•
DOWN IN THE VILLAGE they were making kunande.
There were perhaps a hundred of them, bucks and girls, squatting two by two round the little fires in the long, low hut. Behind them, in the smoky shadows, sat the drummers, crouching over the kundus, filling fetid air with the deep, insistent beat that changed from song to song, from verse to refrain, with never a pause and never a falter.
The couples around the fires leant face to face and breast to breast, and sang low, murmurous, haunting songs that lapsed from time to time into a wordless, passionate melody. And, as they sang, they rolled their faces and their breasts together, lip to lip, nipple to nipple, cheek to brown and painted cheek.
The small flames shone on their oiled bodies and glistened on the green armour of the beetles in their headdress. Their plumes bobbed in the drifting smoke, and their necklets of shell and beads made a small clattering like castanets as they turned and rolled to the rolling of the drums.
The air was full of the smell of sweat and oil and smoke and the exhalation of bodies rising slowly to the pitch of passion. This was kunande, the public love-play of the unmarried, the courting time, the knowing time, when a man might tell from the responses of his singing partner whether she desired or disdained him. For this was the time of the woman. The girl chose her partner for the kunande, left him when she chose, solicited him if she wished, or held herself cool and aloof in the formal cadence of the songs.
N’Daria was among them, but the man with her was not Kumo. Kumo would come in his own time, and when he came she would leave her partner and go to him. For the present, she was content to sing and sway and warm herself with the contact of other flesh and let the drumbeats take slow possession of her blood.
A woman moved slowly down the line of singers. She was not adorned like the others. Her breasts were heavy with milk, her waist swollen with childbearing. Now she would throw fresh twigs on the fire, now she would part one couple and rearrange the partners. Now she would pour water in the open mouth of a drummer, as he bent his head without slackening his beat on the black kundu. This was the mistress of ceremonies, the duenna, ordering the courtship to the desires of her younger sisters, dreaming of her own days of kunande when she, too, wore the cane belt of the unmarried.
The drumbeats rose to a wild climax, then dropped suddenly to a low humming. The singing stopped. The singers opened their eyes and sat rigid, expectant. Distant at first, then closer and closer, they heard the running of the cassowary bird. They heard the great clawed feet pounding the earth—chuff-chuff-chuff—down the mountain path, through the darkness of the rain forest, on to the flat places of the taro gardens and into the village itself. Tomorrow they would go out and see the footprints in the black earth. But now they waited, tense and silent, as the beat came closer and closer, louder than the drums, then stopped abruptly outside the hut.
A moment later Kumo the Sorcerer stood in the doorway.
He did not enter, stooping as the others had done under the low lintel. He was there, erect and challenging as if he had walked through the wall. He wore a gold wig, fringed with green beetle shards. His forehead was painted green and the upper part of his face was red with ochre. His nose ornament was enormous, his feathered casque was scarlet and blue and orange. His pubic skirt was of woven bark, and his belt was covered with cowrie shells. His whole body shone with pig fat.
The boy who had been singing with N’Daria rose and moved back into the shadows. N’Daria sat waiting. Then Kumo gave a curt signal to the drummers, and they swung into a wild, loud beat as he moved down the hut and sat facing N’Daria. No word was spoken between them. They sang and moved their faces together as the others did, but N ‘ Daria’s body was on fire and the drums beat in her blood, pounding against her belly and her breasts and her closed eyelids.
Then, after a long time, slowly the drumbeats died and the fires died with them. Quietly the couples dispersed, some to sleep, some to carry on the love-play in a girl’s house, others to seek swift consummation in the shadows of the tangket trees.
Kumo and N’Daria left the hut with them and walked through the darkness to the house of N’Daria’s sister. Here there was food and drink and a small fire, and when they had eaten, two of the drummers came in with two more girls and they sat in pairs, backed against the bamboo walls, to make the greater love-play, called in pidgin “carry-leg.”
Kumo sat with his legs stretched out towards the center of the hut. N’Daria sat beside him, her body half turned to him, her thighs thrown over his left leg, his right leg locked over hers. Then began a long, slow ritual of excitement, tentative at first, then more and more intimate and urgent. At first, they sang a little, snatches of the kunande songs; then they laughed, telling stories of other lovers and scandalous doings in the village and on the jungle paths. They made laughing flatteries of one another’s bodies and their skill in the arts of love. Then, gradually, their voices dropped and their whispers became fiercer and more desirous.
