“The next morning my father awoke both frightened and determined. U’ivuans simply did not go to Ivu’ivu—Ivu’ivu was, my father said, a land inhabited solely by gods and spirits and monsters. Sometimes he had listened to the adults of the village tell stories at night about Ivu’ivu, about how in the dark the island came alive and roamed the seas, its huge bulk cleaving the waters and upsetting the tides before returning to its spot before dawn. He had heard stories of how trees there talked in whispery rushes, how stones slid silently across the ground, how there were plants that fed on flesh. Everyone had claimed to know some foolish person who had once gone there to explore and who had never returned.
“But my father knew he had no choice, and at any rate, he knew from what had happened to his father that while Ivu’ivu held the likelihood of danger and death, remaining on U’ivu guaranteed it.
“My father went down to the shore. He had nothing to trade, nothing to give, and even if he had, there were very few fishermen who would venture as far as Ivu’ivu—the trip would take almost a day, and that, and their fear, meant that convincing someone to carry him by boat would be impossible. Oh, my father thought, if only I could fly! If only I could swim like a dolphin! And then he thought of the turtle’s dream and felt anger, and then despair. How could he fulfill such an impossible command?
“As my father stood near the shore, very sad, he suddenly saw something dark sliding beneath the water’s surface. My father assumed it was a school of the skinny, silvery fish that anyone could scoop up with a bit of homemade net and then cook over an open fire, their bones so fine you could eat them whole. But then, to my father’s great astonishment, the thing rose, and my father saw that it was an enormous turtle, the biggest he had ever seen, both taller and wider than he was, its feet as large as lawa’a ferns, paddling the water in brisk, forceful strokes and staring at my father with its slow yellow eyes. My father was so amazed he found himself unable to move, but then the turtle waddled the top half of his body onto land, and my father understood that he was to straddle the turtle’s back and the turtle would take him to Ivu’ivu.
“My father had never felt exhilaration like the kind he experienced riding atop the turtle. The turtle swam gingerly through the shallows, careful not to scratch his feet on the great oceans of coral, but once they were in open water his swimming became swift and powerful, and they passed groups of sharks, pods of whales, and once a magnificent fleet of other opa’ivu’ekes, hundreds of them, each as big as the one he was riding, who lifted their heads from the water and stared at him as if in salute with a multiplicity of glowing eyes.
“In no time at all they were at Ivu’ivu, and as my father was climbing off the turtle’s back, he was for a moment certain that the turtle, who had been watching him with his big eyes, as large and yellow as mangoes, was going to speak to him. But the turtle did not, only blinked at my father and turned and swam back to sea, while my father kept his head bowed in the turtle’s direction, in respect, until he could no longer hear the turtle’s strokes, only the sound of the waves.
“For the next many days, my father walked. Although he listened as hard as he could, he never heard the trees speak to one another, and although he stayed awake as long as he could, he never once felt the island make its nighttime perambulations. But he did see flocks of strange birds, their plumage bright blue and yellow and red against the forest, who swaggered through the trees in bustling, clucking groups, and branches so thick with chattering vuakas that they sagged under their weight, and makava groves so wild and tangled with fruit that his father would have wept to see them.
“After a very long time, my father reached a village, and there, although it was not easy—the people were suspicious and thought him a ghost—he was finally welcomed, and on his fourteenth birthday given his spear. And eventually he made a family.
“But even after all these years, no one ever believed my father was from another place. They did not believe in U’ivu. And why should they? They could not see it. My father’s claim that this island was one of three that made a country called U’ivu was information they had never heard before and had no reason to believe. To us Ivu’ivuans, Ivu’ivu is the world, no more, no less. For many years I myself did not believe my father’s stories—I thought they were tales he had made up to amuse us. But eventually I began to think he might be telling me the truth after all. Why? Well, first, my father is a very honest person. I have never known him to insist that something is true when it is not. And second, he has told this same story for so many years now, I can only believe in him, and because he is my father, I must.”
