Lily King: Euphoria

‘That are kept in ceremonial houses?’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean something bigger. Kept apart. Something they might not have told you about, but you sense exists.’

He was suggesting that after nearly two years they were withholding some vital aspect of their society from me. I assured him that I had been shown every totemic object in their possession.

‘They told me theirs was a descendant of a Kiona one.’

‘The Mumbanyo told you this? About what?’

‘Do me a favor and ask them again. About a flute. One that’s sometimes kept in isolation and has to be fed.’

‘Fed?’

‘Could you ask while I’m there? Your informant might not tell you the truth, but at least I’ll have a look at his reaction.’

‘Did you see it?’ I asked.

‘I only found out about it a few days before we left.’

‘And you saw it?’

‘They sort of presented it to me.’

‘As a gift?’

‘Yes, I think so. As a gift. But then this other clan — there were two rivalrous clans in our village — took it back before I got a full look at the thing. I wanted to convince Nell to stay longer, but there is no rerouting her once she puts her mind to something.’

‘Why did she want to leave?’

‘Who knows. They didn’t fit her thesis statement. And she calls the shots. We’re on her grant money. Will you ask your man for me? About a sacred flute?’

‘I’ve already shook them down hundreds of times about such things, but all right.’

‘Thanks, mate. Just to see his face, really. See what it reveals.’

My beach appeared around the bend.

‘Do you still have the butterfly net?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Haddon gave it to you in Sydney. Remember? Made me jealous.’

But I had no recollection of it.

I cut the engine and paddled in so as not to wake the village.

This time Fen shook her. ‘Nell. We’re here. We’ve reached the famous Kiona.’

‘Hush. Let’s not wake them,’ she whispered. ‘Lest we get shot by the arrows of the Great Warriors of the Sepik.’

‘Princes,’ Fen said. ‘Princes of the Sepik.’

My house stood apart from the rest, and hadn’t been lived in for many years. It was built around a rainbow gum tree, which came up through the floor and went out the roof. Many Kiona had come to believe it was a spirit tree, a place where their dead relatives gathered and made their plans, and some kept their distance, making a wide curve around my house when they passed by. They had offered to build me a house closer to the center of the village, but I had heard stories of anthropologists waiting months for their houses to be finished and I had been eager to settle in. I worried that Nell would have difficulty with my ladder, which was steep and nothing more than a wide pole with shallow notches for steps, but she climbed up, torch in hand, with ease. She didn’t notice the tree until she was inside and the flame lit the room. I heard her let out a big American ‘Wow.’

Fen and I hauled up their duffels, and I lit my three oil lamps to make the place seem more spacious. The gum tree took up a good bit of room. Nell stroked it. Its bark had shed and the trunk was smooth and streaked with orange and bright green and indigo. It wouldn’t have been the first rainbow gum she’d encountered, but it was a striking specimen. She ran her palm down a swath of blue. I had the odd feeling that they were communicating, as if I had just introduced her to an old friend and they were already getting on well. For the truth is I had stroked that tree many a time, spoken to it, sobbed against it. I busied myself, gathering my medicines and looking for my whiskey, because I was tired and a bit raw from the long night and long ride, and I could not be certain I wouldn’t well up right then if she asked me a single question about my tree.

‘Ah, just what I was dreaming of,’ Fen said when he peered into the tin cup I handed him.

The two of us sat on the little sofas I’d made from bark cloth and kapok fiber while Nell wandered about. My body felt like it was still skimming across the water.

‘Don’t snoop, Nellie,’ he called over his shoulder. And then to me: ‘Americans make such good anthropologists because they’re so bloody rude.’

‘You’re admitting I’m a good anthropologist?’ she said from my workroom.

‘I’m saying you’re a nosy parker.’

She was bent over my desk, not touching anything, but looking closely. I could see there was a sheet of paper in the typewriter, but I couldn’t remember what it said.

I pointed to the box of medical supplies I’d set on the trunk between us. ‘Those wounds of hers need treating.’

Fen nodded.

‘I’ve never seen how anyone else works in the field,’ she said.

‘I guess I don’t count,’ Fen said.

‘Is that mango leaves? You have a question here about mango leaves.’

‘And now she’s going to solve your problem, having been here a full five minutes.’

I feigned confusion and joined her in the workroom.

She was looking at the great mess of notebooks and loose papers and carbons.

‘This makes me miss the work.’

‘It’s only been a few days, hasn’t it?’

‘I never settled in with the Mumbanyo like this.’ She looked at my clutter of papers as if it had value, as if she were certain something substantial would come out of it somehow.

I saw the note she’d been referring to.

mgo Ivs again on grv.??

I explained that I’d been to the burial of a boy in another Kiona hamlet and mango leaves were carefully placed over the grave.

‘You’d seen the pattern before?’

‘No, a different leaf pattern each time. But I can’t find the pattern to the patterns.’

‘Age, sex, social status, mode of death, shape of the moon, position of the stars, birth order, role in family.’ She stopped to take a breath. She looked like she had about forty-five other ideas for me.

‘No. They keep telling me there is no pattern.’

‘Perhaps there isn’t.’

‘The same old woman quietly gives the instructions.’

‘And when you ask her directly?’

‘Leave it alone, Nell,’ Fen said from the sofa. ‘He’s been here twice the time you have, for Christ’s sake.’

‘It’s all right. I could use some help. She’s the one woman in the area who won’t speak to me.’

‘Not even indirectly, through a relative?’

‘A white man killed her son.’

‘Do you know the circumstances?’

‘There had been some fighting downriver and the kiaps came in for a roundup. They calaboosed half the village. This young man had been visiting his cousin — nothing to do with the fight — resisted arrest, and died from a blow to the head.’

‘Have you made amends?’

‘What?’

‘Have you made offerings to this woman for the mistake of your kin?’

‘Those pigs are hardly my kin.’

‘To that woman they are. They don’t think there are more than twelve of us in the whole world.’

‘I’ve given her salt and matches and tried to charm her in every way I can think of.’

‘Is there a formal amends ritual?’

‘I don’t know.’

She looked exasperated with me. ‘You can’t afford to have someone so set against you. Everyone will know it and measure their response to you against it. She’s skewing all your results.’

Fen cackled behind us. ‘Didn’t take you long this time. I think that might be a record. Shall we make a pyre of all his notes?’

All her face could muster was a pale peach flush. ‘I’m sorry, I—’ She put her hand out halfway to me.

‘I’m sure you’re right. I should find out how to make amends.’

She didn’t seem to believe my tone of voice or the expression on my face, and apologized again. But I wasn’t put out by what she’d said. Quite the opposite. I was eager, desperate for more. Ideas, suggestions, criticism of my approach. Fen might have had too much of it, but I had had too little.