The People in the Trees

by Hanya Yanagihara

  Around me the conversation groaned on. There would be a long, bright spatter of talk from the village leader, then responses from Fa’a and Tallent. Were things going well? Not well? It was difficult to say. I could discern from the softness of Fa’a’s and Tallent’s voices that they were being willfully calm, possibly conciliatory, but was unable to determine whether this was costing them much effort. Next to me, I could hear Esme breathing adenoidally, but she often did that and so that too proved unhelpful. I saw from time to time the men, and then Fa’a and Tallent, turn to look at the dreamers, who did not look back at them, and when this happened, I heard Fa’a’s and Tallent’s voices dip lower, their speech become faster and somehow more beseeching.

  Naturally, this interlude would prove to be another to which I wish I had paid more attention, that I had tried harder to fix in my memory every gesture and sigh, but in the actual moment I simply daydreamed. I studied the neatness of the boundary between the village and the forest, the abruptness with which the trees stopped and how they indeed seemed to ring the clearing like people themselves, as if the village were a theater in the round and we the actors. I wished I could turn my head and look at the women and children who were grouped behind us, but I didn’t dare.

  And so instead I watched a baby hog, which was about the size of a feral cat, play in the dirt behind the village council. He must have been very young, because his tusks had not begun to grow in and his eyes were still big and wet in his face. He was playing a game with himself in which he jumped back and forth over the line between the forest and the village: a little hop and he was in society; another hop and he was not. Hop, hop. Hop, hop. It was so easy. I couldn’t take my eyes from him, not for a very long time.

  Something about the village had been troubling me, but it wasn’t until that night, when I was lying on my palm-frond mat and waiting for sleep, that I realized what it was.

  The negotiations, or whatever they were, had taken time, so much that we all felt the light dim and the air grow cooler and heard the children behind us begin to mewl for their meal. At that point the conversation ended abruptly, and all of us, the three on their side and the four on ours, clambered to our feet, Fa’a and Tallent bowing their heads slightly to the others, who did not bow back. And then we rejoined our group—the dreamers—while the three village representatives went to speak to the other men and the women began to swat at the children and disappeared into various huts for dinner supplies.

  It did not feel auspicious, the group of us sitting there, still at the forest’s boundary, the guides passing around manama and kanava fruit to us all while just a few yards away the village went about its life as if we had never existed, but Tallent came over to Esme and me to briefly assure us that all was well. “We can stay, for now,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it once we’ve fed them.”

  It was a very grim meal, sitting there trying to swallow the manama fruit, whose squished, squirmy pulp seemed to clot and then expand in my throat. Some of the women had at last taken down the animal from the fire—it was now so charred that its entire back had been scattered to the wind—and replaced it with a large swaying apron of red meat, extravagantly quilted with white threads of fat. The smell of it cooking (indeed, the scent of the fire itself) made the fruit all the more unbearable, and I finally had to put it down so I could let my memory of eating flesh, real flesh, fill my mouth and mind and palate: the feel of meat’s unyielding viscosity, how you could turn it in your mouth for minutes if you chose, how with every chew it seeped blood, so tannic and tart on your tongue. The women did not cook the meat for very long—just until the red had begun to shade into brown—before two of them plucked it off the fire and laid it on a large lawa’a leaf, and the men and children hurried over to pull at it with their bare hands, stretching it until pieces smacked off into their palms. And then another, smaller curtain of meat was stretched over the flames, cooked, and eaten by the women.

  In the end, it took us so long to get the dreamers settled for the night (they seemed oblivious to the smells of the fire) that we were all too exhausted to talk. But as I said, it was only when I was lying there, the dreamers and Esme snoring around me, Fa’a’s back shadowed against the still-burning fire (a truce might have been made with the villagers, but I noticed that Tallent was not abandoning our nightly watch), that I was able to identify what I had noticed but was unable to articulate: there were no old people in the village. The three village representatives had appeared to be in their thirties or at the most their forties. But I had seen no one who looked older. It was a village of the young.

  Of course, I had not had a chance to observe them closely, I reminded myself. Tomorrow I would pay more attention. But as I dropped off the edge into sleep, I could hear a small voice asking, What does it mean?

  Nothing, I told it. I was tired.

  But I knew even then that I was wrong.

  “I’ll have to explain later,” Tallent told us. It was morning and the dreamers were agitated; Mua in particular was babbling away at Fa’a, who was holding his palms out placatingly. Sometime in the night, Fa’a and Tallent had moved them deeper into the forest, and I had to walk some two hundred feet or so into its darkened depths toward their voices to find them. “I have to find out what’s bothering them.” He turned to Esme. “Can you take the women to the stream and give them water?”

  “What about me?” I asked.

  He glanced at me wearily. “You can walk back into the village,” he said. “They’ve given us permission.”

