by Mandy Sayer
It was around this time that she had a breakthrough with her playing. Perhaps it was the discipline of having to perform under such harsh conditions, or being surrounded by so many foreign sounds, but whatever it was, in between shows she began developing a personal repertoire of melodic patterns. She had some for the blues in B flat, slightly different ones for the blues in F, a totally different one for ‘Hindustan’ in D minor, and this repertoire kept building upon itself, like scaffolding around a building.
Charlie and his portable organ helped enormously, and allowed her to adventure into improvising on the chord changes of a given song. She was finally starting to understand what James had tried to teach her that day back in Sydney, at the conservatorium’s piano. She borrowed certain phrases and licks from swing tunes and either kept them as they were, or inverted them, playing against the dominant note of the chart and using a subservient one, which was like following the shadow of the tune rather than the tune itself. And the way she mixed and placed the notes during her solos now was totally her own.
Wherever the troubadours travelled, they continued to ask about the mythological Negro who’d run off with some Aussie commandos. One villager said he saw a lone black man amid a group of whites helping to carve an airstrip at the foot of Mount Wilhelm, another saw him marching along a track with a patrol towards Goroka. Another said he’d been grenaded in the Eastern Highlands.
When the fighting moved up into the Bismarck Range, the musicians moved with it, accompanying the hammer of gunfire with Benny Goodman medleys. Every now and then Pearl paused and gazed down at the valley they’d left behind, the red sash of Ramu River stained with volcanic silt against a skirt of deep green jungle.
August passed with the roar of mountain howitzers and mortars as the Allies moved further into the highlands, whittling away one Japanese post after another. At night, grenades exploded into a fire of orange light as tracer flares arced through the sky. Sometimes the Japanese kept screaming and yelling until dawn to ensure that the Australians and Americans could get no sleep. More than once Pearl saw a soldier stir, grab his gun, shoot a few rounds, roll over again and go back to sleep.
The ranges they now climbed grew in altitude—up to ten or eleven thousand feet. The air was thin and Pearl found she had to take deeper and longer breaths to play the saxophone. When they rested, she’d lie on her back and work on exercises for her diaphragm. She began practising circular breathing so she wouldn’t have to pause so often while she performed a solo. Leaves and branches constantly dripped with water, even when the sun was shining. The troubadours, including Wanipe, performed beside rivers, in trenches, between rows of native gardens.
The puppy was developing into an alert and affectionate dog, always eager to please. By this time she’d grown to the size of one of Pearl’s boots and her ears often stood up and quivered like a bat’s. Throughout the winter months, while they walked from mountain to mountain, Pearl taught her to sit, to lie and to roll over. Training Pup became the only diversion for the musicians while they toiled between villages and forward posts. Soon the dog could play dead, fetch props during the show, and walk on her hind legs. She was fiercely protective and growled and barked if even a bush mouse came too close to the group.
Now that Pup could walk on her hind legs, it wasn’t too hard to teach her to turn in a circle. At first she could only do it once, but after two days and rewards of dried biscuits, she was twirling in a series of pirouettes, dropping onto the ground, rolling over, and repeating the turns again.
The dog made her premiere at a mobile medical post carved into the side of a mountain. Mr Blue sang ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’ while Pearl played the melody on organ and Pup cantered and spun before the crowd of weary medics and wounded patients, all of whom cheered and whistled. Pup’s one number proved to be the highlight of the show, with men calling for an encore.
Of course the more Pup performed, the more she improved. After each show, the soldiers would always crowd around her to pat her and feed her scraps and then she was passed from lap to lap like a newborn baby. The men then invariably pulled crumpled snapshots from wallets, photos of their own pets from home—faded images of themselves with floppy-eared bassets, shaggy sheepdogs, and drooling labradors. The owners in the pictures were almost unrecognisable as the lean, gaunt creatures that stood before her. Pearl thought that maybe the dog act was so important to these men because Pup represented all the tenderness and comfort of a world from which they’d been separated for months, even years. And as they fed the dog their biscuits and stroked her ears it seemed as if their own capacity for affection and love were slowly being rekindled.
