Women’s Prison
IT RAINED ON AND OFF FOR DAYS IN TAIPIVAI, rain like a child’s tears: sudden, copious, without apparent cause, as if the pent emotions of the atmosphere simply got the better of it. The showers ended in the same spirit, sun beaming through the last drops, a smile after sorrow.
I found a good place to stay—the only place—an airy cabin with bright coral curtains. Unlike Happar, Typee still lives, home to a few dozen families near the rivers mouth. Madame Kekela, my landlady, was descended from the ancient tribe. But my lodgings might have been in the Dordogne: jam and baguette with coffee on her verandah in the morning, fresh flowers on my table in the afternoon. She was a stocky woman in her late forties. Her husband was away, working on a freighter. Their children had grown and left for Tahiti. She’d travelled a bit herself—San Francisco and New Zealand—which gave her the idea to cater for wanderers and Melville buffs who made their way to Taipivai.
The river bordered her property, behind a waterlogged orchard of breadfruit and bananas. Further upstream it was a stony torrent, but here it ran deep between mud banks. A contemplative heron often stood beside a whirlpool, and great land crabs scuttled about looking for dry burrows, scratching at my door on rainy nights.
Madame Kekela was a heavy smoker, and the nono flies were making me one too. We’d sit on her verandah for a while in the evenings, puffing away. Jon’s picture rang no bells, but she listened to my story and offered to put the word around. She agreed that Tari Kautai was the man to see. He’d been chief of Taipivai when she was little, during the Second World War. Later he went into the police, though she wasn’t sure when. “He is the oldest in the valley. No one can say precisely how old—not even himself. That’s old, no?”
“Will he talk to me?”
“Take him a bottle.” Her motherly face smiled in the light of a match. “Then he’ll talk. And take some flowers from my garden. He has a young woman with him. She moved in not long ago. A cousin, he says, from Hiva Oa. She’s got a little girl. The story is her husband left her. But we never heard about this cousin before. People are talking.” She laughed. “Can you imagine? He’s old as a turtle!”
Taipivai village occupied only the lowest part of the valley, straggling along one side of the river for about a mile, up and down from a small wooden church. A tiny shop sold soap, batteries, cigarettes, and dubious tinned meats named Klik and Spork. I bought a carton of Gitanes and pinned one of my posters by the door.
The houses were mostly clapboard bungalows smothered in clouds of bougainvillea, some built on ancient platforms. I stopped at every one and showed Jon’s picture. People were sympathetic and not in the least surprised—Polynesians, I found, took matters of family and descent very seriously. Some even became talkative, speaking of situations like mine among themselves: men who’d never returned from fishing trips, from jobs across the sea; women who’d run away to Papeete and never been heard from again. But so few were old. At least half the villagers were children. I met only five who’d been adults in 1953.
Two of these were an old couple who lived up the valley by a neglected coconut grove belonging to the church. The wife began to speak then stopped herself. When I pressed her, she said very hesitantly that she thought she recalled a white man being found dead in Taipivai, in the 1950s; the husband said it was the 1970s, and not a white man, merely an unidentified skeleton—someone who’d drowned or fallen from the cliffs.
I felt disheartened. Their story was unsettling but too vague; nobody else recalled anything like it. And Tari Kautai was taking a long time. A new hip in a man his age was no joke, no matter how amusing it might be to Sergeant Benoit. What if there were complications? He might never be well enough to come home. And why should his memory be better than anyone else’s? I decided to give him a few more days. After that I’d have to take my chances on Nuku Hiva’s roads, making my way over the mountains to Hatiheu, the last village of any size. If I learned nothing there, I’d have to roam the rest of the island, going to every farm and fishing camp.
Each day I went out, taking a lunch, and each evening Madame Kekela read my face and shook her head. When I’d spoken to every living soul in Taipivai, I began exploring the upper valley, finding my way through guava thickets and banyans to an imposing platform called Paepae Merivi, said to be where Melville had stayed, half guest, half captive of the Typees. Like all the finer ruins, it was made of boulders skilfully fitted without mortar, with a flight of steps at the front; the back had a raised footing of cut stone for the wooden house, the rest being an open terrace where Fayaway’s family had buried their dead and spent their sunny days. Melville’s or not, it would look good on film, its mystery deepened by the thick woods all around and the snarling river below.