  “All right,” I said. Part of me was miffed that I hadn’t been asked to help sort out whatever was wrong with the dreamers. But the other part of me was bored with them and eager to explore.

  “But, Norton—”

  “What?”

  “Don’t antagonize them, all right?”

  “Of course I won’t,” I assured him. I was serious about this.

  He looked at me then, and was about to say something else when Fa’a called his name—“Po! Po!”—and he turned away again.

  In the village, the people were moving around in the slow, muted, half-stagger of the recently roused, although it didn’t seem to be particularly early: the huts were already throwing pale shadows against the ground, and the day was already warm. I had thought that my appearance would elicit some sort of reaction—panic, suspicion, fear, or at the very least curiosity—but no one looked up as I approached. They appeared, indeed, to have collectively decided to ignore my very presence, which I thought quite an accomplishment given the absurdity of my existence in their realm. One woman bustled past me with another sheet of meat, this one pinkish but again flounced with white fat like lace, and dropped it, blanketing the still-smoldering fire. Another dragged from a hut a woven basket piled with what looked like large pinecones and started snapping off their leaves as one might from an artichoke. A third woman took those leaves and placed them to soak in another basket, this one filled with water. On the other side of the village I saw the leader, across from whom I had sat yesterday, and raised my hand to him in greeting. But he looked past me, as if I were waving to him from across a busy street and he was pretending not to know me; the artifice of it made me smile.

  There were thirteen huts in the first ring surrounding the fire and nine in the second, all of them about seven feet high and of a simple conical construction. In the center of each was a tall post of what looked like palm wood, and splayed out from it, like ribbons on a maypole, seven ropes of thickly braided palm frond that had been stretched taut like cables and staked into the earth. On top of this loose-knit infrastructure had been laid a large cape of tiered palm leaves. The cape overlapped in the front, so you could tie one edge of it back and make an entryway. The huts in the first ring were for sleeping; secured with more braid to the outside of the capes were woven-palm mats, each about five feet in length and three feet in width. Inside, though, the huts were empty and smelled of dried grass and dirt. They were sizable; I estimated perhaps two ad
ults and two or three children could sleep in them comfortably.

  The huts in the second ring—actually, it was more of a half-ring, a crescent that hugged the backs of half of the sleeping huts in a loose embrace—were of the same build and shape, but these, unlike those in the first ring, were used for storage. The first was the meathouse. After one of the women had left it, I walked in and saw that the entire floor had been hollowed out, maybe about ten feet down, and that its bottom was lined with parcels made from dark, glossy leaves. The villagers had carved from the dirt crude steps that led to the depths of the hole, and I climbed down them to scoop up one of the packets, which was cool and heavy with something dense but yielding. As I was lunging upward, however, my foot slipped and I caught myself against the leaves lining the floor’s bottom. As I did so, I felt the ground shift under me, a gentle sway, and when I reached my hand under the leaves to investigate, I felt a cold slosh of water and realized that they had dug down to an underground stream, which they were using to refrigerate the meat.

  The next three huts held dried things, many of them tied to braids that crisscrossed the interior of the space like strands of Christmas lights. I identified a string of vuakas hanging by their poor, hairless tails, their eyeballs sunken and clouded, and another heavy with dried manamas, their once-babyish skins leathered into wrinkled hides, and a third of mangoes, their scent still richly sugary. There were other things too, things I could not identify: something that resembled a flattened lizard, with a hideous death grin of burned-toffee fangs; plump cigars of dusty, silvery leaf sacs that appeared hollow but whose weight sagged their line until it almost brushed the floor; translucent amber triangles speckled with sprouty black hairs. In the baskets that lined the walls I found more of those pinecones (unexpectedly weighty, and fuzzed like mushrooms), seedpods of various lengths and widths, and fungi of different shapes and mustardy shades, and one, woven very tight, abrim with handfuls and handfuls of what looked like toenail clippings but that I eventually realized were hunonos.

  The fifth hut was the only one occupied, but the three women within it, after looking up and seeing me, quickly returned to their silent work. Two of them were braiding fresh green palm into ropes, and the third was shredding the long leaves into strips. A braid demanded three pieces, each about four inches in width. The center section was taken from the center of the leaf itself, the part with the spine; the other two pieces were taken from its softer and more pliable wings. The leaves were quite long, about eight feet or so, and when the women were finished braiding the length of one leaf, they would hasp it to another braid with a short rolled rope of a curly, noodley plant that resembled Spanish moss. All around them, in neat coils stacked on the floor and hanging from the inside of the cape, were lassos of this rope in various stages of drying and in various lengths and thicknesses. The two huts adjacent to this held more rope and more capes for the huts, and other things made of the palm rope as well: nooses (for the hogs, I imagined) with long leashes, braided trebly thick, and a shoulder-high stack of palm-frond mats, and long, sawed-off pieces of palm, one end sharpened into a point so it could be driven into the earth and a hut staked around it.

