chief, if he could. For it was not a land dispute – we knew that and the police knew that – and should they not take some action to solve the tensions among the villages and avoid a war on the mountain?

  David spent another day, another night, in Popondetta. He did speak to the senior officers, but to little effect. The feud simmered on for another year before Andrew gave in to David’s persuasion, and there was a meeting of the villages, a pig feast, compensation (paid for by David), a settlement that ensured at least some form of involvement, and reward, for Náapa in the barkcloth bisnis. It can still be uneasy, even now, and there are occasional ambushes along the road, though more likely by people from other tribes, other places, hoping they can take the cloth, make the money.

  Back in Sydney I looked up Martin Luther King and found, as I should have known, that a dangerous road comes from his last speech, given in Memphis, Tennessee on 3 April 1968, the day before he was assassinated. The road he meant, in a literal sense, was the road that winds down from Jerusalem to Jericho, the road on which Jesus placed the parable of the Good Samaritan. Martin Luther King drove it with Mrs King, he says in the speech. ‘We rented a car … and as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, “I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable.” It’s a winding, meandering road.’ A road that drops 3000 feet, a road of ravines and rocky passes. A road that is ‘conducive for ambushing’. It’s a fine speech that takes the metaphor of the road through many turns: the road through history, the road against injustice, the dangerous road of civil rights; the roads we walk and how we walk them, together or alone; whom we assist, whom we pass by. As with the man of the parable who was left wounded by thieves while travelling the Jericho road, do we pass by on the other side and leave him to die, as the Levite and the priest did; or do we stop, as did the Samaritan, ‘a man of another race’, and lend our help? The Samaritan was a great man, a good man, because, Martin Luther King says, ‘he had the capacity to project the “I” into the “thou”, and to be concerned about his brother’. He thought not of the danger to himself were he to stop, but of the danger to the injured man if he did not stop.64

  ‘Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness,’ King says, for there is reason for us all to be afraid. Bad things happen on dangerous roads, and in dark times many a road can turn dangerous. He hoped, he said that night, that he’d live to walk the road of justice and c
ivil rights further into the twentieth century, undeterred by threats from ‘some of our sick white brothers’. Such were the threats that the plane he’d caught from Atlanta that morning had had to be under guard the previous night. He was thirty-nine years old when he gave that speech – and when, on the evening of the following day, he was shot dead by a single bullet from a white marksman.

  I cannot leave you in Papua New Guinea with only the image of ambush and danger. Such shakedowns are rare, though many a well-intentioned whitey will tell you they’ve been taken for ‘chickens to be plucked’, as Bob Connolly puts it in his account of being caught up in a Highland tribal war while filming Black Harvest in 1990.65 There are indeed roads on which you must travel with care. There are settlements around the edges of towns filled with people – many of them young men – coming in after a slice of the wealth, or because of land pressures at home, and finding only poverty, unemployment and raskol gangs. There’s money being made in that country, a lot of it, not least from logging and mining, but while some grow rich, ostentatiously so, many more are left in poverty, disaffected and without land. If there is violence, which there is, is it a ‘primitive’ instinct, a legacy of pre-colonial tribal warfare? Or is it a response to the divergence between a Westernised economy of wealth, capital and corruption for some, and the degradation that is the lot of many, and not only in the settlements? You might think me an apologist if I put the emphasis on the response to the inequalities of the new. I don’t doubt the legacy of the old, or those warrior enmities, especially in the Highlands. But I also know, and have seen, another PNG that belongs to neither extreme, either in daily life or aspiration; it is to be seen in villages across this rich and diverse country where culture remains strong, authority structures sufficiently intact, where land has not been lost to logging or mining, where there is rich gardening and rich fishing. The challenge for this Papua New Guinea, at once vulnerable and strong, is how to live in both, combining and reconciling the world of the village and the world beyond, without losing control of the land, the ‘soul’ of the country’s culture, and the way its people can live day by day.66 It is not easy, and the challenge is great, the tide can pull against them, but there are many parts of the country – on the coast, on the islands – where a walking between, or with both, is articulated, and where visitors are welcomed and made safe.