The People in the Trees: A Novel

by Hanya Yanagihara

  The crowd began to move closer around the hut, and their humming grew louder. The woman who had plucked the boy from behind her sat directly in front of the entryway, facing in, and next to her sat a man—I assumed they were the boy’s parents.

  I drew closer as well, until I was crouching directly behind the parents, following their gaze into the hut, which had been lit by a small fire built directly under the turtle carapace. In the faint light, it looked waxen and somehow evil, like a trophy from a conquered beast that had been made talismanic over time.

  Inside, the boy lay down on the mat on his back. His face was expressionless, but I saw his right hand, the hand that was visible from the door, opening and closing, the way the men’s did around their spears, although of course the boy was clutching at nothing but air. The chief stepped over him so that he was straddling him and chanted a few words. The humming grew louder yet. And then the chief slowly lowered himself down, first onto his knees and then on top of the boy entirely, where he lay, quite still, for several minutes. He was not a big man, but the boy was very small, and the chief’s body blanketed him so completely that I could see only the boy’s hand, opening and closing against the palm mat.

  Did I know what was to happen next? I suppose. But the whole thing seemed so much the stuff of fever-dreams—the chanting, the weird light, the humming, the distant snorting of the hogs, the chief’s naked, sweat-shined back and thighs—that when the chief finally said something brief and the boy turned onto his stomach, I was shocked by the violence with which it happened.

  Although perhaps violence is not the correct word, because while it is true that the chief was assertive, he did not seem needlessly aggressive. I noticed before he began that there was a small no’aka-shell dish of fat by his side, with which he rubbed the boy, and his sodomizing of him, while thorough, did not appear to be in any way vicious. The boy, for his part, lay very still and utterly silent, his arms down by his sides, his hand opening and shutting, his face turned into the mat.

  After the chief had finished, he stood and walked to the entryway and bowed his head to the parents, who bowed back. And then he said something, and a group of eight men, among them two of the boys who had brought back those stacks of vuakas on their spears, joined him at the opening. The chief lifted the crown of ferns from his head and placed it on the head of one of the older men, whom I recognized from our arrival-day negotiations, who then went into the hut and repeated the chief’s actions. When he was done, he bowed to the boy’s parents (and they to him) and the crown was passed to the next man, and then the next, until all of them had visited the boy.

  When everyone had had his turn, the chief spoke, and the boy moved onto his hands and knees and then stood, slowly, and walked to the entryway to join him, the two of them silhouetted by light from the fire. The chief brought the boy before him and turned him around in one slow revolution before his parents, and I could see that the insides of his legs were tattooed with dried blood. But otherwise he looked the same boy he had been when he went into the hut: the same solemn expression, the same perfect form, the same dark, inscrutable eyes. And then the chief spoke to him again, perched on his head the bushy fern crown, and placed his hands on the sides of the boy’s head in a kind of benediction.

  And then, abruptly, it was over. The humming stopped, the crowd, yawning and stretching, dispersed, the chief rejoined his cronies and wandered off toward the hogs, and the boy, his small head aflame with ferns, was swallowed by a group of his peers, who strode off toward the meat house as a pack. Besides the crown, the only thing that marked him as different was the slight bowleggedness of his walk. So anticlimactic was the denouement that I was left wondering for a minute whether I had hallucinated the entire thing.

