The accidental anthropologist: a memoir

THE ACCIDENTAL ANTHROPOLOGIST

Also by Michael Jackson: Non-fiction The Kuranko Allegories if the W ilderness Barawa, and the f.Vtlys Birds Fly in the Sky Paths Toward a Clearing At Home in the World The Blind Impress Minima Ethnographica The Politics of Storytelling In Sierra Leone Existential Anthropology

Fiction Rainshadow Pieces of Music

Poetry Latitudes of Exile Wall Going On Duty Free Antipodes Dead Reckoning

Accidental Anthropologist The

a

memoir

Michael Jackson

[ongacre Press

Acknowledgements:

I wish to thank the stciff at Longacre Press, in particular Barbara Lorson and Penelope Todd ,for giving my work the kind of meticulous editorial care that every writer dreams of, thereby helping me realise my vision of what I wanted this memoir to be. T he author gratefully acknowledges a writing grant from Creative New Zealand, which enabled the completion of a draft of this work.

First published with the assistance of

T his book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of Longacre Press and the author. Michael Jackson asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Photographs are from the author's collection.

© Michael Jackson ISBN

1 877361 47 X

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand. First published by Longacre Press,

2006

30 Moray Place, Dunedin, New Zealand. www.longacre.co.nz

Book and cover design by Christine Buess. Cover painting:

Yellow and black landscape by Colin McCahon, 1962,

Auckland City Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, gift of the artist's class,

1962.

Reproduced courtesy of the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust. Printed by Astra Print, New Zealand.

Contents

1 Henry & Blaise & Harry & Me Intensive Care ........ Auckland ...........

.

.

9 14

Distance Lends Enchantment

27

Myself Must I Remake

36

Ordinary Madness .

53

Quarrying the Blues

69

Hotel des Etrangers .

83

Nabanda Kala

97

Pauline ....... .

. 117

2 Ethnographic Picaresque Freetown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. 1 29

Barawa and the Ways Birds Fly in the Sky .

. 1 40

Mamina Yegbe's Delusion

. .

. 1 55

Amazing Grace . . . . . . . .

. 1 69

Allegories of the Wilderness .

. 1 80

In the Sandhills

.

. .

. . . .

. 1 95

In the Silence of the Night. .

. 209

Harmattan . . . . . . . . . . .

. 223

3 To and Fro Within the World and Up and Down Upon it Russian Dolls ........

. 243

Quiet Days in Darlinghurst

. 253

Mihi forTe Pakaka

. 268

Being in Landscape .

. 281

Weary Bay ......

. 298

Touristes Tropiques .

. 306

Leaving Indiana ...

. 314

Full Circle

. 323

......

Journey to Yirntardamururu .

. 336

Notes ..............

. 344

We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn't matter where; it is only gradually that we compose, within ourselves, our true place of origin, so that we may be born there retrospectively and each day more definitely. -Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Aurelia Gallarati-Scotti (Lettres Milanaises 1921-1926), 1 956

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him - he may be forced to - but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him every­ where. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends. -James Baldwin, Nobody a Native Son, 1 963

Knows my Name: More Notes of

Part One

H en ry & B l aise & H a r r y & Me

Intensive Ca re

N ight in the tropics falls fast. The stars rush out. At one stride, as Coleridge said, comes the dark. So I write against the gathering dark. When the doctors told me I had almost died, I had difficulty with the word. Pain I could understand, but death was too abstract. It started Friday morning, a little before ten. The chest pains came on so hard I did not dare lie down. I went into the backyard and sat on the steps. I took off my watch, removed my pen and notebook from my shirt pocket. I was expecting the darkness to descend at any moment. I looked at the sunlight on the gum trees and thought this is your last look at the world. I felt vaguely disap­ pointed that it was so nondescript. But I did not think this is the

moment of your death. In the bed opposite mine, a bewildered Italian patriarch has been besieged by his family. He is crying. His wife is wiping tears from her eyes. The old man's younger brother says to him, " If I see you crying I will not come here again.You must smile." The patriarch tells his brother that they brought a big machine to his bedside and a young lady asked him to smile for the camera. His brother laughs. "There," he exclaims. "You see?" It's hot. A ceiling fan wafts cool air through the room. A thunderstorm rumbles in the Blue Mountains. Car tyres swish on 9

a wet road. I think of Africa. Of Pauline. I remember when she went through this same valley of the shadow. I am beginning to understand how it changed forever the way she looked at things. That deep and besetting doubt that one will ever confidently go out into the world again. The overwhelming awareness of one's own frailty. The sense that at any moment the axe will fall, the curtain come down. I remember how intolerant she became of anything that upset the fragile balance she had struck between her need for quietness and the needs of family or friends. "Don't make demands," she told me. "Don't ask too much. I can only deal with my own uncertainty right now." Sunlight spills into the ward. The patriarch sits on the edge of his bed, squinting against the light. Ray, who was wheeled back into the ward half an hour ago, after his "procedure", is anxious to get his Lotto card filled in, to choose the right numbers. " It's seven­ teen million now ! " he informs us. "That's a lot of money." Mr Burns wants to know what Ray would do with so much money. "Buy a pub and drink it dry," Ray answers. There's a long silence. Then Mr Burns says wistfully, "They'll be getting ready for the meat draw at the pub right now." "What pub is that?" Ray asks. "Peak Hill," says Mr Burns. Mr Burns is eighty-three, and Peak Hill is where he was born, and where, he told me this morning, he wants to die. "What would you do with seventeen million?" Ray asks me. It's like asking me if there's anything I have done or lefi: undone that I should put right before I die. Like making a will, destro�;ng manuscripts I would not want published after my death. or \\Tiring to friends from whom I have become estranged. What would I write to Harry? And what would he haYe ro say to me, Harry whom death made so anxious that he gaw the 10

impression that mortality was his personal property - that he had patented it, and no one had the right to mention it when he was around. How would he react if he saw me now, now that I have pre-empted him and confronted the real thing? Would it be, I wonder, like Henry Miller seeing his vieux copain Blaise Cendrars near the end of his life? When word reached Miller of Cendrars' final illness, he could not find the courage to write. "I think of him constantly," Miller confessed in a letter to Cendrars' daughter, "but when I try to write to him words fail me." A couple of months later in Paris, Miller finally brought himself to visit the man whose praises he had sung and whose friendship he had counted on for quarter of a century. It was a fiasco. "I had to get up and run out," he wrote remorsefully twenty years after the event, "and I never went back. Terrible of me, I know, but I couldn't stand to see him suffer so. I believe he was dying of cancer, and he sat there with tears in his eyes from the pain. He wouldn't take opiates. He said, 'I want to see what dying is like.' " Poor Miller, unaware of what actually affiicted his hero (a series of strokes had rendered Cendrars hemiplegic) , yet appealing to us for absolution. "I couldn't contain myself. I had to run away. To see a great man reduced to that state was awful. I never got up the nerve to go back to see him. He died a short time later.'' Perhaps my old friend Harry wouldn't have the nerve to come and see me either, even if he knew what had befallen me. He might imagine that my suffering would rub off on him. Harry was never one for walking in the shadows. Though it wasn't physical death he feared, so much as death-in-life. Decline, dissolution, decay. He could never abide the thought that his talents might desert him, that old age might overtake him before his promise had been fulfilled. Most of us fear the unknown, but it was the known that Harry was afraid of. To be no longer surprised by life, or swept away by inspiration or love - that's what he dreaded most. To be reduced to a bundle of blind habits. 11

"Keep your fingers crossed, and everything's right," Ray announces. "We'll be out of here soon." Harry would have shuddered. Or laughed. I was awake the night Ray had his blackout. When he came round and gazed unseeing into the faces of the night sisters, he was afraid. "Am I dying?" he asked them. Later he told me that he dreamt he was in a train crossing a high trestle bridge. The trestle gave way, the canyon opened up, and he was plunging toward rocks and muddy water. Jovicic, whose bed is opposite mine, deals with his distress by regaling me with stories. Stabbing his thumb toward the floor, he boasts how he has worked undergound all his life. The prospect of open-heart surgery and a valve replacement doesn't seem to bother him. He was bitten by a snake once and cut open the wound to suck out the venom. " I 've operated on myself," he brags, "no worries. Whatever happens, I got no regrets. I enj oy myself all my life." Ray is as cocky as ever. Though his prognosis is not good, he takes the same attitude one might take toward one's car after picking it up from a garage where it has undergone extensive repairs - eager to get behind the wheel, hit the road and go on as before. Stunned by his close call, his two "procedures", and as fearful as any of us have been, he has nonetheless recovered his outrageous innocence. Tonight, as the nurse tucked him in she asked, "Is there anything you want?" "I wouldn't mind a blonde," Ray said. "A what?" the nurse asked, incredulous. "A blonde," Ray repeated, oblivious of the offence. I shit. I shower. I shave. I brush my teeth. It is enough . From the window I watch the sun sinking through a smoky haze over the western suburbs. The breeze through the bathroom window smells of the sea. I am still so shaken by my near-e::-.:tinction 12

and the aftershock of angioplasty that when I listen to the thrum and surge of traffic in the city I cannot imagine myself in the thick of it again. I accept my reprieve, my luck, but am unsure what to do with the life that has been unexpectedly handed back to me. I know I cannot go on as if nothing has changed. Yet, unlike Harry, I never want to accept Cavafy's description of the years as a line of candles guttering one by one before going out, "the dark line length­ ening" . "Everyone dies," Pauline whispered to me, during her last illness. "It's only a matter of when. And it's not death that matters; it's how we live, so that even dying becomes a moment of life."

13

Auckland

I see it in retrospect through Harry's eyes. The sea cobalt blue. Islands in the gulf on streams oflight. In the railway yards, ganglia of rusted lines like entangled destinies. Gnarled pohutukawas bent like gargoyles over beaches of crushed white shell. Westward, beyond the ranges, the sky darkens, and the thump and thunder of surf drowns your voice. Yet winter was never so cold as to extinguish the memory of summer. "I think of the summer as a lover thinks of his mistress," Harry once said. And I thought of a white gravel road descending through manuka to an ironsand coast, cicadas deafening in the heat. Between school and university, I worked in a factory that made poultry mash. I did not know it when I started the j ob, but the Poultryman's Cooperative had been founded by a distant kinsman (Fritz Jackson's grandfather and my father's grandfather were brothers) . Fritz was in his late sixties when I worked in his factory, and we met only once or twice. That we had the same Jackson features we both agreed, but neither of us took the matter further. In 1 994, however, when Fritz's daughter shared with me her memories of her father, I was struck by the uncanny parallelism between his story and the stories of other Jacksons, my father and myself included - our ability, in the face of adversity, to reinvent ourselves . Fritz had originally been a land buyer, but lost his fortune in 1 928 -29 when he became liable, under an archaic law, for the debts of the owners and mortgagees of all the land 14

he'd ever sold. Instead of declaring himself bankrupt, he elected to honour the law. Pera would remember her father slaving to scratch a living from the small farm he bought near Swanson. "My heart used to go out to him, seeing him brought so low, his heart and health broken. But I could do nothing." After the war, when in his late fifties, Fritz established the Poultryman's Cooperative. The factory was suffocatingly hot. The air was filled with dust; beams and rafters were silted with floury mouse scats, and sweat and dust collected on your skin like scabs. Trundling a hand-cart, I would go down into the basement for sacks of pollard, maize, bran, and grit. On the factory floor, I would unstitch the sacks and manoeuvre them to the edge of a steel-lined pit, shaped like an inverted cone. From this churning pit, the mixed mash would be conveyed by an augur into a massive overhead hopper. There were three such hoppers, working twelve hours a day.You had to shout to make yourself heard above the din. At smoko, I would lie among the grain sacks in the basement, reading Erich Fromm, enthralled by the idea that one's first duty was not to family or country, but to oneself. That summer I also read my first Dostoevsky, and grafted on to the idea that one must realise one's full potential, with the grim corollary that in pursuit of this noble goal, any means, base or heroic, was j ustified. Lew Stewart, who worked the number two hopper, was not impressed. "That's an eighteen-year-old talking," he told me. "One day you'll find out it's got fuck-all to do with creating yourself. You go through a fuckin' war before you start preaching to me about creation ." But Lew wasn't going to tell me about his war, except to say that he'd gone to university before he was called up, and returned from the war to find his wife had ditched him for somebody else. It's strange now to compare Lew and Fritz. The one whose life had become an ineluctable yet deliberate descent into the abyss, assisted by booze and self-pity; the other who had picked himself up, paid his dues, and begun again. 15

What would be my fate? When I try to track down the source of the restiveness that has been with me for as long as I can remember, I end up with an incident in early childhood, details of which I still vividly recall. At age two and a half I was hospitalised for a tonsilectomy - a routine operation at the time, but one that involved, for me, a week-long separation from home. Although the hospital was only ten miles away, I felt as if I had been removed to another planet, and though only seven days passed before I saw my parents again I thought I had lost them forever. Wholly dependent on my mother at the time, I no doubt experienced, during that week, what D. W Winnicott calls "unthinkable anxiety" - the intolerable loss of my basic trust in "a personal continuity of existence " . This sense of abandonment and desolation would be compounded every subsequent time I left home - to go to school, to spend a holiday with my uncle in another town. I remained in mourning for a loss I could not specify. There was an emptiness within me that cried out to be filled. Increasingly isolated from others, I suffered the displaced consciousness of the day-dreamer. I became infatu­ ated with women teachers. I sought father-figures. I nurtured an intense kinship with nature. I imagined myself born into families other than my own. Later, these fantasies of rescue and transfigur­ ation, these Platonic longings for completion and wholeness in another, became fixated on the idea of friendship, of romantic love, and of acceptance into a community of kindred spirits. But many years would pass before I found within myself the element I had exhausted myself looking for in the world. The small New Zealand town in which I was raised was as different from Inglewood, Los Angeles, as one could imagine, though not unlike the Inglewood in Victoria, Australia, that I have also visited, and the Inglewood in Cheshire, England, where Malcolm Lowry spent his early childhood. 16

Inglewood, Taranaki, was built on Ngati Maru land, confiscated by the colonial government in 1 863 to punish the insurgent Taranaki tribes

as

well as help defray the costs of a military campaign

against the resistance leader, Wiremu Kingi, and provide land for migrant settlement. Through a kind of ironic coincidence, with which history is replete, it so happened that at the very moment that Ngati Maru lands on the upper Waitara River and its tributaries were being alienated, ethnic Poles in northern Germany were being subject to draconian assimilation laws. Under the Prussian administration, it was decreed that Polish towns, streets, and family names must be Germanized. Moreover, the Polish language was banned in schools, and military conscription enforced. Resistance meant dismissal from work, seizure ofland, and the loss of basic civil rights. Rather than endure this situation, thousands of Poles elected to emigrate, many of them to New Zealand. Thus the dispossessed in one hemisphere unwittingly became dispossessors in another. Initially Inglewood included as many Polish as English families. In an 1 875 photograph of the town, manuka hurdles and fences of split timber mark out their rough allotments, and felled trees litter the scorched earth. The few houses•are windowless, with shingle roofs. From chimneys made of sacking stretched over wooden frames, thin columns of smoke seep into a desolate sky. A wall of bush separates the clearing from the world. In Gaelic, aingeal means fire: hence Inglewood, a fire-cleared place in a forest. This scene came to define the symbolic ambience of my child­ hood. I was an interloper. I did not really belong. I was a refugee from a country I could not name. At night, falling asleep, I would hear the doleful whistle of a freight train in the hills, like the echo of another life. Jane Eyre's reveries were also mine, looking into the distance and longing "for a power of vision which might over­ pass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions t:Ull of life I had heard of but never seen." And like her "I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes . . .

"

17

The reason for my lifelong preoccupation with renewal and my Jobian patience, my ability to wait, lies in the childhood fantasy without which I could not have endured - that another life awaited me elsewhere, or with another, and once reborn in that other world I would find fulfillment and happiness. My impatient imagination raced away to reconnoitre the world, trying to pin down the place where I should have been born, where I properly belonged. Stories in old volumes of my father's Chums and Boys Own Paper took me among Kanakas, wild men from Borneo, and assorted cannibals, and while King Solomon 5 Mines transported me to Africa, Beyond the Great Wall reincarnated me in Manchuria where I learned to ask, "How many seeds in a water melon?" and to sagely reply, "Many". A few years later, captivated by the mysteries of hominid evolution, I became convinced that in the jigsawn genealogy of my species I might discover my own missing links. Like most Pakeha kids growing up in the forties and fifties, I was told nothing about New Zealand's colonial past. Maori people were, for the most part, distantly and exotically Other. I remember the black-dad kuia who would appear, as if out of nowhere, and peddle whitebait from door to door. They wore moko on their chins and smoked pipes. On autumn afternoons they sat, shawls around their shoulders, flax kits at their feet, on benches outside the post office or on the kerbstones. At night they vanished. Invoking Maori myth, my grandparents helped me understand that Maori did not live in Inglewood because they believed Mt Egmont would one day move back to j oin its kith and kin in the central North Island. This was a standard Pakeha way of explaining away the fact that Maori had had their land stolen or seized, and my first introduction to the way in which the rationalisations of those in power derive spurious legitimacy from lambasting the powerless as creatures of irrationality and superstition. One of my few friends in those days was Maori. Eddie's family lived in a ramshackle villa at the bottom of our street.The armchairs 18

were threadbare, and the linoleum on the floor scuffed and torn. There was not a book in the house. Yet I was drawn to the home­ liness of this poverty. When, several years after Eddie's family had moved on, and I was sixteen, my father had me inducted into his lodge. But something in me revolted against its bizarre mix of cabalistic ceremony and old-fashioned charity. I wrote an angry letter of resignation, accusing the lodge of discriminating against Maori . The lodge elders wrote back in outrage, repudiating my accusations and saying they intended to have my letter framed. My father could not understand what had got into me; nor did I. But I suspect that I had made Maoriness a symbol of my own sense of disaffection, a pretext for turning my back on the world into which I had been thrown, in which I felt I had no place and no future. That same year my aunt from America came to stay and opened a

window onto another world in which I could imagine myself

belonging. When she was twenty she had gone to California on a working holiday and stayed. Now a widow, with her sons married, she'd decided to look up her old family and revisit the places she'd left so long ago. She took my breath away. Her raunchy and irrepressible laughter. Her cocktail before dinner. Her Camel cigarettes. The way she said sidewalk instead of footpath, tomeighta instead of tomato. The way she shared her anecdotes of Mexico and Greece with me. One afternoon she took over the kitchen and cooked a spaghetti bolognaise. Looking back, I wonder if she wasn't, in some sly way, w.king her revenge on New Zealand's provincialism, freeing herself from something that had weighed on her mind for twenty-eight years: demonstrating that you could take the provisions available in a small town New Zealand grocer's shop and subversively turn them into something exotic. Something out of this world. At dinner we picked at the pasta our aunt spooned onto our plates (it was macaroni - the only pasta you could buy - and the sauce lacked garlic - also unprocurable) . My father was obviously 19

unimpressed. My younger sisters said it smelt funny, and pushed their plates away. But I tucked in, asked for seconds, and added to my mother's humiliation by declaring that it was the best meal I had eaten in my entire life. That summer, my older sister went away to university. I recall the cyclopean eye of the K-locomotive at the far end of the mile­ long track, blazing and unfocussed, then staring us out like the sun. Then the coal-black behemoth was thundering through the station, brakes shrieking and rods clanking, before it came to a halt in a furious exhalation of steam. As it panted and hissed in its iron harness, my sister clambered up into a second-class carriage, soon to reappear at the window, wiping away the condensation with her sleeve, and mouthing reassurances to my mother. My father was already at the guard's van, ensuring that the big red wooden chest he had made for his daughter, bound with rope and addressed on every side, was safely loaded. Minutes later, amid tears and stifled cries, with smoke and cinders engulfing us, the train lurched and shunted out of the shadows of the station. And as I watched the red lanterns of the guard's van drawn around the last bend before the bridge, I was filled with the sudden and exhilarating sense that I would soon be making this same j ourney. The following summer my sister brought home a friend from Wellington. Pale and woebegone, Jean Watson was dressed in Gothic black. Her world-weary drawl entranced me. My sister explained that Jean was a writer and, as though her friend's bohemian appearance were not sufficient proof, she brought Jean's portable typewriter to the dining table and dumped it in front of us. It was a solid black Smith Corona. I saw it as a miniature version of the great K-locomotives that hauled the trains through Inglewood, whose forlorn whistles had echoed in my darkness with the oblique promise of voyages and the possibility of rebirth . I begged to be allowed to use it and, inspired by the feel of metal keys and the authority of typed letters on a sheet of white 20

paper, I hammered out some surreptitious ramblings about the evils of racism and the problem of nature versus nurture and, on the strength of a few fragments of a conversation I had overheard between Jean and my sister, wrote a poem. Had I known of Cendrars back then, would my situation have seemed as hopeless? "Action alone liberates," he writes. But I was a prisoner of my dreams, and Cendrars' view of life as a gamble, of pushing oneself to the limits, of risking oneself in the world and pursuing courses of action that ran counter to conven­ tional wisdom - this would come but slowly to me. In my second year at university, I did courses in anthropology, psychology, philosophy and English. But poetry was my passion, and when a notice appeared in the cloisters, calling for contribu­ tions to Hippocampus, a new literary magazine, I submitted a sheaf of poems. To my surprise, one was accepted for publication. Like the poems of most nineteen-year-aids, mine were morbidly self­ absorbed. But Blind Man, written about a friend who had lost his sight in a car crash on the West Coast, was an exception. The previous year, our English professor announced that this blind man, Terry Cutler, would be taking classes with us. He would need help with his lecture notes. Could anyone assist? An erstwhile school friend of mine volunteered to be the Good Samaritan. But the Christian precepts which, in the eyes of the Methodist community of Inglewood, Mervyn so brilliantly embodied, were a cross that he would find increasingly hard to bear. When it turned out that he would need to spend every Saturday with Terry and his family in their cottage near the Blind Institute, Mervyn appealed to me to bale him out. Since I had not been singled out for moral greatness, and had no investment in the idea of perfection, I obliged. Reading Blind Man today, I am struck less by my compassion for Terry Cutler than by my infatuation with Dylan Thomas. I am also 21

struck by the banal contingency of life. Had Mervyn Wellington not felt compelled to publicly witness to his faith, I would not have visited the land of the blind or written the poem that became my introduction to Fletcher Knight, who edited Hippocampus with Harry St Rain. Though only one issue of Hippocampus ever appeared, it precipi­ tated a revolution in my life. After years of isolation, I was suddenly admitted to a literary and intellectual circle that confirmed that I was neither a freak nor a failure. The central figure in that charmed circle, however, remained on its margins. Fletcher's co-editor contributed to Hippocampus under an assumed name, and seemed to inhabit some other zone. Perhaps it was because Fletcher's favourite author was E Scott Fitzgerald that I imagined Harry St Rain to be a kind of Jay Gatsby - a figure who materialised from the shadows of trees on a summer's night to stand and stare across a body of dark water, then suddenly vanished, leaving a vacuum which others would fill with wild speculation, innuendo, and rumour. Did Harry mean to have this effect on people? Did he stage-manage his appearances and disap­ pearances to create an aura of singularity and mystery? Or was there some oppressive, unconfided aspect to his life that made him distant without his desiring it? The sketchy details that Fletcher provided only deepened the mystery. The St Rains were a wealthy but not particularly happy family, whose Remuera mansion commanded a view of the harbour and the North Shore. Harry had no intimate contact with his father. One night his father came home late and found Harry playing in his bedroom with his Hornby train. It was the first time father and son had been alone together, and it would be the last. The boy's father said, " One day you'll get on a train like this. It'll take you far from here, and we'll never see you again." It proved almost prophetic. A few years later, unhappy in the prestig­ ious private school to which he had been sent, Harry came close to repeating fifteen-year-old Freddy Sauser's mythologized act of 22

self-liberation.* Escaping to the railway station, Harry climbed into a wagon in the marshalling yards and fell asleep, waking hours later as the goods train rattled into the Bay ofPlenty. Another time, he tried to kill himself by drinking poison. It was only because the poison racked Harry's body so violently that his death was averted; his father happened to be home at the time, and heard ominous noises in his son's upstairs bedroom. W hen he went to investigate he found Harry's door locked. Realising something was seriously amiss, he phoned a doctor and Harry was saved. As he lay in hospital recovering from a severely damaged stomach, he read Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, and wrote a letter to her, confessing admiration and proposing marriage. Ms Murdoch wrote a long hand-written letter in reply, saying that she needed stability in her confused life, and had recently married Mr John Bayley. She did not envisage an early divorce. The first time Fletcher visited Harry, he found him ensconced in a Morton Bay fig tree with his teddy bear and a book. Since one of Harry's contributions to Hippocampus had been an article on Evelyn Waugh, I now found myself imagining Harry, not as Jay Gatsby, but as Sebastian Flyte. And in this piece of theatre, I cast Fletcher in the role of Charles Ryder. Perhaps Brideshead Revisited does shed some light on Harry's life. Consider that famous passage, for instance, where Waugh speaks of the languor of youth, and observes that, while all the attributes of youth - ebullience, optimism, illusion, and despair - are also attributes of other times in our lives, languor is something that belongs to youth alone. At no other age does one experience this ··relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding . . .

•

"

Blaise Cendrars was born Frederic-Louis Sauser. At fifteen he ran away from

home (La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland), taking a train to Basel and thence ro Berlin. After roaming aimlessly through Germany he met a Warsaw Jew and _iewellery merchant called Rogovine with whom he travelled to Russia on the e\·e of the Bolshevik revolution.

23

Sometimes I think that Harry was in search of eternal youth. Not in the sense of never aging, but in the sense of being able to recapture at will the way one sees the world when one first opens one's eyes upon it - when everything is offered in abundance and nothing is asked in return. If Harry thought that living in the present was, as he once put it, "a desperate experiment" it was perhaps because he was so infatuated by his vision of a seaborne nymph at his side whose loveliness would take his breath away and stop the passage of time. When Harry contemplated the years ahead, I think he was filled with an immense weariness. When I first encountered Roquentin in Sartre's LA Nausee, I was imme­ diately reminded of Harry. What was once a world of infinite promise, filled with the smell of fennel, the taste of couscous or the glimpse of a Japanese girl bathing naked, has degenerated into a tedious inventory of words. Life is never more rare and precious than when it is simply lived. Everything is an adventure then, and time loops back on itself, endlessly renewed. But like Roquentin, Harry was convinced that aging erodes this spontaneity. Instead of living, one writes about the lives one has lived. But always from the outside, at one remove, as though through the eyes of someone whom life has passed by, or a voyeur. Was Harry's attempted suicide a way of avoiding the common­ place? Was death by his own hand to be his last adventure - a gesture toward spontaneity in a life that was already losing its capacity to surprise him? Did he see all too clearly the course his life would run, and did not wish to live out something so comprehensively foreseen and preordained? In his Hippocampus article, Harry provides clues as to how these questions might be answered. He conjures a world of good books, of "wine, intelligent company and gay society." The world of Oxford, possibly, between the wars, "before science students were heard of" - a place of country villages and dreaming spires. Such a "place in the sun" , such a place o f "love and friendship" , Harry argues - "always 24

sheltered, always artificial" - is somewhere most of us have been trying to get for a long time. Such a place we hope to find in novels. But Waugh won't pander to our dreams. He excites our longings only to frustrate them, shattering our illusions, revealing smoke without fire, a wasteland, a handful of dust. At this moment of disenchantment, Waugh offers the solace of the Catholic faith. But Harry cannot accept either the consolation of faith or the consolation of reason. There is no distraction. Nothing, for him, relieves the bleak prospect. Harry was also a regular contributor of sardonic letters and political critique to the student newspaper Craccum. He signed his articles Q.E . D. Until Fletcher told me otherwise, I thought these were the initials of the author's name. Harry's two targets were scientism and romanticism. Seriousness in science and soul­ searching in art he found equally abhorrent. Many of my new-found bohemian friends thought Harry too clever by half. By remaining aloof and anonymous, it was all too �asy for him, they argued, to mock the opinions of others, or dismiss them with a bemused shrug. They said that Harry St Rain .:ould not live up to the perfect and brilliant image he cultivated tor himself, so turned on others, satirising their foibles, caricaturing their beliefs, belittling their views. Many regarded his detach­ m�nt and disdain as social snobbery. They criticised the way he hid behind a sobriquet and set himself apart from student affairs . :\s for me, I found his aloofness both daunting and captivating. I saw

in his splendid isolation a way of making a virtue out of one's

loneliness. I read everything he published in Craccum, admiring his mtellectual precosity and mordant style. And on the strength of his allusions to H.L. Mencken, Evelyn Waugh, and Iris Murdoch, I nsiduously read their works . .\ly

first glimpse - or should I say vision? - of the elusive Harry

St Rain was of a tall , tanned individual hurrying through the .:loisters like the White Rabbit. 25

He was always in haste. He gave the impression that he was not so much bent on reaching his goal as anxious to leave the precincts of the university as quickly as possible. But if he was someone in flight, I, no doubt, in his eyes, was someone mired or floundering. I would work in the library for hours on end, industriously researching essays or struggling with hypothetical proofs, and trying not to meet the eyes of the woman with whom I had been hopelessly in love for the last year. But Harry would breeze in and out, his sky-blue shirt unbuttoned to the chest, confirming my conviction that though I had never known anyone like him, and would never hold my own in his company, he was, in some inexplicable way, like me. Perhaps it was the attraction of opposites. I had come of age in a small Taranaki town, and gone to an agricultural high school where I had failed to distinguish myself. By contrast, Harry had been blessed with every advantage, and had already proved himself academically. While he was articulate, well-read, and a master of irony, I was tongue-tied and reticent, and passed my exams only through dogged perseverance. In contrast to Harry, whom I regarded as an Adonis, gifted with good looks, intellectual acuity and confidence, I saw myself as Hephaestos, ugly, ill-favoured, and inferior.Yet, in time, I would come to understand that j ust as Harry set his sights too high, with the result that whatever he wrote fell short of his ideal and left him in despair, I started out with such a debased image of myself and my abilities that whatever I wrote made me feel that I was getting somewhere, and that one day I might amount to something after all.

26

Distance Lend s Enchantment

After finals that second year, Fletcher and I found work digging ditches on the site of a new housing development at Mangere. Harry, we heard, had gone north to work as a linesman for the Post and Telegraph Department, and we did not see him until the beginning of the new academic year. He was standing in a long queue, waiting to enrol. In contrast to everyone else in sandals and summer shirts, Harry was wearing a

heavy airforce greatcoat. Fletcher later explained that he'd been

given the coat by a Maori with whom he'd been working. Harry had admired the coat and innocently asked where he might buy one. To his astonishment and shame, his workmate took off the coat and insisted Harry have it. Fletcher reckoned this may have been the first time Harry had been given something without strings attached, by someone without an ulterior motive. In any event, he wore the coat everywhere, despite the summer heat, in celebration, he claimed, of a world of" custom and ceremony". But as

with his blue unbuttoned shirts and the poses he struck with

Thread Bear in his parents' landscaped garden, this new persona was ephemeral. Perhaps he saw me in a similar light, as someone testing for a bit part in a second-rate tragedy. Garbed in a black duffel coat, I spent most afternoons becoming bloated with beer in the Kiwi, Central or Grand. I did not drink to drown my sorrows but to conjure, for a few hours, that spurious sense of enlargement and self-confidence that may be given by a skinful of beer. When the 27

pubs closed at six, a group of us would make our way to the Golden Dragon in Grey's Avenue for half-orders of chop suey or chow mein, then head back to the campus to attend a talk. I would always take the last bus home to my parents' house in Mount Roskill, staring bleakly into the suburban darkness, the stirrings of a new poem in my head. When I try now to fathom the vague sense of desolation that dogged me then, I think it had more to do with my inability to place myself in relation to the past, the future, or the country in which I found myself than in any specific loss. Fletcher felt it too. We felt incomplete in ourselves, and unhappy with what we were. There was something missing, something that inhibited and diminished us. At times we blamed our parentage, believing that our fathers had failed us in some way. When Fletcher told me how his father had clumsily pressed money into his hands on the day he left home, unable to express his feelings in any other way, or when Harry confessed that his father had never shown him any physical affection, I recognised these signs of Anglo gauche­ ness in my own father. But more, I remembered the January day I returned home from a Student Congress at Curious Cove in the Marlborough Sounds and Dad and I went downtown to a movie. Standing behind him in the queue at the box office, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of the frailty of this man who had had to suffer my ingratitude, my bouts of drunkenness, and my adolescent tirades against his "bourgeois values". There were also times when we lamented the meagreness and marginality of our social circle, aware of how few of us there were - intellectuals, beatniks, poets, sustaining ourselves on European art, foreign literature, and imported jazz and blues. But some­ times we were given glimpses closer to home into what we were looking for. One autumn day Fletcher persuaded me to accompany him to meet the poet R.A.K. Mason. Mason's house was on the slopes 28

of Mt Eden, a villa much like any other in the street. His wife Dorothy made a pot of tea, and did most of the talking - mainly about the active part she and Ron played in the New Zealand­ China society. After tea and biscuits, Ron asked if we'd like to tag along while he wandered over Mt Eden, filling sacks with fallen leaves. He was a landscape gardener, he reminded us, and needed the leaves for mulch. Unfortunately, the poet did not mention poetry at all, and since Fletcher and I were familiar with Mason's Rimbaud-like repudia­ tion of literature in his early twenties, we were loathe to broach the subj ect. This silence troubled me, for though I knew many of Mason's poems by heart, and thought of him as the equal of any of his English and American contemporaries, I found it impossible to connect the writing with the man. I had expected Ron Mason to manifest the genius of his poems. I had imagined Fletcher and I coming away from our afternoon in his company transformed, the missing sides of ourselves discovered, our lives made more complete. But like pilgrims who have failed to witness a miracle, we felt disappointed. That winter, I reciprocated Fletcher's invitation by taking him to meet James K. Baxter in Wellington. I had first met Jim Baxter through my older sister, and we had exchanged a few letters and poems in the ensuing years . It was a windswept night in June - a fact I remember from the first line of a poem Jim sent me a week or two after our Wellington visit. Fletcher and I sat in the front room ofhis family bungalow in Ngaio. His wife, Jacquie, and their two children remained out of sight in the back of the house. By contrast with our visit to R.A.K. Mason, we talked poetry non-stop - or rather Baxter did. Where Mason had been laconic to the point of awkwardness, Jim creaked on and on like a waterwheel, churning out phrases, inundating us with images, and proffering world-weary words of wisdom . . . "About Ron Mason. He is a very good bloke indeed. Whether he can still write or not is beside the point. The poems come 29

out of a chasm of suffering: perhaps he is better off free of the chasm for a while at least. He has no outer skin. To be near him is to receive some kind of charge of acute sensitivity, rawness even, combined with the sense of rough j ustice of the union man. A New Zealand Camus." But again we came away empty-handed. For though our search was for mentors, path-finders or father-figures who might recog­ nise us as kinsmen and adopt us into a community of like-minded souls, Mason, Baxter, and McCahan (whose drinking circle in the Kiwi we sometimes j oined) were all too familiar, and too preoc­ cupied with their own struggles. I suspect that we saw them as the kind of people we risked becoming if we remained too long in the country that Colin McCahan described in 1 958 as "a landscape with too few lovers" and Baxter, a couple of years later, called "the body of our common love . . . murdered by triviality" . That same year I saw McCahan's Gate paintings in a small gallery off Symonds Street, and they knocked me out. Angular and globular shapes, hinged and adrift in fields of light. Figures against the ground with no fixed point of view. After-images moving from the frames and out of the room into the city which I re-entered with all my senses altered, as though I were high on hashish . I walked in a daze. Horizons were overturned. At times I did not know whether or not the pavement was on the same plane as the sea. I was seeing Auckland for the first time. I saw houses in windows and windows in the sky. I walked without knowing where I was going, and in Freeman's Bay the gas tanks were like tin cans floating between pylon and lattice, disobedient of gravity and perspective. But Auckland itself did not seem to register this event, though there were plenty of newspaper reviews dismissing McCahan's work as yet another example of the sort of art that a child or chimpanzee could do. I cannot speak for Fletcher, of course, but I hated the idea of having to fight this kind of losing battle, not for acclaim, but simply for acceptance. It wasn't a matter of getting 30

one's work published; Charles Brasch had already printed one of my poems, inspired by a reading of Arthur Koestler's critique of capital punishment, in the December 1 959 issue of LAndfall, and he was keen to see more of my work. It was a fear of being contin­ ually derided and dragged down by a petty prej udice against intel­ lectual and artistic striving that had the audacity to pass itself off as a down-to-earth, honest-to-goodness, home-grown philosophy. I was not really aware of it at the time, but I was already in the same mould as Mason, Baxter, and McCahon. Though I could not, as they did, see Christ in those that suffered, I instinctively proj ected my own sense of marginality onto outsiders and underlings . I also shared their mistaken assumption that the despised and rej ected are thereby virtuous, and the privileged vicious. In aligning oneself with the oppressed, I thought that one automatically stood on the side of truth. This kind of logic made me determined to change the world. To alleviate suffering, to do good works, to live among the poor. But this salvationist impulse had its origins, not in any direct exper­ ience of the poor, but in my own unexamined sense of victirnhood, as I came to realise when I ventured on a career in welfare. Our role models were all outsiders. For Harry, it was Evelyn Waugh, HL. Mencken, and Iris Murdoch; for Fletcher it was Scott Fitzgerald. As for me, I had already steeped myself in Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Wolfe and D. H . Lawrence, and that year, thanks to a recent gift of books to the Auckland University library by the Carnegie Foundation, I devoured American liter­ ature with a vengeance, and experimented with writing in the American grain. One week my role model was Edward Arlington Robinson, the next Wallace Stevens . . . Yet we longed for a more immediate exemplar. Someone, as Stevens put it, "beyond us yet ourselves". We found him in Herman Gladwin. Herman was in his early fifties, and almost as old as the century. He had set foot on every continent, seemed to have had more 31

incarnations than a cat, and his experience encompassed more history than any of us could grasp. A world where merchant ships still stowed canvas. Cities of horse-drawn cabs. Uncharted atolls . His vitality belied his age, leaving us to wonder what shape­ shifting secret had allowed him to move from country to country, wife to wife and trade to trade, so effortlessly. There was nothing of which he did not have an original opinion. As for his poems, I had heard or read nothing like them. Twenty-five years on, I sat with him during his dying days, talking of old times. He was -living in a shabby suburban room where he had roughly assembled the obj ects that had always defined his encampments: one of his model ships, a shelf of books, a battered folder of poems, a suitcase full of clothes, and a bar radiator which kept him warm and on which he grilled his staple of cheese on toast. As we talked, he upbraided me for persist­ ently getting the facts wrong about his life: I had always wanted to mythologise him. But, I protested, had he not always represented his past to us in mythological terms? In some ways he resembled Ezra Pound: wiry, energetic, cantankerous. He claimed to have been conceived in the rain on top of a horse-drawn bus somewhere between London Bridge and the Elephant and Castle. He was born in Barking, Essex, and spent his boyhood exploring the Thames marshes. His father was a glass-blower whose work included blowing penis-shaped hot­ water bottles for use in nunneries. His mother died of galloping consumption when he was five. At eighteen he left England, and worked all over the world as an ordinary seaman. One time, in San Francisco Bay, he met some New Zealand seamen and got fired up about seeing the South Pacific. A year or two later he jumped ship in Auckland. During the thirties he worked on and otT as a painter and sign-writer. He painted the old Parliament Buildings in Wellington, and was active in the Communist Party. It was Fletcher and Harry who discovered Herman, in Albert Park. On their way to a lecture, they noticed him sitting on a bench 32

by the fountain, smoking a cigarette. An hour later, recrossing the park, they found him still sitting in the same place, and asked him what he was doing. "Contemplating how one can measure both mass and velocity," Herman replied. He hastened to assure them that it was an aesthetic, not a philosophical, question. He was down to his last cigarette, and the quandary had presented itself as to whether he should keep the cigarette in its original form or send it up in smoke, which would then drift and dissipate pleasingly into the air. Fletcher and Harry told Herman that all through their lecture they could not stop thinking about him, and they asked where he lived and whether he was hungry. Herman had been living on an old scow moored at St Mary's Bay. He was a manic-depressive, so could not be trusted to do anything, but he had received free lodgings and pin money for occupying the scow and, as it were, taking care of it for its owners. W ith a galley and galley stove, and plenty of lumber in Winston's yard, he had been well set up. Absolutely perfect for an ex-seaman . Unfortunately, the owners had decided to hire a professional watchman, and he'd been laid off. Fletcher and Harry invited Herman back to their flat for a meal. He ended up spending the best part of a year with them, dossing on the sitting-room floor, going to student parties, and steadily reading through the books on Harry's shelves. Herman was a great autodidact. Blessed with the eclecticism of the self-made man, he possessed a genius for synthesising philos­ ophy, poetry, autobiography, anecdote and myth. In the Lome Street coffee bar where it had become our habit to gather every night, Herman held forth on Proust, Empedocles, Montaigne, Marx and Engels, Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, and Teutonic mythology. His mainstays at the time were Samuel Beckett's Watt and Laurens van der Post's Lost World cif the Kalahari. The latter he blithely urged me to embrace as a model for doing ethnography, and so transgress the boundaries that we, as students, were being taught to defend. Harry never j oined us. As enthralled as any of us by Herman's 33

homespun philosophy, he nonetheless kept his distance. And his cool. He was, as Herman so memorably described him, "couth, kempt, and deeply gruntled" . But Fletcher and I were spellbound by Herman's impromptu lectures on the dialectic, his latest poem, and his cabalistic draw­ ings. Our age difference mattered in only one respect. Herman had an older person's intolerance of youth's egoism, impetuosity, and moral gaucheness. He was always berating us for talking too loudly, moving too clumsily, acting without forethought. Once he harangued me for setting down my coffee cup noisily in its saucer. "Even the most mundane action," he said, "should be carried out mindfully." One of his favourite drawings depicted a small figure hurrying across an open field. In its tracks lay a trampled daisy. Above the scene, Herman wrote 1 + 1

=

3 , by which he meant

that our actions have repercussions that go far beyond the field of our immediate awareness. That heedlessly crushed daisy would, in the fullness of time, change the course of history. The fate of any individual, like the future of the planet, was determined by the accumulated effects of a trillion such trivial and thoughtless acts. It was inevitable that one day I would trample the daisy. Indeed, in a poem from this period, Herman made me the very quintes­ sence of heedless youth: Loud man that toils and sighs remember on your young cheek the water from other eyes. Loud man whose art is as short as the season of the ant remember the pant of the lover under night skies. 34

Old man dried milk skimmed of its red rimmed view confused in the river of youth remember the blue beams of the sea remember the pangs of thy birth of thy parting step on step over fallen timbers over old smoke; Winter never forgets.

