That evening we gathered for the blessing of the food storage huts, which were nearly empty after all the festivities for Xambun. We were all crowded into the small area around the food sheds, but no one stood within five feet of me or Fen, whereas Nell had a little girl in her arms, another child on her back, and several children encircling her legs. Adults wore the totemic plants of their clan. A pair of yams were carried into each shed and blessed and urged to procreate. Ancestors were invoked in long songs and prayers. I was hot and tired of standing and still queasy from the scarification. Somewhere in the bush was that boy in a small hut alone, weeping and blind with pain.
Fen nudged me and I followed his gaze to a man at the edge of the crowd. Even if I hadn’t known about him, I would have said he was different. People stood near him, men his age and a girl quite close, but he looked more alone, more psychically removed, than any native I’d ever seen. At the end of the ceremony he was called up to stand at the door of a storage house, but he wouldn’t move. The crowd urged him up, but eventually a garland of tubers was brought to him and placed around his neck. He lifted his head briefly. It seemed all he could do to not rip the heavy necklace off. He was meant to sing the final prayer but he did not, and after a few moments Malun came forward and did it for him.
We talked about him on the way back to the house. Nell agreed with me about his disposition but Fen thought we were overreacting. To him Xambun seemed like any young man returned home after being away for a long time: mildly disoriented, figuring out his new path. Nell wanted to start interviewing him straightaway. She wanted Fen to go find him in one of the men’s houses, but Fen persuaded her that Xambun needed a few more days to settle in, that they would get better information once he got back in the rhythm of his old life.
22
I have a biographer now, a young fellow who comes round wearing untucked shirts and thick specs. My mother makes him tea and he proceeds to ask me questions. This is the one he seems to want to get at most, the question he brings back visit after visit, sometimes saving it for last, or putting it right up front, or burying it in the middle, thinking he might trip me up. How did you come up with the Grid? I have thought a great deal about why I do not answer. Partly it is shame—though that word hardly captures the depth of it—that prevents me from responding. Another part is that our innocence, our utter ignorance of what lay ahead for Germany and the world, is now nearly impossible to comprehend. And another part still wonders: If we had not come up with the Grid, had not had that experience together, and if I had not stayed but gone back to the Kiona, would any of the rest have happened?
It was late on that third night of my stay on Lake Tam that it happened, that shift in all our stars.
We were back at the kitchen table. We’d gone through Helen’s book again, filled it with marginalia in three different hands.
‘I keep thinking there’s a way to map all of it,’ Nell said. I’d seen how her notes were filled with sketches and diagrams.
‘What do you mean?’ But I knew, of course. I’d seen it. I’d dreamt it.
‘Map the arc?’ Fen said.
‘Orientation.’ She and I said it at the same time, that one word. Orientation.
‘The idea that cultures have a strong pull in one direction, at the expense of other directions.’
I was drawing the first line as she spoke.
At the expense of other directions. I felt like her words were pulling it out of me and at the same time my axis was pulling the words out of her. I wasn’t sure if I was having my own thoughts or hers. And yet I felt the melting ice, the sense of urgency. I bisected the line. Just as I had drawn it in my dream.
Fen, somehow understanding completely, pointed to the top of the page, above the top of the vertical line. ‘Mumbanyo.’ And then to the bottom of it. ‘Anapa.’
We fell on this piece of paper, each of us with our pencils, shouting out and filling in the four points of the compass with the names of tribes and then countries. If we stopped at that moment and suggested criteria, defined each direction of the compass, I have no recollection of it. In my memory we went at it instinctively, fully agreeing that Americans were Northerners like the Mumbanyo and that Italians belonged in the South with the Anapa. To the West were the Zuni and to the East the Dobu and the other Dionysian North American tribes. We had to add Southeast for the Baining and Northeast for the Kiona. We ran out of room and had to add a page to all four sides of the initial paper, sticking them together with fig sap and then racing on to get our ideas on the page. We were all bent close together, arms overlapping, foul-breathed and two-years filthy, and I felt like I was back in England with my brothers, included in some pressing project of theirs, making a birdhouse or the backdrop to one of Martin’s elaborate plays.