  I know it is not a very popular thing to say, but I have always believed, even before this occasion, that certain ethnic groups are predisposed to certain types of behavior or, perhaps more accurately, naturally endowed with certain characteristics. The Germans and Japanese, for example (and I don’t think it possible to dispute this), have an organic predilection for a particular brand of refined cruelty, the French for a kind of glamorous laziness that they have managed to pass off as languor, the Russians for alcoholism, the Koreans for surliness, the Chinese for parsimoniousness, the English for homosexuality. The Ivu’ivuans, for their part, had a special interest in and inclination toward sexual promiscuity. A week or so after that evening, I was walking deep in the woods, bored and a bit claustrophobic from the many hours spent in the village, and saw the boy from the hut with one of the spear-carrying adolescents. This time the older boy was leaning against a tree and the younger one was fellating him. Now, the natural assumption here (which was, predictably, the one Esme made when I later told her and Tallent about what I’d seen) was that the boy was some juvenile sex slave. But I do not believe that to be the case. Over the months we remained in the village, I witnessed a sort of pervasive sexual freedom and openness that I was surprised at not having noticed before: I saw couples (men and women, but other permutations as well) rutting in huts and in the woods, and children of all ages nuzzling other children, of course, but adults too. It had never occurred to me before Ivu’ivu that children might enjoy sexual relations, but in the village it seemed wholly natural, as indeed it was.

  But to return to the ceremony. As soon as it was over, I trotted back to Tallent, who was reading by the precious glow of his flashlight over one of his notebooks, and tried quietly to tell him what I’d seen. As I have noted before, I often found it difficult to read Tallent’s face, but this time, for once, it was easy: I saw shock, and disbelief, and disgust, and excitement, and envy, each emotion replacing the next as neatly and wholly as images in a slideshow.

  Unfortunately, Esme awoke midway through my recitation and I was made to recount the entire incident again. Not surprisingly, she did not receive the information well, and essentially accused me of lying, her voice rising higher and higher until Tallent was forced to tell her to compose herself.

  “I just don’t believe it,” she finally hissed (we were all speaking in whispers so as not to wake the dreamers). “There’s been no indication of this type of behavior, there’s been no mistreatment of the children, there’s been—”

  “But that’s just it,” I told her. “It’s not mistreatment. The boy seemed completely fine afterward.”

  She scoffed. “You’re going to tell me that a young boy who’s just been raped by nine men—”

  “You’re not listening, goddammit,” I snapped back at her. “He wasn’t being raped. His parents were right there. It wasn’t a violent occasion.”

  “It’s by its very nature violent, Norton! I don’t care if the parents were there or not!”

  Anyway, it was a very tedious conversation, and round and round it went, and it might have gone on for much longer if Tallent, who had been watching us, had not put an end to it by promising he would talk to the village chief about it the next day.

  And he did. According to the chief, what I had witnessed was a ritual called a’ina’ina, and it was bestowed upon each boy when he reached maku o’ana. The point of the ceremony was to instruct boys in the ways of lovemaking, and who better to teach a boy than another man? And what better way to help a boy relieve some of his preadolescent aggression and anxiety than to show him an outlet toward manhood? Girls, being less sexually charged, had no equivalent ritual, but they were thought to need less sexual instruction than the boys. The chief also invited us to witness the next a’ina’ina, which would take place in three nights. It was highly unusual, the chief said, to have two boys whose eighth o’anas were so close together, but that was what had happened this year.

  I found the chief’s explanation of a’ina’ina perfectly reasonable. Esme, of course, did not. I couldn’t tell what Tallent thought. But three nights later we were all back at the ninth hut, watching as this time a different boy, a little more cushioned and somehow not as attractively alert as the boy I’d seen, was
greeted by the chief at the entryway and taken in for his initiation. And even though everything was exactly as I’d described it—the humming, the chanting, the burning fire, the boy’s acquiescence, the wreath of ferns—Esme adamantly refused to speak of it later. She marched back to our mats like a teenager in a fury, and if there had been a structure with a door available, she would have stomped into it and slammed it shut. As it was, she flung herself down and rolled onto her side and pretended to be asleep, even though she woke me twice in the night with her muffled sobbing.