Perhaps it was the fear of such a sentencing that led Harry to keep his distance. He knew that sooner or later we would all bear the brunt of Herman's censure and ire, if only because we were young and had the advantage of a formal education. But Harry's absence from that corner table where we drank Cona coffee and sat engrossed in talk over wine bottles encrusted with candlewax may simply have been because he could not allow himself to become too close to another human soul, having discovered too early the love that gives with one hand only to take away with the other. Auckland, he once said cryptically, was a principality of pain. And so I imagined him out there on the edge of the night, moving in some charmed circle of his own choosing, keeping the world at arm's length, waiting, waiting for the sun to rise.

35

M yse l f M ust I Remake

I f I stuck at my studies, it wasn't because I was a scholar. It was because I could alternate academic life with life in the "real" world - seagulling on the waterfront, working as a postman, a builder's labourer or a storeman. For in those days you could absent yourself from classes and defer essays for months on end, then make good the deficit at the eleventh hour. Having "got terms" you seques­ tered yourself in the university library, swatted maniacally for six weeks, and sat finals. If I were an undergraduate today, I would not survive. This pattern was, of course, also born of economic necessity; my bursary was not enough to live on. But most importantly, it was consistent with my view that academic life was too removed from the burly-burly of the world. Though captivated by the ideas I was encountering in philosophy, psychology and anthropology, I feared that this intellectual life would compromise or stifle my craving for "reality" and my desire to write. Lew Stewart, with whom I had worked at the Poultryman's Cooperative, often came to mind. Once in a working weekend a man told me That reality will wander along the all ey s Like a cur in hunger down the garbage cans. It is hard imagining a way of saying When the way was living to that man.

36

Working on the wharves or on a building site was a way of "keeping me honest," as the saying went. It forced me to explain myself to men who thought that " going to school" at my age suggested a reluctance to grow up. And it gave me a chance to exchange a world of texts and abstractions for a world of face-to­ face encounters and direct experience. But these contrary impulses unsettled me. When I was a boy, my grandfather often chided me for never sticking at things, for always changing horses in midstream. Certainly there was no denying that my enthusiasms came and went in bewilderingly quick succession. A passion for Meccano model-building culminated, at thirteen, in my winning an inter­ national prize for a miniature mechanical kiwi, and indicated to my parents a future as an engineer. A couple of years later, my meticulous collections of native ferns and mosses revealed a talent for natural science. But when at sixteen I became fascinated by fossil hominids, and wrote my first poems, these enthusiasms went unremarked - for no one in my family had ever heard of anthro­ pology. The idea of making a living from writing poetry was, of course, too absurd to even consider. In the face of my grandfather's scepticism, I invoked Ecclesi­ astes: "Whatever thy hand findest to do, do it with all thy might." My grandfather was unimpressed; my grandmother even more so. Wanderlust, she enj oined, was as bad as any other lust. At university my desire to break through the envelope of my upbringing and broaden my horizons had met with Herman's approval. When my academic advisers insisted I choose between anthropology and English on the grounds that science and art were mutually incompatible, Herman said I should do no such thing. Invoking the image of a stew, he said the more ingredients that went into it, and the longer it simmered, the better it would taste. Surprisingly, Herman did not suggest travel as an answer. Perhaps this option was obvious, given his own itinerant life. Possibly he 37

saw travel as an escape. And I had yet to see anthropology, like the army, as a means of seeing the world. At the end of my third year at Auckland University, my thoughts turned to Wellington and the south . I 'd visited the city once when I was seventeen, and had never forgotten waking one morning in the all-night train from Taranaki as it wound its way down the narrow littoral of the Kapiti coast. Windows of wind-scoured sea and blue sky were suddenly shouldered aside by the Stygian narrows of a tunnel, before the train emerged at Korokoro in sudden light, and the harbour drew me into its outstretched arms. In returning to Wellington, I imagined that this adolescent vision would be restored, and when Harry agreed to j oin me there, I felt that my new incarnation was guaranteed. Up until this time, Harry and I had rarely met, and although I thought of him as a kindred spirit we had never really talked. Almost everything I knew about him had come from Fletcher, or was hearsay. Our first meeting was at the Cenotaph. I had been in Wellington for a couple of months, working on the waterfront; Harry had j ust arrived. We were both nervous and tongue-tied, which may explain why I have no memory of what we said. Perhaps we both felt a little like Henry Miller, meeting Blaise Cendrars for the first time. It was December 1 3 , 1 934. The American writer was forty-three and had just published his first book. Cendrars was four years older, a co-founder with Guillaume Apollinaire of /'esprit nouveau in modern poetry, a veteran of the First World War, a seasoned traveller, author of twenty-seven books - including poetry, fiction, and collections of folktales - and a friend of such luminaries as Marc Chagall, Amedeo Modigliani, Fernand Leger, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Eric Satie, Igor Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau. Understandably, Miller was in awe of the older writer, despite a magnanimous review Cendrars had recently written of Tropic 38

of Cancer for the Dadaist j ournal Orbes. In the piece entitled "Un Ecrivain Americain N ous Est N e", Cendrars saluted Miller as "profoundly one of us, in spirit, style, power and giftedness . . . a universal writer, like all those who have worked out a way of expressing in a book a personal vision of Paris." On a wintry afternoon not long after the review appeared, Cendrars walked into the studio at 1 8 Villa Seurat where Miller lived with his pal Alfred Pedes. Cendrars was burly, but not tall. With his battered features and smoker's squint he looked like an ex-prizefighter. But the tough exterior and ebullient manner belied his intelligence, ironic humour, and love of solitude. His eyes were as blue as the packets of Gauloises Bleues that he chain­ smoked. Like Cervantes, he had lost an arm on the battlefield. When he gestured, the empty sleeve of his jacket flapped from his right shouder, and when he lit a cigarette he held the matchbox between stump and armpit, and struck the match with his left hand. He was famous as a raconteur. So was Miller. But not, it seems, in the company of Cendrars. Alfred Pedes later described the meeting: Aft er an initial ex ch ange of cordial greetings accompanied by th e customary

accolade, Cendrars began

if Cancer. His

to give h is impressions of Tropic

praise gush ed forth with a warmth and fervour wh ich

moved Mill er profoundl y.Th ough h e understood Engl ish perfectl y h e refused to speak it. He did so perh aps because h e th ough t of Mill er in terms of a writer " de

chez nous"

wh o woul d h ave been

well advised to h ave been born in France. " C 'etais pas malin d '�tre ne en Amerique! "

he ex cl aimed in h is

th undering voice th at was meant to reverberate in th e wide open spaces of th e four continents. To cement a fr iendsh ip food and wine are indispensabl e. W ith a negl igent gesture of h is uniq ue h and Cendrars waved away Henry 's sh ame- faced confession th at h e was broke. He pretended th at h e h ad just cash ed a ch eq ue for th e ex press purpose of giving / 'auteur

39

du Tropique du Cancer marchand de vin . . .

a good time.

"]ustement, je connais un petit

"

I n th e street h e h ail ed a taxi and gave th e driver th e address of his

petit marchand de vin

-

somewh ere in Montmartre, near

th e Place des Abbesses. From th e moment we boarded th e taxi Cendrars talked and never stop ped till we reach ed our destination. I t seemed to me th at h e was in an ex ceptionall y ex pansive mood, but I l ater found out th at this was his normal condition . . .

Pedes goes on to describe a wine shop with sawdust on the floor where Cendrars is given a royal welcome. As food and wine are brought to the table, Cendrars entertains Pedes and Miller with astonishing stories about his adventures on the upper Amazon. Then, "the performance over, he calmly beckoned to the patron for more wine and returned to his rocquifort au beurre. Eating, however, did not deter him from talking. From Amazonia he jumped straight into the trenches of Flanders, then by a minor detour via Italy and Russia proceeded to the heart of Africa. Although there was no positive transition between one subject and another, they were nevertheless mysteriously interconnected, strung like beads of experience on the threads of life. In the three or four hours spent at the dinner table we had the impression of having partici­ pated in some of the adventures he has made legendary." Miller was "flabbergasted by Cendrars' wizardry," writes Pedes. "He recognised in Cendrars a sort of cosmic brother, and his heart went out to him." But a skeptic might point out that if Miller had not accepted the role of happy acolyte the meeting may not have gone so well. Cendrars could be a blagueur and a bad listener, unwilling to brook competition. "When he told a story," his daughter once observed, "he could not stand to be contradicted or interrupted. If anyone called into question, or worse, agreed with what he was saying, he would become enraged . . . He would sulk. To speak while he was speaking was to stand between him and his creation. He resented it as an intrusion. It was incongruous, obscene. It broke the spell." 40

As for Miller, the meeting with his hero was a mixed blessing. As soon as he and Cendrars had gone their separate ways, after nine or ten hours in each other's company, Miller sat down and wrote a long letter to Anals Nin. It was two in the morning. "I have just gotten away from him," Miller confesses, "had to run away. As a man I must have sorely disappointed him. I was almost taciturn. A cause de toi! And yet, what a day! What a night! He's a real man I tell you, and I feel bad that I let him down. Perhaps he is that one man I wrote about recently, the man I expected to come forward and hail me. And how I fucked myself! " Five days later, his mood is just as gloomy. In another letter to Ana·is, he confesses, " In my present state I hesitate meeting Blaise Cendrars again. He had asked to see me again, very soon, and I promised to invite him for dinner. But I haven't the gusto for it. I may feel sad when he comes - and that would spoil things. I can't even write him a letter tho ' I 've tried to several times. He must have a strange opinion of me." It's often occurred to me that had I gone out of my way to meet Henry Miller - whose work I once tried to emulate, and about whom I have written so much - I would undoubtedly have been as intimidated as Miller in the presence of Blaise Cendrars. Our need for heroes makes fools of us all; worse, it prevents us recog­ nising the flaws in those we extol. When I read Henry Miller's letters to Anals Nin, or Miriam Cendrars' account of her father's failings, I feel enormous relief. No friendship can carry the burden of idealisation. It's all very well describing the rapport between Miller and Cendrars as spiritual kinship, as Pedes does - an affinity between "beings belonging to the same species, having the same wave-length, magnitude and calibre." But the truth is more banal, as would prove to be the case with my friendship with Harry. When one's expectations become too great, the possi­ bility of disappointment is more than the relationship can bear. 41

Then, one has no choice but to distance oneself from it in order to salvage the ideal, or - since I' amour se revele en se retirer - avail oneself of distance to renew the terms of engagement. We rented the lower storey of a house perched high above Evans Bay. Sitting in one of those cumbersome red Wellington buses, toiling up the switchback road to Roseneath with its clay embank­ ments studded with flax and pohutukawa, I felt exhilarated and invincible. Years of loneliness had made me hungry for love and friendship. In Harry I saw the possibility of what I called at the time "a redemptive and illuminating blood pact". It was the same with every girl I met; I created a Platonic fantasy of twinship, a marriage of true minds, instantaneous completion. But I was too intense, too absolute. I expected too much. My longing to be saved from myself repelled the very people on whom I set my heart. Harry was j ust the opposite. His reserve and studied calm intrigued women. They were attracted, as I had been, by his splendid inaccessibility. Within days of moving into our flat I had persuaded New Zealand's leading young Trotskyite, and our milkman - whom I chanced to meet in a French Reading Knowledge class at univer­ sity - to j oin us. Harry referred to our flatmates as Leon and Clyde. It was Leon's first venture away from home, and his notion of cooking a meal was to boil a pound of mincemeat and serve it unadorned. Clyde subsisted on milk. Our fridge was soon full of it, and the path outside the back door became impassable for crates of empties . When our landlady - a divorcee who favoured peroxide hair and gold j ewelry - insisted we do something about it, Harry disarmed her with his Midas smile. Her small son, Nathan, was another matter. The boy formed an attachment to Harry and was always imploring him to play rugby. Memory yields these fragments, like bone fishhooks from a midden. But was the life we lived any less fragmentary? I remember 42

gathering paua at Point Jerningham. I remember a day in March at Balaena Bay, pine needles, seaweed and bleached sticks gummed together at the water's edge with spume. Harry and I were sun­ bathing on the stony beach. The water was already too cold for swimming. A white balustrading marked the zigzag path down to Kio bay. "As if stitched to the hillside with surgical gut," Harry remarked. I had just finished readingjustine. Now it was Harry's turn to be seduced by Durrell's breathtaking similes and turns of phrase. I still have my copy of the book, its covers warped from lying in the sun that day. But in my memory it belongs to Harry, who was carried away by the nostalgic portraits ofJustine and Melissa, and by Durrell's stately prose that rendered even the most tragic event luxuriant and entrancing. But while the Alexandria of the Quartet captivated Harry, it was Cavafy's Alexandria that spoke to me. The city as a cage. The ines­ capable ruin that haunts its citizens wherever they travel, drawing them back in memory for a final reckoning. In Durrell's poem,

Alexandria, you can hear these echoes of "the old man of the city" . To the lucky now who have lovers or friends, W ho move to their sweet undiscovered ends, Or whom the great conspiracy deceives, I wish these whirling autumn leaves: Promontori es splashed by the sal ty sea, Groaned on in darkness by the tram To horizons of love or good luck or more love As for me I now move Through m any negatives to what I am.

With the onset of winter, we abandoned our eyrie above the bay. Clyde needed more room for his milk crates. Leon was readying himself for an assault on Christchurch, which he reckoned to be ripe for revolution. And Harry said he needed more privacy. 43

Perhaps he was oppressed by my expectations of intimacy, much as I felt burdened by his romantic image of me as someone destined to burn out early, his promise unfulfilled. Over the next few months I inhabited a series of flea-infested private hotels with names like Savoy, Albemarle and Rutland. Still attached to Henry Miller's and George Orwell's picaresque accounts of being down and out, and of the lower depths, I felt at home among the retired working men who haunted these shabby buildings. I found solace in a shared beer or a flutter on the horses, and grew used to their catarrhal choruses and urine reek - symptoms of failing lungs and sphincters - that filled the gloomy corridors both night and day. On Sundays they hurled their empties into a lot across the way, the shattering of glass their ultimate gesture of rage against the failing of the light. Harry also stayed at the Rutland for a while. He wanted to see my decrepit world for himself. We invented nicknames for the old codgers who sat hunched over their cornflakes and brain patties in the breakfast room, gulled out of melancholy by Faith and Hope, the two Maori waitresses who worked there. Twice Paid, the hotel proprietor, and his wife, Grimalkin, were forever reminding us that our rent was overdue. And Bertrand Russell - the spitting image of the great iconoclast - embarked optimistically each morning on an expedition to the TAB, but spent his evenings in the dining room, groaning softly to himself, bemoaning his losses. We were both in revolt against respectability. We had no intention of joining any political party, no matter how ideologi­ cally correct its agenda. We valued independence of mind. Our unspoken motto : epater le bourgeoisie! My few months working as a clerk in the Treasury were dedi­ cated to this kind of vainglory. When told that I had to wear a suit, I went out and bought an expensive two-piece tweed outfit that answered the description but outraged my superiors. When instructed to make a scrapbook of clippings from the Financial

Times on GATT, I was careful to paste in plenty of ads for Lucas 44

batteries - a subversive allusion to my supervisor's surname. When asked to measure the clock face in the Board Room, I performed the task during the course of a high-level meeting of senior heads of the Treasury, the Reserve Bank and the Ministry of Finance. And when entrusted with taking proofs of the Budget and

Economic Survey to the Government Printing Office, I ensured that the statistics were subtly revised in conformity with what Harry had told me about the true state of the New Zealand economy. For my exasperated superiors, this was the last straw, and I was sacked. As a final gesture of defiance I pushed Lucas's collection of potted cacti off the windowsill during the lunch break. They plummeted seven floors to form a symmetrical crater of earth and terracotta shards in the dark blue roof of a Navy Department car. Harry delighted in my escapades, and even went along with me in my madness. The day after I left the Treasury, we went up to the roof of the Rutland and dropped clothes pegs on the heads of public servants descending the steps to Lambton Quay. Later, we strolled downtown wearing policeman masks cut from the backs of cornflakes packets. Inevitably, we were accosted by two real constables who did not take kindly to our idea of fun. Harry was not fazed. Signalling to me to act dumb, he began some spiel about how I was a victim of a broken home, and had lost my marbles, and should not be judged too harshly. I thought he was in complete control of the situation until the cops said he would have to accompany them to the police station. With a pitying look, they told me I was free to go. If Harry was to be believed, he was often rumbled by the police, usually late at night when he was walking along Oriental Parade alone. There was something about Harry which people in authority did not like. He was too enigmatic. Too glib. He gave them the impression that they were the butt of some private j oke. Often as not he would get roughed up. How else could one protect oneself in the face of his mercurial and condescending manner?

45

In Clarissa Young, Harry met his match. He was introduced to her by Brij en Gupta who had recently taken up an appointment in Asian Studies at the university. Like a Cheshire cat, Gupta presided over a select group of students - at once guru, matchmaker and hermeneut. Clarissa was stunningly beautiful, her face vaguely oriental, her smile an entreaty and a trap. Harry and I both fell under her spell, though it was to Harry, of course, that she turned, and Gupta who gave the liaison his blessing. Soon after meeting Clarissa, Harry told me she was cold. "One part woman, three parts a child," he said. He could not understand why he was so deeply drawn to her. That the attraction was mutual was obvious. They would sit together in the Ghuznee Street coffee bar where we hung out in the evenings, looking for all the world like lovers. Yet everyone knew they were not. Looking back, I wonder if Harry did not see himself in her. Someone unable to yield to love, who could not trust the other. They would gaze into each other's eyes as one might gaze at one's own image in the still surface of a dark pond. And Clarissa would break into laughter as if a spring, wound to breaking point, had just snapped. Though it was all display, I envied them. They made me wonder whether the semblance of love wasn't more to be desired than actual passion. One night, at a party in Gupta's house, I watched as Harry lay supine on a couch with Clarissa leaning over him, pecking at his flesh with the languor of a tropical bird. Though their love­ making was like some tableau vivant, I felt disconcerted and hurt. I got drunk. I went out into the night and wandered for hours under the stone pines and cedars in the Botanical Gardens,j ealous and bereft. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the affair ended. Rumour had it that Clarissa had called it off. Gupta let it be known that Clarissa had baulked at the idea of "settling down" . While it amused me to think of Harry in any domestic role, I did not risk asking him 46

if what I had heard was true. In the coffee bar where I repaired every evening, Gupta judged Clarissa to be cold and naive. Others called her ruthless and cruel. One mutual friend opined that Clar­ issa was bisexual. Neither she nor Harry showed up to advise us otherwise. A few days later I was taken aback by a call from Clarissa. Would meet her? She needed someone to talk to. Could we meet at Suzie's coffee bar at five? Over coffee, I hardly heard a word she was saying. I was aware of little else than the fact that I was alone with her, and that she was taking me into her confidence. When I told Harry of our meeting, he was enraged. He stood at the foot of Plimmer's Steps, demanding that I not see her again, asking me to see things from his point of view. It was the first time I had glimpsed his vulnerability. But I saw her again, and imagined I was in love with her. We walked along the waterfront, we talked of what we wanted to do with our lives. If we mentioned Harry it was only to distance ourselves from him, and create a space where we could come into our own. In the weekends we climbed Mt Kaukau, emerging from the soughing, creaking pine plantation onto a windblown ridge that overlooked valleys of indelible greenness and, beyond, the sea. I sensed that there could be nothing physical between us. Perhaps I

was

respecting Harry's wishes. Or was overwhelmed by my own

inadequacy in comparison with him. One thing was sure, none of us would remember the events of this time in quite the same way. Gupta would describe how a devas­ tated Clarissa sought refuge with him. How he drove with her to the top of Mt Victoria one stormy night and tried to console her. Clarissa, mindful of her self-image as a feminist, would commit her story to print thirty years later, recounting an agonising choice between marriage and domesticity on the one hand, and an inde­ pendent academic career on the other. According to her version of events, she one day took the cable car from Lambton Quay to 47

the university, and between buying her ticket at the bottom and getting off at the top decided to ditch Harry and pursue a career. W hat resolution! As for my own recollections, I recall Clarissa saying that Wellington was a carousel. And so the carousel turned: Clarissa and I drifted apart, and Harry met Annette. I find it difficult to describe Annette without typecasting her, without making her out to be simply an example of a class, a member of a set. Perhaps this is how she wanted to be seen. Perhaps this is how I wanted to see her. W hile Harry and I were desperate to stand out, and cast ourselves in heroic roles, Annette, I believed, was desperate to belong - but to the right circle. Like me, she was a child of small-town New Zealand. Both of us, I like to think, were driven to remake ourselves in some more cosmopolitan image. W hereas I took a literary and intellec­ tual route, she sought to refashion herself in the image of a social elite, possibly because she readily accepted the view, typical of our parents' generation, that England was synonymous with home, security and respectability. So she emulated an English upper­ middle class ideal. She improved her speech, polished her manners, looked to her grooming, and wore a cashmere sweater, court shoes, camel-hair coat, and carried a pigskin handbag. She had none of the dark mystery or intellectual panache of Clarissa Young, but what she lacked in style she made up for in self-assurance. Her goals were limited, and therefore attainable. Her self-image was consistent and clear, and thereby she gave the impression that she could be relied upon. In Harry she found an exemplar of the class she aspired to belong to. And Harry saw in her an admirer and guarantor, someone who might redeem the upbringing he had struggled to repudiate, and forgive him his trespasses. A cynic might say - as Gupta indeed did - that Harry had "settled for" Annette. But if she was a low-risk lover. Harry was a complete gamble. His affair with Clarissa seemed to have precipitated some 48

terrible unhappiness in him. It kept him from responding deeply to Annette's love, and hung about him like a dark cloud. At this time I was working a night shift in a Newtown bake­ house, running an automatic bread slicing and wrapping machine. Clyde had left me his ten-speed racing bike when our Hitaitai flat disbanded, and I used it to ride to work. One night, as I was setting off, I came upon Harry leaning against the door jamb of his hotel room, his eyes half closed - like Finn at the beginning of Iris Murdoch's Under the Net. I couldn't help thinking there was something theatrical and rehearsed about the way he stood there, but I was used to his mannerisms by now, and set no store by them. However, when I spoke to him I saw that he was afraid. I asked if he was all right, and of course he said he was. But ten minutes later, as I was cycling between the tramlines in Courtenay Place, which glistened in the street lights after rain, I suddenly felt compelled to go back. I braked hard. My bike skidded on the wet tramlines. Convinced that Harry was going to kill himself, I stood in the dark and deserted road near the corner ofTaranaki Street, not knowing which way to turn or what to do. What does one do with premonitions? They fly in the face of reason . They are seldom confirmed by the course of subsequent events. One risks looking foolish if one acts on them. In any event, by the time the premonition has come fully into one's conscious­ ness it is usually too late to act. All these thoughts passed through my mind as I stood in the

street before climbing back on my bike and cycling slowly toward Newtown. Harry survived the night. We never spoke of the incident. A few days later he left Wellington. Not long after Harry's departure, Annette sought me out. She was in deep distress. Apparently Harry had been unable to commit himself to her. There were things he needed to resolve in himself. 49

And only in Auckland could he do this. I was touched. In Annette's bewildered face I saw my own misery. But it was worse for her. She was in love with Harry. Because of Harry, she had come to realise that the young solicitor to whom she had been engaged was someone she could never love. She had called off the engagement. There was no going back. But what was she to do now? I could neither help nor comfort her. Then she surprised me by confessing that she did not really know who Harry was. He had confided little to her about his life. Her questions had all been answered by evasive hints, mysterious allusions, unfinished sentences. "I don't think anyone knows him, or that he knows himself," I said. "Not in the sense you mean. Not in the sense that one knows where one is going, what one is going to do with one's life. I think this is the knowledge that he does not want to have, that he shrinks from, that he fears." "What about his family?" "I 've never met them." "But you knew him in Auckland. You were friends, weren't you? What was he like there?" "Much the same as he is here." Disappointed, Annette almost ended our conversation. But then she rallied, and asked: "Why did he promise so much? W hy did he let me believe he loved me as much as I loved him?" It was to be the only intimate exchange we would ever have. W hen she found that I did not have the key that might unlock Harry's soul, she turned away. And at that moment, I think, she began to see in me the side of Harry's personality she could neither understand nor accept. She split him in two. And while he now became her knight in shining armour, albeit an inconstant one, I became the uncouth berserker, whose howls of pain on the tundra at night would no longer be construed as the cries of a lost soul within the gates. 50

At the end of the year I found work as a steward on the Maori, which sailed nightly between Wellington and Lyttelton. I shared a six-berth cabin with five gay men, whose badinage was unre­ lenting. Scotch Annie would ask me, "What's the difference between a straight New Zealander and a queer New Zealander?" then tell me, "Five beers" . Or catching me reading Moby Dick, which he immediately translated as "Maybe Dick" , he would try to caj ole me down from my bunk to j oin the party. I would try to sleep through the drinking and carousing, but there were nights when it was all too much and I went on deck and stood at the taffrail, watching the churning wake in the windswept darkness as if it were an image of my own confusion. In Lyttelton, I would take refuge among the lichen-covered stones and tawny grass of the Port Hills or visit Terry Cutler in Christchurch, trying to piece together the story of who I was. W hy was I so susceptible to their gibes and repartee? I had never felt sexually attracted to men. Yet I recoiled from the thought that men might covet me, and it weighed on my mind that my friendship with Murray Groves (one of my anthropology teachers at Auckland) had been misconstrued as a homosexual dalliance. After unsuccessfully trying to transfer to the Hinemoa, where the stewards were said to be as straight as the

Maori stewards were bent, I signed off the articles and made my way back to Auckland to lick my wounds. Harry was working as a postman. Fletcher was unhappily married and teaching at the university. We would meet occasionally in a pub to get plastered and complain about our lots. I had a sense that we were all in a dark wood, a place of forking paths, emotionally lost. We had come of age in the fifties - when men did not know how to treat to women as equals rather than as sex obj ects, when our ignorance of our own feelings made us panic at the thought of baring our souls to, or physically embracing, another man, and when alcohol was our panacea if not our salvation. One evening, after several hours of hard drinking with Fletcher and Harry in the 51

Albert Hotel, I perversely told them that I had "changed my sex" . With hindsight, I think I was possibly pre-empting a conclusion that I felt they were about to reach. In my outrageous disclosure I hoped to salvage some sense of determining my own destiny at a time when my whole world seemed to be collapsing around me. But behind my tormented desire to spit on the world into which I had been born, to degrade myself in drunkenness and flout every convention, lay the unshakeable belief that this was all a necessary prelude to my rebirth in some other place, some other guise. And years later, when I began to find my feet, it would be this curious connection between degradation and regeneration, this perverse but universal impulse to contravene that which is in order to realise one's own capacity to be, that would become the leitmotif in all my anthropological writing.

52

O rd ina r y Mad ness

T he phrase is Charles Bukowski's. It's what I suffered from back then, toing and froing between the magnetic poles of Auckland and Wellington, torn between my desire to write and my yearning for a different life. Harry and Annette were now living in a sun-filled flat at Oriental Bay. They listened to the music of Bartok, Vivaldi and Respighi. They drank Campari sodas in the late afternoon. The kitchen smelled of freshly ground coffee. There was fruit on the table in a wooden bowl, and flag irises in glass vases. Art books and

House and Garden magazines were scattered about. It was a place of elegance and happiness so far removed from my own under­ ground life that when I visited them I felt like a cockroach. Their parties were like pieces of meticulous theatre. Glamorous women reclined on the Sanderson-print settee like butterflies catching the light. Men in pressed trousers and ironed shirts absented themselves from conversation in clouds of Sobranie smoke. Annette was in her element, laughing easily, fixing drinks. Harry drifted among the crowd like a tropical fish, trapped in the sunlight he had always sought. Everything about him belied the rumours I had heard: that he had talked to Annette of the hollow­ ness of his life and threatened suicide. And yet, among the golden lads and girls that would not, like chimney sweepers, come to dust, I felt a deep and subversive kinship with Harry, and half expected him at any moment to rej oin me in the shadows. What I failed to understand was that the very world whose shallowness appalled 53

him, rescued him from drowning in the depths. Th ere's a c ool web of langu ag e winds us in, Retreat from t oo much joy or too much fear: We g row s ea-g reen at last and c oldly die In brininess and volubility.

He liked to quote this poem of Robert Graves's about the way language spells away the overhanging night. He saw literature less as

something one laboured at than as a supernatural gift. A form

of magic. He referred to himself as a writer long before I saw any evidence - apart from the portable Olivetti he kept on the desk near the window and his pieces in Craccum - that he indeed wrote. Where writing was my lifeline, it was, for him, a saving illusion. I worked for a while as a proofreader on Truth. Wellington, which a year before had been for me a place of infinite promise, had now become a place of defeat. I wrote poems in which I described myself as a dirty sheet of newsprint blown down an alleyway, crumpled against a iron fire-escape, lying sodden in the gutter. My weekly pittance as a proofreader was blown on grog. Some days I went without food. I huddled under the thin blankets in my hotel room trying to keep warm, or sat at my table in a duffel coat, bashing away at my typewriter in a desperate attempt to transcend my surroundings. At night I would scratch myself until my skin was raw and bleeding, and try to annihilate the hundreds of fleas that bred in the scrim-covered walls. Weekends were worst. With nothing to do and no money in my pocket, I would prowl wind-swept streets, inhabited only by drifters and the Salvation Army band. Sometimes I would beg the price of a meal from a passer-by, and use the money to sit in the Roxy cinema for five hours (Action in the Roxy manner - you said it) . watching B-grade horror films or westerns. Little boy lost, he t akes hims elf so s erious ly,

54

h e brags of h is mi sery, h e likes to live dangerously.

So Bob Dylan sang in his "Visions ofJohanna" . But my visions were all of the fortunate life that I believed Harry and Annette were living in their flat near St Gerard's, overlooking the harbour, sheltered from the storm. Whenever I appeared on their doorstep, Annette made me feel like an intruder - a vestige of the life Harry had now put behind him. She disguised her dislike in raillery. She saw me as a comic figure, though I, of course, failed to see the j oke. She called me Estragon, sharing Harry's view that Samuel Beckett, whose work I admired, was anarchic and morbid. She teased me about my "pension-cheque" clothes, my unwashed socks, my job on Truth. The accusations were justified, if cruel.

I returned to Auckland, and to the waterfront. I kept away from the university. My goal now was to save enough money to go abroad. But then I met Candace Urquhart. At Auckland University, I used to see her almost every day, but had never been able to bring myself to speak to her. Like me, she spent long hours in the university library. But to steal a glance in her direction left me disoriented for hours. She was a music student. A flautist. Strawberry blond hair, unblemished skin, imperfect teeth. Not conventionally beautiful. It was her aloofuess that drew me to her, a self-containedness born, I imagined, of some unfathomable sadness. I attended all her recitals, fantasised meeting her, yet dreaded the prospect. What would the daughter of a wealthy and well-known Auckland surgeon ever see in me - a callow, tongue-tied youth from a backwater Taranaki town? A party in Remuera brought us together. She said she knew of me. She'd read some of my poems in student magazines. I recited her a few lines from an elegy I 'd written for my psychology 55

teacher, Harry Scott, who had been killed in a climbing accident in the Southern Alps. One death passes toward my own before l igh t falls upon th is l and; grass is forsaken by th e vall ey wind; seeds are taken to death unsown, before l igh t fall s upon th is l and.