You must remember that the entire time Mua was speaking, I was looking only at Tallent. I could not understand Mua’s words, of course, so I tried to interpret how Tallent was reacting to them by watching his face. It was not very illuminating. I have to imagine that Tallent was changing some of the words as he went, making Mua’s sentences lovelier and more complex, but I was unable to gauge his reaction—his voice only strode onward, his tone calm and unchanging, even when Mua’s voice pitched up in excitement and then crested down. Later, when Tallent and Esme and I read over my notes and things were explained to me and put into their proper context, I would marvel at just how calm he had remained, how well he had been able to compose himself, when with each sentence Mua spoke he must have felt himself moving closer and closer to a discovery he had not even known to imagine for himself.
Only once did I hear Tallent’s voice change, and much later I would wish that I had been watching him more closely at that moment, that I had thought to seize the image in my head and preserve it in wax, so that I might always be able to look upon it as one of those rare moments in which one senses the plates of the world shift beneath one and life is forever altered: on one side of the buckling earth is the past, and on the other side the present, and there is no soldering the two together ever again.
“I’m going to ask Mua when his father died,” Tallent murmured to me, his eyes still on Mua. “Mua, e koa huata ku’oku make’e?”
Mua responded quickly, tossing his arm toward the group, and as he did, I saw Tallent grow absolutely still, and in that instant—as strange as it will sound—I had the sense that he was trying to shrink into himself, to pitch himself backward into the soft floor of the jungle, which might open like the mouth of a great beast and swallow him, gently, whole.
“He’s still alive,” said Tallent, and then he looked at me, and in the night—we had been interviewing Mua for at least an hour by then—his face, under the copper of his skin, was as pale as bone. “Vanu is his father. Mua says we can speak to him if we like.”
It took an entire day of Esme and Tallent talking—to each other, to me—to make me fully comprehend the implications of Mua’s story. By this time we were moving again, the dreamers (as I had come to think of them, for their somnambulists’ drool, their dopey half-glaze of clarity, as if they were slogging through a thick sediment of sleep) separated into three groups, bound together by their wrists with a long string of vine which was fastened to the waist of one of the guides. We were headed—again—uphill, but in no particular direction, for Mua was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to explain to us where his village was. But uphill seemed the only possibility; to our left and right, the forest had once again closed in, the tree trunks nudged together so tightly that only the faintest ringlets of ferns could penetrate the millimeters between them.
Of course the first thing I had done after Tallent had finished translating was to pluck Vanu from the group (he had been sleeping and flicked away my hand several times, grouchily, before I was able to rouse him) and bring him over to Mua. I watched him as Tallent tried to negotiate a conversation between the three of them. Did he look—even as I was thinking it, I couldn’t believe I was even entertaining the question—older than Mua? Maybe, I thought; if Mua looked sixty or thereabouts, Vanu appeared maybe five or six years older. And was there a resemblance? Perhaps—both had the same flat cheekbones, th
e same jutting lower jaw, the same low forehead carved up with horizontal grooves like a bit of bark. But on the other hand, they all looked the same to me, and had I brought over Ika’ana instead of Vanu, would I not have been able to see a similarity as well?
But later, when I was speaking with Tallent—or trying to, at any rate; Esme, who had been so slow throughout most of our ascent, was now trotting after us like a small white dog—and telling him of my observations, I was informed that I had missed the more important information, information that, as Esme seemed pleased to tell me, I could not have understood the significance of.
The first thing was, apparently, the matter of the king. “Do you remember when Mua said that his father was twelve in the year the king died?” asked Tallent.
“Of course,” I said. “But that could be any king, right? The current king’s father, perhaps?”
“It could have had he just said ‘the king.’ But he didn’t. He used a particular honorific, ma, which is used only in association with one particular king—King Vaka I, the king to unite the islands. And when did King Vaka I die?”
I said nothing. Of course I didn’t know.
“In 1831,” chirped Esme from nowhere.
“Right,” said Tallent. I had the distinct sense then that he and Esme had been practicing this call-and-response the night before, and I resolved right then that I would not participate in their little theater. “And do you remember, Norton, how Mua spoke of the ka’aka’a healer?”