High on a slope I saw the “taboo grove” he’d feared, scene of “horrible idols, heathenish rites and human sacrifices.” It was eerie even now, with its deified ancestors overthrown by missionaries and time. The stone tiki figures were roughly life-size, some headless, others without feet or on their backs. Perhaps they had once been fearsome; now they were merely outlandish and forlorn. More poignant than their physical decay was the thought that these ancestors had lost their descendants. No one alive remembered who these beings were; and in losing their past, the offspring, like you and me, had lost their way.
They made me think of you, of who and where you might be now. I pictured you here, the two of us searching for your grandfather on these mountains in the sea.
As I got to know the valley, I saw that Typee had been a garden city from one end to the other, a succession of terraced orchards, houses, temples, and dancing platforms, running below the mountain walls for several miles. It must have been home to thousands.
The Vaiahu fork, which I’d seen from above, and which Melville had described as a park-like mix of buildings and fruit trees, is completely cut off and overgrown today, not even a game trail leading in towards the falls at its head. But the main branch has a track as far as a small hydroelectric plant that lights the village. One morning I walked up there, beyond all the ruins, determined to reach the twin cascade of Teuakueenui, the Two Great Eels, down which Melville and Toby had tumbled like shot monkeys.
It looked easy on the map, but wasn’t. Above the hydro shed the valley was very narrow, and looked as wild as in 1842. I had to spider over boulders beneath trees crowding the torrent’s edge, or wade to my thighs in fast water. I saw no machete cuts, no sign that anyone had come this way in years.
After an hour I reached the end, a great broken bowl of dark basalt, water-carved from mountains boiling with mist. Here the Two Great Eels thundered into a broad, revolving pool.
I took off my clothes and stood in the spray. I swam into deep water and let it take me round and round beneath the shifting arc of a rainbow. I thought of Henderson and Tiurai, their waterfall romance, and how, ultimately, they seemed to have led both Jon and me to this island they had never seen.
The voice of the falls drowned every other sound, though from time to time I thought I heard a human voice, calling or singing. I glanced around, but it was only a trick of my ears, or perhaps the chiming of stones washed down from the heights.
Next morning I woke to the throb of a helicopter, shockingly loud, echoing between the canyon walls. I’d slept late, and my first thought was that the chopper had come for me, caught me unawares, and I hadn’t time to lose myself in the woods. My legs were stiff, and the din was fading by the time I got to the window. The craft looked small and old, a bulbous dragonfly body with a thin tail, like a Bell I used to hire for aerial shots.
Madame Kekela broke into a wide smile at breakfast—Tari Kautai was home! I waited two more days while she gathered the news. It was good. His operation had gone well; they’d kept him in Papeete for such a long time because of his age, nothing more.
He lived on a windy headland down the Typee bay, overlooking the beach where Melville fled Nuku Hiva. Here the river meets the sea, a brown surge into clear jade.
I turned up late in the afternoon, to catch him fresh from his siesta. A baby was crying inside. A short plump woman of about thirty came out at my knock, and I gave her a spray of oleanders and hibiscus. She seemed a country person, shy and plainly dressed in a dark green shift. Without a word she led me through a banana grove against the house.
The old Typee was slumped in an armchair on his back porch, the ocean flopping and seething on the shingle below. Chickens and puppies dozed by his feet. He had been braiding rope. Nearby were sacks of coconut fibre and new coils hanging from the eaves. He wore one earring and a pair of khaki shorts. His flesh was lean, pale yellow, and vaguely translucent like a mummy s. A zipper of neat stitches ran up his thigh. He had a good head of iron-grey hair, a coarse goatee, and thick eyebrows ending in long whiskers like the feelers of a prawn. He might have been anywhere from seventy to ninety years old. If he’s eighty, I thought, he’d have been about my age when Jon posted that letter.
“He won’t speak to you outside,” the woman said. “He can’t hear over the surf.” She eased him up and helped him into the dark interior. The window louvres were closed, admitting only slats of light. When my eyes adjusted I saw that it was one large room, with sleeping quarters behind a cotton screen. There was a pleasant smell of strong tobacco, dried fruit, sinnet, spices. I gave him my name.
“Speak up, please!” He settled himself into a chair and motioned for me to sit opposite, across a small table made from a cable drum. I repeated who I was and briefly why I’d come, adding that Madame Kekela and Sergeant Benoit had suggested I visit him. If this was an inconvenient time, perhaps I could come back another day?
“Not at all, Mademoiselle.” His hands ran inquiringly over the bottle I presented, recognizing its shape, the best Taiohae could provide. “Johnny Walker!” He chuckled amiably, showing empty gums and wide eyes like milky quartz. The young woman went outside.
