Witi Ihimaera - Uncle's Story

The touch of Harper’s lips was dry, firm, taking full possession of Sam’s mouth. The pressure increased, and Sam felt the full erotic force of the kiss begin to flood through him.

Suddenly Sam heard laughter. It was only soldiers going down the corridor but it was enough for him to wrench away from the kiss.

‘No,’ Sam said again.

Sam leapt up from the bed. His heart was pounding. He wanted to stay. He wanted to go. He didn’t know what he wanted. He pulled on his clothes. Quickly. Desperately. He turned to Harper. The blond American was sitting up in bed, a horrified look on his face. He looked at Sam and there was fear written in his glance.

Sam went to the door. He managed a smile.

‘You were drunk. All the bars were closed. We were both feeling horny. I was there. You were there. That’s all it was, right?’

Cliff Harper’s lips quivered. ‘Right.’

But that wasn’t all it was. When Sam got back to the Peter Badcoe Club, no amount of ribbing from George and Turei — ‘Where were you last night?’ ‘Was she hot?’ — could dispel his sense of regret about what had happened, or what had not happened, between him and Cliff Harper. Throughout the day, the touch of Harper’s lips, the smell of him, the feel of him, remained. He excused himself from his mates, needing time to himself, and made his way to Roches Noires Beach. When he was a teenager and wanted to be alone he would go down to the Waipaoa River. There, beside the deepest waterhole, he would take a heavy boulder, dive, and let the stone pull him down to the bottom. Anchored there, amid the swirling mud and sunken logs, the eels nipping at his body, he would sit looking up at the surface of the water. What bliss it had been to be alone in that glowing green world. To watch the bubbles streaming up from his lips — until, inevitably, the pressure to breathe would build, and he would kick himself from the bottom and soar towards the light. His first gasp of breath was both a victory and a defeat.

Sam swam as far out as he could, and lay on his back, looking up at the sky. He thought about Harper and searched his past to see if there was anything there which predisposed him towards men. Nothing. But, somehow or other, Harper had got through to him.

‘So why didn’t you let it happen, Sam?’ he asked himself.

This was why. The mana of a man, his value in Maori culture, was in his fighting power and his warrior tradition. It was all symbolised in a man’s cock. It, as much as the fighting club, personified all that a man was. With both, man was made sacred and women profane. This had been the way since the beginning of Time when Ranginui, the Sky Father above, was set apart from Papatuanuku, the Earth Mother below. Ever since, the roles of men and women had been preordained. Indeed, all the Gods were male until Tane decided to make a woman out of the red dust and mated with her. Male to female union was therefore sanctified by the gods. Any other kind of union could never be countenanced; it transgressed the order of the Maori world, it transgressed the tapu nature of man. The consequences were too fearful to contemplate. You relinquished the mana, the tapu, the ihi or life force and the wehi or dread that the dynamic of being a man depended on, to maintain your power relationships with the world. You brought noa upon yourself, the loss of sacredness, and, without sacredness, you were prone to punishment, dishonour, banishment and death. You also brought this on your partner.

In the evening, trying to drink himself out of his sadness, Sam sat in yet another Vung Tau bar with George and Turei. He called for another round and, from the corner of his eye, saw Cliff Harper. Immediately Sam’s heart lifted. He grinned, and Harper grinned back. His smile lit up the whole room. But Sam suddenly felt slashed by lightning, and he turned away.

‘I can take my punishment, Harper,’ he thought to himself, ‘but I won’t allow you to be punished.’

When he looked back, he saw that Harper was still looking, and his fingers were moving.

Hi, Sam.

The message was filled with loneliness and need, as if Harper was the only one left in the world. Across the crowded bar it came: ‘Is anybody there? Can anybody hear me?’ Sam put up his hands and deflected it.

Sam, I know you can hear me. Please talk to me .

Harper was standing, working his fingers with furious speed. All around, people were looking at him, curious. The words started to come out too fast, losing all sense, desperate.

Talk to me talktome pleasetalk …

Sam turned to George and Turei. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said.

The next day, George and Turei were sleeping off a hangover. Sam had been told about a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Vung Tau. For some reason he felt he should go there. He borrowed a bike from the Club and negotiated his way out. For a while, Sam was escorted by a pack of laughing young boys. They zoomed around him like butterflies, shouting out: ‘Hey! Kiwi! Can you fly?’

At the outskirts the boys dropped behind, shimmering, settling in the dust. Sam found himself biking through another country. This was a country that breathed. At every inhalation the trees, grasses and rice shoots bent down as if bowing to the wind. At every breathing out, the soft warm breeze brought with it the tintinnabulation and tinkling of a thousand temple bells.

‘One small piece of land,’ Sam thought, ‘and so much blood spilled for it.’

The sun was at its apex in the blue-hot sky, and very soon Sam found himself sweating. But he didn’t care. The oxygen breathed through him, making him at one with the breath of the land, and he began to smile at his sense of unity with God’s creation. The sun was shimmering. The paddy fields stretched away into the haze. Raised dykes criss-crossed them like a chequer board. Family tombs popped up here and there. In some of the fields women were cutting the rice with sickles, feeding the stalks into threshers worked by fast pedals, stacking up the straw like conical hats. In other fields the women bent over, uprooting seedlings, gathering them into bundles and carefully placing them into sacks. Some walked along the dykes with heavily laden shoulder poles. In adjoining fields, men guided harrows yoked to plodding water buffalo. In the calm, almost soporific surroundings, Sam was reminded of his own people of Waituhi, his aunts, his uncles, his kaumatua and kuia. They lived like this too. Substitute maize and kumara for rice and they could be bending in these fields.

An hour later Sam, perspiring heavily, stopped to rest. Opposite him workers were shifting water from an irrigation channel to a field, using a conical basket sealed with lacquer and attached to a double rope. Standing either side of the channel, they dropped the basket into the water, then stepped back and tightened the ropes, swinging the brimming basket up into the air and dumping the water into the field. Nearby, an old man was sitting beside the road. He was dipping a ladle into an urn and drinking from it. When he saw Sam he gestured to him.

Water? The drink to give you life?

Sam nodded.

‘Yes. Wai ora. Yes.’

The man watched with approval as Sam drank. When Sam was finished he made questioning motions.

Are you going far?

Sam nodded and put his hands together, signifying prayer.

The old man nodded, frowned and then pointed to the sky. Sam was surprised to see that clouds had begun to gather. Even as he stood a gust of wind swirled through the green rice shoots.

Go fast ! the old man motioned.

He made a rising and dipping motion with his hands.

Get to temple just before the rain, just over the next hill.