Wanipe now did a solo on his sugar cane flute, while Pearl hid behind a bush or inside a tent, changed into her red dress and wig, and painted on her make-up. She sang with a quality not unlike the way she now played the saxophone, which were improvisations on the principles James had taught her, refined by her understanding of the circular-breathing technique. All her reeds had split and splintered by now, and she had to make her own ones by filing down strips of bamboo.
Any spare time during their trek into the clouds was devoted to her saxophone. When she was confident the party wasn’t close to enemy posts, she rehearsed this gentler way of playing, like an actor going over lines, whispering to herself. She practised before and after shows, in the harsh white light of mid-afternoon, at dusk, when machine guns rattled in the mountain peaks above, when the surrounding ridges purpled into shadows. She practised by streams, imitating the song of flowing water, and with each day her melodic lines became lighter and more fluid. She saw birds with narrow bodies that looked like thin pencils with wings, and impersonated their chirping on her instrument so well they chirped back, believing she was one of them.
This new lyricism had its own power, she knew, especially when she stood in foxholes, ankle-deep in mud, and played songs like ‘What is This Thing Called Love?’ Her new way of playing gently erased the heavy wetness of the soldiers’ uniforms, the bugs nipping at their hands and necks, their hunger cramps, the distant coughing of mortars.
The music she expressed now was a curious hybrid of everything James had taught her and the suggestible, vulnerable life force that was no one else’s but her own. It had the attack of a warrior and the restraint of a monk. Sometimes, when she was practising, Pup’s ears would twitch, and soon the dog would be up on her hind legs, cantering back and forth across the ground, reminding Pearl of the society women spinning and twirling over the polished dance floor of the Trocadero ballroom. She seemed to herself to be another person altogether to the girl she had been the year before, confident to the point of recklessness, with the childish notion that she could find one man in the hundreds of square miles that were the jungles of New Guinea. Back then, she’d been sure it was fearlessness and love that had spurred her on, but now she suspected it was something less noble—naivety, perhaps, or even stupidity and arrogance.
They were struggling along a path, on their way to a base hospital, when they stumbled upon a pygmy trader. He was no more than four feet high and his nose was pierced with a U-shaped bone. He was poised behind a tree, brandishing a bow and arrow. Wanipe held up his hands and explained, in rudimentary pidgin, that they weren’t enemies. He put down the portable organ and played a few notes. The trader became intrigued by the organ, lowered his arrow and crept forward. He played a few notes too, and laughed, and then Charlie played him a chorus of the blues. They shared some tobacco with him and, as they sat on their haunches and smoked, Pearl, as usual, raised the question about the black American who’d run off with the Australians to fight. The pygmy’s eyes widened then, and he began nodding quickly and pointing to the top of the mountain. ‘Big black,’ he said. ‘One black. Big. Big.’ He waved his hand in the air, indicating the staggering height of the man.
‘You’ve seen him?’
The pygmy pointed to the clouds crowning the mountain. ‘I see.’ He began shooting from an imaginary rif
le, gunning down a group of invisible Japanese.
‘Will you take us to him?’ asked Pearl, already calculating that a trip to the summit wouldn’t be too far out of their way. ‘Can you show us where he is?’
The pygmy looked doubtful.
Wanipe said something in another language, and the two bantered back and forth. The pygmy blew smoke from his nostrils and shrugged, pointing to the string bag at his feet filled with trinkets and shells.
‘Big hike. Two day,’ Wanipe explained to the others. ‘He climb for smoke.’ And so they secured their guide to the top of the mountain by trading a handful of tobacco and two razor blades.