“I don’t see well any more. They told me I should let them do my cataracts. I told them I’d think about it. But I won’t. I’d have to wear glasses!” He touched my arm.
He was surprisingly vigorous, contorting his face histrionically like a character in a silent movie, the shrimp whiskers adding greatly to the effect. He made me think of Fidel Castro at his most engaging, in seductive interviews with pretty foreign journalists. His French was good, the product of a Catholic boarding school.
“A knife at my eyes! I won’t have it,” he repeated, gripping my arm more urgently. “I said I’ve seen enough.” He released me and paused; then, “Will you allow me, Mademoiselle, to touch your face?”
His fingers, bony and calloused from years of rope-making, walked lightly over my skin as if reading Braille. The woman came back with three glasses and some water on a tray. “My young cousin,” he said. “Martine. Her name is Martine. She’s looking after me.” We shook hands.
“If you feel strong enough,” I began. “I’d like to ask about a long time ago. Nineteen fifty-three. Do you remember a stranger, an Englishman, turning up on Nuku Hiva back then?”
“I’m plenty strong enough! They fuss so much. Wouldn’t let me home for weeks. I’ve never liked Papeete. Do you?”
“Not much,” I said. Martine patted his shoulder, reminding him what I’d asked.
“Strangers? Many strangers came to Nuku Hiva in those days. The government sent them here after the war. Gave them land. We had a man with no lungs. Mustard gas! And there were …,” he groped for words he hadn’t used in years, “pacifists. Conscientious objectors. The authorities wanted them off Tahiti. Some of them never went home. They fell in love with Nuku Hiva girls.” He smiled towards Martine. He seemed to be talking about the forties. Or even the twenties. I steered him back to 1953. What was he doing then? Was he a policeman in Taiohae, or still chief of Taipivai?
“I was chief three times. Cant remember the years. Why do you want to know?”
“The man I’m looking for was my father.”
The bottle stood unopened beside three empty tumblers and a pitcher of water. I wondered if he was waiting for me.
“Shall I?”
“Bien sûr!”
“Santé!” Raised glasses in the semi-darkness. Kautai swallowed greedily, set down his glass, and sent a bony hand to the floor for a tobacco pouch. He began rolling a huge cigarette in a six-inch square of newspaper. “Why did your father come to Nuku Hiva?”
“To hide, maybe.” I explained about the Korean War, the downing of Jon’s plane. “I think he was unwell. I don’t know how. Perhaps he was confused.” I didn’t know the French for shell-shock or post-traumatic syndrome. “It’s also possible he was looking for someone. Someone called Henderson. A Demi. This person might have come from the Leewards. From Raiatea.”
“Ah! Les Îles Sous-le-vent.” The lovely name fell dreamily from Kautai’s tortoise lips. He knew them well; he’d worked on a gunboat before the war. He put down his cigarette and beckoned.
“Let me feel your face again.”
“I don’t look much like my father,” I said. “He was fair, blue eyes, average height. I’m dark and tall.”
“Yes, I know.” From the darkness under the roof came a geckos call, like the kissing sound one makes at a baby or a cat. His hands took a longer, deeper reading than before. “The bones!” He laughed. “You might almost be Maohi!”
My looks again. Several had called me that—the Tahitian form of Maori, meaning any Polynesian.
“Except my nose.”
“Oui! Except your nose!”
The Typee sat back pensively, nearly invisible in the darkening house. From behind the curtain came whimpering and suckling. Martine and her baby His baby? I’ve still no idea, but I wouldn’t rule it out. The light between the boards faded quickly, as the sun slipped behind the Hapaa mountain.
“I can tell you a story,” he said abruptly. “For a long time I have believed that one day I would have to tell this story. For many years I hoped to tell it. Lately I’ve been thinking it is better to forget. It may not be your story. It may be the wrong story altogether. But if it is yours, it will be very sad for you. Do you want to hear it? You should think carefully.”
“It’s always better to know.”
“So one thinks when one is young! When one is old there’s too much time for going over things. The sorrows of a lifetime run through the mind. Again and again before your eyes, when all you want is sleep. I wish I knew less! But the older I get the more clearly things come back.” He gave a brittle laugh, then resumed smoking and taking sips of whisky like a lizard.
What tormented the old fellow? I lit up, kept quiet, as if mulling over what he’d said. But I agreed with Frank: Explanations, however distressing, are more consoling than mysteries.
“I should like to hear everything you can tell me, Monsieur.”
“Very well. You’ve decided. I remember those years. It was the time of the big bomb scare. The Lucky Dragon. I was constable in Taiohae.”