My words were drowned by the din, and I felt foolish to be saying them. She said she was sorry about my teacher's death; she had heard that he was a good man, and the poem did him j ustice. I felt grateful, but was under no illusions. I sensed that she saw nothing in me, and not wanting to impose, I accepted that we would probably never meet again. One Friday night I was browsing in Progressive Books in Darby Street. Posters from China hung overhead: watercolour horses, bamboo groves, workers of the world united and smiling beneath billowing red flags. Shelf after shelf was stacked with works by Marx and Engels, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung from the Moscow Publishing House. W hen I glanced up, she was standing at the counter. My face burned. I was suddenly conscious of my dirty overalls and hobnailed boots. I did not know whether to run or hide. But she spotted me in the gloom and worked her way around the book tables until she was near enough to speak. "What are you doing here?'' "What are you doing here?" She explained that she'd dropped by to see the man who owned the bookshop. His daughter was a friend of hers, and had recently gone to England. Candace had come to get Helen's address. "Are you going to England?" "I might. I 've applied for a scholarship to the Royal Conserva­ tory. What are you doing?" 56

"Seagulling." "Which is? " "Working on the wharves." "Aren't you going to go on with your anthropology?" "I 'm not sure. I want to get away from academe for a while. I want to do something useful in the world." The absurd phrase seemed to strike some chord with her. She said she felt the same. Becoming a flautist had been her father's idea. He was a frustrated musician, and she had grown up doing his bidding, trying to please or at least appease him. But increas­ ingly she'd felt as though she were a mere instrument of his will; she wanted to do something other than music. How could music make any difference? How could one make music when the world was crying out to be fed and clothed and housed? We both forgot why we had come into the bookshop. Talking fervently about the woes of the world and the need to commit one's energies to changing things for the better, we left the little red books and communist manifestos behind us and walked up from the basement into the blinding light of the afternoon. We met almost every day. Whenever I wasn't working, I would ring her parents' house and ask if she was there. Her mother would usually answer the phone. Distant and disdainful, she made me feel like an annelid worm. I quailed at the thought of ever making her acquaintance. As it turned out, Candace had no intention of having her parents meet me. I was never invited to the house, and we would rendezvous outside a cinema or coffee bar. In the weekends we would go sailing in her father's yacht, The Magic Flute . . . though it is not strictly true to say we sailed, since Candace always switched on the engine and steered the craft out into the Hauraki Gulf as if she were behind the wheel of her father's Jaguar. At Waiheke Island, Candace anchored the yacht in an isolated cove and we swam ashore. We spent most of the afternoon on the beach together, talking or gathering shells, and at dusk swam 57

back to the yacht. I towelled myself dry and got dressed on deck, while Candace went below. Then she called me down. I remember thinking that I had come into some fabulous fortune that would crumble to dust if I were not vigilant. She said, "I cannot promise you anything, but I want to give you what is wholly mine to give." I thought it was the most astonishing thing anybody had ever said to me, and as she undressed and we fell onto the narrow bunk with the sea knocking against the sides of the craft and darkness descending, I told her I loved her. She was like quicksilver. An embodiment of the tinsel and cinematic world I had dreamed of entering when I was a boy. I wrote poems about the Gulf, and believed her when she said they touched her. I floated through the days, sustained by my infatua­ tion, intoxicated by the thought of seeing her again. But then she let me go, and I plunged into such deep despair that there were days when I thought of nothing else but how I could drown myself in that same gulf we had sailed upon in such splendour. She told me she had decided to go to England. It was what Daddy wanted, and Mummy too. "Aren't you going to congratulate me?" she said. I stammered something, and asked her to promise she would write. "No," she said, "let's not write. I hate letters." "Then I will come to England with you," I said. She laughed then, a brief hysterical laugh that was like ice cubes dropped into a glass, and I could see she thought for a moment that I was serious. "When will you leave?" "At the end of the summer. I don't really know." Now, as I leaf through my notebooks from that long-ago time, I am struck by a paradox. The most terrible things that befall us, the things that threaten to destroy us utterly, appear, in our descrip­ tions, tedious and banal. Day after day, page after page, I rendered 58

a compulsive account of my misery. At times, I was overwhelmed with anger that she had used me to cultivate some illusion of solidarity with the working class. At other times, self-pity gave way to obsessive questioning: What is she doing? Who is she with? Will she write? Then there are glimpses, in this repetitive register of despair, of how I tried to bargain with Fate and forestall the inevitable. I bought an old truck in the belief that she might be persuaded to spend the summer travelling around the country with me. I wrote a sonnet to her every day with a view to dedicating a book to her. Another piece of my desperate magic was to pilfer a set of Wedgwood china from the hold of an English freighter, convinced that this gift would gain her favour. She said it would be better if we did not see each other. I phoned her every few days anyway. My pathetic appeals must have made it easier for her to put me from her mind. One night, drunk, I phoned her house and her father answered. I said who I was, and asked if I could speak to Caddy. "Candace can't come to the phone right now." "When can I call back?" "I don't think it would be a good idea for you to call again." "Tell her I'll call tomorrow?" "She's going to England tomorrow." It was the final betrayal. I put down the phone, devastated. Exhausted by unhappiness, I could not sleep. My stomach was in knots. If i lay down or sat still, the pain broke over me in waves. I thought of the times we had lain together in the narrow bunk of her father's yacht, when she must have been thinking ahead to the time she would abandon me. I stubbed out cigarettes in the palm of my hand. I walked the streets of a city I could not bear to live in any more. For as long as I was on the move the pain was lessened and I could think straight. I racked my brains for some feat I might perform to impress her, to bind her to me forever. Toward dawn I came to her house and shinnied up the big magnolia at the entrance to her driveway. I sat in a fork of the 59

tree, nursing a bottle of rum, and kept watch. I knew she would be leaving early. I knew the name of the boat she was sailing on. I knew the quay where it was berthed, and the time it was due to sail. I heard voices, and the slamming of car doors. Then the crunch of tyres on the crushed-stone driveway. I climbed down from my perch and stood in the path of the Jaguar. When it stopped, I went to the back window and gestured for her to wind it down. "I wanted to say goodbye," I said. "Goodbye," she said. "I wanted to wish you luck." "Thank you." Her father turned impatiently in his seat. "We're running late. You'll have to let us go." "I had no intention of stopping you . I only wanted to say goodbye." "You've said it." "Candace," I said. From her reluctant mother I got Caddy's address in London, and wrote several times. She replied only once. "You wouldn't like it here," she wrote. "It's the kind of place I couldn't imagine you in at all." Then, at the foot of the page, scribbled like an afterthought, words which to this day pain me to repeat: "England represents order; you represent anarchy." I tried to drown my sorrows in drink, and became an habitue of the hole-in-the-wall bar at the Queen's Ferry. An odd assortment of low-lifers hung out there: newspaper men, con-men, barflies, and the seedy entourage of an ex-porn Queen from King's Cross, Sydney, who'd come home to lick her wounds and regale us with stories of life on the wild side. Somewhere around that time, befuddled and adrift, I met Bob Lowry. Lowry was one of the great rogue elephants of New Zealand's 60

literary and left-wing scene. In 1 93 1 , while still a student at Auck­ land University, he produced Phoenix

-

the literary j ournal

with which, according to Denis Glover, "New Zealand litera­ ture begins." He counted among his contemporaries and friends Rex Fairburn, Jim Bertram, R.A.K. Mason, Denis Glover, Colin McCahon, Frank Sargeson, Allen Curnow, and Charles Brasch. His bacchanalian parties were legendary, and James K. Baxter's well-known lines are not too wide of the mark: Anno Domini

1 956

Here Lowry lived, a stone volcanic god Fed with honey and red gourds, Open ing his heart like a great door To poets, lovers, and the houseless poor.

For many years Bob had been New Zealand's most innovative typographer, and he'd had a hand in the founding of the country's finest literary presses - Unicorn, Griffin, Philips, Pelorus, Pilgrim, Wakefield. Indeed, wrote Denis Glover in 1 946, "If typography is a word that some of us now understand, the credit is Bob Lowry's." By 1 962, however, Bob had fallen on hard times and faced bank­ ruptcy. As a last-ditch effort to keep his business afloat, he installed two outmoded and dilapidated presses - a Thompson platen and a Heidelberg flat-bed - in a rented basement in Airedale Street. His bread-and-butter work was printing Craccum and labels for a health food company. His genius as a typographer meant little to clients whose chief consideration was getting their work done on time, and many old allies wrote him off him as a beer-sodden has-been. It's true he aspired to Robert Burton's ideal of taking tobacco and drinking "day long in a Taverne or Ale-house, to discourse, sing, all j est, roare, talk of a Cock and a Bull over a pot . . . " After all, he was an artist and bon vivant, not a businessman, and if there were scholarships in letters to support writers, why not some hand-out for a struggling typographer? But while he liked to quote Joseph Spence's observation about Dr Swift lying 61

abed until eleven o'clock in the morning, thinking of wit for the day, there were times when he saw himself as a martyr, and he envisaged writing an account of his rej ection and estrangement, to be entitled Severed Relations. He recommended I read a book by Winwood Reade

-

The Martyrdom of Man. Many years later,

I did so, but only because ofWinwood Reade's connection with Sierra Leone. He went there in 1 868 in search of the source of the Niger and instant fame. Failing in this ambition, Reade returned to England only to be upbraided at the Royal Geographical Society for the carelessness of his observations and measurements. Feeling unjustly maligned, Reade wrote Martyrdom as an indict­ ment of those who conspire to destroy great minds and crucify true heroes. W hen I was twenty-two, I may have had something of the martyr in me. I worked for Bob without a wage, running the letterpress machines while he comped and locked lead slugs and ink-stained furniture into a chase, deploying the fonts for which he was renowned: Garamond, Bodoni, Caslon Old Face, Gill Sans, Baskerville, Blado italic, Goudy, Albertus. We worked long hours, slaving to keep the antiquated machines going, bludging money to pay the linotypists or wheedle paper and printing ink from the suppliers. W hen we met a deadline we were so exhausted by the effort that we'd invariably blow our earnings on pub crawls and parties rather than settle our mounting debts. We were like Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Nighttown. Even as Bob faced ruin, my life was reinvigorated by his boon companionship. And the Heidelberg was my domain. Compressed air hissed as sheets of paper were sucked up and fed through its black labyrinth. The chase slammed to and fro, and the whole thing clanked like a locomotive, shunting Candace down some dark branch-line of my mind where she could no longer touch me. I watched the printed pages accumulating on the stacker like days upon days, rebuffing the past. She who had found her true love in England counted for nothing beside Bob, this obstinate 62

individual whose livelihood was on the line. In my struggle with abstraction, reality had finally won out. However, Bob insisted that I not j eopardise my future. He urged me to keep on at university and enrol for my M.A. I could continue working for him in my spare time. I should know that sooner or later the press would fold, and we'd have nothing. Unless, of course, we won the Golden Kiwi. So I attended classes, dressed in a boilersuit, wearing a scowl, but spent most of the day and half the night with Bob, at the press or in the pub. Often we drove north in Bob's beat-up Morris van, and sought refuge in his family's bach on the Wade estuary. Euca­ lypts, pines and mangroves cast ominous shadows over the turbid stream. I would wake each morning to the sound of Bob stoking the pot-bellied stove in the living room. A dark demonic wind was tearing his life apart, and the chug chug of the boats towing barges of quicklime downstream seemed to be counting down the days. Midmorning we would drag the dinghy across the mud to the river, and row to the store, then dig for pipis and cockles on the tideflats and return, sluggish against the ebbing tide, to steam our shellfish open, douse them in vinegar, and eat them with bread and beer. At night, the wind assailed the pines and manuka around the bach, and rain gusted noisily over the tin roof, and I would hear Bob walking about in the kitchen, unable to sleep. His calvary was corning, and I could not save him. F rom Wakefiel d Street to Sil verdal e, t he fourteen St ations of t he Cross: Carpenter's Arms, Gl obe, Cl arendon, Market, K iwi, Cit y, Cent ral, Grand, Q uee n's Ferry, Glee son's, Capt ain Cook, Albert, Great Northern, Mon Desir . . .

In those days of early closing, you blundered out of a pub at six o'clock but before heading off to buy fish and chips or a cheap 63

Chinese meal ensured you had the address of a party where the drinking could go on all night. Often as not the venue would be decided at the last minute by someone too drunk or desperate to reckon the consequences. One night that someone was me. I had a key to the anthropology department, and on the spur of the moment announced that there was going be a party there. A piss-up in the hallowed precincts of the university was an opportunity no one was going to ignore. Until that night I had never suspected how many of the crowd I moved with bore deep grievances against academe. It was as if each individual felt he had been singled out and shamed by some ivory tower conspiracy. Now, old scores could be settled. My office was crammed. You had to shout to hear yourself speak. There was a fug of cigarette smoke. Wood splintered as bottle­ tops were ripped off against table edges and chair arms. Windows were flung open. Women caterwauled into the street. Someone spent the best part of an hour gluing water-filled condoms to the ceiling. Someone else drew a series of skulls on my blackboard, depicting the fall of man - from ape to academic. As for me, slumped in a sofa, swigging beer, I quickly ceased to give a damn about anything that was going on around me. The only thing that goaded me into action was a wastepaper basket going up in flames . With my thumb stoppering a beer bottle, I shook the contents vigorously, releasing a high pressure spray which worked effec­ tively as a fire extinguisher. Not long after that, I passed out. I woke as the last revellers and vandals were disappearing into the night. Only then did the full realisation of what had happened dawn on me. The room had been trashed. Strips of wallpaper dangled like flaps of flesh. A ghostly smudge of smuts marked the site of the wastepaper basket fire. Empty and broken bottles littered the floor. 64

The carpet was a mess of butts and spilled beer. And overhead, the distended latex stalectites defied my feeble attempts to pluck them down. It was all too much for me. I walked out of the building, went home, and sought asylum in sleep. A couple of hours later, I j erked awake with a splitting headache. I thought of catching a bus into the city and making an effort to restore the room to order before the cleaners discovered it. But I was overwhelmed by fatigue and indifference, and sank back into sleep. At Bob's press that afternoon, I tried to put the night out of my mind, hoping the clamour and clatter of the machines would dull my memory as readily as it had annulled my imaginary marriage to Candace Urquhart. But then I looked up, and the Head of Anthropology was standing at the doorway, his fisted hand extended as though he had been knocking, or was about to knock. I climbed down from the Heidelberg and, telling Bob I 'd be back, went to face my nemesis. I was surprised by Professor Biggs' awkwardness. It gave me a curious sense of having the upper hand, and I suggested we cross the road to the Globe Hotel where we could talk. In the front bar, I ordered two beers and told the Professor that I knew what he had come to see me about. H e looked relieved, then wary. "There's been a lot of concern about you," he said. " If it's my room . . . " " It's not just the room." "No," I said, deferring to him now. It was one of those times in your life when you are confronted by a story other people have been telling about you that bears little or no resemblance to the story you have been telling your­ self. First, it seemed I was a firebug. It wasn't just the incendiary evidence in my office. A lecturer in the psychology department had let it be known that only days before I had been quizzing him 65

about the psychopathology of arson. I tried to explain that I was writing a story about a barn-burner. But I was not yet at liberty to speak in my defence . . . Second, it was obvious to everyone that I was not serious about anthropology. And then there was the crowd I was hanging out with. And the fact that I was drinking heavily. And to cap it all, there was the question of my "friendship " with Murray Groves, the unspoken quote marks functioning, I supposed, as a euphemism for "homosexual relationship" . " I could go on," the Professor said, "but I won't." His tone of voice became colder now, and more authorita­ tive. He had been in touch with a friend of his who was Medical Director at Kingseat Hospital. An appointment had been made for me to see him at Middlemore Hospital in two days' time. Would I agree to go? It was my first experience of that subtle metamorphosis whereby ordinary human unhappiness is transmuted into a clinical condi­ tion. Gradually and imperceptibly, you cease to have any say in the matter of who you are or what you want. You are reduced to an obj ect whose morbid condition is something you had no hand in creating and can have no say in treating.You are explained away. In due course the distinguished psychiatrist got to ask me what was troubling me. I told him I did not know, but that a lot of people thought they knew. I admitted I was confused about my future in academe. I wanted to write. I wanted to do some good in the world. I did not know how to reconcile all the competing imperatives. I added that some of my teachers clearly thought I had a sexual identity problem, that I was a repressed arsonist, and possibly an alcoholic. On the strength of this confession I was invited to admit myself as a voluntary inpatient for observation at Kingseat Hospital. I panicked. I saw myself classified, obliged to wear pyjamas, consort with loonies, suffer a lobotomy, lose my reason. I thought 66

of the crazy and implacable logic of the Cheshire Cat in Alice and

Wonderland. " I n that dire ction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, " live s a Hatte r: and in that dire ction," waving the othe r paw, " live s a March Hare. V isit e ithe r if you like : t he y 're both mad." "But I don't want to go am ong mad pe ople," Alice re marke d. "Oh, you can't he lp that," said the Cat: " we 're all mad here. I 'm n1ad.You're mad." "How do you know I 'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, " or you wouldn't have come he re ."

told the psychiatrist I would give his "invitation" senous thought. But my mind was already made up. I had to get away. I didn't know where, but some kind of decision had been reached without me deciding anything, and I knew it was now or never. I wrote a letter, quitting the M.A. programme in the Department of Anthropology, and then, with Bob 's amused complicity, carefully charred the edges of the envelope with a lighted match before sending it off. "The irony will be lost on them," Bob warned. "You could set the Thames on fire and they wouldn't turn a hair." This happened a long time ago. The ransacking of the anthro­ pology department, first construed as pathology, became mythology, though years passed before I had any inkling of this . It was only when I applied for a position at Auckland University many years after my fabled auto-daje that the full force of these invisible fictions was brought home to me. My application was rej ected on account of my having once tried to burn down the very depart­ ment in which I now proposed to teach! Some years after this, in Australia, the story resurfaced. An anthropologist accosted me at a party and demanded that I tell him the story about how I burned down Auckland University. The myth was non-negotiable. I disappointed people when I tried to tell them the truth . They 67

gave me reproving looks, as if I were keeping something back or trying to put one over on them. The story had more legitimacy than I had, and, like a parent who can neither fathom nor control an unruly adolescent child, I had to face the fact that the story I had fathered was no longer my own. As for Bob, who had himself entered mythology as a stone volcanic god, he failed to survive the tragedy of falling short of the legendary role that had been foist upon him. Almost a year after he was declared bankrupt, the same crowd that had trashed the anthropology department laid waste to Bob's house on One Tree Hill during the course of another wild party. The tragic news reached me in Australia, in a letter from Fletcher Knight. LastTuesday week I heard from a fell ow I dri nk wi th in the pub that Bob Lowry was dead. Si nce thi s man sai d that he'd got the news from John Yelash, I was suspi ci ous, so I rang

32

Gladwi n

Road i n Auckland, and after some trouble struck a ti me when someone was there.Tina, Barry Crump's ex-wife, answered: it was, as she sai d, "all too true" . W hen I first rang there'd been no one home because everyone had been at the funeral. I heard later that Irene had left hi m ( after so long, and so much happened to them both!) some two weeks before. It must have been the last straw for Bob: so he took an overdose of sleeping tablets. N ow thi s man we knew and loved so much and thought to be so i ndomi table i s ash at Wai kumete. Just li ke th at. It shook me. More than I would have thought; and somehow, for some reason or another, I felt gui lty . . .

68

Q ua r r ying the B lues

B efore I saw it with my own eyes, I imagined Australia as the continent where all the blues in the world are quarried - smalt and saxe-blue smudged on a desert horizon, opals in a rockfall, oceans of ultramarine, and the night's deep indigo. But it was remorse, pure and simple, that made me think this way. The suffocating sense that I had failed my friends, disappointed my parents, and generally made a mess of my life. Yet as I sought a wilderness in which I could do my penance, I craved release from the necessity of apologising for myself. Everything had come to a head one night at Wiri. After Bob Lowry had been declared bankrupt I went to work for Herman Gladwin who had given up looking after old scows and gone into business, manufacturing a floor polish called Lady Gwen. Herman took me on as a salesman, and from his home in Wiri I would drive down into the Waikato and across to Coro­ mandel, sleeping in Tomlinson, his panel van, on the roadside at night and spending my days on my hands and knees, cleaning and polishing a square of scuffed linoleum in some small-town shop in the vain hope of proving the virtue of Lady Gwen to a cynical proprietor. I was still to learn that the secret of selling floor polish was not gleaming parquet but patter and confidence, and I sold next to nothing. It was not my shortcomings as a salesman that brought this period of my life to an end, but the accumulated emotional debt I had been running from and now felt obliged to pay. 69

In Wiri one weekend, as the wind wuthered among the scoria outcrops and scraped the macrocarpa boughs against the walls and windows of his house, Herman accused me of lusting after his young wife. Certainly, it was the sort of thing of which I was perfectly capable, but in this instance I was innocent. After a slanging match that continued long into the night, I walked out of the house, got into my car, and headed back toward the city. The car belonged to my parents, an old Vauxhall they had bought in their retirement, the first car they'd ever owned. I was half drunk. Halfway home, in sudden torrential rain, the windscreen wipers failed. Blinded by the downpour, and too pissed to know what I was doing, I slammed into a concrete stanchion on a traffic round­ about. For a split second I saw stars wheeling in a clear sky, then was aware of rain pattering on the roof of the car, and a milkman asking me if I was okay. I crawled out of the car and inspected the damage. The front of the car was mangled, but I was able to reverse off the roundabout and limp down Pau Road to One Tree Hill where I took refuge with Bob and Irene. In the morning, I borrowed some money from a friend, and booked an airplane ticket to Sydney. My last glimpse of the city was in the dusk - the volcanic cones of Mt Eden and Three Kings resembling whales aground in the city's incandescent shallows, and the distant ithyphallic monu­ ment on One Tree Hill like a pillar of salt. Over the Tasman, overwhelmed by the icy silence of the clouds, I could momentarily forget myself. For the space of a few hours I was out of time. In a blue notebook, I scribbled my reflections on the difference between knowledge and experience. "You know that millions of people have flown before, but you have never experienced flight until now. In effect, you are savouring something akin to the experience of the first aviators. Yet you are aware that you will 70

never have this experience again. You will fly a thousand times in your life, but this particular experience will never be repeated. From now on it will only exist as knowledge." From my temporary high, I was rudely returned to earth. In Sydney, I found a rooming house in Ashfield. It was infernally hot. I lay on my back on a broken wirewove bed, sweat pooling on my closed eyelids. The immensity of the city had left me numbed. I did not know a soul, and with barely enough money to survive a week, I did not know what to do. Late in the afternoon of my second day, weary and dispirited, I checked out of my hotel and bought a train ticket to Melbourne. Harry and Annette were living there. In my desperation I did not give a moment's thought to their situation; whether I would be welcome; whether they would be able to put me up. But it was somewhere to go. When Annette saw me on her doorstep, she did not disguise her dismay. But she quickly recovered, and asked me in. We sat at the kitchen table, hands clasping our coffee cups, and compared notes . Harry had a j ob writing advertising copy, and Annette was working in a panic, stress and phobia clinic in St Kilda. Though happy to be out of New Zealand, they felt little affinity for the city where they had come to start over. Harry quoted a Maltese migrant he'd met on a tram: "Australia, good for money, but no good for the life." Annette's complaint was that she was constantly being accosted and bothered by Mediterranean men, and Harry propositioned by queers. It wasn't safe to go out on the streets alone at night. She had a particular dread of the old pensioner in the next-door flat. "One night I 'm going to find him lying dead under the stairs ." She was determined to find some­ where "more suitable" to live. I asked Harry if he was writing. He said he was working on a story, but it was slow going. No more than five hundred words a week. " It's because he's studying at night," Annette explained. 71

"What are you studying?" "Typography. Book design," Harry said with his customary casualness. "We want to go to England later in the year," Annette said. "We want to make sure Harry will get work." The great Danish folklorist, Axel Olrik, observed that whenever three people come together in any sort of intimate space, only two of them can interact at the same time. The odd person out must wait in the wings, biding his or her time, until one of the actors at centre stage steps aside. Olrik called this "the law of two to a scene" . Harry and Annette, who were about t o get married, had no room for me in their lives. My manifest loneliness cast a shadow, and I hated my dependency upon them. When I had exhausted my fund of stories, I had nothing more to offer. Perhaps this was why, as soon as I found work - the nightshift in a printing press near the Victoria markets - and rented a room in Elsternwick, I felt compelled to shower them with gifts. To treat them to a meal in a city bistro bound us together for an evening. A bottle of expensive wine or several stems of an exotic flower bought my way back into their lives. One day I invited them to the movies . There was a Truffaut film I had seen a few days before, but wanted to see with them. The film was Jules and Jim. Too naive to acknowledge its obvious connection with my relationship with Harry and Annette, I inno­ cently asked Annette, as we left the cinema, what she had thought of it. "I think any menage a trois is an abomination," she said. "And Jules was obviously queer." "You're j oking." " No, I ' m not. It was perfectly obvious that he was trying to sabotage that marriage." Harry said nothing. But I was stunned. For the first time, I realised why the Van Gogh 72

print I had bought them had never been hung, why the flowers I 'd given Annette had never been placed in a vase, why the bottles of wine were always left uncorked, and why I had not been invited to their wedding. Not long after this, I left Melbourne for Gippsland and a j ob in Aboriginal welfare. In mill towns like Nowa Nowa, Cabbage Tree and Cann River, my sense of isolation found expression in a perverse identification with Aboriginal people. I hung out with them, not to improve their lot or understand their lives, but to degrade and efface myself. Though I rationalised this identifica­ tion as a protest against the government's assimilationist policies, and as a penance for European crimes against Aboriginal people, the truth was that I was driven by a need to erase the difference between myself and them, and thereby escape the obligations of my j ob and the claims of my conscience. Whenever I went back to Melbourne to file a report, I phoned Harry and Annette. We would meet in a wine bar or restaurant, swap stories and laugh about old times, but I had a sense now that we were moving in such completely different directions and social circles that there was little we really shared. Once, Harry asked what I was reading. I said Camus. " I cannot read that sort of thing any more," he said. And it was like another door closing in my face. But then Harry was turning his back on a lot of things. One evening, in a rare allusion to his parents, Harry confided that he had nothing in common with them. He did not even take the trouble to write home. He was "reconciled to silence " . The phrase weighed on my mind for weeks, a s I travelled dirt roads from one remote Gippsland town to another, registering stories of despair and anger, sleeping at night in the back of my station wagon at the edge of the sea and, unlike Harry, writing regular letters home to my parents in which I exhaustively chroni­ cled every detail of the j ourney on which I had embarked.

73

From the sea, the forests went forever, blue upon blue. Along the coast, the bluegums were cages made from bone. The boom and thump of surf and smudging spume suggested another world. Nowa Nowa was a small settlement not far from Lake Tyers. In some lost Aboriginal language, Nowa Nowa meant "the rising sun " . It was a mill town. Winter and summer, the odour of euca­ lypts mingled with the smoke from sawdust kilns. The bush was filled with the piping of bellbirds, though nearer the mill you heard only the diesel generator and the droning chinngg of the breaking-down saw. Many of the people at Nowa Nowa had grown up on the Aboriginal station at Lake Tyers. Their parents and grandparents had been forcibly settled there at a time when it was believed that Aboriginals were doomed to extinction and official govern­ ment policy was "to smoothe the pillow for the dying head" . They lived in three-room weatherboard dwellings permeated by smells of decaying sackcloth and woodsmoke. Each was furnished with a table and chairs, a dilapidated sofa, and wirewove beds. The floorboards were covered with cracked linoleum. There was neither electricity nor sewerage. People did their cooking under lean-tos and drew water from rusty corrugated-iron tanks among the trees. "We know we disgust you," Dulcie said to me. "You Welfare Board people, we know what you think of us, of our houses, always trying to straighten us out, make gubbas out of us. It's always been whitefellas telling us Koories who we are, what we have to do. We're sick and tired of being told we're black boongs, that we're shit, that we're not Aboriginals because we don't know any Aboriginal language, because we're half-caste. We're not half anything! We're people, we're black people! What we call ourselves is our business. You call yourself what you want, but don't tell us who we are, how we're supposed to live ! " Dulcie always looked angry, even after she 'd given m e "a piece of her mind" , as she put it, and apologised because she didn't mean 74

me personally. She was forever berating her neighbours, too, for shambling along the street with their heads bowed, as if they had no right to use the local shops or go into the pub. Her maternal grandparents hailed from Lake Tyers, her paternal grandparents from Eden. She lived with a whitefella whose name happened to be the same as mine. They had two kids. About my namesake I knew next to nothing, except how he came to walk with a limp. His foot had been crushed in a logging accident. Unwilling to see a doctor, he'd tried to set the broken ankle himself. For his pains he ended up with a deformed foot, lost his job and drifted to Nowa Nowa, where he met Dulcie. "The white bloke with the gin wife," the white mill hands called him. He wore a grimy boilersuit and seldom washed. He spent much of the day drinking cheap sherry in the bush with his Koorie mates . In fact, since the publican at Lakes Entrance refused to sell liquor to Aboriginals, Mike was their main source of supply. Dulcie had sort of adopted me, possibly because my name was the same as her de facto's, possibly because I looked as lost as he did, and I often drove to Nowa Nowa in the evenings to play a few games of Hundred-up or Jackpot with them. Mike always sat out of the lamplight, morose and taciturn, indifferent to whether he won or lost. The booze seemed to send him deep into himself, or to some other wilderness like Nowa Nowa where he could hide and not be hurt. If Dulcie left the room because one of the children was coughing or crying in its sleep, and I tried to make small talk about the weather or my day's work, Mike would wince as if I was rubbing salt into a wound, and he'd breathe an audible sigh of relief when Dulcie came back to the table and picked up her cards. It was usually late when I left Nowa Nowa and drove my station wagon down to the lake. I 'd write up my daily report for the Welfare Board, cook some beans and bacon over a driftwood fire, and go to sleep in the back of the Holden, listening to the wind in the ti trees and the thud of distant surf. 75

Each day I drove along bush tracks, logging roads and highways, visiting Aboriginal families, helping people file social security claims, taking sick children to hospital in Bairnsdale, keeping my diary of ineluctable misery. Floodwater has gone through the bean pickers' huts at Wirtgwirri. I go down to see if there's anything I can do. A woman sloshes through the mud, hugging her cardigan across her breasts. She brings tears to her bloodshot eyes as she talks to me, dragging on the cigarette I 've given her, waving a limp hand at the drowned bean fields. ''I'm not used to this, Mr Jackson. I 'm decent. I 've lived at Lake Tyers all my life, but now we have to come here. Look ! " She gestures at the waterlogged mattress, the suitcase covered with silt, the clothes hung out to dry on the trees. "Look at that and ask yourself, do you think I can get used to that? I 'm a self-respecting person like yourself, Mr Jackson. You understand, don't you? You know what this does to you - in here ! " And she pummels her breast with her fist. "We went to Eden for a few days, and when we got back the floods had gone through. Up to the windowsill it was! Look - you can see the mark. We lost everything. When I went into town to get my endowment I had to wear an old pair of sandshoes. Honest, Mr Jackson, just having to go up there like that, it does something awful to you . I have to drink. You have to, to keep yourself together." She gazes out over the desolate fields. " I want to get a live-in job. I 'm going to help myself. I mean, it's no use cadging off the Board all the time, is it? You've got to help yourself - and believe me, Mr Jackson, I want to, I want to help myself. I mean . . . " She takes a last pull on the cigarette and throws it away. "Like I told you, Mr Jackson - look, you don't mind if I bum another cigarette off you, do you? - if I have to, if I have to live here much longer . . . " Her voice trails off and she is choking back tears. " I 'll drown myself in the creek. I'm not going to live here and get drunk and Stan go off and leave me all the time. I'm 76

not going to do that anymore. I 've got my self-respect, like anyone else . . . " I give her my pack of Lucky Strikes and a ten-shilling note, and tell her I'll be back tomorrow with some clothing and bedding. Abel Morgan would regularly get drunk on port and meths, stag­ gering home at night along the railway line. It was only a matter of time before a freight train rode right over him. This morning, a Bairnsdale cop delighted in giving me a grue­ some description of how Abel had been dragged fifty yards along the track, his arms severed, his face scraped off on the ballast. "This time he really got smashed! " I turned and walked out of the police station. I had to find Doll Morgan and take her to identifY her husband's body. I touched her elbow lightly, and guided her into the hospital. People were staring at the grief-stricken Aboriginal woman. "Shall I go in with you?" I said. "No," she said, ''I'll be all right." Later, in the car, she said, "It wasn't him, it wasn't really him. It was his clothes . But he was so mangled. I couldn't look at him. I couldn't bear to look." I asked her if she wanted to go home. " No, take me to Sale," she said. She had relatives there. She didn't want to go back to Nowa Nowa. That afternoon I attended the Magistrate's Court to plead on behalf of an Aboriginal boy charged with car conversion. It was my first time in court. I was nervous. I sat near the back of the courtroom, waiting to be called. The young defendant stood in the dock, eyes downcast. I 'd never met him, and the clerk of the court hadn't informed him that a welfare officer was going to assist in his defence. The minutes dragged by while the police prosecutor read the charge and a second-hand car dealer was called to the witness 77

stand. I could not stop thinking of Doll Morgan's distressed face as she stood at the kerbside in Sale, wringing her hands and looking desperately up and down the street, unable to make up her mind which way to go. Then I began imagining what Abel must have looked like in the morgue, shrouded in his blood-stained clothes, with his arms missing and his face erased. I took out my cigarettes and lit up. The magistrate pounded his gavel and bawled, "What is that man doing smoking in this courtroom! " I was flabbergasted. I wasn't aware that smoking was prohibited in a courtroom. It wasn't a church. "Remove that man from this court! " Before I could say anything, a co p was manhandling m e from the room. " I didn't know you couldn't smoke," I protested. ''I'm a welfare officer. I'm here to speak for that Aboriginal boy." "Oh yeah! " And the cop bundled me through the main doors and out onto the stone steps, threatening to charge me with being in contempt of the court. "Then charge me! Because I hold your bloody court in deep contempt! " "Beat it, mate." I drifted away down the street, muttering under my breath, and ditched the dossier in a litter bin that read,YOUR HERITAGE . KEEP AUSTRALIA CLEAN. The gossip about Olga Mainwaring was that her house was always full of blow-ins, that her kids went hungry and never had shoes or warm clothing, and that she screwed around and spent her benefit on grog. I drove to Genoa and found Olga's house. In the yard was a rusty truck chassis and a Hill's hoist. I followed a muddy track to the back door. Olga's hair was tousled, her eyes heavy from sleep. She carried 78

a child on her hip whose nostrils were gummed up with mucus. When I said I was from the Aboriginal Welfare Board, she frowned and mumbled something to herself. Then she went ahead of me into the dining room and cleared a space on the sofa among piles of crumpled clothes so I could sit down. "You can't get anything dry in this weather," she said. I took out my notebook and went to work. How many people did she have living in the house? Where were the other kids? Were they attending school regularly? Did she know that her ex-husband was claiming custody of the children on the grounds that she was incapable of looking after them? I scribbled down her desperate answers. A big mob of relatives had blown in last week. They'd got drunk and smashed things up. She couldn't do anything to stop them. The cops had to come and throw them out. "The kids have all been sick, that's why they've been off school. Ernie doesn't really give a bugger about the kids . He's never given me no think. He just wants them so he can get back at me, that's all." A couple of days later I was in Melbourne. Olga's ex-husband worked as a porter at Flinders Street Station. He spoke of his Aboriginality as if it was some kind of criminal record. Now he was a reformed man . " I don't drink," he said. " I got me own place. I keep me nose clean . Olga couldn 't look after the kids if she tried. She can't even look after herself. She's always got blow-ins there, white blokes from the mill, parties every night. You seen it, the place is a pigsty. You got to cut yourself off. It's the only way. Those black bastards'll rip you off for everything you've got.You want to keep a j ob, you got to stay clear of them. That's what I do - stay well away." I filed my report. A few weeks later, the court ordered that the Mainwaring children be placed in the custody of their father. I returned to Gippsland. The rain had not let up for days. The coast was invisible for spume, and the smoke from the sawdust kilns had draped the forests in torn sheets. I had already forgotten 79

about Olga and her children. At Nowa Nowa I waited on the narrow verandah, watching the rainwater cut channels in the black earth. I knew Mike and Dulcie were home. Why didn't they answer my knocking? Then Mike opened the door wide enough to tell me to fuck off. "You're an arsehole, mate," he said, "and Dulcie doesn't want to see you." I would have jammed my foot in the door and demanded to know what was going on had Dulcie not appeared and shoved Mike aside. "You better come in," she said grimly. The three of us sat around the wooden table. I offered them both cigarettes, but they shook their heads. Their faces were full of anger and grief. What had happened? What had I done? Olga was Dulcie's niece. I had taken away her children. Olga had been drunk for days, wandering down the logging roads and along the beach. Now nobody knew where she was. "You 're young," Dulcie said. "You don't know us. You're only young.You don't understand." She said it like a lament for the dead. Rainwater was dripping from the ceiling into an enamel bowl on the floor. Mike got up from the table and went and leaned against the door jamb. He stared into space. I knew he was waiting for me to go. "We're not once upon a time people," Dulcie said. "You can't take a mother's children from her just cos she's having a hard time of it, j ust cos her house is a bit messy. All the years we've had our kids taken away, ripped from our bosoms, stuck in white homes .We thought you knew better, we thought you knew us, we thought you cared about us. We thought you was different." ''I 'll get the children back," I said. "How will you do that? There's a court order. How can you undo what you 've done? Poor Olga, we don't even know where she is. Poor doll, wandering around like that in the rain . . . 80

"

She fell silent as the rain gusted across the iron roof like a flung handful of stones. "I dunno why you bother to talk to the bastard," Mike said. "He's young," Dulcie said. She wasn't saying it to Mike or to me. "He doesn't know us. He's only young. He doesn't under­ stand." We sat for a long time, the rain pelting down, the lantern splut­ tering, Mike standing over us with his arms folded. "There's always two stories," Dulcie said, "two sides to every­ thing. Always two stories, the outside one and the inside one. You only heard the outside one. You didn't even know there was another story inside that one." I went back to Melbourne. I did what I could, but the court order was not revoked. I sought out pubs frequented by Aboriginals - sleazy back bars with cement floors, tin tables and chairs, the beer passed through a hole in the wall so that drinkers in the public bar would never have to see an Aboriginal face. Sometimes I thought of Mike's stories. I thought of driving north and losing myself in the inland, where the place names were all metaphors for abandonment - Broken Hill, Oodnadatta, Abminga, Bundooma, Coward Springs. At closing time we staggered out on to the street. Match flames flared between cupped hands. Shocks ofblack hair. Swaying figures. Men kicking the hub caps of parked cars. Women with matchstick legs and socks down around their ankles, spitting abuse at passers by. "Whattaya want? Ya cunt! Ya dead cunt! Fuck offi " Then the cops pounced. " I 'm a welfare officer," I bleated as they pitched me into the Black Maria. "And I'm the fucking Queen Mother! " At Fitzroy police station I lined up with the Aboriginals. The only white. It made no difference. I relinquished my belt and shoe­ laces like everyone else, and emptied my pockets . I was slung into a 81

cell with three Aboriginal men, none of whom I knew. All night we huddled under thin blankets on the floor. The cell reeked of urine and booze. We could not sleep for the cold and the cops corning in every hour or so and kicking us on the soles of our feet, goading us to fight. Along the corridor a woman wailed wearily, " Ope the door, ope the door, ope the door." In the morning we were taken into the court. I found myself standing next to Carl. I asked him what would happen. "Plead guilty," he said. "If you plead not guilty, you have to wait a month for a court. Maybe wait in jail." The charge was "Drunk and Disorderly" . " Guilty," I pleaded when my turn came. "You will address the court in the proper manner! " " Guilty,Your Honour." "Convicted and discharged. Next ! " After reclaiming my belt, shoelaces, and car keys I walked out into the daylight, blinking with disbelief. The Aboriginals were waiting for me in the park across the road. I j oined them and we pooled what money we had. Carl, Ned, Jock and Danny wanted to buy some takeaways and grog. I was content to sit and watch a group of Chinese women doing t'ai chi. "When ya going back to Gippsland?" Ned demanded. " I wanna lift." " I ' m not sure I'm going back." "You're a proper welfare officer now," Carl laughed, "you got a conviction." I laughed too. "Sure," I said. Then they drifted off, saying they'd see me around.

82

H otel d es E t rang e rs

A couple of weeks after resigning from the Aboriginal Welfare Board, I sailed from Melbourne on the MV Sydney, bound for Genoa, Italy. From Genoa I took the overnight rapide to Paris, arriving at dawn a day after the deaths of Edith Piaf and Jean Cocteau. After buying a plan de Paris at a tabac near the Gare du Lyon, I walked west along the Seine, past the zoo, toward the Latin Quarter. Though almost penniless, I was feverish with excitement. I was finally where I thought I belonged. That Henry Miller had left Paris in 1 940 and Cendrars had died in 1 96 1

-

the same year

as Celine and Hemingway - were facts I chose to ignore. When you're twenty-three, truth is poetic. Who gives a damn about the difference between imaginary gardens and the real thing? For better or worse, I figured, artists, like lunatics and criminals, obey the dictates of inner worlds. Obj ectivity is either irrelevant or chimerical. It was Tony Hammond, a fellow student at Auckland Univer­ sity, who first put Tropic if Cancer into my hands. Tony had been friendly with Robert Goodman, who ran a bookshop in Queen's Arcade and somehow managed to smuggle into the country such banned books as LAdy Chatterley 's Lover, The Naked Lunch, Ulysses, and LAst Exit to Brooklyn. The dog-eared, scarlet-covered, Obelisk Press paperback of Miller's masterpiece duly did the rounds and finally reached me. I was stunned. This was the way I wanted to write, addressing my own expenence directly and passionately. 83

But Miller had struggled for years not only to purge his writing of literary mannerisms, but to give up entirely the idea of himself as a literary man: It is now the fall of my se cond ye ar in Paris. I was se nt he re for a re ason I have not ye t bee n able to fathom. I

have no money, no re source s, no hope s. I am the happie st man

alive. A ye ar ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longe r think about it,

I

am.