Even though she was weary and hungry, Pearl now crawled over rock faces, slipped in the mud, and grasped at vines as she trekked stubbornly into the clouds. The air grew cooler; the rainforest thinned. They toiled along a narrow track that wound over spurs, plateaus and streams. Sometimes she grew dizzy with the altitude. By nightfall, they’d climbed so high that the trunks of trees were covered with lichen and the ground was blanketed with leaf mould. Eerie, swirling mists moved down the slopes, so thick sometimes that they couldn’t see an arm’s length in front of them. It was there, enveloped in this silvery vapour, that they made camp for the night, beneath a canopy of damp branches. The trio shared their bully beef with the pygmy. To reciprocate, he pulled out a wooden pipe, then lit it and passed it around. When Pearl inhaled she tasted the smell of burning rope and her muscles went so limp they felt as if they were dissolving into the mist. Charlie began giggling and Wanipe burst into a rendition of ‘Beer Barrel Polka’, forgetting half the words to the song. The last thing she remembered was resting her head on her backpack and feeling as if she were rising out of her own body.
When she woke at dawn she found Wanipe and Charlie sprawled on the same groundsheet, asleep. The pygmy was nowhere to be seen, and when she looked around she realised that Charlie’s organ had vanished, too.
20
It was still misty and cool and there was the constant sound of dripping water. Branches on either side of the path sometimes joined and intertwined, forming lush wet steeples above their heads. The odds of finding James at the summit were slim—the three doubted the pygmy had even encountered him—but they’d come this far out of their way, and decided to continue on, over the top of the mountain, and make their way to the medical base from there. Wanipe was angry with himself for being hoodwinked by the trader, for getting high and letting his guard down, and so he led the way up the steep incline with a grim, determined stride. The mist grew so thick they found themselves circling the same terrain for hours. By mid-afternoon, Wanipe confessed that he was lost and they began scouring the area for a path they’d missed, the one that would take them all the way to the summit.
Finally, the sun came out and the air cleared a little. Soon they discovered a narrow track that gradually sloped upwards through the trees. They walked for another hour or so, until they glimpsed the conical shapes of roofs pointing into the clouds, a cluster of about eleven or twelve huts that stood on a plateau of the range. There was one long house thatched with palms. The tiny village was ringed with vegetable gardens, bordered by flowers the colour of butter. They saw two small children on the track, chasing a fleet-footed baby cassowary. The infants were grabbing at the escaping bird before they stumbled into Wanipe and fell over. When they righted themselves they caught their first glimpse of Pearl and Charlie. The taller one froze, and then screamed, as if he’d seen a gruesome monster. Suddenly, the cassowary was abandoned and the children were fleeing back to the village, screaming one word over and over in their own dialect.
Wanipe was as confused by their reaction as Charlie and Pearl. The three of them were now wary about continuing on to the village; as Thomas had warned them, there were cannibals scattered throughout this part of the country, and it was rumoured that some of them had sided with Japanese forces, uniting against all the white invaders. But they barely had time to discuss their next move because a whole group of naked villagers began teeming down the track towards them. A wave of panic shot through Pearl, and she was suddenly terrified to be one of only two white people outnumbered by so many blacks.
Wanipe, however, pointed out that the villagers held no axes or spears. He told Pearl and Charlie not to move. Suddenly about fifty people were mobbing them, all jostling to get a closer look, exclaiming to one another in their own tongues in high, hysterical voices. Two tall men ventured forward and touched Pearl’s face, rubbed Charlie’s neck, and then looked at their own hands, as if they expected to find something that hadn’t been there before. They tried it once more, whispering to each other, and Wanipe explained to Charlie and Pearl in his halting pidgin that they were attempting to rub off what they thought was white paint.
When no white paint appeared on the fingers of the men, a hush descended and they all stood back in a kind of wide-eyed reverence. Pearl found it hard to believe they’d never seen white people before but Wanipe assured her that it was true. And when the two taller men stepped forward again and plucked hairs from the heads of Charlie and Pearl, Wanipe explained the villagers probably thought they were ghosts or even two great gods from the sky.
