Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

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 adults and two or three children could sleep in them comfortably.