Eve rything that was lite rature has falle n

from me .There are no m ore books to be written, thank God. T his then? This is not a book.This is libe l, slander, defamation of characte r.This is not a book, in the ordinary se nse of the word. No, this is a prolonge d insult, a gob of sp it in the face of Art . . .

There was another thing about the opening pages of Tropic of

Cancer that affected me profoundly. It was the way Miller made life appear so simple and straightforward - a matter neither of intellectual contemplation nor of political action, but of fidelity to immediate experience. Intrigued by such a Zen-like attitude in an age that cried out for political commitment, George Orwell had compared Miller to Jonah "inside the whale" . But it was precisely Miller's Rabelaisian gusto, his happy knack of immersing himself in the stream of everyday life without the slightest urge to create an orthodox narrative, or impose a point of view, that captivated me. Experience is always aged in being interpreted. Encrusted with ideas, life becomes calcified, sclerotic. "The truth is," as Cendrars put it, "few people know how to live, and those who accept life as it is are even rarer." The exhilaration I felt when reading Tropic if Cancer for the first time, and then discovering, through Miller, Blaise Cendrars, is now inextricably mixed with my first memories of Paris. It was a windless late-autumn morning in October. The sun was shining, the air already cold. The leaves on the plane trees were brittle and rusty. There was a mulch of foliage on the damp pavements, and there were footprints of petanque players on the chalky paths. On 84

the boulevards, waiters in long black aprons were setting up tables and wicker chairs, and the air was filled with the smell of flowers,

Gauloises and fresh coffee. I strolled along the quais, browsed in Shakespeare & Co, tasted my first espresso, ate my first croissant, and sought out neighbour­ hoods made familiar by my reading. Armed with a copy of Cendrars' Trop, C'est Trop that I bought in a bookshop near the Sorbonne, my first port of call was 2 1 6 rue Saint-Jacques. Here Cendrars had lodged when he was my age, and the Hotel des E trangers, which stood on the site in 1 9 1 0, was the place he would thereafter declare to be his true birthplace. This initiatory birth demanded a complete break with the past: Raze my childhood to the ground, My family and my customs; Build a railway station there instead, Or leave some waste ground To erase my origins . . .

The quarter where Cendrars came into his own had older associations too. Sharing a room with his future wife, Fela, and translating letters and documents for a pittance, Cendrars revelled in the coincidence that Jean de Meung had composed his thir­ teenth-century masterpiece, The Romance of the Rose, in the same hotel. Moreover, Fraw;:ois Villon and Restif de la Bretonne, the two writers with whom he identified at this time, had both lodged there. But just as Cendrars and Fela were soon forced by penury to leave their historic niche, so too was I . I n the nearby rue d e la Harpe (then cobbled, now asphalted) , I rented an attic room in the sort of rundown pension that may have once accommodated Max, the hapless refugee of whom Miller writes in one of his most compelling tales . When you are on your own and new to a city like Paris, it is 85

impossible to be still. The streets are obsessional. You walk them from daylight until long after dark. You collapse onto a sagging bed in a cramped room, but cannot sleep. It is not the noise of the street four storeys below but your remoteness from all those other enviable lives that fills you with despondency. In a cheap notebook you scribble your misgivings and memories. You are determined to spend the next day looking for work, yet know it will be no different from today. And all the while you are intoxicated by this sense that you have finally found a place where you belong - the students filling the sidewalk cafes along the Boul' Mich, bread­ crumbs spilled on a paper tablecloth, the smell of Moroccan couscous and the Balkan charcoal-grills, coal barges chugging upriver, the autumn sun on your face as you forage among the bookstalls along the quais . . . Living on baguettes and cheese, chilled by the wind, I lived like a pilgrim. One day I walked to Clichy in search of the Avenue Anatole-France where Henry Miller completed writing

Tropic of Cancer and began Black Spring, moving as in a dream, my spirits flagging, yet sustained by the belief that if Miller had overcome poverty and starvation and made it as a writer here, so too would I . But Miller's Paris had been reinvented many times since he lived there. Now it was Miles Davis's turn, and Juliette Greco's. Now coffee bars, bebop and existentialism defined the moment in an ambience of angst, mauvais foi, ennui, and chic

. .

. words I picked

up in passing and filed away for future use. One day, having drifted south of Montparnasse, I suddenly recognised a couple of street names . . . rue d' Alesia, rue de la Tombe-Issoire . . . and stumbled upon the Villa Seurat where Miller was living at the time of the publication of Tropic of Cancer in 1 934. It was here, at number 1 8 , that Miller and Cendrars first met. For me, at least for the moment, it was the end of the road, and that night I took the boat train to England.

86

Crossing the Channel via Dieppe-Newhaven, I took some conso­ lation from the knowledge that Henry Miller had once travelled this same route. But as the lights ofDieppe vanished into the dark­ ness, and salt-spray and rain lashed my face, the full force of my destitution overwhelmed me. In Paris I had walked the streets in a dream. In London the streets exuded a dankness that seeped into my bones, weighed me down, and brought me to the edge of despair. It was my third day in the city. I was ravenous, but did not want to spend what little money I still had on a meal, preferring hunger to sleeping rough in the Embankment Gardens. Slouching along Fleet Street, head down, in a funk, I heard someone call my name. I told myself I had been mistaken, and scarcely raised my head. But then the voice was closer, and a hand grasped my arm. "Mike! Mike Jackson ! " A line o f T. S. Eliot's came into my head: "You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! " and then I was looking up, face to face with Graeme Hetherington, who was grinning at me and saying what an extraordinary coincidence it was. I had met Hetherington on the Sydney. He had graduated from the University of Hobart in Tasmania, and was off to Birmingham to do a Ph.D. in Hittite Studies. I had liked him well enough, but he was an uncomfortable reminder of the persona I had turned my back on in Auckland, so had kept my distance. Now, unbe­ lievably, he was putting in a second appearance in my life - as a savwur. When I confessed that I hadn't eaten that day, he bundled me back along the street to a Wimpy bar. When I told him I was broke, he opened his wallet and pressed a five pound note into my hand. And when I confided that I did not know a soul in London, he scoffed and said he'd walk with me to New Zealand House in Haymarket. I could go through the names and addresses there. ··You can't tell me that from a country as small as New Zealand there's not someone here in London that you know." 87

It was then that I remembered Fleur. We'd been close friends in Wellington. She'd left New Zealand a year before I did, and far more decisively. England was where she wanted to live. England and nowhere else. And poetry was what she wanted to live for. Fleur took me in until I found a job and somewhere of my own to live. Given my recent experiences of living rough, it was probably only natural that I should end up working with dossers. The London County Council Welfare Office for the Home­ less was an army hut, half hidden under the Hungerford Bridge. Defeated men and women shuffied in and out all day. My j ob was to interview them, record a few details about their situation, then issue meal vouchers and tickets for a night's accommodation at a Salvation Army or Church Army Hostel . When the tickets ran out, the homeless were dispatched to the Camberwell Reception Centre, a Dickensian institution whose routines I submitted to one night in order to understand why so many dossers preferred sleeping under the arches to the ordeal of the "spike". You were admitted in the evening. On entering, you were directed into a changing room where you were told to strip naked. Your clothes were then taken away for fumigation. Next, you received a blanket and a mug of milky tea, and were directed into the dormitory. It was like a factory floor from which the machinery had been removed. There were rows upon rows of narrow cots. You sat there, wrapped in a blanket, cold, without privacy, unnerved by the bronchial coughing of broken men and the occasional foul-mouthed protest of someone who'd gone berserk and had to be dragged away. You slept fitfully if at all. At dawn, after getting back your clothes and receiving another mug of tea with some chunks of bread and margarine, you were turned out into the street again. I thought I'd had it tough, but every day now I looked into the face of irreversible suffering, of real defeat. Like Burnsides, with his 88

epilepsy, psoriasis, and naive optimism. "When I land a j ob I 'll buy some decent clothes and get back to being a chef again." Or blind Lillian Goodgame and her deaf companion whose name I have forgotten. She spoke for him and cared for him as though he were her child, and he in turn steered her through the crowded streets . She wore a coarse woollen coat with a cheap brooch pinned to the lapel. Her thick-lensed spectacles magnified her lifeless eyes. If I learned anything about human misery during my long winter under the Hungerford Bridge, it was how little there is to tell. I guess I discovered this when Candace broke off our relation­ ship. Despite the intensity of my feelings, there was no story to recount, nothing much to say, except that I went through hell. So it was with the stories I now heard from the men and women that drifted in and out of the welfare office. I remember Mary Overland, encrusted with dirt and unmiti­ gated sorrow. She used to be a nurse. One evening she came home early, after her night shift was cancelled, and found her husband in the toilet being fucked by a transvestite. In a state of shock, she walked out of the house and kept on walking. She never went back. She had not seen her children for seven years . She was obsessed by her own degradation and shame - as though she had wronged him . " It's too late now," she told me. " I ' m too embarrassed t o get in touch." The remorse of these drifters intrigued me. Their all-encom­ passing abjection and guilt. A few of them celebrated their freedom, telling me that they owned nothing, were beholden to no one. But I wasn't fooled.You could see it was all a disguise, a desperate attempt to feel free by doing unto themselves what had been done to them. Most tragic were the veterans. These were the shell-shocked survivors of the war, who came home, like Lew Stewart, to find that a wife or girlfriend had not waited, had buggered off with someone else. Men whose nerves were shot, who would 89

be devastated by the phone ringing, who had recurrent night­ mares of bloated corpses, and would wake in a cold sweat to find a putrescent head staring at them from the darkness, mouthing their name. Men who would never recover their lives, but walk in circles forever, as in a prison yard. One of my j obs was to interview men who might qualify for a place in a British Legion home. Many of these old soldiers had been waiting half their lives for such a chance. Some had been gassed during battles on the Western Front in the First World War, and could hardly find breath enough to answer my questions. All unburdened their stories as if I were the first person to ever listen to them. I was reminded of the way Cendrars speaks of the war in the opening pages of L'Homme Foudroye - a book written during the Second World War about the first, after a long silence. "And the eclipse that I observed on that occasion was an eclipse of my very being, and I still wonder how I survived that terror about which I have, until now, spoken to no one . . . " I wrote letters home. Occasionally I saw Fleur and other friends. But mostly I chose isolation. One of my haunts at this time was the National Gallery. I went there almost every day, since it was only a short stroll from where I worked, yet another world. Two paintings obsessed me. The first was Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Crowned with Thorns. Christ's face is that of both a saint and simpleton. He looks at us with an expression as foolishly and beseechingly innocent as his tormenters' faces are ignorant and cruel. It was an expression that brought home to me the sense of victimhood I still suffered from. My "muggins complex" as my friend Alex Guyan called it. Always feeling hard done by, always feeling that the world owed me something. It was the same "complex" I had seen so clearly in Bob Lowry, whom I still mourned. The second painting was Piero di Cosima's The Death cif Procris. 90

A young woman lies dead in a field of wildflowers, accidentally slain by her husband, Cephalus, while he was hunting. A satyr kneels beside her head. His left hand gently touches her shoulder. With his right hand he smoothes her hair from her forehead. His face is filled with pity and tenderness. At her feet, Procris' faithful hound Laelaps keeps vigil. Beyond these figures is a lake, its near shore crowded with oblivious birds and beasts, the far shore lost in early morning mist. I would sit on the bench in the middle of the room, contem­ plating the painting. Once, I was distracted by a young woman entering the room. She sat and gazed at the same mythological scene that entranced me. I longed to speak to her. But I felt my shabbiness and penury so acutely that I could not bring myself to even glance in her direction, though this did not prevent my famished eyes following her when she turned her back to me, - the line of her legs, her bony hips, the exposed nape of her neck, her black hair plaited and tied - until a group of tourists was ushered into the room and the spell broken. Since leaving Melbourne I had lost touch with Harry and Annette, though I knew of their plans to come to England. It was therefore a coincidence quite as remarkable as running into Graeme Heth­ erington on Fleet Street when I ran into Annette one afternoon as I was emerging from the Underground at St John's Wood. Even more uncanny, perhaps, was the fact that she and Harry were living only a couple of streets away from where I had rented a room. "I thought you were going to France?" Annette said, as though I had broken a promise to her by ending up in England. That I was working among down-and-outs did not surprise her in the least. If only to show that I had no intention of encroaching on their privacy, I left it to Harry and Annette to initiate contact, and retreated to my books and my experiments with gouache. Moved by a Soutine and Modigliani retrospective at the Tate, I had decided that since I was getting nowhere with my writing, 91

I might succeed with paint. Undoubtedly, too, I was influenced by my mother's letters, in which she recounted her struggle to paint abstract landscapes, and her forays with my father into wild New Zealand in search of inspiration.* My own life as an artist was, however, continually frustrated by my landlady. An elderly French spinster with a passion for Esperanto, she wore a velveteen gown and bedroom slippers, kept her thinning hair permanently in curlers, and seemed to have known only dashed hopes and disappointment. Arriving home at night, I would find notes on my bedside table, chiding and cautioning me. Dear Mr Jackson, 1.

Please clean your paint spots off the wooden par tition.

2.

The drawer s are only for

clothes must be put there.

I

clean underwear. Not

even semi- clean

have given you ex tra coathangers and

put ever y thing in order. 3.

Please do not leave your small s ly ing around.

At other times, I was verbally enj oined to make my bed every day, to put some padding under my typewriter (the racket of my writing was disturbing others in the house) , and to desist from using foreign coins in the gas meter. I was about to find somewhere else to live when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I saw the first grim notices scrawled

in black crayon on newspaper stands near the Bond Street tube station. Everyone was in a panic, desperate for details. The old newspaper vendor was consulted as if he were a seer. I went down Bond Street and found a pub, where people had clustered around a radio, listening for updates. When I got home it was late, but my landlady had been waiting for me. She was beside herself with

•

My mother, Emily Jackson j oined the Auckland Society of Arts when she was

fifty, and had her first solo exhibition thirteen years later (in 1 972). She continued to exhibit regularly over the next twenty years, becoming one of New Zealand's most respected artists.

92

grief. In her eyes, Kennedy had been the hope of the free world. Kennedy and Esperanto, that is. She asked if I wouldn't mind making her a coffee and sitting with her awhile. She talked for hours among her volumes of Pushkin, Esperanto texts and issues of the Peking Monthly. She talked about Brittany, where she grew up. About why she had studied English rather than Russian (her Russian teacher made a pass at her) . About the reason she had come to live in England (her English fiance was killed in the first year of the war) . And finally, and tirelessly, about Esperanto. If everyone in the world spoke the same language there would be no grounds for human misunderstanding, assassinations or wars. Next morning she knocked at my door and said she wanted to take me to Canning Town market. She had noticed how shabby my clothes were; it was high time I dressed in something decent. When I saw Harry and Annette a couple of days later, I was wearing an expensive Swedish suede jacket, Oxford trousers and new shoes. "Very chic for a social worker," Harry observed. '' I'm moving out," I announced, "before this goes any further." Iris Murdoch begins the second chapter of Under the Net by declaring: "There are some parts of London which are necessary and others which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earls Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river." As if conforming to this existential cartography, I found a room in Hammersmith. The distance between Hammersmith and St John's Wood was, of course, not only measured in the cost of tube fares and travel time; it was social. And as I descended further into the world of the homeless that Jack London called "the abyss" , I became increas­ ingly indifferent to the orderly, non-contingent world that Harry and Annette inhabited. 93

If I saw Harry now, it was usually for a pub lunch in the Strand, halfway between the publishing house where he worked and the welfare office under the Hungerford Bridge where I eked out my living. Our conversations were stilted. I was inevitably broke, having distributed my meagre earnings among the tramps in a self­ defeating effort to mitigate my distress at their suffering. So I would feel ashamed at asking Harry to buy the lunch. I also lacked the confidence and aplomb I felt were needed to move among the smooth-talking professional crowd he was in with. We would have had little to talk about were it not for Harry's fervent interest in my experiences of life inside the spikes and doss-houses, and on the streets. I now wonder if it bothered him, being so far from the edge. One night, Harry, Annette and I went to see Antonioni's La Notte at a Hampstead cinema. In the opening sequence of the film, the dying Tommaso says, "What should I do? What can I do?" then answers to the effect that his life has been more shadow than substance, that he has lacked the courage to probe things deeply and fully. As we left the cinema, Harry recalled this moment, and asked me what I thought of it. I cannot remember how I responded, but the earnestness of Harry's question is something I have never forgotten. Though I too had yet to discover the life I wanted to live, I believed I had glimpsed it in a dream. I had no doubt as to the source of the dream. It belonged to the day the Sydney docked in Bombay, the day I first set eyes upon the East. The experience had affected me as deeply as it had Marlowe in Conrad's Youth, coming from the sea to a place of "danger and promise," where "a stealthy Nemesis" lay in wait. India was the opposite of everything I had known . Crowded, unflagging, noisy, smelly, anonymous and fecund, it held me in thrall. I spent most of the afternoon drifting around the city, before 94

losing my way in the red light district around Falkland Road, locally known as the Kamathipura. Street after street was lined with cages in which frail girls, like birds, sold into slavery for the price of a cassette-player or tin roof, whispered and fluttered. Pimps pursued me wherever I turned. "You want j iggajig, Sah? Sahib, sahib, sahib, you like leetle girl? Sah? Yes, Sahib, I can do, Sahib?" To escape the wheedling and pestering, I walked into a cinema and bought a ticket. I was ushered into an upstairs seat, and found myself watching a film of the great Persian epic, Sohrab

and Rustum. I had never before seen an Indian film. Although I couldn't understand Hindi or read the Urdu or Malayalam sub­ titles, I was captivated by the music, one song in particular. Sohrab and his sweetheart are by a river. Sunlight sparkles on the water. They are singing to each other before Sohrab goes off to do battle with his father. One night in London, months later, I dreamed I was back in Bombay. As I woke from the dream, the song was running through my head. I didn't want to lose it. I didn't want to break the spell. I was convinced that as long as I held the music in my mind, I would be connected to the exotic world I had glimpsed for a moment, then lost. I walked out into the London streets and walked all night, singing the song softly to myself so that I would remember it. I kept it alive in my head all day as the mist lifted from the river, as trains crashed and racketed above the roof of the welfare office, and tramps came and went with their hardluck stories and stricken faces. As that winter grudgingly gave ground to spring, I succeeded in getting a volunteer position with the UN operation in the Congo (ONUC) . For about a week before I left London, I stayed with Annette and Harry, enj oying their hospitality and company as if for the last time. Mindful of the violence that had followed Independence, Harry saw my going to the Congo as willful self-immolation. I 95

laughed this off, saying anything was better than another English winter. In the hours before taking the tube to Heathrow, I wandered with Harry around Soho, finally winding up in a record shop in Tottenham Court Road. I asked the salesman if he had anything ofWoody Guthrie's, only to be asked if I had heard anything by this new singer, who sounded like Woody. I thought he meant Jack Eliott, but no, this was a young guy called Bob Dylan. So Harry and I listened for the first time to "The Times They Are A-Changin' " . When i t came time for u s to go our separate ways, I wanted to embrace Harry, or at least clasp his hand. But Harry, I knew, shrank from such intimacy, and I was too unsure of myself to initiate it. In the end, we simply turned and walked off in different directions . But as I descended into the Underground I glanced back and saw him for a moment, as couth and kempt as ever, but no longer, I felt, as deeply gruntled.

96

N a band a l
T he storms come up from the south. By mid afternoon, anvil­ topped thunderheads tower over the city. The air is charged with electricity. You hear thunder far off. Then it cracks overhead, making you cringe. Forked lightning splits the sky. With the first spattering of rain you smell asphalt and earth. As it pelts down, people dash for cover under the mango trees along the Avenue Valcke, and cars slow to a crawl along the flooded Boulevard du Trente Juin. I buy a copy of Le Progres outside the Cafe Leopold I I . The boy at the news stand has lost most of his fingers to leprosy. A burnt­ out case. Luckily for him, the soaring inflation rate has made ..:oins superfluous. He holds out a grubby wad of ten-franc notes berween the stumps of his fingers and palm, and with the knuckles of his other hand feeds me my change. The cafe smells of sweat and rain. I take a seat by the door, order a Primus beer, and spread the newspaper open on the table
"' C'est vrai ce qu 'on dit - qu 'ilfaut que les blancs partent?" ·' Only the families of UN personnel," I say. "Only women and :hildren." 97

"You are not afraid to stay, monsieur?" "With the National Congolese Army to protect us, how could one possibly be afraid?" It's the kind of cynical bravado everyone cultivates here. Though I still surprise myself that I go along with it. I saw Marthe this morning at Le Royal - the apartment building that is the UN headquarters in Leopoldville. Marthe has developed several marketing cooperatives up and down the country. How many have survived Pierre Mulde's incursions in Moyen Congo, Gaston Soumialot's invasion of North Katanga and General Olenga's rebellion in Kivu is anyone's guess. For more than a month now it has been dangerous to travel outside the provincial cities. Stacks of paper proj ects collect dust in the Depar­ tement des Affaires Sociales. Haitian stenographers file their nails and stifle yawns as UN heads confer in closed meetings. At midday the PX is packed with UN personnel spending their p er diems on packets of Camel cigarettes, six-packs of Budweiser and bottles of Glenfiddich . By six in the evening, when the curfew begins, all have retreated into the hill suburbs, white Peugeots parked behind padlocked gates. When I see Marthe gesturing angrily at the end of the corridor, my first thought is that she has once again been refused permis­ sion to travel to Kivu and check on her community development proj ects there. But when I get close enough to hear what she is saying to the UNRRA office staff, I learn that she has been ordered to prepare for evacuation. " I am nobody's wife. I am not a child. I am not a dependent," she rails . " I have been here since sixty-two. I do not need une p etite vacance ! It's an outrage. It's discrimination ! " Catching sight of me, she demands, "What do you think?" If anyone should be flown back to Europe, it should be me. I haven't created a single community development scheme - even on paper. Nor am I likely to do so, even if the National Congo­ lese Army, inspired by the optimistic pronouncements of its high 98

command, succeeds in crushing the rebellion. I spend most of my time in my hotel by the river, reading and translating Blaise Cendrars . "What can one do?" I say. " C'est le Congo. " Marthe is incensed. " Ce n 'est pas le Congo. C'est New York ! " I n colonial times, Parcembise was Leopoldville's elite neighbour­ hood. The streets are shaded by jacarandas. Villas are enclosed by high walls, topped with broken glass and barbed wire. Behind wrought-iron gates, guard dogs bare their fangs, salivate, and bark at Congolese passing up and down the street. The air is scented with frangipani and bougainvillea . On the street door to Marthe's apartment block is a sign

-

A ttention au Chien Mechant ! As I unlock the door, I half expect an Alsatian to leap at my throat. But the lobby is deserted. It is only two days since Marthe left, yet already her apart­ ment smells mouldy. I drop my duffel bag on the parquet and look around. There are two paintings propped against the bookcase. Tourist-shop art. Wiry African figures strolling through a forest clearing. A fisherman in a pirogue on the river. Maybe she intended to take the paintings back to Europe as gifts for her family. Then I remember, she doesn't have any family. On the dining table is a bunch of keys, a note telling me to make myself at home, and a ledger in which I am to keep a record of payments to Albert. She has also left me a photocopied file of docu­ ments that date back to colonial times - official wage-rates for domestic servants . It amuses me that despite her hurried departure \1arthe found time to answer my misgivings about paying her houseboy the equivalent of twenty dollars a month. Waiting for Albert to turn up, I fix myself a gin and tonic and go out onto the balcony. In the square, there is a boulangerie called Le Coq Hardy. All the other shops are boarded up. I am having second thoughts about moving out of my hotel. I am going to miss the river and its floating islands of hyacinth; the OTRACO 99

river boats such as Conrad may have captained, that lie beached and derelict beside the ferry landing; and the distant roar of the Livingstone rapids in the night. I regret having let Marthe talk me into living in her apartment and taking care of it while she is away. And the prospect of dealing with Albert unnerves me. Marthe's "boy" is old enough to be my father. In fact, one of the first things he tells me when I ask him about his family and where he lives is that he has two sons about my age in the army. He is worried about them. They are stationed in Kamina, defending the town and airstrip against Soumialot's guerillas .

" C'est loin, Kamina, " he says, making Karnina sound like a synonym for sadness. As he moves toward the kitchen, I follow, and stand in the doorway as he rummages in a cupboard for his bucket, mop and detergent. "Look, Albert," I say, "I'm not sure I really need a servant. I mean, I can't have you doing all my menial tasks for me. I thought it might suit us both if maybe you came here once or twice a week, just to put in an appearance . . . " "But Madame Haedens said I should come every day." "But why? There's nothing for you to do. If you come every day, we'll get in each other's way and feel uncomfortable." "What about monsieur's meals?" "And another thing, if l'm going to call you by your first name, you must call me by mine. I can't have you calling me monsieur. My name is Michael." "Oui, Monsieur Michel." "And there's the question of your wage, Albert. I 've already told Madame Haedens that I cannot agree to pay you only a thousand francs a month ." Albert stands with his arms by his sides, rigid and startled as if posing for a photograph. I try to hide my irritation. "I want to pay you three thousand francs a month . But I want us to keep the 1 00

arrangement to ourselves. I'll pay you on the twenty-fifth of each month, like Madame Haedens, but I'll enter only a thousand francs in the ledger so that everything will be en regie. Is that okay?" Albert picks up the bucket and tilts it under the tap. " Oui, Monsieur Michel," he says, and starts running water into the bucket. Driving back to the apartment for lunch, I am flagged down by the Belgian driver of a refrigerated meat van. He's had a puncture and asks if I can keep an eye on his vehicle while he walks to the Total service station for help. "No problem," I say, and park my j eep about twenty metres behind him. No sooner has he disappeared up the road than people converge on the meat van from all directions. They saunter around it, kick at the flat tyre, inspect the padlocks on the back doors. It's as though I am invisible. One guy breaks open the padlocks with a j emmy. Another positions a jack under the rear axle. Have they been lying in wait all morning, equipped with these tools, expecting such a windfall? Or has all this been carefully planned - six-inch nails strewn on the road, a team of helpers? The metal doors are flung open. Men, women and children clamber up and start handing down carcasses. People hack up the meat with p angas. Everyone is laughing. Before long, people with headloads of meat are filing away over the open fields, vanishing as quickly as they came. As for the truck, its axles are chocked up on hunks of wood and a group of men are bowling the tyres away down a muddy track. I switch on the j eep 's ignition, j olt back on to the road, and accelerate past the stranded truck. "Albert," I announce, "today I'm going to make you lunch. Give me your apron." Nonplussed, he unties his apron and hands it to me, then stands aside as I peel and slice potatoes forjdtes, and crush 101

garlic and black pepper for the entrecote steaks. He says, "You are doing everything. It isn't right, Monsieur Michel." I push past him to get the lettuce and tomatoes out of the fridge. He says, "What is there for me to do?" "Put a record on." "Which one, Monsieur Michel?" "You choose." Albert puts on a rumba called "Nabanda Kala". I set two places at the table and open two bottles of beer.

" Bon apphit ! " I say, ignoring Albert's disgruntled expression. " Bon apphit, " Albert mumbles, and sits down. I ask him if he has always worked as a houseboy. "Always," he says. "Always for whites?" He looks at me guardedly. "You don't regard such work as beneath a man's dignity, as women's work?" I ask. "Some people say that." "Do you like the work? Is it hard to find work like this?" " One is lucky to have work. Times are hard, Monsieur Michel. Everything costs. Everyone suffers. It is not a question of what one wants to do. It is a question of survival." "Have things changed much since Independence?" "What things, Monsieur Michel?" "The way people treat their servants, for example." "Sometimes people are kind, sometimes they make life very hard for you ." "And Madame Haedens, is she kind?" "Madame Haedens, yes, she is very kind." "In what way?" "She gives me clothes for my wife. She always gives us food. Sometimes she gives me a box of cigars." 1 02

Albert sips his beer. "You're not eating," I say. " I am sorry, Monsieur Michel, but I am not hungry." "Does it bother you that I serve you lunch?" "Yes, monsieur, it bothers me." "Why?" "It is not right." "But you can't always be a servant, Albert. Isn't that what Inde­ pendence means - becoming your own master? " " It is true what you say, but porcupine can't teach pangolin to climb trees ." " I didn't know porcupines could climb trees." Albert begins to clear the table - his uneaten entrecote and french fries, his salad and glass of beer . . . "So am I the pangolin or the porcupine?" I ask. "You confuse me, Monsieur Michel," Albert says, and pads out to the kitchen in his bare feet. A carte p ostale from Geneva: The ne ws pape r he adlines here would make you think the e ntire Congo is a bloodbath. I'm s till try ing to pe rs uade those imbe ciles in Ne wYork that it is pe rfectly s afe for me to re turn. I hope you are e njoy ing your petit Say

bonjour

sejour

in my apartme nt and that all is we ll.

to Albe rt for me .

Cordialement,

Marthe .

I have bought an alarm clock so I can wake at six and do all the housework before Albert turns up at seven-thirty. When he arrives, I follow him into the kitchen and wait while he disentan­ gles himself from his string bags and unfolds the scrap of paper on which he's written the cost of the greengroceries. He gives me my change, then puts the vegetables in the fridge. He appears more subdued than usual. 1 03

"Have you heard from your sons?" "They say the army is regrouping." Both of us know this really means the army is retreating. "I received a postcard yesterday from Madame Haedens. She says to greet you." "Is she well?" "Yes, she is well." "I hope she comes back soon." Albert unstraps his sandals and pushes them out of the way. He takes his mauve apron from behind the door and ties it around his waist. I follow him as he pads around the apartment. I have waxed the parquet so well that I have to tread carefully. Albert's bare feet give him a firm grip. He checks the bathroom. It is spotless. He looks into my bedroom. The window is open, the bed made without a crease. "Everything is very clean and tidy," Albert observes. I seize my chance. "You see, Albert, how pointless it is you making this long j ourney here every day. Wouldn't you prefer being at home with your wife?" "My work is here, Monsieur Michel. I do not want to be at home with my wife. I will do your laundry this morning." " I 've already done it." "Then I will dust the books. Madame Haedens likes me to dust her books from time to time." I give up. Yesterday he polished the silver. The day before he cleaned windows. Today he will dust the books, even though it is the rainy season and there is no dust. A night of torrential rain. I sit at the dining table, working on my translation of Blaise Cendrars' Moravagine: I don't believe there are any literary s ubjects , or rather that there is only one: man. But which man? The man who wr ites , of cours e. There is no other s ubject poss ible. 1 04

W ho is he? In any even t it's not me, it is the Other. Other," Gerard

"[

am

the

de Ner val wr ites under one of the ver y rare photo­

graphs of himself. But who is thisOther? Doesn 't much matter. You meet someone by chance and n ever see him again. On e fine day this guy resurfaces in your conscious­ n ess an d screws you aroun d for ten years. It's not always someone memorable; he can be colourless and without character. T his is what happened to me with Mister

X

-

M oravagine.

I wanted to star t wr itin g. He had taken my place. He was there, install ed deep down in me, as in an ar mchair. I shook him, str ug­ gled with him, he didn't want to trade places. He seemed to say, "I'm here an d here I stay! " It was terr ible. I began to notice that this Other was appropr iating ever y thing that had happen ed in my life, assumin g character traits I thought of as my own . My thoughts, my favour ite studies, my tastes, ever y thin g con verged on him, belonged to him, n our ished him. At great cost to myself, I fed and nurtured a parasite. In the end I no lon ger knew which of us was copying the other. He took tr ips in my place. He made love instead of me. But he never possessed any real iden tity, for each of us was himself, me an d theOther. Tragic te te- a- te te. W hich is why on e can wr ite but one book, or the same book again an d again. It's why all good books are alike. They are all au tobiographical. It's why there is onl y one literar y subject: man . It's why there is onl y one literature: that of this man, this Other, the on e who wr ites.

The p ortejenetre is open. The night smells of decaying foliage and rain. Above the noise of the rain I hear snatches of a Fran<;oise Hardy song. Plaintive. Remote. Someone in a nearby apartment has been playing it all evening. I shove my books and papers aside. Who is playing this record? Why the same song over and over again? 1 05

The song keeps running through my head as I drive through the rainswept darkness. The headlights of my Jeep pick out Africans walking beside the road, or grouped under makeshift canopies of hammered tin, grilling manioc and shish kebabs over braziers. At the crossroads I cannot decide whether to drive up to the Stanley Memorial or head downtown . The windscreen wipers flick back and forth . I sit mesmerised. Water drips on to my shoulder from where the canvas hood is fastened to the frame. The Carousel Club is not far from my old hotel. A malfunctioning neon sign buzzes and clicks in the rain. C A R 0 U S E . . . It's early. The only people at the bar are half a dozen Congolese girls. Lacquered hairpieces and cheap perfume. Lips are purple, faces blurred in the lurid light. I buy two bottles of Primus beer. Joe the piano player is from Southern Rhodesia, only he calls it Zimbabwe. He is one of Joshua Nkomo's men. They are waiting to return home and begin the armed struggle for Independence. "So how's the United Nations?" Joe drawls. "As ununited as ever," I say, and set a bottle of beer down on the piano for him. He stops playing and quaffs some beer. "What else is new? " he asks. I glance over at the bar, at the Congolese girls. "Who's the girl in the blue dress?" I ask Joe. "Why don't you ask her?" Joe says, and starts playing again. Most of the night I lie awake, smoking cigarettes, listening to the rain. The girl beside me smells of palm oil and ash . . . The dawn light infiltrates the room. Sophie's glossy hairpiece is on the bedside table, her blue dress flung over the back of a chair. When I hear the front door open and close, I think it is a door in an apartment downstairs. I have been asleep, and have dreamed 1 06

of a village with thatched roofs like hair, and fire-blackened rafters like human skin . I hear Albert moving around in the kitchen, and seize Sophie by the shoulder. "Wake up! You have to go." As I scramble out of bed and pull on my trousers, Sophie sits up, folds her arms across her breasts, and yawns. " Quick!" I say. When I hear Albert padding down the corridor, I stumble toward the door. "Monsieur Michel ? " he queries. As he peers into the bedroom, Sophie snatches up a sheet to cover herself and utters a queer squeal of annoyance. Albert begins to say something in Lingala, but I steer him back through the doorway, holding my trousers awkwardly with one hand to keep them up. When Albert has disappeared into the kitchen and shut the door, I go back to the bedroom. Sophie is sullenly tugging her hairpiece over her own braided hair. She looks even more of a child than she did last night. Ne fait

pas �a monsieur, je t'en p rie . . . I take a wad of notes from my pocket and peel off three hundred francs. She crushes the notes in her fist. " �a va ?" I ask. " Oui, fa va. " She snatches up her red high-heeled shoes and pads barefoot down the corridor to the front door. " I 'll drive you," I say. " I will walk." "No," I say angrily, ''I 'll drive you." Not once between Parcembise and the city do we speak. When I have dropped her off, I go to a p atisserie for coffee. The very thought of the apartment sickens me. I am in half a mind to check 1 07

back into my hotel by the river and forget that any of this has ever happened . . . It is midday when I get back to the apartment. Albert's sandals aren't in the kitchen, and his apron is hanging behind the door. In my bedroom the bed has been made with freshly laundered sheets. On the couvre-lit a pair of my trousers is laid out, and an ironed shirt. The cite indigene is a labyrinth. Shanties made of mud, beaten sheets of tin, palm fronds and packing cases. The pulse and jangle of hi-life. Young men in dark glasses staring. When I ask, " Is this Nyanza?" they smile. A woman sidles up to me and urges me to go back, it's dangerous for me here. I press on, followed by children who beg for coins. Sweat is trickling down my ribcage. I curse the heat, the potholes into which I stumble, the children pursuing me.