“Does the white man touch you like this?”
“No—no—” She lied and half believed the lie in the warmth of the moment.
“Is the white man as great a man as I am?” His fingers pressed painfully into her flesh.
“He is not a man. Beside you he is a lizard.”
“If he touches you, I will kill him.”
“I would want you to kill him.”
“I will make his blood boil and his bones turn to water I will put ants in his brain and a snake in his belly.”
“And I will watch and laugh, Kumo.”
He caught her to him suddenly. His nails scored into her body, so that she gasped with the sudden pain.
“What does he teach you there in the little hut?”
She buried her face in his shoulder to hide the small smile of triumph. Kumo was a great sorcerer, the greatest in the valleys. Kumo could change himself into a cassowary bird and travel fast as the wind. But even Kumo did not know the secrets she learnt in Sonderfeld’s laboratory.
“Tell me. What does he teach you?”
She giggled and clung to him.
“What will you give me if I tell you?”
“I will give you the charm that makes children and the charm that destroys them. I will make you desired of all men. I will give you the power to strike any woman barren and make any man a giant to embrace you.”
“I want none of these things.”
His mouth pressed to her ear, he whispered urgently so that the others could not hear.
“What do you want? Tell me and I will give it to you. Am I not the greatest sorcerer in the valleys ? Does not the Red Spirit speak to me in the thunder and in the wind? Ask me and I will give. What do you want for the secrets of the white man’s room?”
“Only that you should take me—now!”
His body shuddered with the flattery and the triumph of it.
“And you will tell me, when?”
“Tomorrow or the day after, when I can come without being seen. But not now—not now!”
Kumo laughed. His plumes tossed. His teeth shone. He swept the girl to her feet and half ran, half carried her out of the hut.
The consummation was a wild, brief frenzy that left her, bruised and crumpled, alone in the tall and trodden kunai grass.
The drums were silent, and the fires were dying as N’Daria stumbled up the path to light the lamp in Sonderfeld’s laboratory. Her body was aching and her head was swimming with fatigue and drunkenness, but between her belly and her belt was a piece of cotton wool which carried the life of Kumo the Sorcerer.
Wee Georgie was waiting for his wives to come home. In the small squalid hut on the edge of the track, he sat shivering under a ragged greatcoat, lamenting his misfortunes like Job on his dunghill.
First was the irregularity of his marriage, unblessed by the Church, the Administration or the tribes. The plump brown sisters were happy enough to share his rations and warm his rumpled blankets, but they counted themselves still among the unmarried and went to the kunande and solaced themselves regularly with the village bachelors. Wee Georgie was a tolerant fellow, frankly admitting his own impotence, but the mountain nights were cold and his blood was so thinned with alcohol that he could not sleep without the companionable warmth of an oily body, fore and aft.
More than this, his kidneys were suffering from half a century of systematic abuse and he was forced to make repeated trips to the base of the big casuarina tree while the cold seeped into the fatty marrow of him.
But worse than all, theme of the longest lamentation, was the liquor shortage. Père Louis’ altar wine was thin comfort and soon gone—and Sonderfeld’s ill humour had robbed him of his weekend ration of hard spirit. There was only a quarter of a bottle of whisky between himself and the terrors of the night, and this he was saving until the girls came home, so that he could sit and listen to their spicy gossip of village love and piece out the scraps of scandal that might one day earn him an extra bottle from Sonderfeld. It was the only pleasure left to him in the days of his decline, and he clung to it jealously, cursing the shameless lusts that kept his women late from his pillow.
