Euphoria (10 page)

In her grant proposal, she claimed that she would continue her inquiry of child-rearing in primitive cultures, but the Tam were tempting her with something even more enticing. At first she dared not hope, but the data kept coming: taboo reversals, sisters-in-law on friendly terms, emphasis on female sexual satisfaction. Yesterday Chanta explained to her that he could not go to visit his sick nephew in the far hamlet because his wife’s vulva would go wandering if he did. They were grand on the word
vulva.
When Nell asked if an elderly widow would ever marry again, several people said at the same time: ‘Has she not a vulva?’ Girls themselves decided whom they would marry, and when. Fen disagreed with every conclusion she drew on this topic. He said she was blinded by her desire to see them this way, and when she laid out her evidence he said whatever power the women had was temporary, situational. The Tam had been chased out by the Kiona and only recently restored to their lake by the Australian government. Many of their men had been killed or calaboosed or blackbirded, he said. Whatever she saw was a temporary aberration.

She decided to go to the last house first today. She was often depleted by the time she got there, and her notes on those families were always less substantial than the others.

‘Baya ban,’ a little girl called from the first house.

‘Baya ban, Sema.’

‘Baya ban, Nell-Nell.’

‘I’m not coming …’ Nell couldn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t know the word for yet. ‘Fumo,’ she said finally. Later.

‘Baya ban, Nell-Nell.’

No one seemed to be home at the other houses she passed. No smoke rose from their roofs, no one leaned out of the doorway to call a greeting. Some children were playing a game behind the houses. She could hear their bodies snapping through the brush and then a collective scream when someone was caught. At first her presence had stopped their games. The same children who played in her house in the morning rushed to hide beneath the houses, spying, giggling, shrieking even. But now they didn’t notice, didn’t even come to see what was in her basket for them. Now they knew she would come to each of their houses and they would see the goodies later.

From the last house on the women’s road smoke was rising. All five fireplaces were being used, and she could hear heavy footfall, more like running than dancing. She heard murmurs but no words. Instead of calling out from below first, she climbed up the ladder without a word. The running footsteps grew louder and the whole house shook. People seemed to be yelling at each other in a loud whisper.

Nell-Nell di lam, she said before she pushed the bark cloth aside and stepped in.

It was dim, all the blinds drawn, and she could see little. There was a high-pitched clattering at the back half of the long house, shells or stones being moved around and women whispering and their bare feet thudding quickly across the
floorboards. Malun greeted her and offered her guava juice as she always did. Her eyes adjusted and she could make out mosquito bags laid out down the length of the house, but only the long ones, none for the children. Women, thirty or so, many more than usual, were strewn on the floor. Some had torn nets or half-finished baskets in their laps, but many were doing nothing, which Nell had seen plenty of times among the men but never among the women. The women here were never idle. Some raised their heads and whispered their greetings to her.

Malun returned with the drink. Her face was bathed in sweat. The house held a humidity far beyond the normal tropical damp. As she handed Malun things from her basket, she watched her carefully. Her pupils were dilated and tears of sweat were running down her stomach. She had an odd, enigmatic expression on her face and seemed to be trying hard to concentrate. Nell looked for signs of betel nut, lime powder, and mustard pods—a potent combination she knew the Mumbanyo used for a strong high—but saw nothing. Or perhaps they had some other drug. They were high on something, she knew that much. Some seemed unable to keep a smile from twisting up the sides of their mouths, like her brother at the dinner table after he’d snuck off with a bottle of her father’s gin. Her own sweat prickled her face and thighs. She’d worked through her own illness and injury; she’d worked with people who only told her lies, who chatted and laughed through every question, who ignored her, teased her, imitated her. It was all, all of it, part of the job, but this odd conspiracy of sweaty women seemed to press at a tender spot deep in her. She picked up her basket and left. It was silent as she climbed down, but when she was five steps away the house exploded with laughter.