" Fiche-moi le camp ! " M y voice i s cracked and feeble. The crowd o f children i s not following me now; it is moving ahead of me like a wave. When I finally locate Albert's house, he is waiting outside, as though word of my coming had already reached him. His face is contorted with anger. Then I realise he is looking beyond me, at the children. Brusquely, he raises his arm and shouts something at them in Lingala. They shamble a few yards back and stop. "White men never come here," Albert says . "Is this your house?" I ask. He pushes aside the plastic strips in the doorway and gestures for me to go inside. "It is a poor man's house," he says, "but you are welcome." The darkness blinds me. "You have come a long way, Monsieur Michel," Albert says. "I wanted to come and see where you lived." I stand nervously in the middle of the room, trying to get 1 08

accustomed to the gloom. Albert indicates that I should sit down on the battered sofa against the wall. Then he goes out into the backyard and says something to a woman sitting there. The woman immediately picks up a scrap of tin and starts fanning the embers between the hearth stones. When Albert returns, he sits opposite me on a folding metal chair but keeps glancing toward the back door. I direct my gaze to the photographs on the wall and the glass-fronted cabinet containing candles, bunches of native tobacco, plates and cutlery. "My wife will bring tea," Albert explains. She enters the room with her eyes lowered and hands me a thermos of tea. She has pulled her lap a over her breasts before entering the room. I put a sugar cube and some evaporated milk in the cup she gives me. She holds the box of sugar cubes in front of me, as if l should take more. I shake my head, and she leaves the room without having spoken a word. "Where is your cup?" I ask Albert. " It is all right, Monsieur Michel." He watches as I fill my cup from the thermos. "Albert," I begin, "I wanted to talk to you . . . "

"Ah bon," he says, as though he has no idea why I have come. "I missed you yesterday. I wondered why you didn't come back to the apartment after siesta." "There was something monsieur wanted me to do?" "No, no . . . " "You have told me ever since you moved into Madame Haedens' apartment that I was not to come every day . . . " His eyes meet mine, but betray nothing. I dig into my pocket and pull out the plastic pouch of aromatic Dutch tobacco I bought in the PX. "Here, this is for you ." "That's very kind of you, Monsieur Michel." He opens the pouch, sniffs the tobacco and begins to fill his 1 09

pipe. I light a cigarette, then stand up and take the box of matches over to him. "Are these your sons?" I ask, looking at the photos of the sombre men in battledress. "Oui, Monsieur Michel." There is a photo of a young girl too, not unlike Sophie. "Have you lived here long? " I ask. "Since two years. I used to live in Kinshasa, but my wife felt that it was unsafe, so we moved here." " It's safer here?" "Pah ! " He throws up his hands. " I am getting old. In a year or two I'll go back to my village. I'll quit work. I 'll let my sons take care of me." "Where is your village?" "It is far." "How far?" Albert puffs at his pipe as if he has not heard my question. I sit down on the sofa again . "Now that you have more days off, perhaps you'll be able to spend more time there." "Perhaps ." " I 'd like to go with you some time. I 'd like to see your village. I 'd like to see where you live." Albert guides me out of the labyrinth of Nyanza to where I left my j eep. It's not there. Albert insists on searching up and down the Avenue Mahamba, but I tell him it is pointless. I catch a bus into the city and walk to the Nigerian Police headquarters . The sergeant in the sky-blue beret tells me I will have to make a written statement. He shows me into an air-condi­ tioned room and gives me a form on which I am to describe the circumstances of the theft. When I have done this, I return the form to him. He casts his eyes over it and frowns. "You have written your statement in English ! " 1 10

"What else?" "Your carte d'identite says 'Nationalite: Neo Zelandais '." "So?" "So you have to write your statement in French." "But I'm a New Zealander. English is my first language." "You must write your statement in French. Those are the rules." It takes me half an hour to complete my translation. The sergeant is satisfied. "We all have to follow the proper procedures," he explains as he passes my statement to the Nigerian Police trans­ lator. An hour later, the statement - now rendered into unreadable English - is returned to me for my signature. At the Department des Affaires Sociales the news is that Marthe is coming back. I move out of the apartment at once and back to my hotel. It's several days before I put in an appearance at Le Royal, to collect my mail. There's a note from Marthe. She wants me to contact her urgently. The following afternoon she runs me to earth at the Cafe Leopold I I . "Michael! " she cries, and with the back o f her hand bats aside the newspaper I 'm reading. "What have you done to Albert?" I open my mouth to say something. "You've spoiled him completely! He won't do a thing I tell him. He turns up late in the morning. He demands more money. He looks as if I disgust him. What did you do to him while I was away?" " I didn't do anything to him, Marthe. I paid him a little more than you do. I told you I 'd probably do that. And I told him he didn't have to come to work every day. There was nothing for him to do." "Nothing? The place is a shambles ! I knew I couldn't trust you. 111

I knew this would happen if I went away." "Marthe, why don't you sit down?" "No, I will not sit down! " " I paid Albert more because h e needs the money. I went and saw where he lives. He and his wife don't even have a floor in their house. It's j ust linoleum over bare earth . . . " "Oh! He's actually seen how the natives live, has he?" She glances around as though she wants her sarcasm to reach every corner of the cafe. "What self-righteousness! Do you think we can be laws unto ourselves? Is that your idea of a civilised world - everyone doing what he pleases?" "This isn't a colonised country any more, Marthe. You can't exploit peo- " "Exploit! Don't be so na'ive! What do you think you've been doing? Did you ever think of what Albert wanted? No! You presumed to know what he wanted, and you forced him to play along with your selfish little game. Do you really think you know Albert? Do you know how he thinks, what he feels? Bullying him, blackmailing him, undermining his position. You call that equality! " " If things have gone wrong between you and Albert . . . " "Wrong! It's you and Albert who have gone wrong, not me." " I 'm sorry if that's how you feel." "You haven't the faintest idea how I feel." She turns and walks away, and the whole cafe stares at me as if I owe them an apology too. On the C-1 30, flying to Kasai , I am the only passenger. Far below, the shadow of the aircraft is tugged across gulches and grassland. I make out red dirt paths, villages like the one to which Albert will return . . . Our cargo is made up of bales of chicken wire and a Volkswagen Beetle, eye-bolted to the floor. As the plane drops into airpockets, the VW is jerked violently upward. I flick through Marthe's notes 1 12

on the community-development proj ects she wants me to check out. Sunlight streams through the window. I begin to fall asleep, remembering Marthe's accusations. Then we are descending through rain cloud. The airstrip is in shadow. Tufts of grass sprout from cracks in the tarmac. There are no signs of life. We unload the VW. The Swedish pilot fills it with petrol from a forty-gallon drum. I get in the car, switch on the ignition, and the engine splutters reluctantly into life. As I drive off, the pilot gives me a perfunctory wave, then ducks under the wing of his aircraft and disappears. In the city, the silence is unearthly. I find the Imokasai building and park the VW. I cross the foyer. There is a deck of playing cards strewn over the terrazzo. A radio crackles with static. From time to time a voice breaks through with news from Leo or E'ville. The UN radio operator sits in front of his receiver, headphones hanging around his neck. He squints through cigarette smoke. "I t doesn't sound to o good," he says. "The rebels are moving back into Lusambo." He tells me he's ready to destroy the radio equipment and move out at a moment's notice. In the next room, the UN Chief ofArea Operations is drinking percolated coffee from a plastic cup. " It's crazy," he drawls, "fuckin' crazy. You ask for fuckin' supplies and they send you fuckin' chicken wire! What the fuckin' hell am I supposed to do with chicken wire?" He screws up the consignment notice and tosses it away

m

disgust. " Is there any chance of my getting a j eep?" I ask. "What do you want a j eep for, pal?" " I want to go to Muchona and check out a project there. A school." 1 13

"You crazy? Because the area's under ANC control doesn't mean a goddam thing. They're all as jumpy as jackasses. Anyway, what the hell are you going to do with a school up there? Teach?" I look around. The boxes of vehicle spares, the copy of Playboy. In the next room the radio spits and crackles. "So is there a spare j eep I can have?" "Pal, you can have my job and kiss my arse if you want. Sure you can have a jeep. There's a four-by-four in the yard. Ask Hank for the keys. And tell him where you're going and how long you expect to be gone . . . " Hank, still squinting through smoke, points to a bunch of keys on a hook on the wall. "Don't get raped! " he sings out as I leave the room. At the edge of town, the road degenerates into a rain-eroded track - red laterite between brakes of elephant grass and the forest wall. At the first ANC roadblock, the officer in charge bangs the muzzle of his automatic rifle down on the metal ledge of my seat. I hand him my laissez-passer and carte d'identite. He flicks through them without a word, and signals for the barrier to be raised. The j eep churns through quagmires and grinds uphill. It is hot and clammy. People move into the grass as I pass, steadying their headloads, alarmed . . . I stop at a village to ask for directions. A small boy tugs at my trousers. "Des pierres, monsieur, des pierres." He opens his fist and shows me a handful of uncut diamonds. He wants to exchange them for a cigarette. I drive on, reaching Muchona at dusk. The school has been destroyed by termites and rain. I sit on the porch of the town chief's house, trying to swallow the chikuanga his wives have brought me to eat - "lumps of some stuff like half-cooked dough, of a dirty lavender colour . . . wrapped in leaves" as Conrad described it in Heart if Darkness. A man approaches. His clothes are filthy and ragged. His bare 1 14

feet are like charred wood, the toes unsightly stumps. He dumps a bamboo creel and two traps on the porch at my feet." Monsieur?" he says. He pulls a strip of Iiana from the neck of the creel, and drags out a dead porcupine. He turns the porcupine over. One paw is mangled and bloody. Its two sharp rat-like teeth jut upward. I reach down and touch the inert body. It is cold, like the rain.

"Monsieur?" he says again. For days I drove down deserted roads, through brakes of elephant grass, the bush swathed in mist. As I saw it, the UN's development programme was little more than a new mask for what Conrad had called the "civilizing mission". Like Kurtz's vainglorious enterprise, it simply disguised and euphemised Europe's longstanding desire to control Africa's wealth, and I found it hard to rid my mind of King Leopold's savage dominion - the amputations and castra­ tions as punishment, the millions enslaved or shot in the course of Belgium's quest for rubber, gum-opal and ivory. As a volunteer worker, I should not, perhaps, have felt so deeply implicated in this dubious history, yet without this disquiet I may not have found my own path . In Elizabethville, I checked into the Hotel Leopold I I , with its anachronistic balconies, dingy dining-room, and thin Corinthian columns that recalled a regime that had gone for good. Over the city, heavy blue thunderheads were massing. People drifted past me on their way to the market. A group of women moved slowly down the centre of the road, keening for the dead child they carried on a wooden litter. As the first heavy drops of rain pattered down through the pendulous flowers of the jacaranda trees, the stormlight became tinged with lilac. I felt strangely free. As if the Congo 's bloody struggle for Independence had been, obliquely, my own. But as with any revolution, the new is never ushered in without the old being ruthlessly attacked, cut out, and destroyed. For an 1 15

individual, rebirth is both an ordeal to be endured and a death. Old ties are cast away, one turns one's back on one's parentage, one's childhood. Bridges are burned. There is no turning back. This is no less true for a country attempting to radically rein­ vent itself. The old must be erased if the new order is to arise. So declared Chrisopher Gbenye when he ordered the execution of everyone who was literate or had worked for the Belgians: "We must destroy what existed before, we must start again at zero with an ignorant mass ." Like Pol Pot in Cambodia a generation later. The trouble with revenge is that it binds one ever more firmly to the past one is so determined to surpass. Vengeance is not revo­ lution. Revolution is going beyond the past. Not long before leaving Kasai, I was invited to spend a few days with a group of Franciscans at a former Belgian coffee planta­ tion they had brought back into production with the assistance of twenty or thirty young Baluba men. Each day we worked. At night we filled the large, barely-furnished living room of the old Belgian homestead and watched movies (I remember Jean Marais in Le Bossu) or talked. I experienced a cameraderie I had seldom known before. One night, I went down to the Lulua river with some of the young Congolese to watch the hippos come ashore. As darkness fell, the black grassland was suddenly filled with the shimmer of fireflies, as if the stars had disintegrated and fallen to earth . Then we heard the hippos clambering up the muddy slipways along the river bank. Dark holes in the glimmering, fallen sky, they moved about as if blind to our presence. Another night, rummaging around for something to read, I found a dog-eared copy of Claude Levi-Strauss's Les Structures

Elementaires de Ia Parente, and read with growing fascination about the rules of reciprocity that underlie all human interaction. I had glimpsed the Africa I now wanted to know. Not a place I might have a hand in changing, but a place in which I would be the one that was changed. 1 16

Pauline

C endrars' first wife, Fela Poznanska, once said that when she first met Blaise - in Bern in 1 909 - she felt that he could have been born in any country in the world. "He doesn't much resemble his compatriots. He's got Gorki's head of hair, Baudelaire's leather pilot-coat and big cravat, and in his gestures has the grace of an Italian. He could also be Polish." Cendrars was twenty-two. Inter­ viewed forty-three years later, he would appear almost indifferent to the image he had once so avidly cultivated: of the risk-taker, the dare-devil, the adventurer who had tried his hand at every trade, learned English by working his way through the Encyclo­

paedia Britannica, enlisted in two world wars, made and squandered millions. Observed the interviewer, "You have dedicated yourself to being a man of the world, that is to say to break ties, to cut loose . . . " World-wearily, Cendrars replied, " If you like. But I give it no credence." Determined to keep the legend alive, the interviewer tried again. "You've also got a great appetite for risk." " I know nothing of that," Cendrars replied. "Do you think it's really possible for me to understand the circumstances of my life?" .1\t twenty-five, I was also at a loss to understand the circumstances of my life. Back in Auckland, old friends kept telling me that I had come full circle, and my parents were "glad to have me home " . But I was still restive, and living abroad had, if anything, only increased 1 17

my sense of having no fixed identity, no specific anchorage. Just before Easter 1 965 I went south for a j ob interview at the Department of Maori Affairs. As the train crossed the low­ lying flax fields near Foxton, I looked for an augury among the black seedheads of flax and the seahorse clouds but none was forthcoming. In Wellington, the man who sat behind his polished desk, fingering a jade letter-knife, was clearly less impressed by my resume than his colleague had been - who had responded warmly to the letter I sent from Athens, where I taught English to college students for a few months after I left the Congo. "Maoris aren't Africans, you know," he said. Was I to feel insulted by the insinuation that Africans were somehow inferior to Maori, or by the suggestion that I might not be aware of their obvious differences? I bit my tongue, but it availed me nothing. The interview on which I 'd pinned my hopes ended with that door-in-the-face phrase: "We'll be in touch." Insurance towers were going up all over the city, and before the day was done I got myself hired as a builder's labourer on the GM Assurance site in Waring Taylor Street. But I was back to square one, dependent on my sister and brother-in-law for a roof over my head, in debt to my parents for my airfare home from Greece, and with no clear vision of my own path . In the Duke of Edinburgh one evening, I bumped into an old friend who, to my astonishment, was still struggling to finish his B.A. at Victoria University. Mike knew of a party that night on Kelburn Parade. He'd met a couple of girls . We were invited. I didn't feel like going to a student party, having been nowhere near a university for several years, but when the pub closed at six I found myself shouldering a crate of beer and beginning, with Mike, the slow climb up narrow flights of concrete steps to the Terrace, and thence to Salamanca Road. It was at that point, as we trudged past Victoria University's Student Union, that Mike suddenly remembered that he was the 1 18

secretary of the Literary Society and that there was a meeting at seven that night that he had to chair. I was determined to go on my way, but Mike begged me not to. The meeting wouldn't take long. So I took a chair at the back of the room while Mike ponder­ ously called his meeting to order. She was sitting in the front row. At first I could not see her face. Her hair was dark. She was wearing a dark-blue polo-neck jersey and hessian skirt. There was something about her that attracted then compelled my attention. She turned her head slightly. She was very beautiful. I wanted to hear her speak. When the business of the meeting was concluded, a dishevelled poet climbed to his feet, pulled a sheaf of papers from his duffel­ coat pocket, and proceeded to explain that since no one seemed to have fully understood the allusions in his last published poem, it might be helpful if he read us a commentary he'd written for it. He had been speaking for no more than five minutes when she raised her hand. The poet was flustered, and tried to ignore her. But she was sitting right in front of him, and finally he asked her irritably what she wanted. Her accent was polished, her intellectual acuity immediately obvious. I can no longer recall her question, but it told me that she was brilliantly irreverent, incredibly well-read and did not suffer fools gladly. I didn't want to let her out of my sight. As the meeting broke up, my face was burning and my hands were trembling. Though panicked by the thought that I would lose her unless I acted at once, I could not bring myself to approach her. Fortunately, however, Mike was talking to her friend while she stood by, and so I sidled up to them and, without meeting her eyes, asked if "they" would like to j oin Mike and me for a coffee. Mike tried to protest, but we repaired to a gloomy and near­ empty coffee bar where we engaged in desultory conversation for an hour. She was very reserved. Almost disdainful, I thought. But I was smitten . 1 19

After coffee, Mike and I walked them to Rosina Terrace where they flatted with two other students . I have never believed in miracles. The very idea irritates me. It belongs to the vocabulary of those irksome individuals who answer your phone calls by confiding in awed tones that they'd been thinking of you at the very same moment you rang. People who believe that every coincidence is evidence of some hidden hand benignly steering them through life. People who pepper their stories with words like karma and fate and synchronicity. Despite this, I was no more immune to superstition than any other human being, and in this case I felt that a miracle had happened. We had met. I had her address. I knew her name. And her friend Carol had invited me to call on them any time. I took up her invitation the following evening, still in my work clothes. She was wearing a white woollen dress, and a suede coat with a fur collar. She was waiting for her boyfriend to come by. They were off to a National Orchestra concert. I hid my disappointment, and fell into conversation with Carol. Later that night, when Pauline came home from the concert, she asked Carol how her evening with me had gone. "He did the dishes," Carol said, "plied me with questions about you, then left." Next time I called in, Carol invited me to stay for dinner. We sat at a round table in the kitchen. They were all curious about me. Why was I working as a builder's labourer? What was it like in the Congo and in Greece? At one point I said that I was thinking of going to Vietnam as a correspondent; I wanted to bring home the truth of the war to those in New Zealand who supported it. The truth was, however, that I was wanting to bring home to Pauline that I approved the slogan she and her flatmates had painted in large black letters on the side of their house facing the cable car: U. S. OUT OF VIETNAM NOW! After dinner, as though at a prearranged signal, Pauline's flat­ mates all left the house, ostensibly to see a movie, and Pauline 1 20

suggested I light the fire in the front room - her room - while she fixed some coffee. She said that when she first saw me, she supposed I was a seaman. Mindful of Cendrars' meeting with Fela, I considered this a very flattering remark and proceeded to tell her how I had hitchhiked from the Congo through Northern Rhodesia shortly before it became independent and how I had a vision of returning to New Zealand and falling in love and marrying. I still kept a white stone that I picked up from the roadside near Chirundu , and a battered edition of Ryder Haggard's She that I bought in a Bancroft dairy before recrossing the border. All auguries, I said. And then I asked her about herself, where she hailed from, and what she was stud­ ying at university. She'd spent most of her childhood in North Canterbury, she said. Like me, she had been impatient for as long as she could remember to leave home and make her own way in the world. She spent her sixth form years at Christchurch Girls' High, then enrolled in the Otago University Medical School, only to quit after a year, exasperated by the intellectual sterility of the lectures, the absurd amount of rote-learning, and the morbidity of the dissection room. After returning to Christchurch, she spent the summer working at Sunnyside mental hospital, then began an arts degree, majoring in English. "I was rapt in Hopkins . . . " '"Away in the loveable west,"' I began, " ' On a pastoral forehead ofWales"' . . . and then she picked up the line . . . " ' I was under a roof here, I was at rest, And they the prey of the gales."' She laughed with delight, and asked if I would like more coffee. I said no, but got up and crouched in front of the fire, and care­ fully placed some more pine cones on it. "Stay there," she said. "There is something I 'd like to show you." It was a book. She'd had her books in storage in a Christchurch basement for a year and they had been spoiled by damp and 121

mildew. Broken-backed and water-stained, her most cherished volume was The Renaissance. She opened it on the floor, and we pored over it, our bodies accidentally touching from time to time. Cimabue's Crucifixion . . . Gozzoli 's Journey cf the Magi, Cosima's portrait of Simonetta Vespucci . . . which she compared to Botticelli's Venus and La Primavera. I asked her if she knew Cosima 's The Death of Procris. " No," she said. Then, as she made to turn the page, I reached out my hand and covered hers with mine . . . All night we lay in each other's arms in her narrow bed, listening to the rain gusting over the iron roof, sharing the stories of our tribulations, and our dreams. Once she got up and moved naked through the darkened room, touched by the flickering firelight, and switched on the record player. There was a song she wanted me to hear, sung by the Soviet Army Ensemble. A song that then mixed with the sound of the wind and rain. "Your eyes are as dark as night, as clear as day; I think of their beauty and cannot sleep . . . " When she came back to bed, I kissed her, and with the palm of my hand gently moved the strands of her black hair back from her forehead. Her blue eyes were dark in the half-light of the fire. In the shadows, her broad cheek bones and lips were Egyptian. She told me of her break-up with her fiance in Christchurch at the end of the summer. David had been crushed, but she simply could not share his middle-class aspirations - the house in Fend­ alton, the Afghani rugs, the Jaguar. I should have been reassured, but felt humbled and incredulous that someone so beautiful and urbane should be attracted to a bum like me - my hobnailed boots and torn denims thrown on the floor, a scribbled poem on the back of an envelope . . . It would be all too easy to give the impression that we found instant completeness in each other. That we were assailed by no 1 22

doubts, experienced no difficulties, and lived happily ever after. But like any form of rebirth, love is replete with pain and confuS!On. So intense were our feelings for each other that we felt stifled and panicked. I saw my travel plans going up in smoke. She feared the loss of her hard-won independence. One night, at a party, I became arrogant and conquistadorial. I flirted with the other girls in the flat. And danced with an old flame, throwing our friendship in Pauline's face. She left the house, and took refuge with friends. Contrite and pathetic, I phoned her next day, and asked if I could see her. "What am I to think?" she asked. "That I can trust you, after the callous way you behaved?" The following day she left for Waiau to spend some time with her parents . When one falls in love, one takes on the life of the beloved as if it were one's second body, one's very soul. I could not turn my mind or hand to anything for thinking of her. When I breathed, it was as if my breathing were as vital to her as hers was to me. I could not imagine living without her. At night I would fall asleep only to wake in a cold sweat, desperate that she might decide against seeing me again. And yet, as I despaired at this possibility, I was seized by a contradictory impulse - to retrieve my sanity and independence before it was too late, to put her out of my mind forever. Cendrars was right when he wrote in Moravagine that love is masochistic. We wrote each other every day, tentatively but lovingly, and when she returned to Wellington I had no doubt as to my path, my camino. We walked in the Botanical Gardens, under the great stone pines that reminded me of the Bay of Naples . The city lay below 1 23

us. It was one of those gifted, windless, late autumn days when the harbour is like a looking-glass, the distant Orongorongos blue upon blue. I told her that I had decided to remain in New Zealand. I would go back to university and resume my studies of anthro­ pology. In the meantime, to pay my debts, I had taken a position relief-teaching at a high school in the southern Wairarapa. It was only an hour from Wellington . . . Together with a couple of other teachers, I boarded in a rambling villa on the outskirts of Greytown. Every day after school, I worked in my room, revising the poems I 'd written in the Congo, and translating Cendrars, though without any thought of publi­ cation. Friday afternoons, I hit the road and hitchhiked down to Wellington. I had never been happier in my life. Pauline would be waiting for me at Rosina Terrace, her week's work done. We would go downtown for dinner, and then to a movie. Or, if the other girls were out, we would light the fire and spend the night talking and making love. Like me, Pauline was fascinated by the links between one's intellectual interests and one's life. She once said that she thought of a text as a refracting mirror, like the sea, in which one glimpsed fragments of the author's world as well as one's own. Discussing her ideas about Conrad's Youth she recounted how, at fifteen, she felt she had the whole world at her feet - like Marlowe, feeling he could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men. But that summer she contracted glandular fever, and was rushed by ambulance to Christchurch Hospital. Tests were done, though several days passed before a diagnosis was reached. During that time she was in a ward of senile and dying women. She felt condemned and frightened. When her mother visited her, she begged to be allowed to go home. Back in Waiau, however, she had no energy for anything. Though a champion swimmer, she did not go near the baths. And though she had learned to drive earlier that year, and her mother 1 24

encouraged her to drive her over to Hanmer for golf, she could not bring herself to get in the car. Many years later, she would write a novel, remembering this loss of strength, this terrifYing failure of confidence, and in a letter she wrote to me in England, when I had gone ahead of her to begin my Ph.D. at Cambridge, she would confide: All my life I have wanted to be strong. But I have alway s believed that strength cannot be drawn from others or from things; it can only be found in oneself. I' ve alway s felt absolutely alone in the world. I' ve alway s felt that my life is in my own hands. All I' ve ever asked of other people is the freedom to be my self. The world is a wilderness. I want to go forth into it and be tried and not found wanting. I don't want to step back from the brink. I want to find the inner, not the outer, sanctity of this life. I want to find the heart of darkness, the nothingness that is som ething, and emerge from it humbled but not broken. I want to find the ex tent of my strength. I want to know m y self, and be at one with what I am. To accept adversity instead of shutting it out with the spiritual defenses I have at my disposal. I don't want to have any buttresses - house, marriage, family, friends, sex - unless my whole being is engaged in them. If I succumbed to these things, I'd lose every thing I' ve ever struggled for, and life would not be worth living.

As the school year drew to a close I told some of the other teachers that I was about to get married - a stratagem to rent a school house in Featherston for the summer. Though my deception proved embarrassing (colleagues showered us with wedding gifts, and my pupils brought me flowers) it was the beginning of an idyll. Long summer evenings walking the country roads together or swimming at the Tauherenikau Gorge - the soft russet of bracken, the cobalt blue of agapanthus and Michaelmas daisies, flax with its fireblackened beaks, the crab claw boughs of macro­ carpas, sheepmobs of cloud pouring over the gorse slopes of the Rimutakas. 1 25

It was one of those blessed periods when one is wholly content to accept things exactly as they are. And yet, for all its vividness, and despite the strong sense I have, as I write these lines, of re-entering that time, I am aware that the past eludes us just as inevitably as we move beyond it. Twenty-nine years after the summer that Pauline and I spent in the Wairarapa, and twelve years after her death, I was briefly in Wellington, visiting old friends, Mary and Les Cleveland, and beginning my research for The Blind Impress. One evening, Les dug out a reel of film he'd shot during the summer that he and Mary, and Vince O'Sullivan and his wife Tui stayed with Pauline and me in Featherston. Les had never devel­ oped the film, but decided to do so now. The photos he brought out of his darkroom were grainy, grey and scratched. This only increased their power. It was like opening up a grave and finding no evidence of decay. And the impact of seeing these photos, these images I had unwittingly reworked in memory, was overwhelming. There we are, sitting outside the Lake Ferry pub in the sun, except for Mary, who must have taken the photo. In another photo we are in the bar, holding glasses of beer and peering at Mary behind the camera. Other photos capture us sitting together in the long grass somewhere near the Pinnacles, eating lunch. There is this vivacious young woman laughing at the camera, and a callow young man, myself, beside her, draining a bottle of DB Brown. Though this other self is someone I scarcely remember, and my image of Pauline is now dependent on the photos I have of her, I think Harry St Rain was right when I saw him in London a couple of years later and introduced him to Pauline. "Pauline seems to have straightened you out," Harry said. And I agreed. I had been adrift, but with her I now had a keel, a rudder and a sheet-anchor. I was finally able to set my course and, like Odys­ seus, come home.

1 26

Part Two

Ethno g r a phic Pica resq u e

F reeto wn

N ot long before Pauline and I went to Sierra Leone, a story broke in the English Sunday Times about the fate of an English yachtsman called Donald Crowhurst. His trimaran ketch, Teignmouth Electron, had been found adrift in mid Atlantic. The life-raft was lashed in place, the helm swung freely, and the sails lay folded on the deck, ready to be raised. But Crowhurst had vanished. Three blue-bound logbooks on the chart table revealed what had befallen him. On 3 1 October 1 968, Crowhurst had set sail from Teignmouth, Devon, in a bid to win the Golden Globe single-handed round­ the-world race. His trimaran had been built and equipped in a hurry. There had been no time for intensive sea trials, and Crow­ hurst had sailed late with his course unplanned. To make matters worse, hatches leaked, steering gear malfunctioned and the electrics failed. The reasonable course would have been to abandon the voyage. But loathe to admit defeat, Crowhurst began to work out an elaborate deception in which he would calculate and radio false positions, giving the impression that he had rounded the Horn in record time and was making excellent progress across the Pacific. In fact, he was sailing in circles in the South Atlantic, well away from shipping lanes, awaiting an opportune moment to announce that he had reached the Cape of Good Hope and was again in the Atlantic on the final leg of a circumnavigation of the globe. What brought Crowhurst to the realisation that he would never be able to pull off the deception? Inconsistencies in his carefully 1 29

forged logbooks? Guilt over having deceived those who loved him and had supported his enterprise? Doubt in his ability to remember every detail of his concocted story and remain consistent in every­ thing he said on his return to a hero's welcome in England? In the ineluctable silence and solitude of the sea, the yachtsman began to lose touch with reality. Entangled in the web of lies he had spun, he saw that his voyage was doomed. By the time he sailed into the Sargasso Sea, he had retreated into a wholly private world. Becalmed, and having lost all track of time, he began to imagine that he could leave his body at will and make himself divine. Surrounded by a debris of dirty dishes and dismantled radios, he penned one of the last entries in his log: It is t he end of my game t he trut h has been revealed.

A few minutes later, he climbed the companion ladder to the deck, then stepped off the Teignmouth Electron into the sea. As Pauline and I stepped from the aircraft, the hot soup-sweet African night enveloped us. My body felt swollen. My shirt stuck to my skin. Inside the airport terminal, African bodies pressed around us, pungent and cloying. It took two hours to get our passports stamped, to reclaim our baggage, to clear customs.We moved in a state of torpor, saying nothing, as if we were strangers to each other. It was after midnight by the time we got away from the airport. Lightning flashed along the Bullom shore, and the humid air was heavy with the stench of decomposing vegetation and the sea. In the taxi, the breeze through the open windows revived me. But I was beginning to rue the promise I 'd made to my friend Alex Guyan in London. Alex had insisted that when we arrived in Free­ town we stay at the City Hotel. Graham Greene had killed a lot of time there during the war, and Alex was an avid fan of Greene's. 1 30

It amused him to think of me sitting on the same balcony where Wilson sat at the beginning of The Heart of the Matter, "his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork . . . his face turned to the sea". I asked the taxi driver if he knew the City Hotel. Sure, he knew it. He could take us there for only thirty leones . It sounded like a lot of money, but I didn't know the exchange rate and, besides, it was a bit late now to negotiate our fare. Too tired to take anything in, we crossed the Sierra Leone River on a listing ferry and were driven through labyrinthine streets, lit by braziers and flickering oil lamps. By the time our taxi set us down outside the City Hotel, our minds were in a fug and we had lost track of time. In the darkness, the wind thrashed at the palms in the hotel forecourt. Thunder rolled and caromed in the peninsular hills. We found the main entrance to the hotel barred by a metal grille, and the shuttered windows showed no signs of life. Already we were wishing we had taken the airport bus with the other whites and gone to the Paramount Hotel, even though the cost of a room there would have been prohibitive, even though we had vowed to steer clear of tourists, to plunge straight into Africa and keep our promise to Alex. I shouted up at the dark and decaying concrete fa<;:ade. "Anybody there?" A first-storey window was wrenched open, and a woman called down to us in Krio. At the same moment the rain came bucketing out of the sky. Pauline and I must have looked ridiculous, soaked to the skin, with our shoes awash in the floodwater sluicing down the street. The woman at the window was j oined by others. They laughed and shouted down at us. "We don't speak Krio," Pauline shouted back. "Wait," the first woman said, " I dae kam." They all traipsed down, dressed in miniskirts, shrieking with 131

laughter. They held beach umbrellas above their heads to protect their jet-black wigs from the downpour. They wanted a dash. I dug in my pockets and came up with some English coins. The women took them gleefully and ran around to the front of the hotel, beckoning us to follow. The lobby was feebly lit. Off to the left was a deserted saloon bar. Ahead was a flight of wooden stairs . The prostitutes clattered up the stairs in their high heels and fish-net stockings, gales of laughter going into the darkness, the smell of cheap perfume lingering in the clammy air. When the hotel porter emerged from the shadows, bleary-eyed from his interrupted sleep, I explained that we had come in on the London flight and wanted a room.

" Kam

we

go," he ordered. Dragging a bunch of ancient keys

from his pocket, he started to climb the stairs, using the bannister to pull himself up. Pauline and I lugged our suitcases after him. Our room was at the end of a dingy corridor on the first floor. It was furnished with a double bed under a torn mosquito net, two chairs and a chest of drawers . The room stank of mildew and excrement. I went into the bathroom. The toilet hadn't been flushed, nor would it flush. When I pulled the chain, there was a noisy gurgling in the pipes and a mess of paper pulp and shit disgorged into the stained bowl. We were too tired to care. I bolted the door and we stripped off our wet clothes, towelled ourselves dry, and crawled under the mosquito net onto the bed where we lay jarred and spent from our journey. I thought:We have done what Alex wanted us to do. I can write him tomorrow and say we have experienced Greeneland in all its seediness. Then we can find somewhere else to live. We woke at first light to the jangle and blare of hi-life music. I went to the louvre window and looked down into the street. 1 32

Several Toyota and Datsun taxis were parked at an angle to the kerb, and the drivers were washing their cars with buckets of sudsy water. I was reminded of the way young men in the Congo used to wash their bodies, soaping themselves until they were all but invisible for lather. Beyond the intersection, over laterite stonework and rusty roofs, I glimpsed the sea. Far out, a sunken freighter showed only its funnel and mastheads above the surface of the ocean. It must have gone down during the war, when Atlantic convoys used to assemble in the harbour. I made a mental note to mention this in my letter to Alex. "What are you looking at?" Pauline asked. I told her about the taxi drivers and the sunken freighter on the sand bar. Then I asked if she felt like getting up and going down­ stairs, to try to find something to eat. "Don't even talk about food," Pauline said. She was suffering from morning sickness. She felt as if she were going to throw up. "We'll move out of here," I said. "At least let's get a room with a toilet that flushes. I'm going to try to get some more sleep," Pauline said. " If you go out, try not to make too much noise when you come back." I lifted the mosquito net and kissed her on the mouth. " I 'll see you in a while," I said. I went out of the room thinking we should not have come to Africa. I felt sick in the stomach at the thought of Pauline preg­ nant and having our baby in such a place. I should have called it off, this year in Sierra Leone doing field work for my Ph.D. I should have come alone or not at all. In the downstairs dining room, some retired Krio clerks were eating breakfast. No one looked up as I walked in. When the waiter asked if I wanted an English breakfast, I made the mistake of saying yes, and was served braised spam, glutinous eggs, and chips fried in rancid dripping. The cook had been with the hotel since colonial times. Like the ex-clerks in their English 1 33

serge and bowlers, his menu parodied the world that Sierra Leoneans had once been encouraged to emulate. I had no appetite for the food in front of me and was beginning to think that my dream of returning to Africa, which had sustained me for five years, had been as ethereal and anachronistic as the idea of Empire. When I tried to imagine myself in a remote village, speaking an African language, asking people to tell me about their lives, a terrible sense of despair came over me, such as Malcolm Lowry described in his story "Through the Panama" : the "inenar­ rable inconceivably desolate sense of having no right to be where you are." In the days that followed, I filled my notebooks with such misgivings, panicking whenever I thought of the j ourney I had embarked upon. And each night I was tormented by the same dream, in which I wandered disoriented in an immense building, looking for a room where I was supposed to enrol. Pauline grew impatient with me, and recollected the series of events that had brought us to Freetown together

-

the month

we had spent in Copenhagen where she did an intensive course in Danish, the modern language most akin to Old Icelandic, the weeks in Paris waiting for a sailing from Le Havre to West Africa, and finally the flight back to London when she fell ill , and where, in the course of an operation to remove an ovarian cyst, she was found to be six weeks pregnant. "I want to be here," she assured me. "I want to have our baby here, in this climate, with you! " Vultures wheeled high above the city. I n the street markets, pedlars cried, "Biscuit dae ! " " Five five cents." We tried out our Krio, " Omus for da wan dae ?" " Omus for dis," buying pineapples, bunches of bananas and scoops of groundnuts wrapped in funnels of brown paper. We went to Immigration to get our visas. In the piss-soaked alley outside the Immigration Department, a sign had been posted: URINATING PROHIBITED IN THIS AREA. We found a pharmacy with the improbable name of Vulga Thera. 1 34

Beggars crowded around us. Some leaned on staves, their legs like burnt matchsticks. Paraplegics sat in little carts and shoved themselves along on their knuckles . Pauline pressed coins into the fingerless hands of a burnt-out leper. In the street, a Toyota Coaster moved slowly through the traffic, a logo above the cab saying SWEET ARE THE USES OF ADVERSITY Now reconciled to remaining in our hotel, we sat on the hotel balcony in the cool of the evening, drinking tonic water and writing postcards home. The sad-eyed Swiss proprietor, who had run the hotel in Graham Greene's time, limped to and fro behind the bar. Our waiter was a thickset man with a coarse-featured, morose face. He derived unending pleasure from prising caps off bottles of Star beer with a grand and sweeping gesture, then watching as kids scrambled around his feet, fighting for possession of the bottletops. If there was a blue star printed under the cork inlay, you won a lottery prize. " Fortunes are precarious here," I wrote to Alex. "We met a deaf­ mute boy on the street today who thrust a scrap of paper under our noses and urged us to read what was written on it: 'Good morning I am no hable to spick and I can not find chob Please will you help me Tankyou God pless . . . ' "

I was going to add something about the inescapability of poverty when I became aware that a boy was standing close to me, watching me write.

"Kushe," I said, and hoped he would go away. He said his name was James. He had been attending school but could not continue because his family did not have the money to pay his fees. He begged us to help him out.

" Wusai you dae?" I said. James said he lived in the East End. His expression wavered between shiftiness and shame. "Can you come and see us in the morning?" Pauline said. " If 1 35

you bring your school books, I can get some idea what you've been doing." James said he would come early. Then he announced that he was going, and disappeared into the street. "Do you think he's on the level?" I asked. " I 've no idea. Does it really matter?" Pauline said. A couple of days later, I was lying on the bed in our hotel room reading Melville's Typee. Pauline was sitting at a desk near the window, turning the pages of a cheap cahier, correcting James's exercises. James stood stock-stili beside her, chewing his fingernails. "Do you prefer reading books or listening to stories?" Pauline asked. "I like to read books," James replied. "Why?" "Because they're true." "Do your mother and father tell you stories?" "Yes." "Do they tell you stories about Conny Rabbit? " " I know those stories." "Aren't those stories j ust as interesting as the ones you read in books? " "No, people always tell them in different ways and change them, and you never know which one is true." "Aren't they more exciting and interesting like that - when they're different every time?'' James shook his head. "Why not?" "Because you never know which one is true." "Are all books true?" "Yes." My ears were ringing. I was bathed in perspiration. I pushed through the crowded streets, determined to finalise the business of getting our Land Rover released from customs. But no sooner was 1 36

one obstacle overcome than another arose. Day after day, I trudged from one Port Authority office to another, collecting customs clearance certificates, import-duty exemption authorisations, set surcharge forms, insurance schedules, shipping notes, delivery and condition reports, certificates of importation and release. Then there were letters of affiliation to the university, residence permits, vehicle registration and insurance, a driver's licence . . . more visits to dismal offices where clerks sat slumped over their desks and some taciturn minion would want his palm greased with a dash. I began to think seriously of abandoning my plans to do field work. I imagined myself holed up in the City Hotel, drawing on my scholarship money to write an ethnography of an entirely fictitious society. The task did not seem too daunting. The Fourah Bay College library was well stocked with monographs from which I could glean the formulaic patterns of structural-function­ alist ethnography. To invent a society, one had only to decide the nature of the economy, the mode of descent and inheritance, and the principles of legal and political life, and everything else could be deduced. Since conventional ethnographies were generally so devoid of in-depth descriptions of actual individuals, I need not concern myself unduly with details of real lives. Stereotypes would suffice. And sweeping generalisations would gloss over the subtle­ ties oflived experience and give my account an aura of obj ectivity. Even the language of my make-believe world could be constructed as a dialect of some actual West African language. Hadn't Jorge Luis Borges done something akin to this in his account of the world of Tlon? The more I pondered my idea, the more it engrossed me. But when I confided my scheme to Pauline, she said I should not let myself be disheartened by the weeks we had been stuck in Free­ town. It was hard not knowing where we were going or what we were going to do, but shouldn't we give ourselves time to get acclimatised and find our feet?