“You mean the H-bomb tests?”
He nodded. “The American bombs. Boom!” His glowing cigarette traced a mushroom cloud in the twilight. “They were a long way from Nuku Hiva, but wind and water go anywhere, no? Each was bigger than the one before. There was a ship, a fishing vessel—Chinese, Japanese, I’m not sure. But I remember her name. The Lucky Dragon. One doesn’t forget a name like that, not after what happened. Her crew saw blossom floating down from the sky. Pink petals, settling on them like when you sleep under a hutu tree. And they felt lucky. Heaven was smiling! You know how the Chinese are.” He coughed again, his face stony. “Soon all those men are dying. And people on some islands too. It was the …,” he fished for the word, “retombées. The fallout. People here were frightened. ‘Kaoha, Tari,’ they’d say, ‘if this is what the Americans are doing, what will the Russians do?’”
He was warming to the story, doing voice parts, moving his gaunt hands like shadow-puppets.
“How about the French? At Moruroa.”
“That was later. Those bombs are safe.”
Martine came in with some slices of fried yam. The old man softened them in whisky and sucked them down, quiet a long time, recollection seeping like water into a dredged well.
“There was an Englishman here. A man who spoke English. He might have been American, Australian, who knows? He had the bearing of a military man. He arrived without papers on a schooner. He came to the gendarmerie and told us he’d been shipwrecked. We had no telephone. No airstrip. Schooners came and went with the wind. Sometimes two or three would arrive together, sometimes we’d go months with none. We didn’t worry about people who turned up as he did. Many had no papers in those days. We’d put them aboard the next boat and they’d be dealt with in Papeete.” Another silence. The gecko called again above my head, agitated, or perhaps two of them were fighting.
“We had an old motorcycle at the gendarmerie, left over from the war. British make. A BSA. I loved that thing! A moto is a fine thing when you’re young. I rode it everywhere, like a horse. Police business, naturally! It had no springs like they do now. I’d stand up on the footpegs and let it bounce, the saddle coming up to slap my bottom!”
His mind seemed to be wandering. And so was mine—back to my fathers Royal Enfield. Once or twice each summer, when we were girls, Lottie and I would brave the greenhouse spiders to rediscover the machine under its old rug. I’d stare at the great finned engine—its art deco castings had a monumental look— awed by the bike’s fossil power, by its remoteness from my memories of Jon. Lottie claimed she could remember riding pillion, clinging to his back, but I think she made that up. In 1953 she was only four years old.
We became aware that the machine was changing, aging in a way that he, frozen in memory and photographs, could not. The tyres softened and sank; oxide dulled the castings; rust lifted the maroon enamel. It became impossible to see how our fathers bike could ever have been new. I began to think of it romantically as his last passion, a hostage to time, rotting in his stead like the picture of Dorian Gray.
Suddenly Kautai gargled, yanking me back from Tilehouse Street. He spat a tarry bulb of phlegm into a jam jar he used as an ashtray.
“I remember the Englishman helped us get it working. He wanted to make friends. Always a good idea with the cops, no? That’s how he kept himself in Taiohae. Mending things. Boat engines, pumps, kerosene fridges. He hadn’t a sou to his name.”
“What name did he give?”
“Silly! I have the name of the bike but not the man.” Kautai thought the Englishman was on Nuku Hiva for about two months, between one schooner and the next. He was often seen with the doctor, a man from Raiatea who’d been in Europe, in the war.
“We thought it was because they were both military men that they became friends. Later we found out there was a connection.”
“What was his name—the doctor? Was it Henderson?”
“Faraniki. Faraniki Teraupoo.” The milky eyes turned up as he remembered. “Jim! That was the Englishman. Monsieur Jim. As for his surname, I think you’ll find it over there.” He raised his chin in the direction of the bedroom. “You can check presently. Martine will show you. Let me go on while the mind is clear.” The house was nearly dark, only a slatted pallor from the cracks, and the paleness of the old mans eyes. Now and then a match would flare, for Kautai’s cigarette or mine, and the rustic walls hung with rope and clothing would imprint themselves, a retinal flash.
Faraniki Teraupoo! I was certain now. Tiurai must have been a sister or daughter of the guerrilla chief; Frank had left her with more than a cigarette case. And Jim! My father had used his parrot’s name.
