Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

I woke the next morning to screams, to Uva and Tu running toward us, shouting at Tallent, startled groups of bugs and birds rising up and screeching away in their wake. “Fa’a!” they were shouting “Fa’a!” followed by something else.

He was up and running after them at once. “One of you, stay behind with the dreamers!” he called back to us, but both Esme and I bolted after him, which I later had to admit was not very wise — they could have wandered off and we might never have seen them again.

We ran, and for once the jungle, as if recognizing our panic, seemed to adjust itself to us. Our feet did not land in the hollows of roots and did not skid over the ankle-breaking rimes of moss but instead floated over every impediment, each footfall landing as cleanly and solidly as if we had been running on lawn, on tarmac.

Before us, in the distance, was a tree, an enormous makava, its branches stretched low and long like an octopus’s tentacles, and from one of them hung Fa’a. He had used a length of palm-frond rope, the same we had tied the dreamers with, and made an imperfect noose, so imperfect that when I examined him and felt his neck intact, I realized that he had suffocated and that his death had been a slow and agonizing one.

Uva and Tu were howling, their heads thrown back and their eyes seamed shut, their slabby tongues working muscularly in their mouths. Esme was crying. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Fa’a.” Tallent looked exhausted, his face pulling itself down toward the ground, his hands hanging at his sides.

It took all of us to bring him down. Tu climbed up the tree and onto the branch and sawed at the rope with Tallent’s knife. Tallent and I caught him as he fell, and we all carried him back, Tallent and Tu on one side, the rest of us on the other, Fa’a a solid, swinging weight between us.

I had not witnessed a death the entire time I had been in the village. A birth, yes — the baby, like any other baby anywhere else in the world, had slid out, snarled with fleshy cord and colored that particular unattractive mauve color that newborns are, as I watched, barely breathing so as not to betray my presence, from behind the hut — but not a death. So I did not know how the Ivu’ivuans would bury their dead, or even if they had many occasions to do so. 47But the U’ivuans’ treatment of their dead would be different from the Ivu’ivuans’ anyway, Tallent reminded me. In U’ivu they would take the body to a remote location high in the hills and leave it to be consumed by animals. Then, six months later, they would return and move the bones somewhere secret; only the deceased’s family would know the location, and they would never tell for fear that someone else would steal the bones and with them the dead person’s spirit.

But here there was no high hill nearby. That afternoon (we had kept Fa’a’s death from the dreamers) Tu and Uva took Fa’a away. They were gone for so long that, although we did not voice this fear to one another, I think we were all concerned that they might not return, even though they hated the island, and even though they had left their sack of vuakas behind. By the time they did walk back to us it was daybreak, and the sky was lightening, and we could see small dust-colored insects, their wings webbed and traced with veins so fine and yellow they looked like strands of saffron, clogging the air before and above us.

They were spent, gray-faced. They spoke to Tallent. “They’ve hidden him somewhere,” he reported to us. “They said they’d return in six months to hide his bones.” But we knew, all of us, that this would not happen, that Fa’a’s body would remain wherever they had left it, to be nibbled away at by ants and bats and birds and beetles until it was picked clean, its bones as white as butter.

In the end, we had spent so long waiting for Tu and Uva that we had to hurry the rest of the way downhill to meet the boat. Tu carried Fa’a’s spear, which he would return to his family and which would serve as evidence that he was truly gone. By the time we reached the little shore, where the water lapped so far up onto ground that there was a span of about ten yards that was not quite ocean and not quite land, where you could see the two worlds coming together into one — fish swimming above grass and orchids shimmering beneath the ocean’s oily slick — the sun was so high in the sky that for a moment I feared that the boat had already come and gone and we would be trapped here forever, too far from one civilization and unwilling to return to the other. But then we heard a far-off chugging and watched the boat materialize in the distance as a gray-brown smear before it drew closer and solidified into shape. After these months it looked, for all its crudeness, impossibly sophisticated, a creation of a bold and ingenious society. At the prow, the boatman held up his arms, and Tallent waved back to him. I wondered what the boatman would think of his extra passengers, and what the dreamers would think of the boat, and, later, what it would feel like to be on the open water, to have the ocean bouncing away beneath us. With each yard we would be drawn farther away from this place, which was already beginning to feel like a dream, a series of events and meetings that had never happened, and back toward our own society. I asked myself if I was happy about this and was surprised to find that I didn’t know that I was.

The boat was now close enough for its driver to see who we had with us, and even from the shore I could see his mouth form itself into an O .

“Bring them closer — get ready to board,” Tallent told us, already wading out into the shallows to help pull the boat in.

We drew them along, Tu and Uva and Esme and I, each of us holding one of the dreamers’ hands. They were reluctant to put their feet into the water, but once they did, they let out small sighs of happiness, although Ika’ana’s hand tightened around mine, and I squeezed his back to reassure him.

“Come on,” I told him, even though he couldn’t understand, and he looked at me trustingly, his eyes mild, and it was difficult to remember that he had once been a warrior and had once carried a spear that he had protected with his life. Ma’alamakina, ma’ama .

We walked carefully toward the boat, the last in line. The quilt of rocks beneath us was uneven, and Ika’ana swayed a bit from the effort. I could see the boatman’s shaking hands as he touched Eve’s wrist and helped heft her up. Behind us, the jungle steamed.

But I didn’t look back.

34The villagers were engaged in their lili’ika, or “small sleep,” which traditionally begins directly after the midday meal and lasts well into the afternoon. The lili’ika was probably born as a matter of necessity; during the hot months, it was simply too difficult to get work done in the late sun. Second, Ivu’ivuans have traditionally stayed up very late at night, for it is then that the choicest hunting takes place (many of the Ivu’ivuans’ favorite game animals are nocturnal).

Although the missionaries were, as Norton has noted, unable to win many converts, they were able, through the occasional envoy, to convince the king that lili’ika was somehow backward and would thwart the country’s rise; King Tuima’ele therefore abolished lili’ika in 1930, in what was to be one of the missionaries’ most significant legacies. However, the tradition persevered on Ivu’ivu because, as Norton notes, they had no knowledge of the king, much less of his kingdom.

Norton does not significantly address King Tuimai’ele in these pages, but he was by all accounts a fascinating man. Tuima’ele was as old as the twentieth century itself (so he would have been fifty when Norton arrived on the island) and had been ruling since he was twelve. His relationship with the encroaching West was a complicated one. On one hand, he had no doubt heard stories of how his grandfather King Maku had outlawed ka’aka’a as barbaric and backward, probably under direct pressure from the Protestant missionaries who still had a small stronghold on the northern side of U’ivu. And yet he had also heard stories of his own father, King Vake’ele, who as a child monarch had thrown out the last of the missionaries in 1875, shortly after the catastrophic tsunami that destroyed most of their nascent community.