Lily King - Euphoria

‘Why?’

He shook his head. ‘She gets letters now from every crazy person in America. Everyone wants her advice, her approval. Her name on anything is suddenly some magic golden seal. Then there’s Helen.’

Fen had stopped below the ceremonial house with the enormous villainous face looming above us, its black prickly snake tongue hanging six feet out of its mouth.

‘Who’s Helen?’

‘Another one of Papa Franz Boas’ disciples. Mentally imbalanced. Black, black moods. I had to tell Nell to stop seeing her. Nell writes thirty letters to her one. But she never learns. She always fears the worst. Did you see her pawing through that suitcase for letters from Helen? I don’t think there was even one this time.’

But there was a package, I wanted to say. A heavy rectangle with Helen’s name and address in the top left corner. ‘I’m sorry I brought the post then.’

‘Best to get it over with,’ he said, and called up to the men inside.

After we climbed up and passed under the mouth of the hideous face, there was a second entrance, narrower than the first, red on both sides. I saw that it was the lower part of another carving, this one of a woman with a shaved head and large breasts that towered above us. Her waist tapered and her legs split and the opening we were about to pass through was her enormous scarlet vulva. Fen stepped through it without remark.

I took my time, examining how it was constructed.

‘Look,’ he said to me, ‘I respect their rules of secrecy. No woman has ever entered this house. So don’t tell Nell about anything you see here. It will get her all worked up over nothing.’

The inside of a men’s ceremonial house is not all that different to a dining club at Cambridge. There is the same low talk, the same clustering, the same ease. But not for nonmembers. Even Fen, for whom fitting in seemed the least of concerns, who behaved as if the world should conform to him, walked uncomfortably down the middle of the long room, his eyes adjusting, looking for a man named Kanup. Kanup was the manager of Tam art, the one who decided what would be kept and what would be sold, who set the prices and packed the canoes and oversaw the returns. He had lived with a Kiona woman for a time and as soon as Fen found him Kanup began to speak in great grandiose terms of Tam art and why it was superior to Kiona art and to the art of every other tribe in the region. Kanup was the kind of fellow who wanted your attention and made sure he got it. His Kiona was excellent, and I was compelled as much by his utter bilingualism as I was by his knowledge. I made my notes as I had made all my notes in the field, with full concentration and complete uncertainty as to whether they would be of any use at all. Fen disappeared quickly somewhere in the dim back of the vast room. After a while I was aware of voices escalating into argument behind me. I worried it was my presence in their house that was causing the trouble, but when I was able to break away from Kanup’s steady stare on me, I saw their focus was at the back of the room, in the dark alcove where Fen was. I could not see what he was doing or whom he was with.

‘What was going on back there?’ I asked him on the path home.

‘Nothing.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Nothing. Resting. Waiting for you.’ But he was lying, and not going to great pains to hide it.

When we returned to the house the lamps were lit and Nell was on the floor in a circle of open letters, a large calendar on her lap.

Fen flopped on the sofa behind her. ‘Get your Nobel Prize yet, Nellie?’

‘Stalin’s wife has died mysteriously, and John Layard has taken up with Doris Dingwall!’

“I thought he was in Berlin with the poets,’ I said, taking a chair in the corner.

‘Apparently he got very depressed, bungled a suicide attempt, then went to Auden’s flat to get him to finish him off. Leonie says Auden was sorely tempted, but he ended up taking him to the hospital. Then he flew back to England where he’s stolen Doris from Eric.’

Doris and Eric Dingwall were anthropologists at University College in London — and known for their open marriage.

‘What are we doing in November?’ she asked Fen.

‘Buggered if I know. Why?’

‘They’ve asked me to give the keynote at the International Congress.’ She was trying to keep her voice modulated for Fen’s sake.

‘That’s fantastic!’ I said, trying on some American enthusiasm. ‘Quite an honor.’

‘And they’ve asked me to be an assistant curator at the museum. They’re going to give me an office in the turret.’

‘Good onya, Nellie. How’s our bank account?’

She gave him a cautious smile. ‘Very healthy.’

‘Is this what I think it is?’ Fen said. He tapped Helen’s package on the floor with his toe. ‘You haven’t opened it.’

‘No.’

Fen looked at me sharply, as if I knew what that meant. I did not.

‘Come on, Nellie.’ He bent down and put it in her lap. ‘Let’s have a look. Plus we could use this.’ He plucked at the heavy grey twine it was wrapped up in.

Beneath the brown post paper was a box. Inside the box was a slim manuscript, not more than three hundred pages. Its pages were flat, its edges perfectly aligned. We stood in slight awe of it, as if it might speak or burst into flames. Nell had already done this, taken her hundreds of notebooks and magically compressed them into a stack of clean, unbuckled sheets of paper, taken millions of details and slotted them into some sort of order to make a book, but Fen and I had not. From this vantage point that transformation seemed impossible.

On top of the stack was a note in small thick writing.

Dear Nell,

Finally. Hope you and Fen will have time to take a look. No enormous hurry. Am giving it to Papa today and I’m sure he’ll have me revising through the summer. If Fen has trouble with my presentation of the Dobu he needs to tell me honestly and unsparingly. I just received your first letter with the Mumbanyo. They sound appalling. I’m sure you’ve tamed them by now. All love, H

They both looked at this note for a long while, as long as it would take to read a full page of writing. The silence was not still — it was the opposite of stillness. As if the three of them, Nell, Fen, and Helen, were having a conversation I couldn’t hear.

‘Shall we have a look?’ I said. ‘I’ll make the tea’.

‘Teatime!’ Fen said in the voice of a Cambridge tea lady. ‘Make haste!’

‘All of us read it? Together?’ Nell said, coming out of her trance.

‘Why not?’

I was hungry for it. I ached for a new idea, a new thought in my head. I made the tea quickly, scooting around Bani as unobtrusively as I could in that small corner of the house.

Nell began reading as soon as I set the pot and cups down on the trunk. On the first pages Helen declared Western civilization’s lack of understanding of other peoples’ customs to be the world’s greatest and gravest social problem. By page twenty she had brought in Copernicus, Dewey, Darwin, Rousseau, and Linnaeus’ Homo ferus , swept around the globe a few times, and asserted that the notion of racial heredity, of a pure race, is bunk, that culture is not biologically transmitted, and that Western civilization is not the end result of an evolution of culture, nor is the study of primitive societies the study of our origins.

In this first chapter she had laid down in simple honest language many of the tenets our generation of anthropologists felt but had never put on the page so clearly. But it was impossible to stop there. We took turns reading. We devoured her words. It felt as if she had written the book for us and only us, a fat message that said: Carry on. You can do this. This is important. You are not wasting your time.