“This Monsieur Jim became well known along the beach. Tang, the Chinaman with the store, gave him an empty hut to live in. The Englishman loved walking. Every day he’d go up the ridge behind the fort, sometimes for hours. He said he was interested in Merivi, the American writer. This writer must be very famous, no? Every stranger who comes here wants to follow that mans route through the hills! Most of them give up. Some get lost. Three or four have died. They fall in the rain, they are bitten by the centipede, they have a heart attack. … But Merivi wasn’t the only reason Jim did so much walking. He was watching out for the next schooner.”
“To get away?”
“On the contrary. He wanted to make sure he was off in the hills when she anchored. So we couldn’t deport him to Tahiti! That’s when he vanished. While a schooner was in port.”
Martine came in from the porch with a hurricane lamp, bathing the house in saffron light. The old Typee took a swallow of his Scotch and looked at me beseechingly.
“Monsieur Jim walked out of the village when the schooner came and he was never seen alive again. I am sorry, Mademoiselle. This is why I asked you to reflect.…” He strained to hear how I was taking it.
“Can you be sure he died?” An old hope returned: Jon stowing away to another island; or hiding in the hills, living like a hermit, perhaps for years. It was soon dashed.
“We expected him to turn up in a day or two, once the ship had sailed. When he didn’t we were puzzled. Unfortunately, as time went by, suspicion fell on Faraniki, the doctor from Raiatea. There was talk in the village that the two men had been fighting shortly before Jim disappeared. Teraupoo could get unruly when he drank. He was a big man. Heavy and tall. He used to make liqueur with his medical equipment, his glass tubes. Good stuff—better than the schooners sold. I drank plenty myself. Against the law, of course!” He shrugged. “But as Tang used to say when we’d catch him selling opium, ‘Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.’ Poor Faraniki! His face was always sad. But he looked happy when he drank.”
Teraupoo had been taken prisoner by the Germans after the fall of France. Held been forced to work in a concentration camp, or several camps. Kautai thought only his medical skills had saved him.
“Who knows what a man has inside him after such an experience? He never looked well. But how he worked! Always helping people, neglecting himself. Everyone loved him.”
I asked why the doctor had come to Nuku Hiva instead of his home island. Kautai said he’d been posted here by the government. In those days, still reeling from the war, Paris was thinking of letting its ocean colonies go. Islanders were being given white mens jobs.
“If I alone had heard that story about a fight, I wouldn’t have acted on it, Mademoiselle. Teraupoo and I were friends. No one wanted the police bothering him. But the sergeant was French—they usually are—a man named. …” He stopped and thought. “Rivard. Sergeant Rivard. All spit and polish. For him the disappearance of a European was a very serious matter. When the Englishman failed to return, Rivard and I searched his hut. Because of what we found there we had to question Faraniki. I still regret what we put that poor man through. It was very hard on him. I can still see it in his eyes—the fear of being locked up again! He was never charged, but never exonerated either. Not until it was too late. He died before we learnt the truth.”
Kautai paused, and after a minute or so I noticed a regular sound, like a boat engine on the wind. But it was the old man. He’d fallen asleep. The temptation to wake him—to bump his chair, drop my glass, strike a noisy match, was almost irresistible. After a battle with myself I got up quietly to leave, but I was hardly on my feet before he gave a snort. Then came a rustling sound, like a mouse in a kitchen drawer. He was tearing off a square of newsprint and rolling another smoke.
“It was plain that Monsieur Jim had left in a hurry. In his hut was a long letter. We found another letter with it, on the table. One he was writing. Not finished. The sergeant’s English wasn’t too good, and I have only three words: Anuzzer beer please!” The old Typee chuckled, then coughed respectfully, recalling the gravity of his tale.
“Rivard took the papers to the schoolteacher. A nun. A woman of education, naturally. She had difficulty with the first letter, which was in a bad state. But she translated the other. There was still much we didn’t understand. To read strangers’ letters.…”
He began speaking in Marquesan to Martine, who went to the bedroom, retrieving an old tin box.
“Now, Mademoiselle, you can read the rest for yourself. I haven’t looked at these things in twenty years. Not since my eyes started going. Often I’ve wondered whether someone like you would come to me before I die. I thank God that you have!” He toasted the Almighty. Martine fossicked in the box, following his instructions. She handed him a brown envelope. He took out the contents carefully, caressing each item in the same way he’d touched my face.
“It wasn’t my job to keep these things, but if I hadn’t. …” Another shrug. “Anything that goes to Tahiti vanishes. They demand everything, but they pay no attention to what happens on faraway islands. Nobody cares about us here. I think we sent them the schoolteacher’s translation. These should be the originals.” He added that Sergeant Rivard left Nuku Hiva in the early sixties, shortly after the mystery of the Englishman was “solved.” The letters sat in a drawer at the police post, along with one other piece of evidence: a silver cigarette case.
