At the quai, the ship hovered over everything. I helped with their bags, chased down a porter.
‘Last time to tie her shoes,’ Fen said. His flute was wrapped and tied tight, and he set it down gently to shake my hand.
I turned to her. Her face looked small and rigid and miserable. We hugged. I held her close and too long. ‘I don’t want to let you go,’ I breathed in her ear.
But I did. I let her go. And they boarded their ship.
27
I returned to the Kiona. Teket punished me for my long disappearance by not talking to me for the first two days. A few of the old women harangued me on his behalf, but no one else seemed bothered, and the children resumed their habit of following me around, begging to try on my pig’s tusk and waiting for me to discard something—an empty tin, an old typewriter ribbon, a used tube of toothpaste—for their amusement. The rains had finally come and the river was high but hadn’t flooded over yet. The women went out to their gardens in pointy leaf ponchos and the children made what looked like cities in the mud.
They held the Wai they had promised me. Despite all my interviews, my hundreds of questions to hundreds of Kiona about this ceremony, I had got it all wrong. I had missed the complexity of it. Part bawdy, part historical, and part tragic, the ceremony elicited a greater range of emotions than I had realized the first time round. There was a reenactment of their crocodile origins and their cannibal past. Ancestors were brought back to life briefly as their clay death masks were worn by their descendants. Women in war paint and penis gourds chased men in reed skirts till they got them pinned down, then they scraped their bare buttocks on the men’s legs—the ultimate Kiona insult—which made the audience cry with laughter. I sat with Teket and his family and took as many notes on their reactions as I did on the ceremony itself. That night I stayed up late, leaning against my gum tree and writing Nell a fifteen-page letter she wouldn’t receive until summer.
Two days later, I left.
I’d arranged for Minton to pick me up, take me to Lake Tam, then drop me in Angoram, from where I would make arrangements to get back to Sydney. Teket agreed to come with me to the lake and stay on with his cousin for a visit.
Minton arrived early and in good spirits, until Teket climbed into the boat after we’d loaded it up with my bags.
‘Ho there,’ he said. ‘None of them on my boat.’
I was glad I hadn’t paid him yet. ‘I’ll get Robby then.’ Robby was the more expensive driver. I began hoisting my belongings off the pinnace.
‘He can’t sit back there where the ladies sit.’
‘He’ll sit where he bloody likes.’
Most likely Teket had understood exactly how the conversation had gone, but he didn’t let on. We sat where the ladies sat, the Black Opal laundry bag of gifts between us.
It had been difficult to tell Teket what had happened. He’d known Xambun from visits to his cousin. I told him Fen’s explanations for why Xambun was shot and not him. Teket said he’d never heard of anyone trying to get killed—they did not have a word for suicide in Kiona—and he scoffed at the idea of a white man thinking he could be invisible. If the Mumbanyo had shot at Fen, Teket said, the whole village would have been rounded up and put in jail. Of course they had aimed for Xambun.
Minton had never been to Lake Tam. We guided him through the canals. I’d worried that he’d balk at pushing his boat through them but he kept saying, ‘This is fucking loony, mate,’ with a tremendous grin on his face. Then we were out on the lake and his boat sped us across the black water much faster than my canoe ever had, and I wasn’t prepared to arrive so quickly.
The lake was high, the beach only a thin strip near the grasses. The mosquitoes were much worse now. Clouds of them swarmed the minute the boat slowed. I could see the tip of their house. It seemed impossible that Nell would not be behind the blue-and-white cloth door.
The sound of the boat had attracted attention. I helped Minton tie up while Teket was greeted warmly by his cousin and her family. She was not someone who had come to Nell in the mornings and Nell had said she was shy, conscious of her foreignness, and avoided being interviewed. I became aware of a line of older men on the road above, looking down at us. They were not armed with spears or bows, I noted with relief. Teket saw them, too. We exchanged glances, then he sent his cousin to find Malun and the others.
It was understood that I was not welcome in the village, and Teket waited with me on the beach. After a long time, they came. They walked close together, Malun in the middle, her face stiff and grim. She and Sali were covered in mourning mud.