Hanya Yanagihara - The People in the Trees

He led me toward one of the huts closest to the beach and stopped and called out. I heard a rustling from inside, and then the door pushed open and a woman emerged to stand before me, blinking in the light. Behind her I could see the inside of the house, which was dark and whose circumference was rimmed with things: palm-leaf mats and no’aka half-shells stacked one inside the other like bowls; a collection of bamboo poles; a series of woven baskets, their lids askew. Like Pava, the woman wore a single piece of useless clothing, one that seemed to evade altogether the purpose of clothes; in her case it was a long necklace strung with what looked like hog’s teeth, which drooped beneath but did not conceal her teats. Two children — one a boy of maybe eleven (he could not have been much more, for he was spearless), the other a girl of about nine — came out and stood beside her, not touching her, and what was notable about them was their silence, their watchfulness. A few yards from us, a group of children ran by in a noisy flock, but these two did not watch them go, only raised their eyes to me.

Pava was looking at me expectantly, as if I should know them, and when I said nothing, only looked at them and then at him, his expression changed to one of impatience.

“Who are they?” I asked him in U’ivuan.

“Fa’a no ohala,” he replied, surprised. Fa’a’s family .

I was startled and irritated and confused. Why had I been brought here? Was it possible — but no, it wasn’t — that I had asked to meet them?

And so I began my second strange interview of the day. I asked questions and the woman, Fa’a’s widow, answered them, so briefly and dully that I would later wonder if she might be mentally impaired in some way. All the while, my discomfort was overshadowed by a sort of bright rage. Why was I being made to feel guilty about this, to meet Fa’a’s family, to see their sad hut (what I had seen as a disciplined, well-ordered space now struck me as a poor one, bereft of belongings and color and busyness), when I had had nothing to do with his death, which had been, after all, years ago? Had Tallent been subjected to the same meeting? What did they want? Money? Goods?

Any respect I had managed to earn from Pava after my successful encounter with the king quickly dissolved, and after some minutes of this — he looking between the two of us in growing incredulity — he interrupted and spoke at length to Fa’a’s widow, so quickly that I was unable to comprehend. He seemed to be half lecturing, half pleading with her, but I was unable to tell which, for she never lifted her head to look at him. The two children stepped closer to her, but neither looked up. I noticed too for the first time how their skin had a dusty cast, as if they’d been rolled in talc, and how the other children, running past them, did so without even acknowledging their presence. From behind the hut strolled two women, carrying baskets and talking loudly, and although they walked within inches of Fa’a’s hut, neither of them thought to greet the widow or even to look in her direction. It was impossible to feel completely physically isolated from the others — they all inhabited such a small space, after all — but clearly the rest of the villagers had done their best to exclude Fa’a’s family from their society. Even the hut’s location, pushed back as it was to the far perimeter of the circle, seemed freighted with meaning; the only place its inhabitants could go from here was the sea. I looked toward the water and saw, perfectly framed between Fa’a’s house and its neighbor, the conical mass of Ivu’ivu; this view would be the family’s daily reminder of where their husband and father had gone and been lost and the answer, as I would later guess, to their ostracism. 63

Finally, seeing that he was unable to convince the woman to do as he’d hoped, Pava grabbed the boy by the arm and shoved him toward me. “Do you want him?” he asked me.

“What?” I asked. Naturally, I was shocked. “No, no, of course not!”

He pushed the boy back toward his mother (who was still looking at her feet) and this time pinched the girl around her skinny arm. “This one, then.”

“I don’t know what you’ve been told,” I said to Pava, “but I don’t want either of these children.”

“But she cannot keep them,” Pava told me.

“Well, I can’t keep them either!”

I was expecting him to argue with me further, but instead he turned and spoke to Fa’a’s widow once more — a long, diarrhetic stream of words out of which I could pluck only a few unhelpful terms: you, Fa’a, children, no , etc. — and then looked back at me. “Let’s go,” he said, and began strolling out of the village.

As I trailed him, I fretted and seethed. What was that encounter supposed to mean, and how was I to interpret it? The lesson, clearly, was that Fa’a’s death had left his family in a state of penury, for which I was somehow being blamed (though surely the blame belonged equally, if not more, to Tallent — had the children first been offered to him?). Or was that the lesson? And did such a thing as penury even exist here? I had always assumed from the way the village on Ivu’ivu had been run, days and people tumbling into one another with no apparent laws or nuance, that U’ivu too was governed by a sort of lax, unevolved version of socialism, in which everything was shared and no one save the king had anything more exceptional than anyone else. Why, then, were things so difficult for Fa’a’s family? And more importantly, and troubling as well, why was I being offered his children, of all things? Surely it would be more feasible to ask me to procure goods (although I would have had little idea of how to go about doing that either, as I had no notion of U’ivuan money or how to get it) or, at the very least, food? Somewhere inside me, a small fern of fear unfurled: had Fa’a seen me with the boy in the woods and formed some sort of impression of me, one that he had passed on to the others? But I could not think that way. The old wearying sensation of being on these islands was returning to me, the one in which I felt I was forever being asked questions I couldn’t understand, locked into my end of a one-sided, inexplicable exchange in which all my responses were incorrect.

A week later — or more? — I was back at Tallent’s camp, in the same — or was it? — scrub of forest just on the edge of the village. This time my guide uphill had been not a U’ivuan but an actual Ivu’ivuan, a man I remembered from my last visit here, only because he had a terrible cleft palate that made him look as if his lower face had been gnawed on by a beast and then spat up and reassembled. Of course, this did not make him much of a conversationalist, first because he was not given to talking anyway, and second because everything he said was so garbled and slurpy-sounding that he may as well have been speaking underwater.

It had been clear to me from the rapidity with which Uva and Tu had left us to hurry back to their families upon our last return to U’ivu that they would not soon or willingly make another trip to Ivu’ivu, but I missed them and their good-natured ways. The new guide, however — I could not tell if his name was Uo or Uvu — was a wonderful naturalist, and although he could not speak intelligibly, I soon grew to admire and appreciate his ability to spot the smallest of wonders in the forest, which he would either bring to me or point out for my enjoyment. One day he brought me a scarlet petal as small as a chickpea, which upon examination I realized was an orchid, scaled down until it was impossibly tiny, its lip a pale, unearthly gray. When he saw that I liked it, Uo beckoned me to a kanava tree a few yards off our path, and I saw that a small lake of them was painting the jungle floor a vibrant, bloody crimson. But what I loved most was their scent, one that mingled sweetness and decay at once and filled one’s nostrils so completely that its very memory lingered for hours afterward.