“Yes,” I said, and had again a vision of the healer holding the stone baby aloft in his hands, his chants and the women’s cries filling the close, tiny hut.
“Well, ka’aka’a was outlawed by King Vaka I’s son, King Maku, in 1850, upon penalty of death. So—”
“Actually, 1849,” said Esme, all but panting with excitement.
“Sorry, 1849. So that means—”
“Yes, but surely there were people who disobeyed. If this was a tradition—”
“You don’t understand, Norton,” said Esme, and so intense was the effort I expended to keep from slapping her that I felt myself grow dizzy, “U’ivuans do not disobey the king. Ever.”
“So what are you saying?” I hurried on, before Tallent could chime in with his agreement and the two could remind me how stupid I was. “That Vanu was born in 1831?”
“Actually, he’d have been born in 1819,” said Tallent peaceably.
I stopped then and looked at them. “Please,” I said. “Please don’t tell me that you believe him.”
“Why not?” asked Tallent in the same calm, reasonable tone.
For a moment I did not trust myself to speak. Oh god, I realized, I have made a terrible mistake. I thought of Sereny, his gusting, benign presence, the sad and resigned look he had fixed me with when I had told him—without any thought!—that I would be delighted to fly off to an island I’d never heard of, with an anthropologist I’d never heard of, for almost half a year. I felt myself gripped by an intense desire to get off the island, followed almost immediately with a dull sort of ache—I would never escape. I was aware then of how lonely I was, here with the dreamers and the guides and Tallent, who was frustratingly out of my reach, and ugly, charmless Esme, with her round, shiny face and her khaki shorts that bunched at her crotch.
“Well,” I said, as calmly as I could, “the turtle, for one.”
“Oh,” said Tallent, waving his hand as if I were a waiter offering him a dish he did not care for. “Forget the turtle for a minute. What’s important is—”
“The stone baby,” I continued.
“But those do exist,” Esme interrupted.
“And are exceedingly rare,”31 I finished. “But Tallent,” I pleaded—I needed to know, and I feared his answer—“you’re not implying that you really believe Vanu to be one hundred and thirty-one years old, are you?”
Tallent looked at me for a long moment before answering, and when he spoke next, his voice was gentle again. “I know it seems improbable, even impossible, Norton,” he said. “But I can find no other conclusion. And besides”—and here he swept his arm out, indicating everything that was around us: the trees with their microscopic monkeys and massive sloths, the stones bearded with green and the rocks stubbled with moss, and, ahead of us, Eve and her people, shuffling behind the guides in a slow, ragged line—“what about this place is not impossible?”
And to that I unfortunately had no answer. Even Esme was silent. After a while there was nothing left to do but continue walking, and for quite some time none of us spoke and the sounds of the jungle stepped in to supply the conversation we could not have.
So there I was, a scientist (presumably), a doctor (allegedly), and a colleague (regrettably) of two people who were convinced that a man who appeared to be 65 was actually 131.
I knew that they thought I was being rigid and intellectually incurious and boringly conservative, and I knew too that they knew I thought them ridiculous and undisciplined and dangerously fanciful. The difference was that only one of us was bothered by this. Esme, in fact, seemed overjoyed, cleaving to Tallent like a flake of fungus to a damp sapling.
It was difficult not to sulk. Even Tallent, whose ability to notice the everyday shifts of emotions normal people experienced was rather less than stellar, swung into step with me for a minute. “Don’t worry, Norton,” he said, handing me a manama fruit (bruised, bulging, busy with hunonos), which I by this time felt confident enough to admit I really didn’t like.