S
even weeks. I waited seven full weeks and then I could not wait anymore. I got in the canoe before sunrise and gunned it, slaloming through black clouds of mosquitoes and the occasional croc drifting like a tree limb. The sky glowed a pale green, the flesh of a cucumber. The sun came up suddenly, too bright. It grew hot fast. I was used to the heat, but that morning, even moving swiftly in my canoe, I was overcome by it. Halfway there my vision began to sparkle and blacken, and I had to pull over briefly.

I knew the Tam were already a success by the greeting I got. The women in their canoes in the middle of the lake called out loud hellos that I heard over my engine, and a few men and children came down to the beach and gave me big floppy Tam waves. A noticeable shift from the chary welcome we’d received six weeks earlier. I cut the engine and several men came and pulled the boat to shore, and without my having to say a word two swaybacked young lads with something that looked like red berries woven in their curled hair led me up a path and down a road, past a spirit house with an enormous carved face over the entryway—a lean and angry fellow with three thick bones through his nose and a wide open mouth with many sharp teeth and a snake’s head for a tongue. It was much more skilled than the Kiona’s rudimentary depictions, the lines cleaner, the colors—red, black, green, and white—far
more vivid and glossy, as if the paint were still wet. We passed several of these ceremonial houses and from the doorways men called down to my guides and they called back. They took me in one direction then, as if I wouldn’t notice, turned me around and doubled back down the same road past the same houses, the lake once again in full view. Just when I thought their only plan was to parade me round town all day, they turned a corner and stopped before a large house, freshly built, with a sort of portico in front and blue-and-white cloth curtains hanging in the windows and doorway. I laughed out loud at this English tea shop encircled by pampas grass in the middle of the Territories. A few pigs were digging around the base of the ladder.

From below I heard footsteps creaking the new floor. The cloth at the windows and doors puffed in and out from the movement within.

‘Hallo the house!’ I’d heard this in an American frontier film once.

I waited for someone to emerge but no one did, so I climbed up and stood on the narrow porch and knocked on one of the posts. The sound was absorbed by the voices inside, quiet, nearly whispery, but insistent, like the drone of a circling aeroplane. I stepped closer and pulled the curtain aside a few inches. I was struck first by the heat, then the smell. There were at least thirty Tam in the front room, on the floor or perched oddly on chairs, in little groups or even alone, everyone with a project in front of them. Many were children and adolescents, but there were men, too, and a few nursing mothers and elderly women. People moved across the room with purpose, as if they were in a bank or a newsroom,
yet in a distinctly Tam style, weight back and bare feet making a sort of smooth slide forward. Every few minutes I had to turn my head to the side to take in cooler, less fetidly human outdoor air, like a swimmer turning for breath. The smell of humanity—without soaps, without washing, without doctors to remove the rot of teeth or limbs—is pungent even outdoors at a ceremony, but inside, with the blinds down and the fire lit to keep away the bugs, it’s nearly asphyxiating. Slowly I became aware, as I did my peering in and sipping of the air behind me, of all their belongings. I’d thought the two hundred porters to get up to the Anapa had been an exaggeration, but now I understood it had to be true.

They had brought bookshelves and a Dutch cabinet and a little sofa. At least a thousand books lined the shelves and spilled onto the floor in great piles. Oil lamps rested on end tables. Two writing desks in the large mosquito room. Boxes and boxes of paper and carbon. Photography equipment. Dolls, blocks, toy trains and rails, a wooden barn with animals, molding clay, and art supplies. And great coffers of things still unpacked. In the smaller mosquito room I could see a mattress, a real mattress, though it did not seem to have a box spring or frame, and sat on the floor looking swollen and out of place. I didn’t understand how it was that the Tam weren’t pawing over their things, pressing the typewriter keys and tearing pages out of books, as the few Kiona children I’d ever let in my house had done. Nell and Fen had established an order—and a trust—I’d never even aimed for.

Just when I thought I should stop spying and return to the center of the village to find them, a little boy in the corner shifted on his hip and I saw her. She was sitting cross-legged,
a little girl in her lap and another brushing her hair. She held up a card to a woman facing her. The woman, whose son was nursing vehemently on a breast that looked tapped out, said something and they both laughed. Nell made a few notes then lifted another card. The Tam had a way of holding their chin out, as if someone were holding a buttercup beneath it, and Nell was holding her chin out this way, too. After she had gone through a small stack of cards, a man came and took the woman’s place. When Nell got up to get something on her desk, I saw she’d picked up their smooth glide as well.