Whatever form Pearl and Charlie had taken in the eyes of these villagers, it was no doubt miraculous and divine. Children and women pressed forward to touch their hands while men plucked hairs from their arms and heads. Even though Wanipe was as black as they were, the villagers also regarded him with awe and respect, perhaps as some emissary between their own world and the worlds of ghosts and gods. They tried to communicate with him but their languages weren’t the same, and even that disparity seemed to afford him some otherworldly status in their eyes, confirming the trio’s supernatural difference.
One of the taller men lifted a necklace over his head and proffered it to Charlie. It was made of thin bamboo slats and bright red feathers. Charlie smiled and nodded and took the necklace, looping it over his own head. Then the second tall man offered his to Pearl, which she accepted with a smile and a nod. Wanipe received one made of polished bones from a woman. Pearl thought for a moment, wondering what they could offer in return. She took off her backpack and rummaged in a pocket and pulled out three packets of razor blades that she’d been carrying for weeks.
Later, at the village, Pearl and Charlie showed them how the blades effortlessly sliced sweet potatoes, carved bamboo, etched wood and removed hair, and with these demonstrations the pale white couple assumed an even higher mythic status, two magical ghosts who’d appeared to help them. Several men slaughtered a pig in their honour and began roasting it in an open pit in the centre of the village, while children and women dragged Pearl and Charlie from hut to hut, wanting to show them where they each lived.
It was night now, and a bonfire raged in the darkness. The aroma of sizzling meat and smoke wafted through the clearing. Sweet potatoes were thrown upon the embers. Children ran in circles, playing with Pup. A group of men produced drums made from hollowed tree trunks. They assembled in a circle around the fire and began beating with their hands complex, circuitous rhythms that flipped and somersaulted into time signatures that neither Pearl nor Charlie could grasp, let alone follow. Their accents fell in odd places in an order of beats that seemed impossible to count, though not one man hesitated in its execution, in the perfect synchronicity. It was as if they were imitating the way the rain had drummed against their roofs on a particular night, or the noise of a herd of wild pigs running down the mountain.
The night grew more convivial and the trio forgot about their journey, their stolen organ, their orders to reach the next post. Everyone feasted on the pig and sweet potato, a welcome change from the monotony of army rations. Afterwards, the villagers shared betel nuts, spitting their red saliva into the fire while bare-breasted women in skirts of grass and vines sang in soprano voices, their hips swaying from side to side. Wanipe pulled out his bamboo flute and accompanied the women as they danced around him.
Pearl disap
peared into a nearby hut. She discarded entirely the smelly khaki uniform and dressed herself in the long red evening dress. She propped the blonde wig on her head, but instead of painting on a mask of thick, garish make-up—of pretending she was a man impersonating a woman—she applied a subtle sheen of colour to her lips and cheeks, using a stick of charcoal to line her eyes. She plucked a flower from a bowl in the corner of the hut, stuck it behind her ear, and discarded her army boots. The disguise—or lack of it—was invigorating, and for the first time the outfit didn’t feel like a costume.
The villagers gazed at her with expressions of confusion and disbelief as she took her place beside Charlie. Perhaps they thought Pearl had conjured herself from a man ghost to a woman ghost, because one of the native girls rushed up and cupped her hands around Pearl’s breasts, but they were so small the girl backed away, still puzzled.
Pearl stifled a laugh and turned to Charlie. ‘What about “Sophisticated Lady”? Y’know that, Charl?’ Charlie’s eyebrows rose. Pearl had never sung a ballad before, and certainly not this one. And, as she never tired of pointing out, she hated ballads.
Charlie played a four-bar introduction on the harmonica and Pearl lifted the hem of her dress and turned towards the audience. The voice she began to sing in was distinctly different from the one she used to entertain the troops—lower and more controlled, a kind of mesmerising lilt.
It was a delicate, feminine song usually sung by female vocalists. She was happy to be relieved of the pressure of always having to pretend she was her brother, of constantly being on her guard. And the times she most feared for herself was during the female impersonations, when the swing of a hip or the flash of a leg could betray her true identity.