It was also difficult to admit that in my desire to introduce some scientific rigor and logic into the process, I had unintentionally given Tallent and Esme even more fodder for their fairy tale. I had made us reinterview all of our foundlings in a process I had hoped would help us determine their true ages. This, however, had proved more challenging than I’d hoped, chiefly because it seemed that there were very few recorded events on Ivu’ivu: they had here no notion of the king, no notion of time, no notion of history. They had never seen a ho’oala before—they continued to stare at us, alone and in groups, in silence, the bolder ones plucking at our wrists and trying to peer up our shorts in an artless echo of our examinations of them—but this piece of ignorance was of no help, as no ho’oala had ever set foot on Ivu’ivu before. Indeed, one of the most memorable events of the past decades (I couldn’t bring myself to say the word century) was Vanu’s arrival, a day that Ika’ana and Vi’iu, Ivaiva and Va’ana all claimed to remember. Each told the story a little differently, embroidered and embellished in various ways (Vi’iu’s rendering had Vanu arriving like a Micronesian Vishnu on the back of a monstrous, trudging opa’ivu’eke), but they all remembered it: skinny little Vanu, his funny, torn tava-cloth bloomers, too young even to have earned his first spear. The twins both claimed that they had been in the midst of their wedding ceremony when suddenly, disrupting the celebrations, there was Vanu, unable to move his eyes from the side of pork roasting over the fire for the feast that would follow.32 Only Ukavi said that she had not yet been born to witness Vanu’s entry into her life. But then she did remember being a young girl and watching Vanu get married. Like the others, her memories grew more complete and assured the deeper into the past she reached.
“He’d have been about seventeen when he was married,” said Tallent later, his pen bobbing over his notebook. “So Ukavi was born shortly after he arrived, which means she’s approximately—what? A hundred and nine? A hundred and eight? Around there.”
But it was Ika’ana’s story that really made him and Esme excited. For Ika’ana, it emerged, had been born five years before the great earthquake, the one event that everyone on Ivu’ivu seemed to remember. This was a terrible catastrophe for the islands, felt as far away as Fiji to the west and Hawaii to the north. U’ivuan mythology explained it as a passionate lovers’ quarrel between Ivu’ivu and A’aka (over what, no one seemed to know), a war in which the gods, each determined to destroy the other, assaulted one another with all the weaponry they had, A’aka enlisting his sibl
ings, the gods of the skies, to storm and rage on his behalf and Ivu’ivu riling the waters into towering waves, ones that reached so far into the sky they almost scraped the sun. After it was over, the two never fought again, in part (so the story went) because they realized their powers were evenly matched and one would never be able to overwhelm the other, and in part because their old and long-suffering friend Opa’ivu’eke had begged them to stop, and neither god could bear to see him made unhappy by them. In U’ivuan, the earthquake was known as Ka Weha: the Fight.
“I was a small child during Ka Weha,” said Ika’ana to Tallent. “But I remember how the ground beneath me split and cracked like a no’aka fruit,33 and how my mother ran with me into a nest of lawa’a ferns and held me until the gods stopped their arguing. And I remember how when we made our way back to the village, the cooking fires had spread and the male’es were on fire, and how my mother said we were lucky it was the beginning of ‘uaka because the rains would soon be coming and we would be safe. That night we prayed and danced to the gods and their happiness, and there has never been another fight since.”
He said a great deal more, and although Tallent leaned forward, asking questions and writing and writing, he translated nothing else for me, and when I asked him what else Ika’ana had said, he only looked thoughtful and said he needed to think about it for a while.
“Think about what?” I asked, but he didn’t answer.
But anyway, the important part: Ka Weha had taken place in 1779. Ika’ana was therefore about 176.
“He can’t be,” I protested, the panic rising up again, nearly choking me.
“It’s 1950,” said Tallent, calmly but with a slight edge to his voice; he was growing frustrated with me. “He was five during Ka Weha. Math doesn’t lie, Norton.”
Math didn’t lie. But everything else did. Tallent was right about one thing, though: it was 1950. A few yards off, Ika’ana sat, slightly rheumy-eyed, eating his portion of Spam. Next to him sat Fa’a, his fingers fanning out and then closing again around his spear. And although I could have reached them in a few long strides, I still couldn’t have told you simply by looking who was the younger and who was the older, who was the madman and who was on my side.
The People in the Trees: A Novel Page 16