‘Yes, you are.’
‘No, I’m not,’ but I couldn’t stop smiling. ‘I feel the same way.’
‘No you don’t. Look at you. You’re all rangy and relaxed, with a big grin on your face.’
‘I think Fen might have begun his cathedral this morning.’
‘Writing?’
‘Pages and pages.’
She seemed surprised, but unimpressed. ‘He chases down these things that are nothing in the end. And now Xambun is here and he won’t help me with him. I can’t enter a men’s house. The more fuss I make about it, the more he resists, and we could leave here in five months without ever having interviewed him.’
‘I could try to have a word—’
‘No, please don’t. He’d know we’d spoken and it would make it worse.’
I wanted to help her, offer her something. I told her about the second entryway of the men’s house I’d seen the day before, as delicately as I could.
‘You’re saying you walk through her labia?’ she said, already reaching for her notebook. ‘This is the kind of thing he’s deliberately keeping from me.’
‘Perhaps he’s respecting their taboos.’
‘Fen doesn’t give a damn about taboos. Nor should he. We’re trying to piece this culture together, and I’ve got a partner who withholds information.’
She sharpened a pencil and made me tell her again, in greater detail. She asked many, many questions, which led to a discussion about the vulva and the way various tribes on the Sepik used the image. In the end I did feel I’d given her if not a conversation with Xambun, then something she could use. It turned her mood around, and I felt how exhilarating it would be to work in the field with this woman. Our conversation veered back to the manuscript on the table. We read through the first chapter again, making notes in the margins. We rewrote the opening and went into the study, where she could type it up. The desks were side by side and I read what we’d written aloud as she typed. We moved onto the next chapter, both of us reading along silently now, stopping at certain passages, often the same passages, and making a note for Helen. Several children had ignored the big banana leaf over the ladder and climbed up into the house anyway. They sat outside the mosquito netting watching us, occasionally attempting to imitate the strange sounds we made.
Fen returned in time for the Dobu chapter. He didn’t like what he saw, the two of us alone together, working on Helen’s book, and he sulked until Nell got him to tell the story about the Dobu man who was convinced his invisibility charm was working perfectly and snuck into women’s houses only to be struck with a digging stick at the door every time. Then he described the love hex a healer had put on him the day before he left. There was no question that he believed it to be wholly responsible for how quickly he fell in love with Nell on the boat home.
Nell went off on her rounds and Fen and I caught the last bit of a scarification in a ceremonial house. The initiate, a boy of no more than twelve, was wailing and a group of older boys were holding him down on a log while a few men cut into him, making hundreds of small slits on his back and shoulders. They dropped a citrus mixture into each wound so that the skin would puff up and the scars would be raised and textured to look like crocodile skin. His blood had soaked the log in dark striations. When they were done they painted him with oil and turmeric and smeared him with white clay and carried him off weeping and half conscious into seclusion until he healed.
Fen and I walked down to the beach. I’d seen dozens of scarifications but it didn’t get easier to watch. My legs felt spongy and my chest burned. We sat in the sand and I don’t know that we exchanged a word.