1 37

What brought me back to reality was a map. The map was stapled to the wall of the corridor in the Institute of African Studies at Fourah Bay College. It showed Sierra Leone divided into tribal areas . The research I had proposed at Cambridge for my Ph .D. would have meant living among the Mende in the south-east, studying the impact of literacy on village life. I had never been entirely happy with this plan - a continuation of research I had done for my M.A. on the impact of literacy in early nineteenth­ century Maori New Zealand - but had not been able to come up with anything else . . . The map showed a region in the north, defined by a dotted line. Across this blank space was written KURANKO. I do not know why I responded as I did to this map. All I knew was that this remote region was where I wanted to go. I told the director of the Institute of my plans. He said that very little was known about the Kuranko. This was all I needed to make me absolutely sure of my path . A few days later, Pauline and I loaded our supplies into the Land Rover and headed north . A warm wind flowed through the cab of the vehicle. Grasslands stretched away under an immensity of sky. The road behind us was lost in billows of red dust. We were going to a town called Kabala. We were enamoured of the name. It invoked the Hebrew qabbalah and its esoteric tradi­ tions of cosmic union. But we couldn't be sure where we would end up at the end of the day. Few roads were signposted, and north of Makeni the road degenerated into a tortuous and eroded track. We passed through towns where people were celebrating the end of Ramadan. Women danced in tight circles, resplendent in voluminous gowns and high silken headkerchiefs. Men lounged in hammocks slung under the eaves of verandahs. We crossed turbid streams where butterflies danced in shafts of sunlight. In the lop hira plains, the air was filled with the odour of burned elephant grass. 1 38

I reached for Pauline's hand, and we glanced at each other and smiled. " It's hard to believe I seriously thought of staying on in Freetown and writing a fake ethnography," I said. "The trouble with lying," Pauline said, "is that you always have to make a mental note of everything you say, so you won't be caught out in the future. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.You are free to live." "Do you have any regrets?" I said. "About Sierra Leone, I mean." " I couldn't be happier." It was then that I remembered the story of Donald Crowhurst and became aware that for as long as we had been in Freetown, this story had been at the back of my mind, casting its shadow over everything I thought and did.

1 39

B a rawa and the Ways B i rd s F ly in the S ky

T he day after arriving in Kabala, I introduced myself to the Koin­ adugu District Officer and explained my proj ect to him. The D. 0. listened patiently before saying that there was a young Kuranko man teaching at the District Council School who might help me. His name was Noah Marah. A couple of hours later I was deep in conversation with the man without whom none of my research in Sierra Leone would have been possible. After repeating what I had told the D. O. how I was studying for a Ph.D. in anthropology at Cambridge, and wanted to write a book about the Kuranko - I asked if Noah would be willing to help me make a start with learning the language. His enthusiasm was immediate and overwhelming. He had often thought of writing something about his own society, and would be only too happy to assist me. So before the day was out, Noah and I found ourselves sitting on the porch of his house, going over the Kuranko phrases of greeting and the elements of Kuranko kinship. I could not believe my good fortune. So engrossed did Noah become in my research that it wasn't long before he agreed to take a year's leave from his teaching j ob and work for me full-time as a paid field assistant. He also helped us find a place to live - a newly-built, three roomed, mud-brick, pan-roofed bungalow on the edge of town. We also met Noah's wives,Yebu Bah and Yebu Bangura, and Noah's mother, Aisetta, a redoubtable woman who had borne eight children, all of whom 1 40

were still alive. Aisetta immediately took Pauline under her wing, and in Yebu Bah Pauline found a staunch friend. Soon we had worked out a modus operandi for my fieldwork. While Noah and I made forays to outlying villages, Pauline would remain in Kabala to be near the clinic in case of a medical emergency and where she could use her time to finish translating the Icelandic family sagas she had brought with her to Sierra Leone - the basis of her own Ph.D. research at Cambridge. Noah's mother and Noah's wives would keep her company and see to her needs. That Christmas I made my first trip to Firawa, though Christmas was the last thing on my mind. Firawa was Noah's natal village, and his family - the Marah - had ruled there for more than three hundred and fifty years. "A person's clan might be older than the Marah," went the Kuranko adage, "but it is under a cotton tree planted by the Marah that he was raised." According to the genealogists, a warrior called Yamisa had first settled the country, descending from the forested foothills of the Lorna range where his elder brother Borsingbi had already made his home. Legend has it that Yamisa declared, "M'bara wa," (I am going to my own place) and thenceforth this tract of country became known as Barawa. The first stage of our journey was by Land Rover - twenty­ five miles along a pot-holed, laterite track to Koinadugu , and on to the Seli river. From there we began the ten-mile walk to Firawa, skirting swamps and crossing plateaux where the fired elephant grass had covered the path with filigrees of ash . Before us stood th e great inselberg Senekonke - " gold mountain" - where the Marah rulers once offered sacrifices for the protection of the land. Sometimes, Noah said, the death of a ruler would be presaged by the creaking of granite doors in the inselberg, and the music of xylophones carried on the wind. Though we entered Firawa in the heat of the day when most people were resting, praise-singers were soon hurrying out to meet us with xylophones and flattery. 141

"Nomor (almighty), nomor," they cried. And then, as Noah distributed coins, they cried with even greater enthusiasm, " Nom or, Marah, nomor! " As we crossed the compound named for Noah's branch of the ruling lineage, two of his elder brother's wives approached, and, bowing low, clasped his hands. "In sene, in sene, you are welcome, you are welcome," they cried, and they clapped their hands as we pressed on into the heart of the village. In the chief's compound, a collapsible tin chair was brought out for me, and I was bidden to sit down. Then, summoned by the chief's drum, elders began to appear, and Noah moved among them, shaking hands. I felt conspicuous and awkward under the quizzical and some­ times suspicious scrutiny of the old men , and when chief Tala Sewa emerged from his house, his anxious face only increased my unease. Noah, however, had prepared his introduction care­ fully. As he explained that I was a pen pal who had come to visit him and see the place where he had spent his childhood, nods of approval were directed my way, and even Tala Sewa seemed to relax a little. Finally, through the praise-singer who relayed the chief's words to his audience, Tala Sewa let it be known that I was welcome, and that I would come to no harm while I remained among them. This said, he indicated that gifts should be brought out for me. First was a winnowing tray piled high with unhusked rice. Then a young man pushed through the crowd and squatted in front of me with two russet hens compressed between his knees. Noah explained that such gifts were always offered to strangers - at once a tangible expression of goodwill, since food sustained life, and a subtle way of disarming a potential enemy. I thanked the assembly, using the Kuranko phrases Noah had taught me. Several of the elders smiled, either in appreciation of my attempt to speak their language, or in amusement at my inepti­ tude. I was then led to the house next to Tala Sewa's. 1 42

Anomalous among the circular, thatch-roofed, wattle-and-daub houses that enclosed the compound, the house in which I was to lodge was built of concrete blocks and roofed with corrugated iron. It had been built by a police sergeant from Firawa who had made a small fortune in the diamond districts of Kono, where he still lived. Inside I was surprised to find a spacious parlour, with prayer mats on the floor, a low table, and several framed photos of members of the sergeant's family on the walls. My bedroom was furnished with an iron-framed bed, wooden chairs, a table, and a kerosene lamp. As it turned out, this generous show of hospitality was not entirely gratuitous, for among the freight I had reluctantly trucked from Kabala to the Seli river-crossing during the previous weeks was the cement the sergeant needed to complete the steps of his house. "We have a saying," Noah explained, '" Nyendan bin to kile,

a wa ta an segi ' "

-

when you walk along a path through the

nyendan grass (used for thatching) it bends before you; but when you return along the path, the grass bends back the other way. In the same way, greetings, goodwill, assistance and gifts move to and fro within a community, keeping the paths open, keeping relation­ ships alive. After showing me my room, Noah returned to his elder brother Abdul's house. I was glad to be alone for a while, and began unpacking my rucksack. But my privacy was short-lived. "Honk, honk ! " It was Noah's nephew, Sewa, and though Sewa had never seen a motor vehicle he knew exactly how to imitate a horn . In the parlour, two ofAbdul's j unior wives had left enamel dishes of parboiled rice, with a palm oil sauce of chicken and cassava leaf. Sewa made gestures and grinned, encouraging me to eat. I took the food out onto the front porch, only to be ambushed by a crowd of children. The older ones, having quickly overcome their trepidation, propelled their terror-stricken younger siblings 1 43

toward the tubabu (whiteman) . But I was glad of their company. I could try out my Kuranko with them without embarrassment. That night I fell asleep not long after nightfall, hearing the shuf­ fling of bare feet on a cement floor, and the ping and ticking of the roofing iron as it cooled. During the next few days, I found myself so captivated by the things I heard and saw around me that it was all too easy to believe I intuitively understood them. But understanding is never born of enchantment, any more than initiation is consummated in newness alone. Understanding comes of separation and pain. To understand is to suffer the eclipse of everything you know, all that you have, and all that you are. It is, as the Kuranko say, like the gown you put on when you are initi­ ated. To don this gown you must first be divested of your old garb, stripped clean, and reduced to nothingness. I would begin my days at Abdul's house. The porch was of mud and dung, its floor as burnished as a riverstone. Sitting with my back against the wall, I could observe the comings and goings in the compound and ply Noah and Abdul with questions. Abdul was ensconced at a treadle sewing-machine at the other end of the porch, putting the finishing touches to the white country-doth gown his niece would wear for her initiation. He was a taciturn man at the best of times, and I suspected that the row of pins he held tightly between his lips was a pretext for ignoring my ques­ tions . So it was Noah who bore the brunt of my incessant curi­ osity, as groups of strangely attired women performed before the house before receiving a dash and moving on, or groups of pubes­ cent girls, their hair braided, beaded and decorated with snail shell toggles, their waists encircled with strings of beads, danced out the last days of their childhood. But behind the drumming that lasted long into the night, and the air of festivity, there were deep shadows. I was told of the neophytes' vulnerability to witches, and 1 44

of the dangers attending cliterodectomy. I heard of fearful encoun­ ters with bush spirits and arduous hazings. And I wondered how these young girls would feel, returning after weeks of sequestra­ tion in the bush, not to the security of their parental homes but to the uncertainties of life as newly-weds in the houses of strangers. If I empathised with the neophytes, it was, I suppose, because I was also like a child, and because the shock of too many new experiences - a language I could not grasp, food I often found unpalatable, customs I could not understand, afflictions I could not cure - was beginning to erode my own self-confidence and make me vaguely paranoid. As the days passed, I began to miss Pauline, and worry about her. One evening I went out to the latrine that stood in the grass­ land behind the sergeant's house. For a while, the silence around me was broken only by the repetitive piping of a sulukuku bird. Then suddenly I was startled by the presence of several Senegalese fire finches flitting above me. Aware that for Kuranko these small, crimson birds embodied the souls of children who have died in infancy, I became convinced that something was amiss in Kabala - that Pauline had had a miscarriage, that her life was in peril. That night I slept badly, and in the morning confided my anxi­ eties to Noah. He too was missing his children, and wondering about his wives back in Kabala. Perhaps it was time for us to return. But I was determined to stay, at least until the initiates entered thefafei - the bush house where they would live for several weeks after their operations, receiving instructions from older women. Already I was aware that initiation was at once the symbolic begin­ ning of adult life and the celebration of communal solidarity after the long months of the rains when families lived on farm hamlets, scattered and isolated in the bush . It was around this time that I consulted my first Kuranko diviner. His name was Doron Mamburu Sise. Noah had sought his advice, 1 45

and allowed me to sit in on the consultation, and so, a couple of days later, without thinking too much about it, I asked if I might follow suit. " The tubabu wants to know if you can look at the stones for him?" Noah asked. Doron Mamburu gestured that we should go inside his house. Stooping, I followed Noah through the low doorway into a house that smelled of stale woodsmoke. Doron Mamburu dragged shut a rickety cane door whose daubing of mud had all but flaked off. He then sat and waited, his eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom, before spreading out a mat on the earthen floor and ordering me to sit down opposite him. "Why have you come?" he asked. Noah spoke for me. "He wants to find out about his wife," he said. "She is expecting a child. He is worried about her. He wants to know if all is well, if all will be well." The diviner emptied some stones from a small monkey-skin bag and with the palm of his hand spread them across the mat. Most were river pebbles: semi-lucent, the colour of rust,jasper, and yellow ochre. Among them were some cowrie shells, old coins, and pieces of metal. When I handed Doron Mamburu his fifty cents consultation fee, he mingled this with the other obj ects. "What is your wife's name?" "Pauline," I answered, pleased to have understood the question. Doron Mamburu found difficulty with the name but did not ask for it to be repeated. In a soft voice he addressed the stones, informing them of the reason I had come. Then he gathered up a handful and began to chant. At the same time, with half-closed eyes, he rhythmically knocked the back of his cupped hand against the mat. With great deliberation he then laid out the stones, some in pairs, some singly, others in threes and fours. "All is well," Doron Mamburu said quietly, his attention fixed 1 46

on the stones. "Your wife is well. She will have a baby girl." Without a pause he proceeded to lay out a second pattern. "There is nothing untoward. The paths are clear. The birth will be easy." In order to see what sacrifice I should make, Doron Mamburu laid out the stones a third time. "Your wife must sacrifice some clothes and give them to a woman she respects. You must sacrifice two yards of white satin and give it to a man you respect. When your child is born, you must sacrifice a sheep." The diviner looked warily at me, as if wondering whether I would do as the stones suggested. "To whom must I address the sacrifice?" I asked in English. Noah translated. "To your ancestors," Doron Mamburu said flatly. Then, seeing that I was still nonplussed, he added: "You must give those things away, do you see?" Doron Mamburu began to gather up his stones. He had been working on his farm since first light, and was famished. The dull clang of a cooking pot in the yard had already distracted him, and I caught a whiff of chicken and red pepper sauce. Reassured by the diviner's insights, I nonetheless remained sceptical. "How can the stones tell you what you told me?" I asked, again relying on Noah to translate. "They speak, just as we are speaking now. But only I can hear what they are saying. It is a gift that I was born with ." "Could I acquire that gift?" "A person cannot tell if a bird has an egg in its nest simply by watching it in flight." I told Noah that I did not understand. Do ron Mamburu fetched the loose sleeve of his gown up onto his shoulder and frowned. "You cannot go looking for it. Not at all. It comes to you." 1 47

There was a silence. "Eat with me," Doran Mamburu said, climbing to his feet. He stowed his bag of stones between a rafter and the thatch, then wrenched the door open. The sunlight blinded me. When we were seated in the yard, Doran Mamburu 's wife brought us rice and sauce in a chipped calabash. But I had more questions. "How did you get the stones?" I asked. "And the words you say to them - surely someone taught them to you?" Doran Mamburu finished his mouthful of rice. Then, as if amused by my curiosity, he said cryptically: "If you find fruit on the ground, look to the tree." I must have looked very perplexed. Do ron Mamburu continued. "In my case, I began divining a long time ago, in the days of Chief Pore Bolo. I was favoured by a djinn. I saw a djinn, and the djinn told me it was going to give me some stones so that I would be able to help people." "Where did you see the djinn?" "In a dream. They came in a dream. There were two of them. A man and a woman. They had changed themselves into human beings and were divining with river stones. They called to me an d told me their names. They said, 'We are going to favour you with a different destiny.' They showed me a certain leaf and told me I should make it into a powder and mix it with water in a calabash . Then I was to get some stones from the river and wash them in that liquid. When I woke up next morning I went at once to the Bagbe river and found that leaf and those stones . I did everything the djinn told me to do." "Would I be able to find that leaf?" "Eh! I cannot tell you about that." "The djinn then, did you see them again?" "Yes, I see them often. Every Thursday and Friday night they appear to me in a dream. Sometimes they say to me, 'Are you still here?"' 1 48

"Do the djinn speak to you through the stones?" "Yes," said the diviner emphatically, as if pleased that I had finally understood something of what he was telling me. "When you address the stones, you are not speaking to the djinn?" "No! I am speaking to the stones." Again a frown creased Doron Mamburu's forehead. Hitching up his sleeve he scooped a ball of rice from the calabash and slipped it deftly into his mouth. I had finished eating, but not my interrogation. "Do you ever give anything to the djinn?" Doron Mamburu swallowed the rice and washed it down with some water. " From time to time I offer them a sacrifice - of white kola nuts ." I could see Doron Mamburu was tired, and that Noah was exasperated by my questions and the difficulty of translating them. I got up to go. "I have eaten well," I said. "You are going?" "Yes, I'm going to my house." In those first weeks of fieldwork in Firawa, the seeds of almost all the ideas that would shape my thinking over the next thirty years were planted. I was now convinced that the j ustification of anthro­ pology lay not in its potential to explain social phenomena on the basis of antecedent causes or underlying laws - evolutionary, structural, or psychological - but in its capacity to explore, in a variety of contexts, the ways in which people struggle, with whatever inner or worldly resources they possess, to manage the immediate imperatives of existence. Though worldviews differ radi­ cally from society to society and epoch to epoch, our everyday priorities, as well as our notions of what makes us quintessentially human, are remarkably similar wherever one goes. To participate in the lives of others, in another society, is to discover the crossing­ points where one's own experience connects with theirs - the points at which sameness subsumes difference. It may be that this 1 49

savoir-faire, more than abstract ideas, promises the best basis for practical coexistence in a plural world. A year hence, in Cambridge, I would scour the university library in search of exemplars of this view. Though Levi-Strauss had been my first inspiration, I was averse to the idea of life as

logos and to the notion that meaning lies deep in the structures of the unconscious mind. I wanted to locate meaning within the mundane world of lived experience. To glimpse the universal in particular events. And I wanted a form of writing that showed as well as said - something I would later find in Walter Benjamin's use of apen;:us, images, epiphanies, and koan, in Theodor Ador­ no's paratactic style and notion of "exact fantasy", and in Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of "perspicacious presentation" . As for the existential and pragmatist elements in my thinking, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and James and Dewey, would become my mainstays . But for the moment, all I possessed was a vague dissatisfaction with the idea that a people's practical life was a product of their ethical or religious beliifs. B eliefs shadow practice, rather than produce it. Beliefs give us a way of making sense of our lives, but they are not scripts one faithfully follows. Accordingly, it is a mistake to try to understand people solely from the standpoint of the beliefs they espouse; we must explore and enter into the situa­ tions that they actually live. In abandoning the heights from which European science observes the world it deigns to understand, and placing myself in the stream of everyday Kuranko life, I found that many apparent differences between European and African worlds began to disappear. I saw Kuranko society neither as exotic nor as radically other; rather, it comprised a particular set of strategies for managing the kinds of quandaries that human beings encounter

everywhere: how to keep body and soul together in the face of adversity; how to create communitas despite divisions, differences and dissent; how to reconcile the need for attachment with the inevitability of loss; how to balance self-interest and the common weal; how to be both open and guarded, and how to preserve one's 1 50

humanity when little that one says or does seems to make much difference to the way things are . . . In my na'ive and stilted inter­ rogation of Doron Mamburu I see myself beginning to grasp that meaning inheres less in what one has to say about the world, than in what one does in order to endure. And in my fascination with the initiations that I would follow throughout that dry season, I see the beginning of my concern with what it means to act upon the world, reimagining, reworking, and recreating it, rather than suffering it in passivity and silence. Although, for Kuranko, the social order is ancestrally-given and non-negotiable, it is not self-perpetuating, and requires for its continuance the vigorous, mindful, concerted action of everyone living in the here and now. This creation and recreation of the world - symbolically re-enacted in the initiatory rebirth of a child as an adult - is never left to chance. In every generation anew, everyone must make the ancestral order his or her own. This does not imply a blind or slavish recapitulation of the past, for one must actively live what one inherits according to one's own particular abilities and understandings. There is a Kuranko adage - dunia toge ma dunia; a toge le a dununia - which, translated literally, means "the name of the world is not world; its name is load." The adage exploits oxymoron and pun (dunia, "world" , and dununia, "load", are near homophones) to suggest that the world is a head-load, the weight of which depends on the way one chooses to carry it. It bears a family resemblance to Dostoyevsky's notion that "the meaning of a man's life consists in proving to himself every minute that he's a man and not a piano key," and to Sartre's view that "we are not lumps of clay, and what is important is not what others make of us but what we ourselves make of what they have made us." These ideas were confirmed almost every day, as I sat on the porch at Abdul's house and, with Noah's help, eavesdropped on the interminable talk that went on there. Late one afternoon, a group of men my age were debating the origin of an obscure 151

word for orange. I found it odd that such a trivial matter should inspire such vehement talk - though any university committee meeting might provide a telling parallel. It helped me understand that in the seemingly perverse ways in which men and women made palaver, or elders wrangled over some minor point of law, what was important was not settling the issue per se, but using the occasion to voice one's view, to make one's mark, and - to borrow Marx's vivid image - force the frozen circumstances to dance by singing to them their own tune. But what of modernity - this field of forces which, while far from ancestral, was j ust as omnipresent and equally powerful? How did people come to terms with it? A few months before I left England, NASA succeeded in putting two men on the moon. I sat up all night at my Cambridge college watching the television coverage, and by the time the two silvery­ grey, bulky figures of Armstrong and Aldrin finally ascended the ladder to the LEM and "achieved re-ingress" , dawn was breaking. Walking back to my flat, wearied by the cliches of the night, I warmed to the sight of the sun coming out of the mist and the noise of birds. When Pauline and I arrived in Sierra Leone, the country was in the grip of a conj unctivitis epidemic. Locals called the eye disease Apollo, though when a second wave of the epidemic swept the country a distinction was made between Apollo 1 1 and Apollo 1 2 . "What was the connection?" I asked people. The American moon landings had disturbed the dust on the surface of the moon, I was told. Just as the sand-laden harmattan blows south from the Sahara in the dry season, filling the air and irritating one's eyes, so this cosmic dust had brought its own discomforts and disease. Given my curiosity, people were eager to have me clarifY some of the anomalies in the accounts they had heard of the Apollo missions. Some suspected that these accounts were untrue; no one could travel to the moon. Others (ignorant as to how far away the moon was, and believing it to be j ust overhead - no bigger 1 52

than it appeared in the night sky) asked me to explain how a rocket large enough to hold three men could come to a standstill alongside the moon and allow the men to get out and walk about on its surface. Still others demanded to know why the Americans wanted to go to the moon in the first place; what sinister designs and global repercussions did this presage? I had already noted this same suspicion of America in local peoples' refusal to allow Peace Corps volunteers to photograph them. Anxieties clustered around the rumour that photos showing village women with bare breasts would be used by whites in the US as racist propaganda, a way of arguing for the oppression of African-Americans on the grounds that their origins and essence were incorrigibly primitive. In many ways these anxieties anticipated the fears of a later generation: that just as Americans had once sought to steal people's vital essence by capturing their likenesses in photographs, so foreigners were now out to steal and traffic in human body parts and vital organs. But getting back to Apollo, the questions people in Firawa and Kabala put to me should not be read too literally. People were less interested in grasping intellectually the truth of the Apollo programme than in how to resolve an old existential dilemma that it had brought to mind. This was the dilemma of how to control traffic across the borders of their own local world, such that it would be perennially revitalised by imports from the outside world - and these included magical medicines, women, and commodi­ ties like salt, cloth, kerosene, and seeds - without its integrity being endangered or undermined by foreign influences they were powerless to control. It was not that Kuranko had hitherto lived in isolation; rather that the post-Independence period had brought increasing hardship in negotiating relations with the outside world that were to their advantage. While villagers were building roads to get access to markets, young men going south in increasing numbers to work in the diamond districts, and Muslim converts making the pilgrimage to Mecca, Kuranko were coming to see that the outside world was much larger, much more complex, and 1 53

probably much less manageable than it had been for their fore­ fathers. The Apollo stories encapsulated this pervasive suspicion that the might of a foreign power of which they knew very little could cause things to happen in their own backyard without their consent, without their comprehension, and without their control. In his work on myth, Claude Levi-Strauss invokes the principle of dialectical negation: any term has meaning only in relation to its opposite. This logic carries over into existence itself, for one comes into one's own only through experiencing and confronting that which one is not. In West Africa this process of becoming involves an opening up of the "town" to the "bush", the first term being associated with sociality, order, necessity, duty and stasis, the second with individuality, creative disorder, freedom, desire and vitality. Among the Kuranko, this interplay between town and bush defines a scenario for the initiatory passage from childhood to adulthood, provides a backdrop for almost every story told, and informs every act of the imagination - from dreaming, through masquerade, to children's play. In Firawa, I often watched children in the dusty lanes, or on the outskirts of the village, drawing on the ground with sticks. In broken Kuranko I asked them what they were outlining. "Djinn," they said. They were playing with images of the spirits that some had glimpsed or heard in the bush - spirits that both tantalised and terrified . . . Night after night, at Abdul's house, I would listen to stories about the djinn, and the shadowlands they inhabited between human and extrahuman worlds. And again and again I was struck by the same theme - that only by braving the wilderness, by venturing into the world of the not-self, can one capture the vital spirit that will make one fully human.

1 54

Mamina Yeg be's Delusion

D uring my first few months i n the field, I undoubtedly cut a ridiculous figure. Linguistically inept, socially disoriented, anoma­ lous in appearance, and preoccupied by questions the point of which no one could grasp, it was inevitable that I would end up in the company of misfits. But even misfits have stories to tell stories that shed light on both the forces that shape a human life and the ways those forces are suffered, resisted, and reimagined. He was at least seventy - small, spry, and always, it seemed to me, slightly bemused. Though Noah pointed out that Mamina Yegbe had lost his marbles, and tried to dissuade me from setting too much store by what he told me, I felt at ease in the old man's company and often sought him out at the town chief's house near the Kabala market, buying him packets of tobacco in gratitude for his tolerance of my stilted Kuranko. "The world began in Mande," Mamina Yegbe said, alluding to the great thirteenth-century empire that had dominated the West Sudan. "But yesterday and today are not the same. Whatever sun shines, that is the sun in which you have to dry yourself. We are now in the period of the whiteman's rule." He remembered when this period began before the Cameroon War (World War One) , and recalled the names of Palmer and Captain Leigh, who built the barracks at Gbankuma before the British moved to Falaba. He also described the first barracks at Kabala, built on the site of today's town market, and told me when the frontier was fixed, and when the Court Messenger Force and 1 55

the Chiefdom Police were inaugurated. And he recounted how taxes were paid to District Commissioner Warren - or Warensi, as he was known . Initially the annual hut tax was two shillings and sixpence, but later rose to five then to nine shillings, and finally to one pound five shillings, and one pound ten shillings per head. "In those days, people were happy," Mamina Yegbe said. "We were happy with our government. All the chiefs had their favourite music, and whenever the chiefs assembled, the j elibas would play. Chiefs Belikoro, Konkofa, Sinkerifa - I knew them all." At the District Officer's office one morning, I was working through a stack of intelligence diaries and daybooks from the colonial period, hoping to corroborate Mamina Yegbe's recol­ lections oflocal history. Around me the clerks were busy with their own bureaucratic chores, filing memoranda, moving dog-eared files from the " out" tray of one desk to the "in" tray of another, sharpening pencils, or fetching ice-cold Coca-Colas for the D. O. Before being allowed to inspect the records, I had been obliged to submit five copies of an application, all typed, signed, sealed in official envelopes, stamped, and countersigned. It was not long, however, before I was ruing the effort, and my eyes wandered - to the whitewashed wall where two wasps were adding yet another accretion of moist red clay to their nest, and beyond the barred windows of the office where the leaves of an enormous mango tree hung limply in the heat. I closed the daybook and made to go, already anticipating a few relaxed hours at home talking with Pauline over a simple lunch of bread and jam. At that instant, two clerks deserted their desks and asked for a lift to the market. As I switched on the ignition I caught sight of Mamina Yegbe sitting on a rock under the mango tree, smoking his Bavarian pipe with the hinged metal lid. "Do you want a lift?" I called, and gestured in the direction of the market. 1 56

Mamina Yegbe clambered up into the front seat of the Land Rover, beside the clerks. As usual he was wearing an embroidered tunic and a blue silk cap with a tassel, and looked like a Mandarin. He sat bolt upright with an almost smug expression on his face, holding against his chest a large manilla envelope marked in capital letters

O N SIERRA LEONE GOVERNMENT SERVICE.

The envelope was embellished with ornate signatures and sealed in several places with red wax. It resembled a Saul Steinberg drawing. The clerks were clearly amused by the envelope. "What's the j oke?" I asked. The first clerk winked at me, then nodded toward Mamina Yegbe who was gazing straight ahead. The other clerk dodged the question by suddenly recognizing two friends sauntering along the road. "Mosquito ! " he yelled. "Heh! Peacecorps! " And he hung his arm out the window of the Land Rover. A thin, gangly youth who answered to the first description, and his companion, wearing faded j eans with frayed cuffs, lifted their arms to wave, but the dust in the wake of the vehicle enveloped them. After dropping the clerks at the market,

I

sought to satisfY my

curiosity about the envelope. "What is it?" I asked. The old man continued to gaze straight ahead, but raised a finger to his lips. He then got down from the Land Rover and without a word disappeared into a crowd around the kola-nut traders. That night I drove back into Kabala from our house at 'One­ Mile' to buy some cold Fanta at Lansana Kamara's bar. The bar was a shabby and poky corner room that opened onto a verandah and the market place. It was furnished with several warped and dusty shelves, a battered deep freeze, and five armchairs with polystyrene foam bulging out through rents in the red vinyl upholstery. The jangling strains of a hi-life hit issued from a dilapidated record 1 57

player at one end of the bar. " I really love you, Fati Fatiii . . . " Lansana Kamara did not particularly like hi-life tunes, and whenever business was slack he would get out his records from Guinea and, with tears welling up in his eyes, listen to the stirring refrains of praise-songs from old Mali . On the walls of L.K.'s bar were several fly-specked calendars showing beaming Africans in open-necked shirts holding aloft bottles of Vimto, Fanta or Star beer. L.K. disdained such drinks. With a lugubrious air he poured himself another large Martell brandy and a Guiness chaser. I bought what I wanted and was about to go when I noticed Mamina Yegbe in the corner, surrounded by a dozen boisterous youths, among them the two clerks from the D. O.'s office. One of them made a remark that I could not catch, but it drew a burst of taunting laughter from the others, and the old man shrank back as if from a blow. I saw that Mamina Yegbe was still holding the big envelope, only now it had been ripped open, and bits of sealing wax littered the floor among the beer-bottle caps. When the old man saw me he seemed to regain his composure, but before either of us could speak one of the clerks confronted me with bloodshot eyes and beery breath. "He says it's from Seku Toure and Siaka Stevens! " the clerk roared. "That envelope! He says they've given him a big country in Guinea and a million pounds cash! He says he's corning to the D. O. tomorrow to collect it! " Everyone broke into laughter. Then they looked at me, waiting for my reaction. The clerk became angry. "He says he's going to be appointed to a high position, in the government! " he shouted, as I had failed to understand the situation. " It's all in the letter! " I glanced at Marnina Yegbe, who raised a finger to his lips and smiled ingenuously. I appealed to L.K. for a clue as to what was going on, but L.K. simply smoothed his knitted singlet over his enormous belly, lowered his eyes, and took another sip of brandy. 1 58

The clerk, exasperated by my stupidity, lurched over to the old man, wrenched the envelope from his grasp, and shook out its contents onto the bar. L.K. dolefully moved his glass to one side as his customers pawed at the sheaf of papers, spreading them out so that I could see what they were. I recognised several old G.C.E. examination papers, some offi­ cial memoranda and letters, and a page from my own field notes . I could not think how it had come into the old man's possession. Stabbing at the papers, the clerk drew my attention to a bundle of leaflets, all advertisements for Surf washing powder. "This is the letter from the prime minister! " the clerk hooted. "Can't you see what it is?' " I recalled a Volkswagen Kombi that had turned u p outside the market a few days before. A large display packet of soap-powder had been fitted to the roof-rack, and a loudspeaker blared out hi-life tunes. Four or five men in sunglasses and pale blue shirts had gone about distributing leaflets and occasionally giving away sample packets of Surf. In the afternoon the vehicle, still crackling with canned music, disappeared in a cloud of dust up the road toward Falaba. "Yes, I can see what it is." I knelt down and started picking up the papers that had fallen on the floor. They were already smudged with red dirt from the clerks' shoes. The jokers appeared embarrassed by this crazy show of sympathy for the old man. They backed out onto the porch, making half­ hearted gibes and clutching their bottles of beer. L.K. stared morosely at his glass of Guiness. "Do you want a lift home?'' I asked Mamina Yegbe.

"Awa." I looked down the unlit street, thinking, the generator's gone again, and wanting to say this to Mamina Yegbe. I also wanted to ask the old man, now sitting in silence in the Land Rover beside me, if he still intended to present his letter to the D. 0. and claim 1 59

his fortune, but it might have seemed like another taunt. What simple faith we all place in the power of printed words, these fetishized markings on a page - the clerks, this benignly deluded old man, myself! The headlights picked out the mosque and the grove of palms beyond it. ''I'm going back to Barawa on Friday," I said. Mamina Yegbe made no response. " I 'll come and see you before I go." In the darkness the town gave forth the sounds of its invisible life : a dog yelping, shouts, a radio badly tuned, an inconsolable child crying, a motor scooter spluttering down a potholed lane, the drubbing of an initiation drum. I drew up outside the house with the broken verandah where Mamina Yegbe lived.

"Ma sogoma yo," I said, as the old man got down. Mamina Yegbe stood on the roadside in the glare of the head­ lights. "In the old days people were happy," he said. Then he turned and drifted into the darkness. Almost all his life, Mamina Yegbe lived under a colonial regime. He had imagined it to be like chieftaincy - a source of order and benevolent power. If the great Belikoro could conjure thunder­ storms at will and slay his enemies with lightning bolts, then surely the British Crown or the Presidents of Sierra Leone and Guinea could pay him his due, and make good what he was owed. The clerks in the D. O.'s office, who so mercilessly ridiculed him, were no less in thrall to wishful thinking. Indeed it was the maddeningly elusive nature of fortune in the post-colonial world that compelled them to perform their derision of Mamina Yegbe so publicly. In the villages, the older generation still looked to the ancestors to centre their lives, as young women looked to their children, though everyone kept a weather eye open for auguries of misfor1 60

tune. But young men, looking beyond the village, faced a void - a nation in name only, summarily carved out of the conti­ nent by colonial powers, a place whose centre had never held and whose infrastructure was as fragmented as it was surreal: a modern highway that ran eighty miles through the middle of nowhere; a fleet of unused ambulances rusting away in a city yard; a school without teachers; a clinic without pharmaceuticals; a petrol station with no petrol. The young drifted into opportunism and fantasy as orphans sometimes do, hoping for some fantastic change of fortune, a second chance in a another country, or a powerful benefactor or political leader who would guide them out of the wilderness. There was no one word for what these young people craved. Perhaps power comes closest, if we allow that the word covers a vast array of imperatives, any one of which an individual may consider vital to his or her very existence: wealth, worth, work, status, strength, renown, knowledge, recognition. But what of the village? Was this too a source of power? In the villages, life was a matter of reciprocity: the expectation that what you gave in the course of your life would somehow be given back, and that whatever you received would be shared. You respected your elders, parents, and rulers; in return they protect you and saw to your welfare. To the lineage from which you took a wife, you gave bridewealth in return. And you offered guests food and lodging on the understanding that they would do you no harm. Lapses in these everyday protocols of give and take were the concern of Kuranko stories, where, like stories everywhere, all problems were happily resolved in the end. An exploitative chief was overthrown, a j ealous co-wife punished, a duplicitous guest unmasked, a liar hoist by his own petard, a recalcitrant bride reconciled with her lot. Everyone got his due, or his just desserts. But many young people felt there was no natural justice. For them, the time-honoured roles of gender and of age, together with 161

hereditary chieftaincy, cult associations, and labour collectives, were no longer binding or viable. The dreams of the village were no longer their dreams. As for the new sources of power that preoccupied them diamonds, commerce, education, Islam, and the military - these often seemed to belong to a world apart, where j ustice was subject to no known laws. Power is always paradoxical - for the powers that lie within one's reach are seldom as alluring as the powers that elude one's grasp. Rene Girard calls this mimetic desire. Though home is where you start from - and may finally return - life is perpetu­ ally beyond. It is there that you will find the woman you will marry. From there comes the rain that will replenish your own arid land. There is the space you need to enlarge your life, the wealth you crave. Sometimes I thought of the New Zealand diaspora, second only to Ireland's, with so many of us living abroad because home offered us such limited possibilities. Sometimes I thought of my friend Harry, with his reveries of sun-drenched landscapes, summer beaches, and women whose skin was like honey - an El Dorado of the mind, with gold its sacred symbol. But the most compelling image for Kuanko was of a fabulous town rumoured to lie somewhere in the hazy savannah regions to the northeast, and known as Musudugu - town of women - where there were no men, where women were in possession of the most powerful Kuranko medicines and means of sorcery, and where great wealth could be attained. Does vitality always have to be associated with the place most distant from where we are? Every journey in search of these mythical centres of wealth and power was fraught with danger. One heard of men who travelled to Musudugu and did not return . When Noah's father enlisted in the West African Frontier Force in 1 9 1 4 and went to war against the Germans in the Cameroons, people in Firawa declared that he had thrown his life to the winds and become a child of the whitemen. When, in the late sixties, a Kuranko dancer in the 1 62

Sierra Leone national dance troupe enlisted the help of a djinn to make him a great dancer, people shook their heads. To receive help from a djinn meant that one day you would have to repay the debt - with the life of a close kinsman. And when word reached Firawa that some young village men had been killed in a car crash in Freetown, the old men again shook their heads: the calamity would not have happened had the young men remained at home. Yet against these cautionary and conservative voices, the impulse to risk one's life, to stake all on a j ourney into the unknown is as perennial as youth itself. I did some research in the Kabala High School during the rainy season of 1 970. Everyone aspired to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer, and no one would countenance the idea that schooling would not guarantee him an exalted position, with all the wealth and prestige that came with it. The schoolboys wore white gloves and let their fingernails grow long. They spent hours each day laun­ dering their uniforms, lacquering their fingernails, and doing their homework, comfortable in the belief that they would never have to farm or struggle for a livelihood as their parents had done. Even if you landed a j ob - as Noah did - you were often paid sporadically or not at all, and then, like everyone else, had to fend for yourself, or be driven into desperate schemes. Noah spent a lot of time playing draughts . Sometimes I thought of that board of painted squares, with bottle top counters, as an image of his world. The tried and tested moves, the gambles one might take. A person could have, as we say, more than his share of good luck, j ust as another could suffer unfair setbacks - as though singled out by some cosmic power for Jobian punishment. Haven't we endured enough, people would say. Don't we deserve a break? In the villages I would meet young men who had returned from the diamond districts of Kono. Having heard so many stories of sudden riches, they were baffied as to why luck should desert them while smiling on others. Mohammed Fofona - "the man who could turn into an elephant" 1 63

•

-

had j oined the army as a

young man . He saw it as a kind of initiation. "The army gave you discipline, made you a man, made you feel a real force. In those days," he told me, "a soldier was like a whiteman in the villages; he commanded great respect." Mter a few years in the military, Mohammed drifted south into the diamond districts. But things didn't pan out, and as he became more and more dissatisfied with his lot, he lambasted the bribery, bias, exploitation and croneyism he saw in the government, and began to dream of radical political change. Others imagined that Islam might provide the answer to their prayers. In the dry season of 1 979 one of my nearest neighbours was a young man called Abdulai Sisay. After many fruitless months digging and panning for diamonds in the alluvial fields of Kono, he returned home bewildered and disappointed. "My hands are empty," he told me. Some years before, he had consulted a Koranic diviner who had given him good advice. He had then gone to Kono and made enough money to fund his elder brother's pilgrimage to Mecca. Now the same diviner told him that his run of bad luck was about to end, and advised that he should sacrifice a sheep to Allah and share the meat among his neighbours . But even after dutifully taking the diviner's advice, Abdulai was nagged by doubts, and desperate for further insights into the cause of his fluctuating fortunes. When I told Abdulai I was interested in Kuranko dreams, he immediately confessed a keen interest in how white people inter­ pret dreams. And so, within a few days we were comparing our dreams and dream interpretations. One morning, when I told Abdulai of a dream in which I had been in a high place, he explained that the dream presaged esteem and prosperity. Then he told me what he had dreamed. "I was up in the sky, near the moon . I went up like an airplane,

• I write at length about Mohammed's shape-shifting in

(1 989) . 1 64

Paths Toward a Clearing

and came down to earth again. While I was in the sky I was not afraid, but as I came back to earth I became very frightened, and called out, 'I am falling, I am falling' . "In my next dream I was praying. It was the middle of the night. I was praying and counting my beads ." " I think you want to go to Mecca," I said, "just as your elder brother did, but you are afraid that you will not be able to make the j ourney."