“For a while after Rivard left I was on my own at the gendarmerie. I confess, Mademoiselle, that I had my eye—I had sharp eyes then!—on that pretty étui à cigarettes. I ask myself, Why surrender this to Papeete when everyone concerned is dead? So I take it into my own custody, and for the sake of my conscience, I keep the letters with it. ‘Tari Kautai,’ I tell myself very sternly, ‘if a rightful owner ever turns up, you must give them back.’ They are yours now.”
Martine trimmed the wick on the lamp, but I could hardly read a word. One of the letters was disintegrating, little more than papier maché, salty and damp to the touch. This had to be my mothers letter, the one that went “in the drink” when Jon crashed. I poured out the last of the whisky and gulped mine down. My eyes were wet and stinging. I couldn’t read here. I wanted nothing more than to be away, alone.
“There!” said Kautai, unwrapping a flat silver box from a square of cloth, his ropemaker’s hands still nimble. He held it out. “Inside the lid. The Englishman’s name, no? We sent Papeete that name. Never heard anything more.”
Sea air had turned the outside gunbarrel black, but the tarnish inside was a light tan. When my hand steadied I could make out the engraving:
To “Jackdaw” Henderson on his birthday, from his shipmate “P.E.” Two years aboard Bacchante and twenty-two aboard this world August 6th, 1881.
Eddy, Henderson, Tiurai. It was as if the case’s owners had entered and sat down. A hundred years collapsed into a rectangle of blackened metal in a dim house. Perspiration stung my face. When I felt calm enough to make myself understood, I thanked the old man warmly, enfolding a hand like a birds foot in both of mine. These letters, I said, and all he’d remembered, were gifts beyond price. But I couldn’t accept the pretty silver case.
I had no desire for it. All I wanted was to go and read.
“Keep it, my dear. What use are pretty things when one no longer has eyes to see them?”
“Martine should keep it. I insist.” Then I asked how my father’s disappearance had been “solved.” The old man began wheezing alarmingly, quite angry with himself. “Forgive me. This is the most important!
“It was by chance. A few years after Monsieur Jim’s disappearance, the authorities decided to bring us electric light. A team of surveyors and engineers came to inspect the Taipivai waterfalls for a generating plant. Do you know Teuakueenui, the Two Big Eels?” I told him I did. “That’s where they built it in the end. But they also examined the other one. The one called Vaiahu.” His chin pointed across Hapaa towards Muake, to where I’d seen the Vaiahu River make its leap into the Typee gorge.
“I was their guide. There were no roads like today. Only old paths and animal trails. The Big Eels weren’t so hard, but Vaiahu took us days, cutting in with knives. Nobody had been up that fork of the valley in my lifetime. Not in fifty years. No one goes there even now! The rain and the flies were terrible.” He swallowed noisily. “At last we reached the bottom of the falls. We made camp there. Every day I cleared bush for the survey. One morning I am cutting and I find a human skull. This doesn’t surprise me. The old people used to make. …” He lowered his voice, a mix of awe and shame, the shadow of the mission school. “Offerings. They made offerings there. That’s what Vaiahu means in our language. Vai is water or river, ahu is an altar. Soon we found more bones from the same body. All together, not like a sacrifice. Scraps of clothing. A belt buckle. And this silver case. Clearly these were the remains of an unfortunate who had fallen from the cliffs in recent times. I had never seen the cigarette case before but I thought I recognized the buckle. So did others in Taiohae. It was the body of the Englishman, Monsieur Jim. He must have gone walking up there while the schooner was in port.” A papery arm reached out and touched my knee. “Mademoiselle, I am so sorry to bring you this news. But at least you can be certain that your … your father was not killed by Teraupoo. The doctor would never have climbed up there. He wasn’t well enough.”
I’d noted his hesitation. Your father. He remembered something in the letters.
“What was done with the remains?”
“They were respectfully removed, Mademoiselle. By myself. We buried him in the old Protestant cemetery. We assumed an Englishman would be a Protestant. By then poor Faraniki was dead two years himself. He’s there too, not far away. Tahitians are also Protestants.”
“Did Faraniki leave any children, any kin?”
Kautai started at this.