  There was no one sitting in the next hut, but it too was clearly some sort of workshop, for there was an indentation in the center of the floor where someone might sit and a large stone, its surface worn flat, that was clearly used as a table. Stacked in pyramids to the left and right of this were more lengths of palm, slenderer than the ones I had found in the previous hut, some of which had been polished and sharpened, and I realized that this was a place for making spears.36

  I found myself admiring the village, even its simplicity. Yes, it was a crude sort of life, but there was a cozy sense of bounty here, of everything having its place, of every need of life—food, shelter, weaponry—being well considered and provided for, of life stripped to its essence and yet comfortably fulfilled. How many societies can say this, that they have recognized all they need and have made provisions for it all? Here there was food and a source of water and the tools of self-defense, all of it not only available but of a surplus. This, I thought approvingly, was a place that had no needs, and therefore no wants.

  So I was perplexed by the final hut, the ninth. Unlike the other structures, this was draped with not one but two capes, and inside the floor too was covered with a cape. Atop this cape was a woven-palm mat, but unlike the sleeping mats I had seen, this was wider, as if it were meant to accommodate two people instead of one. The hut was unlike the others for another reason as well: this was the only one that had any sort of decoration. Here, lashed to the supporting beam, was what I recognized as an opa’ivu’eke carapace, so beautifully polished that each of its bony plates glinted as if faceted, even in the gray nonlight of the hut. It was a mystery, this hut, especially after the straightforward utilitarianism of the others, and I even peeled back the edge of the carpet to see if some explanation might be hidden beneath: a secret bunker, perhaps, or a subterranean storage space. But there was nothing, only the ground, and after I left the hut and walked away, I could feel its presence, as if it existed only to remind me that in my tidy theories about the simplicity of life here I might after all be mistaken.

  It was only after I had finished exploring all the huts that I realized I was hungry, and once again I was drawn to the fire.

  I should interrupt myself here and explain that one of the reasons it was impossible to see the village as anything but benign—despite the omnipresence of the hogs, and the spears, and the fact that I was an intruder—was that it was so small. It took me only some eighty strides to walk from one side of the village to the other, and aside from the hogs, everything within it seemed miniature in scale: the huts were short, the people were short, even the flames spitting up from that ever-burning fire were short.

  I stood quite near the fire and waited for someone to offer me some food. All around me was industry: there was a cluster of five women tenderizing a large misshapen side of unidentifiable meat with stones, and another group of six sorting through a small mountain of manama fruits—the bruised and inanimate ones they sawed lengthwise into thin rounds; the ones that pulsed with hunonos they placed in a separate stack. The trio I had seen with the pineconelike vegetables had moved on to a pile of what looked like sausages, chubby little logs of young green, and I watched as they split them with a palm blade and flicked out the seeds within, which were kidney-shaped and the size of my thumb and a marbleized lilac and peach color. They talked among themselves, but not consistently, and only briefly: one would speak, and her companions would make a low, whistling grunt of agreement, so that it sounded in the moments between declarations as if a fug of wasps were hovering overhead.

  To the right of the fire were the men, nineteen of them, including the village leader, who were using short, sturdy, sawtooth-edged leaves to polish and sharpen their spears. I stepped closer and saw that in the center of their circle were two bowls made of halved no’aka shells, each of which contained a little pudding of something jellied and the color of diluted milk. After they had addressed their spears’ tips, the men would reach two fingertips into the bowl and stroke some of the substance down their weapons’ shaft, repeating the gesture several times. Unlike the women, the men did maintain a steady sort of conversation, one that rolled and overlapped itself, an echoing monotone that sounded more like a chant than like speech.

  I was wishing then, as I often would, that I spoke U’ivuan, when I heard my name and then saw Esme stamping into view. “Paul wants to talk to us,” she said—Paul, I thought again, not Tallent; his name in her mouth seemed a taunt—and I turned to follow her back to the woods. I looked behind me as I left, but no one watched us go.

  “Did you have an interesting morning?” Tallent asked me as we walked into view. He was tired, I could tell. The dreamers were nowhere in sight.

  Was he being sarcastic? I didn’t know. “Yes,” I said. “I saw something strange,” and I told him about the dish of s
trange ooze that the men had dipped their hands into, happy and hopeful that I might have discovered something new for him.

  “Oh, that,” said Tallent, kneading his forehead with his fingertips. “That was probably animal fat. The U’ivuans render it and polish their spears with it.” He sighed. “Although it is interesting to hear that they do that here as well.”

  “Oh,” I said. My discovery was no discovery at all. And of course that was what they were doing—how could I not have seen that? I didn’t dare look at Esme, for I could not bear to see her triumph, her glee at witnessing yet another example of my naïveté.