"A ko sebe! " Abdulai exclaimed. "That's true. That is what is in my mind." I did not confide everything that Abdulai's dream suggested to me. His first dream gave me the impression that Abdulai felt less and less in control over his own destiny. The dream seemed to be charged with the same anxieties of powerlessness and marginalisa­ tion that I discerned around me every day - villagers working through an entire dry season to build a road through the bush, or a bridge across a river, in the expectation that their collec­ tive fortunes would improve, only to find that nothing changed; young men, like Abdulai, back from the diamond fields, with little to show for their efforts; others back from the cities where they had hoped for a windfall, but found none; students unable to find the money to finish their schooling, or thrown out of college for protesting against the government; men frustrated in their attempts to ally themselves with a powerful mentor and patron. At the same time, Abdulai's dream reminded me of the kinds of fantastic avenues to self-esteem and empowerment that had begun to fill this existential vacuum, particularly among young men. An alliance forged with a powerful bush spirit. The acquisition of powerful medicines, or the ability to transform oneself at will into a powerful animal. Or the hope that Islam and the spiritual authority of the alhadjis - those who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca - would usher in a new age. A generation later, as corrupt governments and coups destroyed the civil state in Sierra Leone, and the patrimonial economy collapsed, these thwarted dreams 1 65

would assume increasingly violent and vengeful shape, mixing indigenous fantasies of magical power with images from kung fu movies, fixations on invincible trickster heroes like Rambo, and the possession of lethal weaponry. A few days after his dream of falling from the sky, Abdulai recounted another dream. "I was lying in bed, drawing my wife toward me, when a pale-complexioned woman came up to her and began pulling her away from me." Assuming that

gbe - pale-complexioned - might, in this context, mean "white woman", I wondered whether Abdulai's dream betrayed a desire to sleep with a European woman, but when I suggested this, Abdulai abruptly clapped his hands together. "Eh! Not at all. That is not what I had in mind." "But who," I asked, "is the woman?" For I was thinking of what so many Kuranko had drummed into me - that one never dreams of non-existent things . To dream that one is a witch confirms that musu

one is a witch. To dream of someone who has died is a confirma­ tion that this person still exists, only in some other zone. As is the case among many preliterate peoples, dreams were not considered to be random figments of the imagination, but glimpses into other parallel realities, ordinarily invisible and intangible - like things glimpsed in the penumbra of a fire. "It is not as you say," Abdulai said. "You see, I have two wives. One is pale-complexioned and one is dark. You know that pale­ ness signifies good luck. Well, I had intended taking my dark wife when I went back to the mines. Now I will take the other one, because in the dream she was pulling the dark one away. This means that she will draw the bad luck away and bring me good luck." "What if things do not go well for you, despite all the good omens?" I asked. "It all depends on Allah," Abdulai said. "A person's destiny is in the hands of Alla h. The Qur'an is Allah's word, and the Qur'an shows us how to understand our dreams." Few human beings can live as if their lot were fixed, or ill1 66

fortune irreversible. Though Kuranko often say that "no sacrifice can cut one's fate" they generally do so after a calamity has befallen them, as if bemoaning and at the same time struggling to accept the apparent lack of any divine or natural j ustice in this world. But this does not mean that people live fatalistically. Indeed, Kuranko seek to avert misfortune and improve their chances in life as much as anyone, though their means may, to European eyes, sometimes seem pathetic or illusory. But none of us exists without imaginary bolt-holes, and in bad times we all have recourse to blind faith, to hope, and to desperate fantasies - some of which may entail useful effects. This is why it is presumptuous to dismiss another person's reality as illusory, or complacently regard one's own coping strate­ gies as reasonable - as the clerks did with Mamina Yegbe, and as Europeans have been doing for a long time with what many still persist in calling African "superstitions". By compelling you to inhabit the world of others, anthropology changes the way you think about yourself. It also makes you reflect on the arbitrariness of fate. Often in Sierra Leone I found myself wondering what course I would have taken, which life I would have chosen, had I been born into this society where circum­ stance had made me a mere soj ourner. At times, I have imagined myself as Saran Salia Sana - the old medicine master of whom I have written in Barawa ( 1 986) - who renounced sorcery in order to practise the healing and prophylactic arts, and who at no time did not have several children under his roof, protecting them from witchcraft and sorcery. At other times, I have identified with Keti Ferenke Koroma, whose life story I have also recounted, who created his brilliant fables in an effort to sustain a vision of a world where promises are kept, bargains are honoured, and friendship and intelligence valued above power and wealth . Though these are the men whose paths I might have followed, whose lives I might have shared had my fate been different, it is not because I attach any sentimental value to so-called "traditional" societies. 1 67

Rather it is because life has taught me the importance of striking a balance between acceptance and protest. Kuranko protest inj us­ tices, to be sure. But the whole thrust of initiation is to teach one to withstand hardship, and accept adversity as an inevitable part of life. Pain, illness and unhappiness are not seen as aberrations from which one might be saved. The insane and sick are never seques­ tered. Death is not denied. Nor do people react to suffering with the outrage and impatience so familiar in our own society - the tormented sense that one has been hard done by, that one deserves better, that permanent health, unalloyed happiness, even immor­ tality, might be one day guaranteed as a civil right. I admired the modus vivendi these two men had worked out, accepting what they could not change and struggling to change that which they felt they could. There is something else I found to admire in these men. Though both had suffered at the hands of others, they had not allowed themselves to be consumed by despair or revenge. Each had lost his father at an early age, experienced broken marriages, and neither had been born to privilege or power. Yet each had salvaged his humanity again and again, choosing reconciliation over vengeance, the common weal over merely personal gain. It would have been easy for them to vent their frustrations on others, to blame and vilify, but in the face ofloss each man stoically recen­ tred himself and pushed on. This is not to suggest that one is free to make one's life exactly what one wills; rather, it is to say, with Merleau-Ponty that "to be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into the world" - the world being at once already constituted by others before us and open to us as a field of infinite possibilities. If one uses the word freedom, it is simply to recognise, as Sartre puts it, "the small movement which makes a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him."

1 68

Amazing G race

O n our first day back in Freetown, Pauline and I drove down the peninsula to Black Johnson's Beach. The air was filled with the noise of cicadas. The sand burnt our bare feet. Ahead of us, witch-crabs scuttled away into their sandy burrows. The tideline was a dark tracery of twigs, coconut husks, and dead stonefish . The only other marks in the white sand were our own footprints. We found a place at the end of the beach shaded by casuarinas, and lay there for a long time listening to the susurrus of the sea. Kabala seemed far more than two hundred miles away, and my experiences in the north felt as though they belonged to someone else. Even if it hadn't been necessary for Pauline to come to Free­ town to have the baby, we would have left Kabala for a while. I needed a break from fieldwork. To take stock, to get my bearings. On our way back from the beach, we stopped in to see Sewa and Rose. Sewa was Noah's older brother. He'd been in and out of politics since Independence, but was now the agent for Alitalia in Freetown . Their house overlooked a tidal inlet called Thompson's Bay, but the track to it was badly potholed, and even in the Land Rover I had to take it slowly. As we drove up to the house, the kids ran out to meet us. They wanted to tell us about an explosion on the inlet that afternoon. A canoe fisherman had been using gelignite and a stick had exploded in his hand. Other fishermen had rowed out to him, but by the time they got him ashore he had bled to death. 1 69

Rose came out of the house and shushed the kids, saying we would not want to hear such gruesome stories. She took Pauline by the arm and led her inside. We sat on the balcony overlooking the inlet, sipping the iced Pepsis Rose had brought us. Rose was combing her daughter Isata's hair. Isata's brother Abu was wheeling his toy fire engine along the top of the concrete balustrade and imitating a fire siren. Rose asked where we'd been and what we'd been doing all day. I let Pauline describe Black Johnson's Beach while I looked up at the high cirrus that was now beginning to change from grey to gold as the sun set. Then I was aware of Rose's voice again . She was talking about the Cottage Hospital, asking Pauline if she had managed to buy everything she'd need when she was admitted. "You will have to take everything," Rose stressed, "your own disinfectant, your own bedding, your own food and drink . . . " I didn't want Pauline feeling anxious, so I told Rose about the Kuranko diviner I had consulted, how he said the confinement would go well and that Pauline would give birth to a baby girl. Rose tugged the comb free from Isata's hair. "You can't believe everything those people tell you," she said. "Well," I said, "when in Rome . . . " "It helped allay our anxieties," Pauline said. "That's all Michael means." And then she told Rose we had made a list of all the things we needed and would go downtown in the morning to buy them. Rose went back to braiding Isata's hair. We all fell silent then, and I looked out over the mangroves in the fast-fading light. Suddenly Rose asked, "Did you know that the real name of this bay isn't Thompson's but Thousands?" " No," I said, " I didn't know that." "Yes," she said, "they used to ship slaves from this inlet." 1 70

I remembered the old university building in Cline Town, built from the timbers of captured slave ships, iron ring-bolts still embedded in the walls. Then Rose said, "Thousands of them were herded into caves and barracoons down there before they were taken out to the ships offshore." The barracoons were slave pens built on the beaches. Coffies or trains of slaves were brought to the coast from up-country, roped together at the neck with leather thongs. All were forced to carry headloads of ivory or food. All bore weals and scars from lashes and chains . The sick and exhausted were shot. On the coast, men, women and children were stripped naked, and further selections made by the slave master and his "surgeon" to ensure that sick individuals would not contaminate the healthy on the voyage out. Two days before shipment, the heads of the slaves were shaved. Sometimes they were branded on the arm with the initials of the merchant to whom they belonged. In Sierra Leone, the slave ships anchored offshore and the slaves were brought out to them in longboats. Two hundred and fifty people would be "tight-packed" on three tiers or shelves in a hold with a six-foot ceiling. No individual had a space more than six feet by sixteen inches in which to move. It was impossible to sit upright, and people were handcuffed and leg-ironed in pairs, "the right hand and foot of one to the left of the other, but across" , so that no one could move without disturbing the person to whom he or she was shackled. Sometimes it was worse. Up to seven hundred and fifty men might be "stowed in each other's laps" in a three-foot space between-decks, "without an inch to move right or left" and, in a partition of the bulkhead measuring sixteen by eighteen feet, two hundred and fifty women, some pregnant, would be confined. In each section of the hold were three or four latrine buckets . In most cases, a slave 's shackles prevented him or her from 171

getting access to the buckets . On the voyage, the slaves were brought on deck at eight in the morning and a long chain was run through their shackles and fastened to a ring-bolt in the deck. They were then given tubs of pulped horse-beans, boiled yams and rice, and buckets of sea water to slake their thirst. During the day, they would be forced to exer­ cise on the deck by dancing and singing. People were flogged if they moved sluggishly or sang laments. Women were often forced to dress in European clothes, decked with beads, and raped. At four in the afternoon, the second mate and boatswain descended into the hold and supervised the stowing of slaves for the night, cramming tall individuals amidships and shorter ones near the bows to maximise the scarce space. In bad weather, these routines would be suspended. Portholes and gratings were sealed against the high seas and rain . In the hot, fetid holds, dysentery and typhus broke out. People lay in their vomit and faeces, and European crew would faint from the stench, dumping the tubs of food in the hold or not taking them below at all. Lying in their own blood and mucus in a ship yawing and pitching in heavy seas, many slaves had their skin worn away until their shoulder bones, elbows and hips were exposed. Crying out in fever for release from their agony, they would be brought on deck, swabbed down and bandaged. Most of the sick died and were thrown overboard. In fact, of the sixty thousand slaves carried each year in English ships, nearly twenty thousand died at sea during the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Many attempted suicide. Some refused to eat and were flogged or tortured. Hot coals were held against their lips, or their mouths were forced open with a kind of calliper called the speculum oris. Some managed to j ump overboard and drown. Others, like the "Muslims" in the Nazi death-camps, simply withdrew into them­ selves and lost the will to live.

1 72

I looked at Rose and Isata in the half-light and shuddered at the thought of what had happened. I felt uneasy too, as though I had been somehow complicit in it. What would I have done if I had been here two hundred years ago? Then Sewa was shouting from the foyer that he was home, and Abu rushed away to see him. Rose stopped braiding Isata's hair and tied the loose strands with a red ribbon. Sewa came out on to the verandah, holding his son's hand.

" Kushe, kushe," Sewa said, greeting us in Krio. He leaned back against the balustrade, his face in darkness. Behind him, lights from the tourist hotels on Cape Sierra smeared the ink-black water of the inlet. Rose stood up. "Kam, we eat," she said, and went into the parlour. "Well," Sewa said to Pauline, " how di bodi ?" "Fine," Pauline said. " Di bodi fine." She related how we'd spent the day at Black Johnson's Beach. Sewa appeared puzzled or disapproving, but Rose was calling,

"Dae eat dae na table ! " and so we moved indoors and took our places around the table. Rose lifted the lids off the enamel bowls and urged us to help ourselves to the fish and okra stew, and rice. Pauline took a couple of spoonfuls, and I served myself little more. I half expected Sewa to launch into his diatribe about how thin I was, and to tell Pauline how she must keep her strength up because she had to eat for two people. "Did you go downtown and do your shopping?" Sewa asked.

"Dem go tumara," Rose said. The rains were coming. When I drove back up to Fourah Bay College after buying vegetables and lentils downtown, the hills were dark under heavy cloud and thunder rumbled away in the north . After a quick trip to the library, I went home. The heat was oppressive. Pauline was out. 1 73

Lying down on the sofa, I read for a while before falling into a deep sleep. I woke not knowing where I was. And my mind was crowded with images from the book I 'd been reading. According to Walter Rodney, the Sierra Leone slave trade had been "prodigious" . He cited a slave captain called John Newton who had made three voyages to Sierra Leone between 1 750 and 1 754 and filled the holds of several ships. Another book, written in the 1 830s by a ship's doctor involved in the suppression of the slave trade, mentioned Kuranko people among those who had been lucky enough to be repatriated and find their way home. That evening, Pauline wanted to know why I was reading books about slavery. I told her it had been weighing on my mind for days. I was distressed by the knowledge that Kuranko had been among those shipped from the white-shell beaches where we'd walked and swum. She flicked through one of the library books, and discovered a reference to John Newton. "You know who Newton was?" she asked. " The captain of a slave ship," I replied. "Yes, but apart from that. He wrote 'Amazing Grace'," she said, and then began singing softly to remind me of the hymn : Amaz ing grace, how sweet the sound That saved a wretch like me, I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see. . .

Newton was employed in the slave trade for ten years, first as an ordinary seaman, then as ship's mate, finally as master of two slave ships. Like most of his contemporaries, he saw nothing wrong with the slave trade. "I never had the least scruple as to its lawfulness," he wrote in his memoirs. " I was upon the whole satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me . . . It is, 1 74

indeed, accounted a genteel employment . . . " His concern for his human cargoes was no less mercenary than that of other slave captains. Quite simply, a dead slave turned no profit. This is why slaves who tried to starve themselves to death were forcibly fed, and those who j umped overboard were rescued from drowning. This is why slaves were washed, shaved, and some­ times rubbed with beeswax and oil, and why their wounds were bandaged. If their nails were trimmed, it was to prevent injury when they fought. If they were forced to dance, it was to keep them fit. If their mouths were rinsed with vinegar, it was to treat scurvy. If the holds were ventilated or fumigated with brimstone, if the decks were swabbed with disinfectant and holystoned, it was to stop the spread of deadly disease. And if lunar caustic was rubbed on yaws and a man with dysentery had his anus stoppered with oakum, this was to promote a quick sale in the scrambles of Kingston and Port Maria. Nothing was done for the slave simply because he was a human being. Naturally, the slavers had God on their side. On one voyage, Newton inscribed the first page of his ship 's log with a passage from Psalm 1 07 : "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep." Surviving terrible squalls off the coast of Sierra Leone, Newton praised the interposition of the Almighty in bringing his ship safely to port. When a slave uprising was put down on board The African in 1 752, Newton perceived "the favour of Divine Providence", then neck-yolked the offenders and forced a confession from them with thumbscrews . Like other slave captains, he held religious services on Sundays, though not for the slaves . Indeed, Newton felt that captaining a slave ship was more favourable than any other calling "for promoting the Life of God in the Soul" . In the evenings, when the watch was set and the slaves safely below "packed in their shelves" , he would pace the deck murmuring his wife's name, recommending her to the care and protection of God, and composing such lines as these for the 175

letter he would write her: "My heart goes often pit-a-pat, lest I should hear that you have been ill or uneasy." He was, as another slave captain gibed, "a slave to one woman" . In 1 755, Newton left the sea and the slave trade, and settled down to married life ashore. He was thirty. He wanted to begin anew. He made resolutions to get at least seven hours sleep a night, devote an hour a day to Bible study, avoid speaking ill of others, and forswear his past life as an "infidel and libertine " . He began a diary with the words, "I dedicate unto Thee this clean unsully'd book and at the same renew my tender for a foul blotted corrupt heart." But was it the slave trade he wanted to repudiate, or rather what he cryptically called "those brutish lusts by which I was once so long and deeply enslav'd"? Thirty-three years would pass before Newton lent his voice to the cause of Abolition, denouncing slavery as an iniquitous, cruel and oppressive commerce "at which my heart now shudders" . But was it God's "amazing grace" that brought about this change of heart or simply that he was sick of the company of rabble and unable to bear long periods separated from his young wife? We woke to violent gusts of wind, the curtains flung back from the open windows, billowing and flailing. I got up and fumbled for the window catches, my movements hampered by the curtains. I pulled the metal frames closed. The sky was being ripped apart at the seams. Thunder crackled. Lightning laddered the clouds. " I think it's starting," Pauline said. She could not get comfortable. She had stomach cramps and complained of an ache in her lower back. I helped her change her position, then massaged her back. We worked on the breathing exercises we'd been practising for months. Then the rain came. It came as suddenly as the wind, pelting down under immense pressure, pouring out of the sky. It was so loud, the deluge, and so furious that the whole house shook under 176

its impact. The drumming on the roof was deafening. Water spilled from the guttering, splashing in the yard. "I must be well acclimatised," Pauline said. "My waters will break with the rains! " The rain ceased. I could hear a frog croaking. Thunder rumbled distantly in the hills. We timed the intervals between contractions. It was five in the morning, more than an hour before first light. "How long since the last one?" Pauline asked. "Quarter of an hour." "I'm going to get dressed," Pauline said. "I think we should get to the hospital. It's better if we have time to spare. Can you pack the things?" "We're going to put you on a drip, Mrs Jackson," the doctor said. "Your waters have burst a little earlier than normal and we want to minimise the risk of infection. It's j ust a precaution." I watched as the nurse set up the bottle, untangling the plastic tubing. Pauline winced, taking her weight on her elbow. " I 'd rather you didn't, Doctor," she said. "I want to be unencumbered for the birth ." "It's for your own good, Mrs Jackson," the doctor said. "But it's better for me without the drip ! " she protested. She turned her face to me. "Michael?" she said. I grasped her hand. "The spasms in my back are getting worse," she said. "The contractions should become quite intense soon," the doctor said. "If you should need pethidine or an epidural . . . " "I don't want anything, Doctor, thank you," Pauline said. " I just want to try to handle things my way for as long as possible." It was hot. Pauline was on all fours. When the contraction came, she screamed, pushing my hand to where she wanted me to 1 77

massage her back. " Fuck! Shit! Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God . . . " As the contraction subsided, Pauline buried her face in the pillow. I could hear the traffic in the street outside, a world away. She was breathing hard, panting, giving herself orders: "Relax relax relax relax relax relax, it'll pass it'll pass it'll pass it'll pass . . . " "Now push, dear, push ! " the nurse urged. "But the contraction hasn't begun," Pauline said. I took the facecloth and wiped her forehead. " I 've got pins and needles," she said. Then she gasped, " Now! One's starting now ! " Her face was tense as she drew in the next breath. I glanced at the wall clock. Three-fifteen. Six hours since we arrived in the hospital. She gripped my arm. " I think I 'm going to be sick ! " I grabbed a kidney dish from the table. " No, not that," said the nurse. "Perhaps you'd better leave now, Mr Jackson," the doctor said. " No, no, let him stay ! " Pauline said. "I want my husband to be with me." She was gasping for breath. "Push ! " said the nurse. "I can't! " "Go and get Doctor Jalloh," the midwife said to the nurse. " I think we're going t o have t o d o a n episiotomy." It was half past five in the afternoon. I knelt beside the bed, gazing into my daughter's unfocused sea-blue eyes. She seemed to return my smile. "Isn't she perfect?" Pauline said. Then she took the baby to her breast, and the infant's tiny head butted for the nipple. Pauline looked at me. "I'm glad it's over. I 've never been through such an ordeal in my life. I can't believe she's here, after all the months of waiting." When the baby had finished feeding, I held her against my 1 78

shoulder and gently rubbed her back. Then I held her in front of me, cradling her head in my hand. Her feet hardly reached the crook of my arm. I could not stop gazing into her face, watching her wrinkled hands clutch at the air. I lay the infant down beside Pauline on the bed. She placed her arm around her. "You must be exhausted," I said. "Exhausted and elated," she replied. "Motherhood becomes you." " I can't get over how beautiful she is," Pauline said. And as I looked at my daughter, the first lines of a poem came to me . . . For her, words are but bruisings of the air And the windfall sound of them is everywhere . . .

1 79

A l leg o ries o f the Wild e rness

When my thoughts return to Sierra Leone, they often return to the stories I heard there. One story, told by a young man called Sulimani Koroma in the dry season of 1 972, has haunted me for years. It was late at night, and we were crowded into a shuttered room in which I had been barely able to find a niche for my micro­ phone. Children were clambering over one another, trying to get nearer the storyteller. Babies slept, oblivious, on their mothers' backs. Old men, chewing kola, unmoved by the commotion, sat in the shadows thrown by hurricane lamps. The story was about a small hand-drum called the yimbe, which is played during initiations. At the time the story begins, this yimbe drum is in the hands of the hyenas in the bush. But hearing it night after night, the villagers become entranced by its sound and present an ultimatum to their chief: "If you do not bring the drum to us in the village, we will go into the bush ." Concerned to keep the community together and maintain his authority, the chief promises a "hundred of everything" to anyone brave enough to bring the yimbe from the bush to the village. A young man decides to try his luck. After saying goodbye to his mother - who fears she will not see her son again - he sets off on his quest. Deep in the bush, he encounters a man-eating djinn. But the djinn, impressed by the young man's audacity and courage, decides not only to spare his life but to help him by 1 80

giving him a fetish, with instructions on how to address it in time of need, as well as an egg, a live coal, and a piece of bamboo. That night the young man reaches the village of the hyenas . Though suspicious and wary, the hyenas offer him food and lodg­ ings, and accede to his request to be allowed to sleep in the court­ house - where the yimbe drums are kept. In the middle of the night he steals the sweetest-sounding yimbe and flees. Hyena Sira, the canniest of the hyenas, who has not slept for fear of what the young man might do, rouses the other hyenas and leads them in pursuit of the thief. However, each time the hyenas threaten to overtake him, the young man summons the fetish . The first time it tells him to throw down the bamboo, which becomes an impen­ etrable forest that hyena Sira has to gnaw her way through. The second time it tells him to use the live coal to set fire to the grass, though hyena Sira quickly douses the flames by pissing on them. The third time it tells him to throw down the egg; it turns into a great lake which enables the young man to reach the safety of the village with the yimbe drum in his possession. Now the djinn gave .the young man the fetish on condition that he kill a red bull and offer it as a sacrifice to the djinn when his quest was ended. But the young man forgets his promise, and when hyena Sira, disguised as a seductive young woman, comes to the village and entices him to accompany her home, he sets off with no thought for his safety. Once they've crossed the lake, hyena Sira leads the young man into an ambush. As the hyenas close in for the kill, he shinnies up a tree and summons the fetish for help. The fetish says nothing. Desperately he summons it again. Again no response. It is then that he remembers his broken promise, and declares that he will sacri­ fice two bulls to the djinn if it saves him. As the hyenas are about to tear him limb from limb the fetish breaks its silence. It tells him to take a branch from the tree. It turns into a gun. The fetish then tells him to take some leaves. These turn into bullets . He fires on the hyenas and they flee for their lives. 181

The young man returns home, and makes the promised sacrifice to the djinn. I have always liked to compare this story with Defoe's Robinson

Crusoe. Both are allegories of the wilderness in which the protag­ onists, separated from their ordinary lives, struggle not only to survive but to triumph. But while the hero of the Kuranko story succeeds in keeping his community together, the world Crusoe creates is entirely his own. Beholden to no one, he is the self-made man, the possessive individualist, a law unto himself, captain and saviour of his own soul. With whom might I identify? Is the anthropologist to be likened to Crusoe or to the young man who belatedly makes good his promise to the djinn? There was a time when people in Firawa said that I was Noah's djinn. They expected him to gain great fortune through knowing me. The truth was, however, that he was my dj inn. As with the dj inn in the story of the yimbe drum, the conclusion of my quest depended entirely on his help. And like the young man in the Kuranko tale who, his mission accomplished, forgets the bargain he struck with his supernatural helper, I would come to be haunted by a sense of having failed to reciprocate the help I had received. For what did Noah gain from his association with me that came remotely close to equalling what I had gained through him? And yet I ask myself, am I my brother's keeper? Am I bound to take upon myself the obligation to make good what Noah felt he lacked in his life? And how is one to determine what one owes others and what one owes oneself? Noah was born in Firawa in 1 942, his mother's last child. His father worked as a court messenger and was transferred often to various parts of Sierra Leone. "I was my father's favourite," Noah told me. "I started school late because my father wanted me to be with him. I was all the time with my father, slept with my father, 1 82

moved with my father, until his death in 1 954. Only then did I really get to know the woman who bore me." In 1 953, under circumstances Noah would never completely understand, his elder brother Sewa took him out of school and pledged him to a Mandingo trader who was travelling south. Noah thus embarked upon a seemingly endless j ourney down boulder­ strewn roads between brakes of elephant grass, driving a herd of cows . His taciturn companion, whose name was Kemo, gave him corn and curdled milk. He watched women in the fields, hoeing up mounds of lumpy black earth. He saw children his own age splashing and laughing in river pools below the girder bridges they crossed. The air was fragrant with the perfumes of flowers after rain, but in the towns the streets were quagmires that stank of cow piss and dung. In the south, at a town called Bambatuk, Kemo took leave of Noah, telling him that he was to remain there and work for Mammy Kasan. Noah saw money change hands. And then an enormous woman, whose brow was creased with an expression of intense disapproval or worry, gathered her flowing blue robe about her and led him to the outhouse where he would sleep. The main house seemed like a mansion to Noah. The walls of its central room were covered with framed photographs of men in army uniforms and women in vast white gowns and towering headkerchiefs. Padlocked doors led to rooms he was not allowed to enter. All the windows in the house were barred against thieves, and it was Noah's j ob to see that the shutters were securely bolted every night. Along the front porch of the house ran an ornate concrete balustrade, painted bright yellow. At one end of the porch was Mammy Kasan's shop. Its ceiling was hung with lengths ofbaft, hanks of rope, metal buckets, and kerosene lanterns. Its shelves were fill e d with packets of Tate and Lyle sugar, Bryant and May matches, bars of soap, bottles of pills, and enamelware. On the worn counter were piles of onions and arrays of okra and red peppers. 1 83

Mammy Kasan sat behind the counter frowning at the street. Hardly an hour passed without her summoning Noah, whose name had become Kekura, to do some chore for her. "Ke-kura, Ke-kura, Ke-kura," she would call monotonously. Then more stridently, "Kekura ! " Noah would come running from the back o f the house, his hands dripping with soapsuds. "Kekura, do the ironing now," she commanded. He would leave off doing the laundry and heat the heavy smoothing iron by filling it with coals from the fire. Then he would struggle with one of Mammy Kasan's voluminous gowns on a rickety table that creaked ominously as the huge iron was pushed along a fold of the cloth. No sooner had he begun to make some headway when he would hear again, slowly and regularly at first, "Ke-kura, Ke-kura, Ke-kura." So he would scoot round the side of the house, dodging the rain puddles under the eaves, and hear the voice raised into an angry summons, "Kekura, come now, Kekura ! " Arriving breathless, at the bottom of the steps, he would be told that he still smelled of Kemo Sise's cows. Noah quickly learned that Mammy Kasan made such remarks to give herself time to remember what it was she had wanted him to do. When the chore came back to mind she would indolently lift and extend her right arm and with her left hand hitch the billowing sleeve of her gown up onto her shoulder. "Kekura, fetch firewood," she would say or, simply, "Bring water." Noah would lower the bucket into the well, and as it hit the water he would see his silhouette j olt and shatter, and a blue half-circle of sky turn to mud. He found solace in the company of Denka, Mammy Kasan's husband. Denka had been blinded by a spitting cobra not long after enlisting in the army in 1 939. Gossip circulated that Denka's mind was a bit touched as well. The blind man, feeling his way along the scarred plaster wall of the house to the back steps, would come into the yard when Noah 1 84

was working there and, for no apparent reason, throw himself into a display of parade-ground drill. Noah would have to push basins aside and kick firewood out of the way lest the blind veteran trip over them. Denka marched up and down, shouting orders to himself: "Lep rite, lep rite, lep rite, lep. Riiiii wheel. Lep rite, lep rite, lep. Squaaad halt ! " He would spring t o attention facing the mango tree, his hand quivering at his forehead in salute. Noah would say,

"I

am over here", and Denka, nonplussed,

would wheel toward the voice and repeat his salute. The boy flinched as his blind companion stumbled over outcrops of pitted rock or waded into a puddle, scattering the ducks. But Denka was tireless. "Give me the pestle," he would order, and taking it from Noah he would shoulder and present arms while the boy dodged the flailing pole. At first Noah was unsettled by Denka's ghosted-over eyes. They reminded him of the spectral gaze of the people in the parlour photo gallery and of the locked rooms he suspected were occupied by the spirits of the framed figures . But familiarity soon allayed his fears, and lying awake at night on his mat in the outhouse he would be lulled by the sound ofDenka's flute warbling and trilling above the rain - until Mammy Kasan's voice broke the spell, calling, "Ke-kura, Ke-kura, Kekura! Come now." From time to time Mammy kasan went on what she called an "errand" to another town. Denka said she went to collect debts. Noah went as Denka's guide. Each held an end of a long pole, the boy steering his blind companion down the narrow bush paths while Mammy Kasan bustled ahead, her gown catching the breeze and billowing like a sail. One morning at Sirabo, Mammy Kasan sent Noah off to buy some bananas. As he sauntered along a row of stalls in the market he was startled to hear snatches of Kuranko. Looking around, he spotted 1 85

three men, one of whom wore an indigo gown like his father's . He sidled up to the men and greeted them cautiously.

"Eh, m 'bonnu! " one of the men exclaimed to the others, "the boy speaks Kuranko." "What is your name?" asked another. "They call me Kekura." "Kekura ! " said the first man, surprised. "And where do you hail from, 'new fellow'?" " From Kabala." "Kabala! Eh, m 'bo, you are a long way from home." "We are also from Kabala," said the second man. Noah fumbled in his pocket for the knife his father had given him. "My father gave me this when he sent me away to school," Noah said. The first man took the knife and turned it over in his hand. "He sent you to school here? In Sirabo?" " No, in Kabala."

" Hun ! " " It's a fine knife," said the second man. The first man made to go. "Awa," he said, "mi nala - we will see you later." Noah felt a lump in his throat as he watched the Kuranko men disappear into the crowded market. He hung around until late afternoon in the hope that they would return but, dreading Mammy Kasan's ire, finally gave up his vigil. Noah's eldest sister Ai was married to Alhadji Momodu Salloh who lived at Bonthe in the southern province. On a trip to Bantai chiefdom to buy rice she chanced to meet the Kuranko men with whom Noah had talked at Sirabo. Noah's father, Tina Kome, had written to Ai about Noah's disappearance, and when the travellers mentioned the small Kuranko boy with an army knife Ai was certain it must be her 1 86

little brother. Although puzzled by the child's nondescript name, she immediately took a truck to Sirabo where the market people told her about Mammy Kasan and her houseboy. Ai came on foot to Bambatuk the next day. The town was on an island in a tidal river lined with mangrove swamps and muddy shell banks. The only way across to the island was by ferry - a wooden raft, given buoyancy by empty oil drums, which the ferryman winched across the river by means of a cable attached to trees on either bank. After asking directions from the ferryman, Ai proceeded to Mammy Kasan's house. Mammy Kasan was ensconced behind the counter of her shop. Ai greeted her and asked casually if she was the trader who had a small Kuranko boy called Kekura working for her. Mammy Kasan's frown deepened. "Kekura is there," she said, tugging at the sleeve of her gown. "I am sure that Kekura is my brother," said Ai. "The last we heard of him, he was in the care of a certain Kemo Sise, a cattle trader." Mammy Kasan said nothing. "May I see the boy?" Ai asked. Mammy Kasan simply repeated, "He is there." Ai walked into the house, calling, "Noah, Noah, are you there?" Denka, sitting in a gloomy corner of the parlor, muttered as if to himself, "There is nobody here called Noah." Ai asked if he knew of a boy called Kekura. Denka at once sprang to his feet. "Att-en-shun," he barked. Then, tilting his head as if to listen for some reply, he called, "Kekura, Kekura, come here." At first Noah hardly recognised his sister in the dim light, but Ai led him to the back door to get out of Denka's hearing. Noah, seeing her face clearly, could not suppress his j oy. "Calm, calm, keep calm," Ai whispered. "You must pretend you do not know me. Just wait. I'll come back this evening." 1 87

Ai returned to Mammy Kasan and asked ifNoah could go back to Bonthe with her. "Perhaps only for a little while," she added, noticing Mammy Kasan's deepening frown. The trader's blunt refusal convinced Ai that further pleading would be a waste of breath . "Even if you were the boy's mother, which you are not," Mammy Kasan pontificated, " I would not let him go with you . He is pledged to me, and Kemo Sise has gone to Liberia." "Then may I spend the night here?" Ai asked. " I 'll go on my way in the morning." Mammy Kasan gave her gruff assent. "Kekura !" she shouted, "bring food! " That night Ai stole down to the outhouse and explained to Noah that he was to run away in the morning. She carefully outlined her plan, making him repeat what he was to do and impressing upon him the need for calm until they had made their escape. It was well after midnight when she returned to her own room. The day dawned, bringing high cirrus clouds like rubbed tobacco, and a sea breeze. Ai thanked Mammy Kasan for ht>r hospitality, said a curt goodbye to Noah, and walked away quickly down the path to the ferry landing. Noah waited for Mammy Kasan to go into her shop. He approached her with his heart thudding. "I am going to cut firewood," he said weakly. He was wearing two pairs of trousers and two shirts, and was fearful that Mammy Kasan would notice. But she was preoccu­ pied, counting out pills from a brown bottle into the palm of her hand. Noah raced through the coconut grove and on through the scrub and grass, taking a roundabout route to the ferry landing. Ai had dashed the ferryman a pound note and told him to wait for Noah. He grinned as he watched the boy squelch clumsily across the mudflats then stumble breathlessly down the landing stage. "My sister . . . " Noah began. 1 88

"Come, Kekura," the ferryman laughed, "let's go." As the ferry slid slowly out into the stream, Noah looked back anxiously at the path to Bambatuk. He half expected Mammy Kasan to appear, with her gown billowing about her, to order them back. "You were lucky," the ferryman said, straining at the rusty winch. "If your sister had chosen to cross in the evening, the river would have been down and you would have been stranded." Noah watched the blurred shadow of the raft in the olive water. Mangrove pods drifted with the current, and yellow butterflies caught by the river wind flapped and flurried near the surface. As the ferry bumped against the landing, Ai seized Noah by the arm and hastened him away from the river. They skirted the first village they came to, using a grove of mango trees to keep themselves out of sight of the houses. But they were close enough to hear the murmur of voices and the thud of pestles, and feared that some kind of alarm would be shouted at any moment. Clear of the village, they regained the path and walked on through the heat of the day. The air was heavy with humidity and Noah's ears throbbed. He complained that his legs were numb and his throat dry, but Ai insisted they press on. All night they walked, picking their way down the moonless path through a wilderness of mangrove forest. Occasionally they disturbed a nightjar resting in the warm dust of the path, and it would fly up clumsily and break the cloying silence with its churring cry. At noon the following day they reached a town where Ai had friends. That night Noah woke from a dream in which Denka was fumbling in the darkness for his flute. It was the first time he had thought of the blind man since the morning he had left Bambatuk.

I must whittle him another flute if he cannot find that one, he thought. Then weariness enclosed him and he fell back to sleep. Two days later they reached Bonthe where everyone fussed 1 89

over Noah and urged him to recount his adventures. Ai had scarcely seen her brother in the eight years since Tina Kome, their father, had left Moyamba, and as Noah spoke of his vicissitudes she responded with reproachful signs and exclamations of incredulity.