  Years later, when all of our lives were very different, Esme published a book about her time on Ivu’ivu42 in which she neglected entirely to mention the ritual. I wanted to ask her why she hadn’t addressed it at all, and even started a letter to her, but I was of course by that point very occupied with more urgent matters and so never completed it. However, I considered her omission the worst sort of intellectual hypocrisy: when documenting a culture, one cannot simply leave out details that one finds distasteful or shocking or that do not fit into the tidy narrative one has constructed. But then, later still, I wondered if her reaction had not been born primarily from jealousy. After all, as far as such events went, the a’ina’ina was an anthropological treasure, and it had been I, not she, who had observed it first. That certainly was something I could understand and even sympathize with, especially considering the events that would follow, which would render her presence increasingly irrelevant.

  As for me, I did not feel it was my position to pass judgment on the ritual. I had certainly found it a surprise, even a shock, but I cannot deny that it made me rethink certain assumptions I’d always had about childhood, and sex in general, and how there was no single correct attitude to either. This may sound very naive, but I suppose I had thought until that point that there were a few absolutes in the world—that certain behaviors or acts, like murder, were inherently wrong, and others inherently correct. But my time on Ivu’ivu taught me that all ethics or morals are culturally relative. And Esme’s reaction taught me that while cultural relativism is an easy concept to process intellectually, it is not, for many, an easy one to remember.43

  There was another unseen and not entirely pleasant consequence of bearing witness to these activities, which was that my dreams at night began increasingly to turn to Tallent. I am slightly ashamed to admit this, for it sounds so childish, but I was, after all, barely more than a child myself at the time. In the mornings I could not remember the specifics, only that he was in them and that I was happy, and that the days that followed often felt unbearably dreary and sad, a landscape bled of contentment, and I began to think of them as something to be withstood before I could return to the cosseting blank darkness of night.

  III.

  Although it may seem otherwise, I do not mean to suggest that I, or any of us, had lost interest in the dreamers and the particular quandary they presented. I also don’t want to give the impression that my haunts through the village were at their expense. Indeed, a significant amount of time was spent bathing them, feeding them, observing them, and interviewing them, all of which rapidly grew very dull. My disenchantment with them was partly because I now had something new—the village and its inhabitants—demanding my attention, but also partly because the dreamers were, by their nature and limitations, boring specimens to work with. They were in fact not dissimilar to those dim white mice I had spent all those mornings killing: necessary, but not engaging in the least. All of us knew there was something about them that was singular and important, but none of us could determine what that thing was, or even how to frame the question that might lead us to an answer. Here, however, I probably had an advantage over Esme and Tallent: I knew, simply knew, that there was some connection between the dreamers’ advanced age and the youth of the villagers, between the villagers’ refusal to see the dreamers and the dreamers’ longing for the village, even as they refused to contemplate entering it; indeed, they would not even face in its direction and preferred to look into the gloom of the forest at all times. But I couldn’t figure out what that connection was. It was always there, a sprite crouched in a sooty corner, beckoning me at the most unlikely, inconvenient times and then sprinting away, cackling, as soon as I began to creep toward it.

  In the meantime, the dreamers remained mostly the same. We could get little more out of them about their lives than we already knew: Vanu’s arrival, Ika’ana’s memory of Ka Weha. We tried to interview them about their lives in the village and their lives in the forest, but their answers were patchy and vague: in Ika’ana’s case because he seemed to have no memory of it; in Mua’s case because of something else—a hesitation, a circumspection.

  One morning, some ten weeks or so after our arrival, Tallent came to us as we sat eating our sad breakfast. (It was, however, less sad than before. As Tallent had promised those many weeks before, we were finally able to light our own fire and were holding over its flames long skewers of vuakas, which Fa’a had procured for us and which were shockingly tasty, like mammalian ortolans.) “We’ve been invited to another ceremony,” he announced.

  “Oh god,” Esme muttered.

  “Tonight,” Tallent said. “It’s the chief’s birthday.”

  It had never occurred to me to think of the chief as an individual; he was simply the chief. I realized then that I didn’t even know his name, or which of the women and children were his, or even why he was the chief. Was it because of an accident of birth or the rewards of accomplishment?44

  “What’s going to happen?” asked Esme sourly. She now assumed that any sort of ritual practiced in the village involved having sex with children, when in fact only two or three of them did.