A sharp pain in the region of his bladder brought him unsteadily to his feet, and he lurched out into the moonlight to relieve himself. He saw N’Daria stumbling wearily up the track, and when he looked up towards the big bungalow, he saw the big figure of Sonderfeld leaning on the veranda rail and, behind him, silhouetted against the window, the gesticulating shadows of three men in the lighted living room. The girl must have gone to leaving the men to drink late. He grinned lecherously and wondered how long she’d stay there. Lansing would sleep at the house as he always did, and when the others had gone, Sonderfeld would come down to the laboratory and the lamp would burn long after midnight. Did he work there—or play? Wee Georgie had his own ideas, but he was wise enough to keep them to himself. This was the softest berth he’d had in many years—he wanted to keep it. Another mistake like tonight’s could mean disaster.
He shivered and swore and reeled back into the hut. Then, far down the track, he heard the pad of feet and the high giggling of the girls. He wondered whether he should beat them, but decided against it. He uncorked the bottle and took a long, gurgling pull that ended in a belch of relief. Then he stretched himself out on the dirty blanket roll and waited for them to come in. With whisky in his belly and girls in his bed, Wee Georgie was the Caliph of the high valleys. He speculated amiably on the scandalous tales that Scheherazade and her sister would bring—he had a shrewd suspicion that N’Daria and Kumo would have their parts in it.
Sonderfeld saw the light go on in the laboratory and smiled to himself in the darkness. He was desperately eager to know the result of N’Daria’s seduction of the sorcerer, but he was too careful a man to betray himself by even the smallest indiscretion. Gerda was safely in bed, but his guests were still drinking. He would go in to them, join the last hazy rounds, and tell them a dirty story or two to send them on their way to bed.
Lansing he would conduct with ironic courtesy to the guest room. With Curtis and Theodore Nelson he would walk a little way down the path that led to the Kiap house; he would tell them one last story; he would stand and watch them weaving homewards under the dark, drooping trees. Then he would go to N’Daria.
He straightened up, tossed the butt of his cigar over the railing and walked into the bright light of the living room.
Theodore Nelson, flushed and voluble, had reached the tag of his story:
“She said to me, ‘What sort of woman do you think I am?’ I said, ‘My dear lady, I thought we’d already established that.’ After which, of course, it was plain sailing from Aden to Bombay.”
Lee Curtis gave his braying, boyish laugh. Max Lansing, grey-faced and weary, stared into his glass. They looked up as Sonderfeld came in, smiling and hearty.
“Forgive me, my friends. I was having myself a little fresh air between drinks. Now the clergy are gone and the lady is retired, let’s have ourselves a private nightcap, eh?”
“If you don’t mind,” said Lansing flatly, “I’ll take myself to bed. I’m very tired. I’m not good company.”
“My dear fellow!” Sonderfeld was instantly solicitous. “Of course we don’t mind. Are you sure you are not unwell? You’re not getting the fever, are you? Have you been taking the tablets?”
“No, no … it’s not the fever. I’m just tired, that’s all. If you’ll excuse me—good night, Sonderfeld. Good night, gentlemen!”
Before they had time to speak their own farewells, he had left the room, a tall, stooping figure bowed under the burden of his own ineptitude.
“That’s an odd fellow,” said Theodore Nelson, as Sonderfeld poured him a generous slug.
“They’re all odd, these anthropology boys,” Lee Curtis chimed in, with his shining new knowledge. “Lots of ’em scattered round the Highlands. Queer as coots. They—”
“You mustn’t be too hard on the poor fellow.” Sonderfeld’s tone was a careful blend of tolerance, amusement and genuine affection. “He’s a clever and devoted scholar. A little prickly in company, of course, but that comes of living alone. Add to Which he is a very sick man. He has had one bout of scrub typhus. If I had not been here, I think it would have killed him. Gerda and I are very fond of him. That is why we like to have him here as often as we can.”
Theodore Nelson clucked sympathetically and plunged his snub nose into his drink. His own reading of the Lansing story made a very different text. But when a man made his living drinking other men’s whisky and eating at other men’s tables, it paid him to keep his thoughts to himself.
Lee Curtis was a less practiced diplomat. Lansing’s views on the cargo cult had been nagging at him all the evening. If they were correct, they spelt trouble for himself. The District Commissioner was a hard man and a subtle one. He had neither patience nor mercy for weak administrators and slipshod investigations. Curtis stifled a hiccup and put the question to Kurt Sonderfeld.
“He’s a clever scholar, you say. But you laughed at his ideas on the cargo cult. Why?”