The boy who’d moved was the one who saw me first. He hollered and she looked up.

She quieted down her guests and came to the doorway. ‘You’re here,’ she said, as if she’d expected never to see me again. I’d hoped for something a bit warmer. She was wearing Martin’s specs.

‘You’re working.’

‘I’m always working.’

‘All your things came. And they’ve built you a house,’ I said stupidly.

She was so small, Tam-sized, and I hung over her like a lamppost. Her hair had been brushed out by the little girl into a wild airy froth. Her wrists were too thin, but she looked rested and the color had come back to her face. I felt overwhelmed by the presence of her, which was even stronger in actuality than in memory. It was usually the reverse with me and women. I was aware now of how hard I’d tried six weeks ago not to find her attractive. I hadn’t remembered her lips and how the lower one dipped in the middle, brimming over. She wore a blouse I hadn’t seen, light blue with white spots.
It made her grey eyes glow. She felt mine somehow, wearing my brother’s glasses. But she was formidable now, with her health and her work. She looked like she did not know quite what to do with me.

‘I didn’t want to miss the euphoria. I haven’t, have I? You said it happened at the second-month mark.’

She seemed to stop herself from smiling. ‘No, you haven’t.’ She looked back to the man to whom she’d been showing the cards. ‘We’d given up on you.’

‘I—’ Every face was turned to us and to our strange way of talking. Teket told me it sounded to him like cracking nuts. ‘I didn’t want to get underfoot.’ She continued to look at me through Martin’s glasses, which made her eyes comically round. ‘Remind me how to say hello.’

‘Hello and goodbye are the same. Baya ban,’ she said. ‘As many times as you can stand it.’ Then she turned to face the room. She pointed to me and spoke a few brief staccato sentences, fast but with no ear for the rhythm of the language, which surprised me. She went round the room telling me every person’s name and I said
baya ban
and the person said
baya ban
and I said
baya ban
and Nell cut that person short with the next person’s name. After she had introduced them all, she called to someone back behind the screen in what I assumed was the kitchen area, and two boys came out, a stumpy naked one with a theatrical smile, and a more reluctant tall one in long shorts, clearly Fen’s, tied tight at the waist with thick rope, his razor-sharp shinbones below. I exchanged greetings with each of them. Several of the children were giggling at Bani’s outfit and he quickly retreated behind the screen, but Nell called him back.

‘What were you doing just now, with those cards?’ I asked.

‘Ink blots.’

‘Ink blots?’

My ignorance amused her.

She weaved, and I followed, through the tangle of legs and all her equipment to the large mosquito room. The desk closest to us was layered in papers and carbons, notebooks and file folders. There were a few books open near the typewriter, with sentences underlined and notes in the margins, a pencil resting in the crease of one of them. The other desk was empty save for a typewriter still in its case, and no chair to sit in. I would have liked to sit at the messy desk, read the notes and the underlinings, flip through the notebooks and read the typed-up pages in the folders. It was a shock to see someone else doing my work, in the midst of the very same process. As I looked at her desk, it seemed a deeply important endeavor to me, though when I looked at my own it seemed close to meaningless. I thought of how she had gone straight to my workroom in Nengai, how respectful, almost worshipful, how she’d wanted to help me solve the puzzle of the mango leaves.

She’d realized her hair was floating in the humid human air, and she hurried to plait it back behind her, tying it off with a rubber band in one quick gesture. I could now see the tall stalk of her neck. She handed me the top card in a small stack. It was exactly that, a blot of ink, a mirror image of nothing in particular on either side of the center, though it was not homemade and there was no crease down the middle.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘They’re Fen’s, from when he studied psychology.’ She smiled now at my confusion. ‘Sit.’

I sat on the floor and she sat beside me and pointed to the big black smudge with its identical sides. ‘What does this appear to be?’

I didn’t think ‘nothing’ would earn me high marks so I said, ‘Two foxes fighting over an urn?’