“Not here. Not here on Nuku Hiva.…” He halted, on the point of telling me what I was going to read. “He never spoke of any. Perhaps there are kin on Raiatea or Tahiti, but I don’t believe so, none that are close. You must understand, Mademoiselle, that if he were alive today he’d be nearly my own age. We who were born back then are very few. Women gave birth, but the babies died. Or they grew to fourteen, fifteen, and coughed blood. Ours was the smallest generation. The whites said we would be the last. We thought this too. So many ghosts, so few alive. When I was a boy in Taipivai only twelve people were living here. And three of them were French! I was the last one of my family. I believe it was the same with Teraupoo.”
The old Typee went silent, as if falling asleep again, but it was just his way of letting me know he’d finished and I could leave.
I slipped the letters gently into my bag and got up. I gave Martine the cigarette case. How else could I repay them? Perhaps I still feared that the case might prove to be tainted by jealousy and anger. What was it doing on Jon that day, when it must have belonged to Faraniki?
Taiohae, November 11, 1953.
Dearest Vivien:
Armistice Day and I’m still on Nuku Hiva. Did you get my last letter? I sent it the moment I got here. A lot’s happened since then. Afraid I still don’t know what I’m doing from one day to the next. But first, yes—I forgive you.
You’re right about the Marshalls. I didn’t have to go. We were all volunteers. Though it wasn’t only allies. Some Yanks got fried as well. Everyone believed the range was safe. I have a confession of my own, Vivien, something I should have admitted years ago. I stayed up a bit longer than my orders, to get a few snaps. At the time it seemed nothing. Later of course, when they warned us about genetic damage, I rued it bitterly. I asked myself countless times whether the price of those pictures might be Livvy turning out a freak. On this score it’s a relief to know she isn’t mine.
That cloud was magnificent, macabre, mesmerizing—I can’t find words. At the time I kept thinking of what Oppenheimer said: that physicists have known sin. And his pithy bit of Sanskrit: I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. (Everyone wondered how long he’d practised that.)
If you didn’t want risk in life, Vivien, you shouldn’t have married a pilot. But understand I didn’t go to Enewetak lightly Overflying those clouds was necessary. Someone had to get readings. We believed these weapons would make war as obsolete as witchcraft. Our weapons have outgrown us. Of course, we may not have outgrown our weapons. There lies the danger, but it’s a chance we had to take.
Mole used to say there weren’t a First and Second War, just one long war that lasted thirty-one years, with half-time in the middle. He was right. Without the A-bomb it might have gone on and on, with Russia after Japan. The bomb was the lesser evil—the alternatives a shambles like the Somme or Stalingrad every twenty years. Or so I believed then. After Korea I’m not so sure. We seem to have the worst of both worlds. We’ve got the bomb, and we’ve still got the meat-grinders. We did things in Korea that no one should ever do. I can’t speak about this.
As for who Livvy’s father is, I didn’t want the details. That’s the hardest thing about your letter. I know you meant well, but now I can’t think of you or her without seeing you in his arms.
So if I didn’t want to know about Frank Henderson’s grandson, what am I doing on Nuku Hiva, helping him drink his moonshine? Fair question. Not sure I can answer, but I’ll try.
What I wanted—the opportunity coming along so unexpectedly it seemed providential, though most schooners put in here on their way to Tahiti—was to see what sort of man he was. In my finer moments I hoped I’d like him, as you suggest, that I’d find him worthy of being my daughters father.
Thing is, Vivien, when I ditched that Sabre I knew I hadn’t long to live. About the time your letter came I got bad news from the M.O. Myeloid leukemia. Par for the course apparently—thyroid, gonads, then everything goes pear-shaped. He gave me three to four months. I’m beating the odds a bit, but I won’t walk away from this. You must understand there isn’t time for me to get home from here—certainly not in a state you’d want to see. Or the girls. I don’t want Lottie and Livvy to watch their father die. So I think it best to stick to what you were told by the War Office. Missing in action. Let’s tell them their old Dad went down in a good cause, helping to make a better world for little girls.
Nobody here knows who I am. (Except Teraupoo now, and he’s given his word.) They think I’m a shipwrecked yachtsman. It’s rather fun—the odd thing about playing someone else is that you become someone else. I’m sure you know all about this from your acting days, but it’s a revelation to me. It’s how I made friends with Livvy’s father. Couldn’t miss him in this place—a big brown chap with a stoop and the Henderson nose. He’s everything you say he is, but he hadn’t a clue who I was. Not till last week.
I can see why he lives here. Tahiti sounds too busy, too many reminders of the war and who’s in charge. This is the most breathtaking spot on Earth. Wild, insanely mountainous, nothing like the Marshalls. (I’d give a lot to have my Leica.) The people are silent and brooding till you get to know them. You’ve seen them in every Gauguin painting. The girls make one ache. The men look like they’d eat you at the drop of a hat. But really it’s like any English village—some people are tight as peas in a pod, others haven’t spoken to their next-door neighbour in years.