“My dear fellow,” said Sonderfeld smoothly, “there is no contradiction, believe me. Lansing is a scholar, a man of books and theories. He lacks the practical experience of, say, a man like yourself.”
Nelson grinned into his drink. You clever bastard, he thought. You clever, clever bastard. There’s weather blowing up and you know it. Lansing knows it, too. But you’re not making any forecasts. You’re leaving it all to this boy, who hasn’t finished cutting his milk teeth. If there’s storm damage, you’ll be high and dry with a handsome profit.
Lee Curtis hiccupped again. The compliment was sweeter to him than the whisky and just as heady. He jabbed an unsteady finger at Sonderfeld’s shirtfront. His voice was thick and furry.
“That’s what I always say. It’s the men that do the job that really know. You do it—in a small way—on your plantation. I do it—in a big way—in my territory. The rest of ’em—the missionaries and the anthrop—anthrop—” He giggled happily. “Christ, I’m drunk! Better take me home, Nelson, before I fall flat on my face.”
Deftly, Sonderfeld maneuvered him through the last drink, smiling like a genial conspirator at the moonfaced Britisher who had survived a thousand evenings like this one. Nelson was no danger to him. Nelson was a bird of passage, hovering high above the storm waters. Nonetheless, it would pay to keep him friendly. With Curtis swaying between them, they walked out of the house.
When the cold air hit him, the boy gagged suddenly and vomited on the path. In the darkness, Sonderfeld grimaced with disgust, but he handled the situation with the ease and competence of long experience. He locked one arm round the boy’s waist, supported his head with his free hand and held him until the spasm had passed. Then he cleaned him with his own handkerchief and handed him over to Nelson with a good-humoured grin.
Nelson watched the performance with bibulous approval. The fellow was a gentleman at least. In his peripatetic career he had met a few originals and many imperfect copies, but Sonderfeld had earned the seal of the connoisseur. If it came to a showdown between the big man and the Administration, Nelson would back private enterprise every time.
Which was exactly what Sonderfeld expected him to do.
He stood a long time, watching, as their shadows swayed down the narrow path. Then he turned and walked swiftly back to the laboratory.
N’Daria was waiting for him.
She had stripped off the ceremonial costume and wrapped herself in an old housecoat that had belonged to Gerda. She was drooping with sleep and her body gave off the smell of fatigue and stale oil. There was no desire in her smile, only a furtive triumph. She held out to Sonderfeld the evening’s prize, carefully laid in a small tube of bamboo.
He took it from her without a word, slid off the top of the tube and gingerly extracted the wad with a pair of tweezers.
Strange, he thought, strange. Between those two steel fingers he held the key to power and dominion. That small foul relic of an animal act was a talisman whose touch would call up armies, rear a throne in the mountains, set on the forehead of its possessor the crown of a new empire. It was a giddy thought.
Yet it was true. The tribes were ruled in secret by the sorcerers. Chief of the sorcerers was Kumo. The man who held the blood and seed and spittle of Kumo was greater than he because at any moment, by a simple willful act, he could compass the death of Kumo. Such was the power of ancient superstition that once Kumo knew his vital juices were held by another man, he would be in perpetual bondage. Burn the tube in the fire and Kumo’s body would burn to agonizing death. Crush the tube with an ax, Kumo would feel the stone grind into his own skull and would die of the impact. Warm it a little, beat on it with a stick, Kumo’s body would bum with fever or his ears would ring with maddening noises.
It was the old, dark, fearful magic of primitive man turned against him by a twentieth-century despot.
For a long time Sonderfeld stood there, lost in the secret joy of his own triumph. The girl watched him, smiling uneasily. Then, abruptly, he replaced the tampon, closed the tube with a snap and thrust it into his pocket. He turned to her and grinned.
“You have done well, N’Daria.”
Her eyes lit up. She moved forward to touch him. He drew back in disgust. It was as if he had struck her.
“But … But … you said …”
“You stink!” said Sonderfeld softly. “You stink like a village pig. Before you begin work in the morning, wash yourself clean.”
With that he left her. She heard the door slam and the key turn in the lock. She flung herself on the low cane bed and sobbed.