Without comment she flipped to the next one.

‘Elephants in large boots?’

And the next.

‘Aren’t you supposed to refrain from smirking at your patient?’ I said.

She forced her lips down. ‘Not smirking.’ She jiggled the card at me.

‘Hummingbirds?’

She put the cards down. ‘Holy crow. You can take the man out of biology but you sure can’t take the biology out of the man.’

‘That is your complete diagnosis, Herr Stone?’

‘That is my observation. The assessment is a bit more unsettling. Highly and disturbingly abnormal. Elephants in large boots?’ She laughed, hard. I laughed too, and a lightness came over me. I felt as if I could float up to the ceiling.

‘How could these possibly be useful here?’ I said.

‘I find that most anything can shed a little light on the psyche of a culture.’

The psyche of a culture.
I nodded, but I wondered what she thought that meant. I wished we could sit alone with a cup of tea and discuss it, but her work was through the mosquito
net and I didn’t want to disrupt her morning any more than I already had. ‘May I observe you with them?’

‘Bani is preparing us food. You must be hungry. I’ll do two more interviews then we can go find Fen. He’ll be glad for a proper lunch.’

She sat back down in the same corner spot beside her notebook and called a woman named Tadi over. I settled against a beam a few feet away. The cards were like everything that has spent time in this climate: faded, fraying, damp, and molding. Each card had the same dent at the bottom in the middle where she held it between her thumb and first two fingers, waiting for a response. And it was a long wait. Tadi stared hard at the card with the foxes holding the urn. She had seen neither a fox nor a Greek urn, so she was stumped. She stared with exaggerated concentration. She was a large woman, a mother of many children by the look of her long nipples and stretched stomach skin, which lay in neat folds like a stack of bedsheets in my mother’s linen closet. She had only three fingers on her left hand and four on her right. She wore little decoration, just a thin tulip bark ribbon around a wrist with a single cowrie shell strung through it. Like the other women, she had a shaved head. I could see the quiver of her pulse in a vein on her crown. And when she caught me looking at her, she held my gaze for several seconds before I looked away. The only Kiona females who had ever looked me in the eye were the very young and the very old. For the rest it was taboo. Nell lowered the card and Tadi blurted out something, koni or kone. Nell wrote it down and held up another.

After Tadi came Amun, a boy of eight or nine with a wide smile. Amun looked all around to see who was watching and
then he said a word that made his friends laugh and the elders scold him. Nell wrote down the word but was not pleased. Even before she lifted the next card he shouted out another naughty word and she quickly called over a woman who was smoking Fen’s Dublin pipe to take his place. Amun crossed the room and draped himself in the lap of a girl who shifted but did not stop her mending of a fishing net to receive him. Nell had the woman, just like the rest, sit right beside her, and she showed her the cards like they were looking at a magazine together.

Their boy Bani brought me a cup of tea and a mound of biscuits. I thought it was far too many until nearly every child in the room leapt up and hovered round me making identical moaning sounds. I broke the biscuits in as many pieces as I could and passed them around.

When she was done, Nell stood up and shooed them all out quite unceremoniously, paddling her hands toward the door. On their way out they put everything back in boxes and the boxes back on the shelves, and within minutes the house was put to rights and the floor was shaking from all the feet going down the ladder.

‘You have quite a system.’

Though she was looking at me, she hadn’t heard. She was still with her work. She was wearing a tulip bark ribbon, too, just above her elbow. I wondered what they made of this woman who bossed them around and wrote down their reactions. It was funny how it all seemed more vulgar watching someone else do it. I felt like my mother, with this sudden distaste for it. And yet she was good at it. Better than I was. Systematic, organized, ambitious. She was a chameleon, with
a way of not imitating them but reflecting them. There seemed to be nothing conscious or calculated about it. It was simply the way she worked. I feared I’d never shake my Englishman Among the Savages pose, despite the real respect I had come to feel for the Kiona. But she with only seven weeks under her belt was more of the Tam than I ever would be of any tribe, no matter how long I stayed. No wonder Fen had grown discouraged.