  “I’m not sure,” said Tallent. “But I think there’ll be a pretty significant feast of some sort—they’re building an additional fire, and everyone’s tidying up over there.” I squinted toward the village and saw that indeed there were two fires smoking instead of one.

  “How old is he turning?” I asked, more to make conversation than anything else.

  But here Tallent turned to look at me and smiled. “Sixty,” he said, saying the word as if he were giving me a gift.

  Sixty. The word hung in the air like smoke, and I thought of what I wanted to say next, to separate the one question I knew I needed to ask from the tangle that filled my mind and mouth.

  Naturally, Esme had to ruin the moment. “Sixty!” she yawped. “Eve’s age!”

  “Eve’s approximate age based on Norton’s physical examinations,” Tallent reminded her gently.

  It didn’t matter, however, because Esme wasn’t listening. And to be honest, neither was I. Tallent’s revelation was demanding some recalibration on my part. No longer was this a village filled with young people; now it was a village with people who appeared to be young but might not be. What this might mean I could not determine, but I knew it meant something.

  “He’s the oldest person in the village,” Tallent added, looking at me closely, as if he were giving me an essential clue that would make me remember where I’d hidden the answer.

  But it didn’t. I had to think, and to do that I had to be alone. I told Esme and Tallent that I was going for a walk. “The ceremony starts at dusk,” Tallent called after me. “Be back by then.”

  I walked in widening circles around the circumference of the village, but by the time the light began to thicken into syrup, I was still no wiser. It was very frustrating, and in my frustration, everything about my surroundings—the damp, squishy forest floor, the far-off moans and bleats of the dreamers, the trees’ continual droppings of various crackly dried plant matter onto my head and shoulders—chafed. I began, irrationally, to somewhat hate Tallent, who had brought me to this island and then dropped on me an enormous mystery that he seemed to expect me to solve.

  By the time I crossed back into the village, I was in a very foul mood. But I walked over to the fires, where I saw Tallent and Esme sitting among the villagers, who had formed two long rows on either side o
f the flames. To my surprise, Fa’a was also there, seated next to Esme and staring straight ahead, his spear laid across his lap.

  “Fa’a’s here?” I asked Tallent, sitting down to his left.

  “Yes,” he whispered back (the villagers were again vibrating with their collective hum). “The chief invited all of the guides, but only Fa’a wanted to come.”

  Before I could think about what this might mean, the chief appeared, walking slowly toward the head of the rows. And although he, like the rest of the villagers, was wearing no clothes, he carried himself as if he were heavy with jewels and cloaks: his straight back might have supported a cape made of yards and yards of weighty crimson velvet; his long, thick neck might have been hung with twisted ropes of gold and slabs of diamond-studded metals. He did at least wear a crown, a double strand, about as thick as my thumb, of a gorgeous, shimmery marigold, in a soft material of such lambency that it gleamed even in the firelight. I had never thought of the chief as particularly handsome, but this night he was indisputably majestic: his skin had been oiled to the same mirrorlike gleam as his crown, and his hair had been brushed out somehow and oiled as well, so that it hung past his shoulder blades and flared around his face in an imitation of the fire; as he drew closer, I could smell the faint rancid odor of fat. His hog—and his hog was, not surprisingly, the biggest and cruelest and most dangerous-looking of the bunch—had been polished as well, and for once his mean little eyes, which were as shiny as lathed bullet shells, were outshone by his slicked, coarse hair and tusks, which seemed to have been honed and scrubbed especially for the occasion. On the chief’s left were the men who had joined him for our negotiations, and on his right were three women, all of whom appeared to be in their thirties, and two boys, one of whom was one of the spear-carrying adolescents I had seen having sex with the boy during the a’ina’ina ceremony.