The storekeeper’s lent me a hut of his by the beach. In return I keep his fridges going (always playing up). He’s Chinese—sometimes he lets me have a whiff of poppy, which makes me feel right as rain. I’m still pretty good, still getting out for walks.
A week ago Teraupoo and I got squiffed on the hooch he makes with his medical kit. Began exchanging confidences. He’s none too well himself, though he’ll outrun me by miles. I got a bit carried away—got the notion that since I wouldn’t make it back to Hitchin, he should go in my place. Husband for you and a father for both girls. So I told him who I was. Didn’t think he’d turn a hair. Women used to have several husbands at once on these islands.
Evidently that’s not how they do things nowadays. Never seen a man so frightened. Thought I was playing cat and mouse with him. He’s like all those poor devils who went through the camps, always watching from the corner of his eye. Suddenly this mild-mannered chap, none too fit but heavy enough, is on me like a sumo wrestler. Luckily Tang hears the rumpus. He and a couple of his customers pull us apart.
Two days later we’re pals again. Faraniki understands now that my suggestion’s serious. (I told him everything—he’s even examined me and I’m afraid his opinion is the same as the M.O.’s.) From what he’s said about his own family, I gather he’s a sort of last of the Mohicans. So for him to learn he has a three-year-old is immensely good news. He became ecstatic, hugging me, weeping and moaning.
When he calmed down he told me about Frank and Tiurai. Same as he told you. Then he brought out Franks old cigarette case. A lovely thing, inscribed to “Jackdaw” Henderson. He absolutely insisted I take it—that I be the one to give it to Livvy, or I should send it if I wasn’t going back. I said he should keep it and give it her himself, when time’s ripe. Good calling card. He balked at that. Perhaps he …
There Jon stopped, in the middle of a page. I turned the sheet over in disbelief. I stood up and sat down, read the whole letter again and again, as if I could somehow extend its length by repetition. I got nowhere with Mother’s. Every time I tried to peel it open, the damp wad threatened to disintegrate. It needed drying, tweezers, a steady hand.
When I couldn’t read any longer, I wrote up what Tari Kautai had told me. Then I lay awake until just before dawn, speculations tunnelling in my mind like worms. Perhaps Faraniki what? Felt guilty? Didn’t want to see my mother? Didn’t think he could face Europe again, not even Hitchin? Or was it that he knew more about the state of his own health than he was letting on, had decided to stay in Taiohae for the rest of a short life, like Jon?
Most of all I thought about Jon’s fall from Vaiahu. It can’t have been his first trip behind Muake, not if he was walking so much. He would have known that ground. Perhaps familiarity made him careless, made him peer from a slippery cornice after a storm, as I did. Perhaps he was frailer than he admits. Or it really might have been a centipede. Or was it the same demon that made him forget his fuel gauge, a reckless invitation for death to take him whole instead of piecemeal? All this I still don’t know, and never will.
But why not finish the line? Schooners don’t move that fast. Why not end the paragraph and write I love you?
Rain woke me mid-morning, loud as hail on the metal roof. Through the window came a smell of earth and wet ashes. I didn’t feel like a tourist or a filmmaker anymore. I had a claim on this corner of the world, and it on me: a blood-and-soil thing. If you work it out, I’m three-eighths Polynesian, which makes you three-sixteenths. (Unless Lumley also had some warm blood in his veins, but I doubt that very much.)
I sat on Madame Kekela’s verandah, rereading the fragile blue pages by daylight, thinking over the trace of that wheel trundling down upon our lives through a century. Because Frank Henderson took a lover in 1881, my mother takes a lover in 1949. Because of this, I exist. Obvious yet indigestible. But does Jon also crash because of this? Am I prone to seduction in 1966 because of his disappearance in 1953? Is that why I abandoned you?
• • •
About noon the sun came out, and we heard the helicopter. I worried I’d overtaxed old Kautai, sent him back to hospital. But it landed in a small field beside Madame Kekela’s, scattering her goats. It had come for me.
For some time I stayed put, obstinately smoking. Eventually the pilot came and helped me pack. Then I heard voices. It was Martine, breathless from running, speaking quickly in Marquesan.
“She has something for you,” said Madame Kekela. Martine pressed Henderson’s cigarette case into my hand and kissed me on both cheeks.
“She thanks you but she can’t keep it. It has many ghosts. The ghosts are yours.”