Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

“Taro,” said Tallent, pointing at one and then, at another, “Sweet potato.”

“How can you tell from here?” I asked him. The fields with their rows of vegetation looked the same to me.

He shrugged. “I can,” he said, and I felt somehow ashamed of myself for having asked.

We passed over some huts, simple structures with what I could tell even from the air were palm-leaf roofs, and an occasional wooden house, but most of Iva’a’aka’s farmers were seasonal, and the island had few full-time residents. Only the plantations’ overseers — for all of these farms were owned by the king, and their produce was given to the government, which then distributed it to the U’ivuan citizens — lived here year-round, Tallent explained; the pickers and growers and gardeners worked on Iva’a’aka only for three-month shifts before returning by boat to their homes and families on the main island. The plane sank in the sky, and as I looked down again, I saw a blur of deep brown streak through one of the fields. “Boars,” said Tallent, and I turned in my seat to look back and stare at them. There they were, the famous U’ivuan boars, and even from a distance one could tell they were monstrously large. There must have been a hundred of them in the pack, and I could see the dirt spraying up around them, an echo of the water breaking against the island’s cliffs.

“And that is Ivu’ivu,” Tallent shouted to me, and I followed where he was pointing. The angle was not ideal — I saw a slant of black mountain, its façade brushed with vegetation — and I crouched in my seat to try to get a closer look at the place where I would be spending the next few months of my life, at the Forbidden Island that would now be our home.

But then the plane turned again and descended once more, and we were above U’ivu. “This is the south side of the island,” Tallent called over the noise of the propellers. “We’ll land here.” And so we did, bumpily, juddering over what I would later see were small hillocks of grass and soil; the runway was no runway at all, just a long stretch of plain earth — that was how few planes landed here.

As we were lifting our bags out of the plane, I saw a short, round figure walking toward us, and when it was about a hundred yards away, it hollered “Paul!” and I realized it was a woman.

“Esme!” Tallent called back, and I was upset and unnerved to see him smile, to see his face fall momentarily into happiness.

The woman came closer and the two all but flung themselves into each other’s arms. Then there was a quick exchange in a language I couldn’t understand but that sounded like pops of gunfire, followed by the two of them laughing, the first time I had heard Tallent laugh.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Norton,” Tallent apologized (it seemed that he would call me Norton and I would call him Tallent, though neither of us had formally established this). “Esme Duff, this is our doctor, Norton Perina. Norton, this is Esme Duff, my research associate.”

“Oh,” said Esme, “Norton. Welcome! Welcome to U’ivu. Have you ever been to the Pacific?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, you’re in for a big surprise! Many big surprises, actually,” she said, laughing.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“Esme is the real U’ivu expert,” said Tallent, while Esme smiled and preened. “She speaks the language much better than I do 22and has arranged all our guides, everything. She’ll be indispensable to you.”

“I’m sure,” I repeated. And in that moment I promised myself two things: first, that I would hate Esme Duff, and second, that within a few months it would be I, not Esme, whom Tallent would consider the expert.

I was very kind to allow myself such a generous timeline to usurp Esme in usefulness and knowledge, for the next few days were bewildering and dizzying. For one thing, it was soon revealed that there were no cars on U’ivu: from the field where we had landed (which, Esme informed me, had been kindly lent for our use by the king, who sometimes used it to practice boar hunting — a dozen boars would be rounded up and released, and the king would charge around on horseback, hurling spears at their ridged, humpy spines) we hoisted our bags onto horses, which had also been lent by the king and which had been tethered to palm trees at the far edge of the field. Even the horses — which were about a half foot shorter than the horses I knew, stumpy-legged and broad-shouldered, more like ponies — were unfamiliar.

As we made the half-hour ride toward town, I learned of all the things U’ivu did not have. There were no roads, for one — trails, yes, with patches of grass and struggling flowers tamped down by horses’ hooves — nor was there a hotel, or university, or grocery store, or hospital. There were, dismayingly, churches, quite a few of them, their white wooden spires the only thing taller than the palms, which cast stripes of black shadow against the dirt but offered no comfort from the sun, which washed the sky a hard, glaring white. I asked Tallent — who was managing to look graceful on his small horse — if there were many missionaries on the island, but it was Esme who answered, telling me that although a hundred or so had made their way to U’ivu in the early 1800s, most of them had died in a terrible tsunami that had destroyed the northern half of the island in 1873. The rest returned home soon after, and U’ivu was once again left to the U’ivuans, the way it had been for the thousands of years prior to the missionaries’ arrival.

“The U’ivuans won’t build their homes on the northern side by the sea — they consider it bad luck,” she said. “But the missionaries wanted those views, and they paid the price.”

I said I was surprised by the number of churches — I had counted four in about twenty minutes — which also seemed to suggest a high conversion rate. But this time it was Tallent who answered. “They weren’t as successful as it appears,” he said. “The U’ivuans enjoyed the novelty of the churches, and when the first one — St. Jude’s, just beyond that crooked frangipani tree — was built, a great many of them came, including the king at the time, the current king’s grandfather. They thought it was funny, I think. So the missionaries took this as a sign that they were ripe for conversion and built more. There are five — right, Esme? — on this side of the island, and there were an additional three on the north side, but the tsunami destroyed those.”

“Did the U’ivuans help in the construction?” I asked.

“No. The missionaries had to do everything themselves. The king gave them the land and the wood — if you look at them, you’ll realize it’s all palm wood, a difficult and impractical material to build with, and the construction is poor — but he refused to let them employ any of his people. They were lucky to get even that.”

“No one tells an U’ivuan what to do,” Esme called out from the head of the line. “We know that well by now.” She laughed, sounding smug.

“No one tells the king what to do,” Tallent clarified. “Every privilege we have here — the mission we’ll undertake, the guides we’ll have — is with the king’s permission. He is involved in everything that goes on here, and nothing can be done without his blessing.”

But we would not meet the king this time, he said. A daughter was getting married, and His Highness was too busy with the preparations to see us. I would have liked to meet the king, to see his wooden palace, but I was happy for one thing, at least — Esme hadn’t met the king either, and so was unable to inform me of all that I was missing: a mansion with dark floors that gleamed with oil, a bevy of silent wives seated on palm mats like a clutch of nesting doves, the king with his fierce, knowing smile.