"Han! " she cried, as Noah listed the chores he had had to perform for Mammy Kasan. "Han, that woman made you work so ?. " Though Ai knew that Noah was pining to rej oin his father, she was unsure how to arrange for him to go home. Days passed, until one day a friend of the family who worked in the colonial administration, dropped by to announce that he had been trans­ ferred to Port Loko. On hearing of Ai's predicament, Mr Banya said he would be only too pleased to take Noah north as far as he was gomg. With great trepidation, Noah passed into the charge of another stranger. Yet by the time Mr Banya put him on a truck at Makeni bound for Kabala, the boy's anxieties had vanished. It was past midnight when the truck pulled up outside the Kabala post office and Noah clambered down and hurried into the shadows, bent on avoiding his relatives in Kabala and getting home. He arrived in Firawa several days later, footsore and alone. His father clasped him in his arms and fought back tears. His mother Aisetta's j oyful crying brought neighbours running. Yeli Fore, the praise-singer, put all his heart into his xylophone, and the thrilling, melodic phrases took such a hold of Tina Kome that he shouted to the whole town to come and celebrate his son's return. That afternoon, when the excitement had died down, Tina Kome sacrificed a cow in gratitude to Allah, and vowed that his son would never again leave his side. Noah would subsequently make these events an allegory of his life. He would recall the idyllic period before his separation from his father (who died within a year of Noah's reunion with him) , and 1 90

compare it to life before colonial rule. And he would complain of hardship and betrayal in the same breath with which he expressed his perennial hope of rescue. "Since my father's death I have been paddling my own canoe," he once told me, and went on to recount what it had been like in the years after Tina Kome died, when he went to live with his married sisters in Kabala and attend school. "It was not an easy time I had then. I remember one time my sister Mantene remarked that my father had petted me; now that my father was dead I would have to fend for myself. So I was there, struggling - going to find food, laundering, doing every­ thing in the morning before going to school. I had to take care of myself." But if he felt hard done by, there was always rescue at hand. "I remember one Lebanese, Mr Hassan Mansour, who took pity on me at one time and told me I could always go to him when I needed help. As a small boy I often went to Hassan Mansour." In 1 959 Noah passed his selective entrance exam and went to high school in Magburaka. But in 1 962, in the run-up to the first general elections after Independence, Noah was obliged to travel the length and breadth of Ferensola [i .e. Kuranko-land] , canvassing votes for his elder brother. When he returned to school, the prin­ cipal warned him that further absenteeism would not be tolerated. So, when his elder brother summoned him in 1 964 to help with another political campaign, Noah's school career came to an end. "I couldn't go on because of hardship. I had to leave school and return to Kabala," Noah said, leaving me to wonder to what extent he blamed Sewa or circumstance for his woes. "I was there in Kabala for some time, struggling. One day I went to Lansana Kamara's shop to buy kerosene, and met Wing Commander Macdonald, the District Officer. We talked for a while and he asked me whether I would like to work. I told him I would, but there were no j obs. He asked me to find him in his office the next morning. I went to the office and found him. He 191

offered me work as a native administration court clerk. But I had nothing of my own. He had to give me twenty leones to buy some soap and clothes . "After I had been there for some time, he posted me to Musaia in the Fula Saba Dembelia chiefdom. I was there doing the work. Then I decided to leave the native administration work because I felt I was deteriorating educationally. I then decided to pick up teaching. I was given an appointment in the District Council School, the same school I had earlier attended as a pupil. So I was there, fighting hard. At this time, while my contemporaries were still at school, I was struggling hard to earn my living." It was there, a few years later, that I met Noah and persuaded him to come and work for me. Whenever I move to a new country or embark on some new venture I am besieged by dreams of Sierra Leone. The dreams are always the same. Noah is asking me when I am coming back. Why I have not returned? For years I have tried to fathom my unease - this persistent sense of promises unfulfilled or broken. There were times when I pretended it was the war that kept me from going back, or the pain of returning to places I still associated with Pauline. But what was it, really, that cried out for resolution? Whenever I broached these matters with Kuranko friends, they assured me that I owed them nothing. My first published ethnog­ raphy - known as "the Ferensola book" because of the iconic value it had at a time when Kuranko were struggling for political recognition - is still sought after by Kuranko exiles in Freetown and abroad. And in academic circles, my ethnographic work has won international awards and been widely praised. Why couldn't I accept that what is given goes far afield of the giver, and does not necessarily have to return to its source? Is it that we find it difficult to escape the sense, so famously captured in the Maori notion of exchange, that gifts are imbued with the hau of the giver, and that 1 92

Second-year undergraduate, A uckland, 1 959.

With Fleur A dcock, WellinJ;ton, 1 9 62 . ii

Pauline, Tui O 'Sullivan, Vincent O 'Sullivan, Les Cleveland, myself, at the Lake Ferry Hotel, southern Wairarapa, December 1 9 65.

Outside the City Hotel, Freetown, Sierra Leone, October 1 9 69.

Not long after returning to New Zealand, early 1 9 65. lll

With Heidi and Pauline in A uckland, Christmas 1 9 78.

With renowned storyteller, Keti Fermke Koroma, Kabala, northern Sierra Leone, April 1 9 79.

lV

Saran Salia Sanoh, Firawa, 1 9 79.

In Canberra, A ustralia, 1 985.

Noah Marah, Firawa, 1 9 79 .

v

-·� Rose Marah and Sewa ("S. B. ) Marah, Freetown, 1 9 79 . "

With Zack ]akamarra and Pincher Jampijinpa, at Paraluyu, Central A ustralia, 1 990. VI

With joshua, Francine, Mandy Thomas, joel, and Allan (Lanny) Snyder, Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, 1991.

With Joshua and Sam Hunt, Paremata, Wellington, 1991.

Vll

With Heidi in my ciffice, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2004.

My parents, Emily Jackson and D'arcy Jackson, on their 55th wedding anniversary, Auckland, 1991. Vlll

this "wind of life" forever longs for the place where it originated? Does this sense of circularity, of a desire for closure, compel us to return what we receive to the place and person from which we first received it? And does this explain why I have been troubled for so many years by a sense of owing Noah something I cannot pay? Yet perhaps it is the very notion of debt that is the problem, not my failure to repay. For to speak of credit and debt is to construe a human relationship in purely contractual terms. This is not the jargon that my Kuranko friends use.When I hear from them, the only claim they make is that I return, that I not allow the "path to die". So if there is any failure on my part it is not a failure to discharge a debt, nor what might seem indifference to the ever-widening gulf that exists between the privileged world I inhabit and the world of hardship they presently endure; rather, it is a failure to give more fully of myself - a failure to recognise the kinship that exists between us. Not long after writing these lines in 200 1 , I received a phone call from Sierra Leone. It was Noah's brother Sewa, telling me that their brother Ali had died. Sewa said he wanted me to be the first to know. And to convey to Heidi, my daughter, the sad news. We talked for twenty minutes or so - of Ali's descent into insanity, of the tragic death of his son and the devastation of the war. I remem­ bered Ali with heartbreaking vividness, his immediate smile, his unfailing generosity, and the day Pauline and I left Freetown on our way back to England, when Ali ran up the gangway minutes before we sailed, with oranges for Heidi. In January 2002, as Sierra Leone prepared to announce the end of its brutal decade-long civil war, I went back to the country I had first visited thirty-three years before. Miraculously, Noah and Sewa were still alive, though neither had escaped the war unscathed. Over the next eighteen months my friendship with Noah was reborn and I ghost-wrote Sewa's biography. When they 1 93

died within a year of each other in 2003 , I felt that I had lost not only two of my oldest and dearest friends, but my link to the country that had become my second home. But then Noah's first­ born son Kaima, who was only a year older than Heidi and whom I had known since he was a small child, begged me to help him with his education, which had been disrupted by the war. With Kaima and others of his generation, I suddenly found my relation­ ship with Sierra Leone renewed, and realised that the path went on, just as Noah had told me so long ago when we first went to Firawa.

1 94

I n t h e Sa n d h i lls

I grew u p i n a land-locked town, and became infatuated with the sea. But like everything else on which I set my heart, the sea was inconstant and ambiguous. During rare visits to the coast, the sea occupied, in my psyche, the place of the unconscious. At night I would fall asleep listening to it throw itself into its heavy-hearted Sisyphian task, its voice by turns irascible and calm. By day I would taunt it, hurling stones at its slathering tongue, or build dikes and moats that it could reach but not erode. It would avenge itself in my dreams, dragging me helpless and voiceless across the ironsand into its dark maw. When I walked to the beach from my uncle's house in New Plymouth, the seagrass underfoot would feel simultaneously spiky and spongy, then scuffed and dry where the sandy path debouched onto the railway line. Sometimes I would place pennies or pebbles on the tracks, and wait for the port train to flatten them. Mostly though, I would press on, stepping from sleeper to sleeper over the rust-coloured ballast until I came to where the path re-entered the dunes, now thick with broom, marram, pampas, and lupin. The broom pods explode in the noonday heat. I breathe in the honey-heavy odour of lupin. Bumblebees hover. Flies buzz. But there is no sound, no sight, no smell of the sea. Moving quickly now, because the ironsand has made me a firewalker, I follow the narrowing, broom-festooned track into the heart of the dunes. There I enter a silence so complete and comforting that I still sometimes seek its sanctuary. I hesitate. If I take one step forward 1 95

I will hear the sea. The uproar of the world. One step back and it will again be silenced. I push on, and the sea is instantly in my ears, its sound indistinguishable from the coursing of the blood inside my head. I inhale a mingling of brine and kelp that is like the sweat one licks from the skin of one's beloved. And the ocean is rolling ashore, shredded on the black volcanic reefs, and a single sweep of ironsand and rock leads my eye from The Sugarloaves in the south to the White Cliffs in the north, and it is like the promise of life. When I finished my Ph.D. at Cambridge I worked for the Board of Extramural Studies for a while, did some tutoring in anthro­ pology, made a return trip to Sierra Leone, and applied for j obs. Toward the end of 1 972 I received a letter from Hugh Kawharu, who had supervised my M.A. studies in Auckland; he had just been appointed head of the new Department of Anthropology and Maori Studies at Massey; would I like to j oin him as a senior lecturer? It took only a few hours for Pauline and me to reach our decision; she had completed her research and residence require­ ments for her Ph.D. on the Icelandic family sagas and was now free to leave Cambridge; as for me, I was happy that Heidi would grow up in New Zealand and, besides, if I was going to write, I would need that silence in the middle of the dunes. One day Herman paid us a visit, and pulled no punches in voicing his opinion of my retreat. Like an avatar of Tiresius he pronounced that I had cut myself off from the real world. I should give up anthropology and return to "the university of life". My old friend Harry visited a few weeks later. I still retain a vivid picture of him standing in winter sunshine in the front room of our bungalow in Palmerston North, bathed in that undying glow of cosmopolitan promise that once made me feel such a clod in his presence. Now I saw the fragility of Harry's fa<;:ades. The dilettante. The dreamer. As he talked, I thought of his postcards from California where he had lived for a while, working on screenplays. Such a far cry from the 1 96

sodden landscapes I inhabited, and Pauline's struggle with cancer. . . The other day I sat on the beach, watching through palm fronds as the sun went beneath the Pacific rim, waiting for the green flash, which never came - or if it did, I missed it. But the colours ! A flamingo pink, becoming melon, then red again, a hard brick­ red - and all the while, the sea getting darker, ink-blue, until it blackened, and the palms were black against the light. And then I had a sharp memory of a time when the world was charged with significance, with possibility, with a resonance beyond what I saw and heard. I have lost that. All I can do now is recall that once I had it, and that it was what I wanted to convey in words. Without it I wonder if the words are worthwhile. Perhaps, because I can remember that it was once there, I can find it again. Perhaps I need somewhere like the desert to go in search of it ...

We talked about writing. But it was clear we were headed in very different directions. While Harry was entranced by Marquez and magical realism, I distrusted fantasy. Dealing with Pauline's illness and working doggedly on my African material, I was guided by Cendrars' dictum that one must write as one eats or breathes. Writing must be a part of life, not a thing apart. "I do not write as a profession . . . To live is not a profession . . . I do not dip my pen in the inkwell, but in life. To write is not to live. It is perhaps to survive. But nothing is in the least guaranteed . . . Harry also took a dim view of anthropology. He saw it as a romanticisation of the archaic. By focusing on tradition, anthro­ "

pologists denied third world peoples the rich possibilities of modernity. Surely one had a duty, he argued, as a child of privilege, to change the third world for the better and not merely document its obsolete and irrational forms? I agreed that one should not exoticise tribal peoples, but felt strongly that one had no right to impose changes on people of whom one was personally ignorant. To stand aloof or set oneself apart from the third world, as I felt Harry did, was to risk seeing that world solely as an obj ect, and to 1 97

easily fall prey to the habit of proj ecting one's own prejudices or fantasies upon it - seeing it only as something upon which one could work one's own will. But to live in it, to engage with it, to risk oneself in it, was to challenge such standpoints. The question of changing the world then became a question of changing one's relationship with it. That my affection for Herman and Harry was not diminished by our disagreements was an oblique proof of the mystery of love, which confounds our predictions and cannot be entirely explained in terms of common interests or shared worldviews. It was the same with Sam Hunt, with whom Pauline and I had formed a close friendship during the two years we lived in Wellington before heading off to Cambridge. Though this bond had a lot to do with our passion for poetry, it went deeper than words and survived Sam's arrant dislike of intellectualism and his suspicion of marriage, both of which, in his view, spelled the end of spontaneity. Did Sam never see the refutation of this opinion in my relationship with Pauline? But then, prejudice, by definition, is never something one subj ects to empirical test but a psychological defence with which the ego protects itself from things it finds too challenging. My other boon companion during those years was Bill Maughan. After several years as an economist with the Treasury, Bill had resigned his job and moved to the Manawatii with his wife Lesley and his small son Karl, determined to write. After learning that they had rented a farmhouse in the hills behind Colyton, Pauline, Heidi and I dropped in on them one Saturday in the early autumn, and before long we were visiting them every weekend. We would ramble over the hills together, discussing everything from the geology of the Pohangina Dome to Bill's latest rej ection letter from the editor of Islands, and return to the house to warm ourselves in front of a fire of pine cones and macrocarpa logs, enjoy a hearty meal and listen to Bill's old gramophone records 1 98

of Kid Ory and Bix Beiderbecke. Bill had already written a satire on the civil service called Good and Faithful Servants, as well as a picaresque novel whose leitmotif was the Leonard Cohen song, "Like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free". I read the typescripts and envied Bill's Dadaist knack of writing tongue in cheek, his irreverent genius. Now he was working on The British Empire for Two and Sixpence, and everything was grist to his mill: his childhood in England, his education in the classics, my adventures in Africa. But even as I threw myself into my own creative re-irnaginings of Sierra Leone, writing the poems that became the core of Latitudes of Exile, I was working hard on an ethnography in which fidelity to the facts precluded any imaginative licence. I was thus continually switching between two kinds of truth, the first embracing whatever enhances one's sense of life, the second respecting academic conventions that constantly sap one's text of vitality. Though Herman had once urged me to transgress bound­ aries and be eclectic, I was beginning to wonder how long I could juggle the imperatives of science and art. This question of truth arose not only in my writing, but in my life, for Pauline was growing impatient with the medical advice and treatment she was receiving. What good saving one's life physically if this meant losing it spiritually? She was asked to undergo a splenectomy that would prevent the dissemination of her lymphatic cancer to stage three. Though this might provide a useful medical statistic, it had no therapeutic value whatsoever - something confirmed by Milan Brych, whom we consulted in Auckland, and in whom Pauline immediately placed her trust. In undergoing chemotherapy under the supervision of someone whose medical qualifications were already being called into question by the New Zealand Medical Association, yet whose compassion helped restore her will to live, Pauline took the view that science alone could neither explain life nor cure our ills. These questions and quandaries found expression in the books 1 99

of poetry and ethnography I wrote during my Manawatu years. But perhaps none of this writing better captures the curious inter­ penetrations of the poetic and the academic, of fact and fiction, than the story that evolved around me, concerning the final days of the French aviator and author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery. At Massey, I generally avoided the staff club. I preferred to buy a sandwich in the student cafeteria, find a quiet spot on the campus and eat alone. It was a pattern I 'd slipped into during my school days, though now it wasn't shyness that made me keep my own company but the exigencies of writing. I wrote at home every morning, then drove up to the university. I needed an hour to myself in the middle of the day in order to unwind, take my mind off Africa, readj ust to academe. But there was always a time lag when I walked about in a daze. Occasionally, I would jot down thoughts and images that related to what I had written that morning or planned to write next day. Often I would be startled to realise that I was staring vacantly into space, with only the haziest notion of where I was. I would snap out of my trance to see students walking along the gravel paths, descending the stone steps in the shadow of the great cedars, griping about boring lecturers and onerous assignments, or exchanging gossip about girlfriends and binges. I realised I was living a shadow life, absorbed in Africa, trying to recapture in words the sound and smell and sight of things I might not see again for many years. Sometimes it was my colleagues who brought me to my senses. Like the day I was running late for my two o'clock class on the Comparative Study of Myth, and parked my Citroen in a loading zone outside the main building. A week later I received a letter from a "Parking Committee", made up of faculty members, repri­ manding me for persistently parking my car in restricted zones. I was asked what gave me the right to act as though I were a law unto myself. After that I went to the staff club a few times, to put in an 200

appearance, to try to meet people outside my own department. Mostly people talked about television programmes, or the best wines you could buy locally, or the intrigues of various commit­ tees they were on. I felt out of place. When my mind began to wander and I began scribbling some surreptitious memo to myself on the back of my chequebook, I knew it was impossible for me to even feign sociability. I was too close to the laterite roads of northern Sierra Leone, or too preoccupied by the lecture I had to give on myth. Besides, I didn't watch television, have much interest in local wines, or sit on committees. One day, however, when I was in the staff club with members of the English department, the talk got round to Antoine de Saint-Exupery. I can't remember how we got on to the subject of writers. Maybe someone had seen a documentary on television or broached the subj ect of French wines. In any event, this balding person in a rumpled herringbone jacket said that apart from Le Petit Prince, Saint-Exupery had written nothing that compelled real interest. I was struck by that phrase, " compelled real interest", because Melvin Kirkwood looked as if nothing had compelled him for a long time. I said I didn't think Saint-Exupery should be dismissed lightly, and that Saint-Exupery had once been my favourite writer. In my late teens I had read everything by him and about him. I still remembered the revelatory impact of Saint-Exupery's view that the visible rests in the invisible, and that an author's task is to reveal unseen connections beneath the surfaces of our familiar world. Then, for some reason I still cannot fathom, I launched into an account of Saint-Exupery's last years. When war was declared in 1 939, Saint-Exupery received orders to report for duty as a flying instructor at Toulouse-Montaudran. Demanding that he be assigned to active duty, he was allowed to fly several reconnaissance missions over Germany, winning the Croix de Guerre for his flight to Arras in Belgium in 1 940. After the fall of France, Saint-Exupery was demobbed. Knowing 201

he could never live in France while it remained occupied, he made his way to America where he endured two and a half years of isolation and inactivity. In early 1 943 he joined a group of Free French sailing with the Americans to North Africa. At Ouj da, the French were attached to the American Third Photo Group of the Seventh Army. The squadron was equipped with new P-38 Light­ nings - fast, long-range aircraft adapted for strategic photographic reconnaissance. According to regulations, pilots had to be no more than thirty years of age, but an old friend of Saint-Exupery's in the French Command had persuaded the Americans to allow the forty-three-year-old Saint-Exupery to fly. After one successful reconnaissance mission over France he was grounded - the result of a crash-landing. He was to spend almost a year in Algiers before he was permitted to fly again. Some of his friends put pressure on him to accept desk jobs or diplomatic assignments. Others were persuaded by his arguments that he should be permitted to rej oin his group. "The only thing that remained were the war missions," he wrote, "- a few hours spent flying over France - something of the dignity of an icy scaffold. It suited me fine. But being unemployed I have nothing to look forward to that means anything to me. Sickening discussions, polemics, slander - I'm bored by the morass I'm entering . . . Everything is mediocre, I can't stand it. At 35,000 feet I was beyond mediocrity. Now I no longer have that outlet." Finally, the Americans approved five more reconnaissance missions in Lightnings from a base at Alghero in Sardinia. Saint­ Exupery felt rejuvenated. He flew his five missions, surviving engine failure, fire on board, fainting due to lack of oxygen, and pursuit by German fighters. In July 1 944, the group was moved to Corsica in preparation for the final thrust to liberate France. Saint-Exupery asked to be assigned further flying missions. His close friends were now desperately concerned for his safety and conspired to have him grounded. 202

He was permitted one final flight. It was his tenth reconnaissance mission. Sortie No: 1 76. Date: 3 1 July 1 944. Time out: 0845.

XX

335

At one p.m. he had not returned. At two-thirty p.m., after numerous phone calls, radar and radio searches, his comrades and commanding officer knew there was no longer any hope of his still being airborne. At three-thirty an American liaison officer signed the interrogation report: "Pilot did not return and is presumed lost." For over fifty years, no trace of Saint-Exupery or his aircraft would be found. What came to light, however, was that the Messer­ schmitt pilot who shot Saint-Exupery down over the Mediter­ ranean unwittingly killed his hero and role model. The young German not only owned all the French author's works in transla­ tion; he knew everything that was to be known about him, and had enlisted in the Luftwaffe on the strength of his admiration of Saint-Exupery's pioneering flights across the Andes and the Sahara. I cannot remember how my colleagues responded to these details, but I do remember vividly running into Melvin Kirkwood in the library a few days later and being taken to task for the unsubstanti­ ated story I had told. "Where did you get all that stuff about Saint­ Exupery being shot down by someone who read all his books?" Melvin asked. " I 've been through all the critical biographies in this library and I'm damned if I can find any reference to any German airman who shot Saint-Exupery down.You sure you got your facts right?" I told Melvin I had read the story in an introduction to one of Saint-Exupery's books. It had been an English translation. I couldn't remember the title. I said I 'd try to remember more details and get back to him. Melvin phoned me at home. He'd been doing some more checking and had come up with nothing. Was I sure of my source? 203

"Now you've got me mystified," I said. I told him I would go through all the Saint-Exupery books in the university library and see if I could find the one I had in mind. " It's going back a few years, though," I said. I could tell that Melvin was beginning to suspect that I was putting him on. Over the next few days, I checked through every English trans­ lation of Saint-Exupery's works that I could lay my hands on. I also skim-read several critical biographies. I was certain I had read the story some six years before when I was living in Wellington. This would therefore discount biographies and translations published since that time. To satisfy myself that I had checked everything, I lodged inter-library loan applications for those of Saint-Exupery's books that were not held in our own library. In the staff club, Melvin asked me how I was faring in my scholarly search for the facts about Saint-Exupery's death. The question brought smiles to the faces of his colleagues. I was angry, but I also felt fraudulent, as if my reputation as a poet really did debar me from credibility as a scholar. I asked myself if I had been so convinced of the veracity of my account of Saint-Exupery's death - an account it now seemed I had largely imagined - then what store could be set by the ethnographic data I had collected in West Africa and was now preparing to publish? Perhaps it was true what people said about me - I should decide whether I was a poet or an anthropologist, and stop trying to be both. That night I went home, determined to ransack my study, to go through every folder of notes I 'd ever accumulated until I found the piece of paper on which I now remembered scribbling, in Wellington some time during 1 968, when ill in bed with flu, the details of the story I had recounted at the staff club. I finally found it. There were four leaves of bank paper held together with a rusty paperclip. Dated 20 March 1 968, the first page was filled with 204

notes about my feelings at the time . . . Lying in bed, Pauline downstairs translating sagas, her unflagging, cool meticulous routine, each day getting her quota done. Myself cut off and isolated, unable to write, like a businessman who is getting no returns . . .

The second page recorded my thoughts after reading Anal s Nin's journals: I am astounded at the reception accorded them. It doesn't figure. She pretends to have written a faithful chronicle of her life for her own edification, and yet the journals are so self-consciously addressed to the world that one has to conclude that they are in part works of fiction.

The third page consisted of two quotations from Spengler that I 'd copied from Camus' Carnets: It was the Germans who invented mechanical clocks, these terri­ fYing symbols of the flow of time . . . The man who gives definitions has no knowledge of destiny.

The fourth page contained the following passage from Stuart Gilbert's introduction to his translation of Saint-Exupery's Cita­ delle: He took off at 8:30 on July 3 1 , 1 944; the weather reports were good, the engines running smoothly, and the plane soared lightly into the shimmering morning air, northwards towards France. At one-thirty Saint-Exupery had not returned and his friends were growing more and more anxious, as by now only an hour's fuel remained in his tanks. And at two-thirty he still had not returned . . . That evening a young German pilot attached to Luftflottenkomrnando 2, entering up the day's report in his logbook, wrote: "Tribun (i.e.

Avignon) has reported one enemy reconnaissance plane brought down in flames over the sea. " Everything points to this plane's being 205

Saint-Exupery's Lightning. By a curious irony of fate this German airman who, after four crashes, had been assigned to an observation post on Lake Garda, was a cultured young man and amongst the most treasured books of his library, now buried under the ruins of his hometown, were those of - Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Under this I had transcribed an extract from one ofSaint-Exupery's last letters: I do not mind being killed in the war. What will remain of all I

loved? I am thinking as much of customs, certain intonations that can never be replaced, a certain spiritual light. Of luncheons at a Provew;:al farm under the olive-trees; but of Handel, too. As for the material things, I don't care a damn if they survive or not. What I value is a certain arrangement of these things. Civilisation is an invisible boon; it concerns not the things we see but the unseen bonds linking these together in one special way and not otherWlSe . . .

I t was then clear to me that the story I had told a t the staff club was in part a fabrication. I had conflated the young German telephonist, whose name was Hermann Korth, with the pilot who shot down Saint-Exupery over the sea. Another thing struck me, rereading these lost pages. All the quotations I had recorded were, in a sense, oblique commentaries upon the impossibility of drawing a hard and fast line between fact and fiction. But I knew that Melvin Kirkwood would not be satisfied with such a conceit. Was I going to tell him that I 'd got my wires crossed? Would argue that my story of Saint-Exupery's death was true to the spirit of things if not completely faithful to the facts? Would I dare suggest that we all improvise with what we remember of the past, that no one, not even the most conscientious scholar, lives his or her life faithfully recapitulating what has already been said and 206

done? Would I add that Stuart Gilbert had got his facts wrong, confusing Sardinia for Corsica, misquoting the time of Saint­ Exupery's final sortie, mistranslating Korth's log report? In the end I let the matter drop. I wrote Melvin a note, saying that my search had been fruitless. I had failed to find the book, the reference or any details that corroborated my story. Since the end of the war, various accounts have purported to explain how Saint-Exupery met his death. First, there was Hermann Korth's, written in 1 949 when he was a theology student in Germany. Then, in 1 972, another ex-Luftwaffe pilot, Robert Heichele, published an account in a German magazine of a mission he flew over the south of France on 31 July 1 944. Heichele and his co­ pilot took off from Orange in Provence, and were patrolling the Mediterranean littoral between Marseilles and Menton when they encountered a P-38 Lightning flying about a thousand metres above them. Inexplicably, the Lightning descended, and Heichele manoeuvred into position behind it. When the Lightning was within range he opened fire. He took another turn and again fired on the Lightning. After a third attack, the Lightning began to lose altitude. It crossed the coast, trailing white smoke. Then the star­ board engine burst into flame, the right wing dipped, and the Lightning ploughed and somersaulted into the sea. Heichele's account was corroborated by Claude-Alain Jaeger, who had been a seventeen-year-old student in Biot in 1 944.Jaeger was a spotter, and kept notes on any military activity he observed in the area. On 3 1 July he observed a P-38 Lightning with Amer­ ican and French insignia flying at rooftop height and great speed toward the open sea. On the same day, a German defence company commander, Leopold Bohm, was on duty at a place called Tete de Chien, high above Monaco. He too observed a low-flying plane, pursued by two others, crash into the sea. 207

Since all these reports suggest that Saint-Exupery's plane went down well to the west of Marseilles, it is difficult to reconcile them with a fisherman's discovery in 1 998, off the coast of Marseilles, of a bracelet engraved with the name of Saint-Exupery's wife, together with a fragment of a flying suit, or with a diver's discovery two years later of the remains of Saint-Exupery's P-38 Lightning in the same area. Without any evidence that he was shot down, are we to conclude that Saint-Exupery suicidally crashed his aircraft into the sea?

208

I n t h e S i l e n c e of t h e N i g h t

If the past is like an amputated arm, memory is its phantom pain. When he was nineteen and living in St Petersburg, Blaise Cendrars fell in love with a young Russian woman called Helene Lenotchka. When Cendrars returned to Switzerland less than a year later, the lovers exchanged ardent and j oyful letters. "You have succeeded," wrote Cendrars, "in restoring my soul, in warming a heart I had deliberately hardened, with the kind of affection I have suppressed in myself for a long time." In the summer of 1 907, Cendrars received news that Helene had died in a house fire. Distraught and despairing, he railed against reason and romanticism, cursing the way they fool one into thinking that life is less arbitrary, less indifferent, than in truth it is. I spit on the beauty that spells unhappiness I spit on reason when it seeks to be too fine I spit on destiny when it refuses to admit nothingness I spit on the words that deceive the animal I spit on life that does not listen to life!

There are certain events and experiences of which we choose not to speak. Not because they hold us in thrall, stilling the tongue. Nor because we fear they might reveal our flaws or frailty. Still less because we feel our words can never do them justice. Silence is sometimes the only way we can honour the ineffability and privacy of certain experiences. And so, in silence, we dwell upon, 209

rather than seek to override or alter the way things are. This, said Miriam Cendrars, was why her father could never write his book on the life of Mary Magdalene. In L'Homme Foudroye, Cendrars refers to this work as his "secret book" on which he had been working for a year. Entitled LA Caris­ sirna, it was a fictional life of Mary Magdalene, "the lover of Jesus Christ, the only woman who made our saviour weep" . Though the book was never written, Cendrars described it as "the most beautiful love story and the greatest love that have ever been lived on earth." The same experiences that compelled Cendrars to write this book also demanded silence. " His silence was its truth," writes Miriam Cendrars. " Had he written it, it would have been, for him, a negation of this truth. I ts truth is preserved in his silence." One thinks ofWittgenstein, who fought in the same war as Cendrars, though on the other side. "Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent . . . " Cendrars lost his right arm in the First World War. Enlisting in the Foreign Legion four days before Germany declared war on France, he miraculously survived the Artois and Somme campaigns when tens of thousands of lives were sacrificed for a few yards of no­ man's land. But his luck ran out during the Champagne offensive at the Navarin Farm on 28 September 1 9 1 5 , when a machine-gun bullet tore apart his right arm and it had to be amputated above the elbow. Invalided back to Paris, Cendrars would tell his friends that he lost his right arm on the same day that his literary hero, Remy de Gourmont, died. But as for the war, it does not figure directly in his writing for many years. Speech, say the Bambara, is the bastard son of silence. The ances­ tors are the measure of all things . They keep their own counsel. But we who follow them into this world speak without fore­ thought, and lose our hold on wisdom and peace. Speech disperses the world; silence restores its wholeness. Speech burns the mouth; 210

silence heals it. Speech builds the village; silence regenerates the world. It is not that we will say nothing of the things that oppress us; rather that in silence things run their own course, and our words are allowed to rise from a source beyond our willing. When this happens, it is almost inevitable that what is most immediate to our thought will find expression in images that are distant from it. As in Cendrars' poem, " Orion", for instance: It is my star. It is shaped like a hand. It is my hand ascended into the sky. For as long as the war lasted I saw Orion through a rifle-slit. When the zeppelins came to bomb Paris they came always from Orion. Today I have it overhead. The main mast pierces the palm of this hand, which has to suffer As my severed hand makes me suffer, pierced as it is by an unbroken spar.

After the fall of France in 1 940, Cendrars retreated to Aix-en­ Provence and three "agonising years of silence". He lived alone. In the kitchen ofhis small apartment, a portable Remington collected dust. His books remained unopened, though he immersed himself in the life of Joseph of Cupertino, the patron saint of aviators - probably because his two sons, Odilon and Remy, were fliers. In his garden he grew some greens and medicinal herbs. Though editors and journalists begged him to write, he wrote nothing. Then, on 2 1 August 1 943, Edouard Peisson, a friend and fellow writer, dropped in on a regular visit. The men chatted about mundane things, then fell to reminiscing about the war. It was the spark that touched off a fire, for that same day Cendrars dusted off his Remington and began the first of his three autobiographical novels, L'Homme Foudroye. 21 1

On another visit, a little more than two years later, on 26 November 1 945, Peisson noticed, on a small table to the left of the entranceway to Cendrars' apartment, a bouquet of flame-red carnations. " Flowers, this morning! " Peisson exclaimed, and asked Cendrars if he was all right. The previous evening Cendrars had received a telegram from Meknes in Morocco informing him that his son Remy had been killed in a plane crash. He nevertheless seemed calm, filled with a " kind of quiet pride", and showed his friend a photo of Remy. A few days later he confided to Peisson: "They want to bring Remy's body back to France. I am against it. He is buried in the cemetery of a Moroccan village with his comrades. Don't you think it's better to let these young airmen rest in peace, in the sand, wrapped in their parachute shrouds like the larvae of cicadas in their chrysalids, awaiting the day of the resurrection?" After surv1vmg lymphatic cancer in the early 1 970s, Pauline harboured her resources. Though she returned to part-time teaching at Freyberg High School and remained active in the campaign against apartheid, her focus was the children's novel on which she was working (instalments of which she read to Heidi at bedtime over three years) and the study ofZen . A return to Firawa during my sabbatical year in 1 979 proved to be psychologically and physically very tough on her, and during 1 982-83, when we lived in Canberra (I had a fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre) and then in Menton, Pauline was often unwell. In the spring of 1 983, she took a turn for the worse, and we went to England. The medical diagnosis was cervical cancer. This time, she refused to subj ect herself to orthodox therapy, and in August we travelled back to New Zealand where she died five weeks later. I found it difficult to go on living in the place where we had shared our lives for so many years. At the same time, Heidi, who was starting high school in Palmers ton North after a year in a 212

French lycee, was also finding it hard to adjust. For several months I devoted myself to preparing Pauline's novel for publication, and to home-schooling Heidi . But that summer, despite having found shelter and love with new friends - Keith Ridler and Judith Loveridge - we decided to go back to Canberra and start over. The arid landscapes around Canberra, the ranges perennially blue, received the ghost of my old self generously. Every afternoon I would run up onto Mt Taylor and lie among lichen-covered boulders and long grass, watching the winter sun melt into the distant Brindabellas, alive to Pauline's presence in every change of the light, every movement in the grass, every metamorphosis of the clouds. But it troubled me deeply that I could not conj ure her image in my mind's eye, could no longer hear her voice, or recall the touch of her hand, nor the smell and contours of her body. At times I struggled against the silence and emptiness; at times I submitted to it, not wanting to fill it with my desperate imaginings, or the noise of my own grieving. And so I dreamt. Strange dreams in which she would appear to me contorted and monstrous. But then, that winter;"night after night I woke from dreams that were adrift with words. Words I scribbled half asleep on scraps of paper by my bedside, and typed up in the mornings after Heidi had left for school. These intense dreams lasted no more than ten nights. Then I worked on what I had been given, crafting a long poem whose central figure was Mary Magdalene, and whose leitmotif was a black rose. I had no idea what lay at the source of these images. But when I had finished writing I was aware that my poem bore, both in its length and imagery, an uncanny resemblance to Cendrars"'Paques a New York" , a poem that was also scribbled feverishly on the threshold between sleep and waking, during a period of hunger, penury and solitude in New York City at Easter 1 9 1 2.

213

A dark island among wheat the blond moonlight and someone dying

200

the dark islands of ourselves waiting for miracles kneeling on stone flags gazing at your face Madonna of the rock

205

that was not taken, survivor of the nighdong pillaging guardian of the street saviour of this penitent Magdalene of the black rose.

222

210

I lie under the cordylines again at Maungahania

175

hearing the wind in which I was quieted.

XII Alive to you again I remember circling frigate birds at a feast of death and resurrection,

1 80

heads of a blue harbour bruised by rain. Now to the day seaward and landward you return

1 85

who lay all winter with me in rock and pine always you, mistress of my silences, telling me what to say.

XI I I Over a besieged city

1 90

you threw the folds of your blue gown. When soldiers stole your ikon their sledges would not move in the heavy snow. They slashed your face;

195

your scars weep when we suffer now. So the suffering in our lives repeats events 300 years ago . . . 221

One mountain thrown against its opposite -

1 50

Your life and mine, the daylight going, needful of the dark, and the broadcast stars Orion, Betelgeuse -

1 55

salt-rimed names a sailor gave to the mountains here: Stargazer, Moonraker, Tantalus, until we are no more than what appears of us

1 60

in wind-combed grasses under a glacier.

XI That which moved like the wind and was sown like stars no more a property of moving

1 65

than was foliage or cloud than these words are . . . It is some other uses me, giving and taking despite my wish determining the furrow

1 70

of the turning plough. My mind is clouded. Images sift through me like earth.

220

And then in the dry season you in the shape of birds answered as I sang. You drew the ash

1 25

from crocodile and fish sieved it from sand, refashioning her who had become for me the river, her voice the cataract,

1 30

and my arms branched again and were green foliage and the rains came and my body was a bridge on which you walked

1 35

into a hinterland of promises Lady, and I gave you all I had to give.

X The river relinquishes

1 40

hills wholly still as their cuneiform shadows r ise out of the valley. I open my heart to them that have destroyed

1 45

everything I know I am. Night lifts itself from the valley floor -

219

Lady, do I embrace the myriad images, go down through an olive grove

1 00

toward the sea, come at evening to a village whose ikon is a snake, meet that dancer braceleted with bone

1 05

whose voice is pitched on the rising wind? The thought of her body keeps me from sleep, I yearn

1 10

for the music of flutes I heard in Firawa above the rain.

IX When my lover died they dismembered and burned her

1 15

strewing the river with her ash, and for a year I traced its source to the mountains, descended it to the sea

1 20

singing her name seeking the understanding she had lived.

218

Lady, should I note these colours seeing you in them, be led over stones, my feet unsandalled,

75

and in you drown? Do I trespass in your zone this heap of skulls this rusted nail in wood from which a cape of barkcloth hangs?

80

Are these your images that stream in the sky claw at the cliff, that twist like willows at the pool? Do I visit this form on you -

85

breasts daubed with mud, blue whispers accompanying me on the hill? Can I trust myself in your arms, my oppressor

90

my comforter, feeling your breath ... Lady, are you indeed myself, are you the sickness-unto-death?

VIII Red ochres and yellow pigments smudge my face. I am in a darkening colonnade. 217

95

v

Me