Euphoria

21

When we returned to the house the lamps were lit and Nell was on the floor in a circle of open letters, a large calendar on her lap.

Fen flopped on the sofa behind her. ‘Get your Nobel Prize yet, Nellie?’

‘Stalin’s wife has died mysteriously, and John Layard has taken up with Doris Dingwall!’

“I thought he was in Berlin with the poets,’ I said, taking a chair in the corner.

‘Apparently he got very depressed, bungled a suicide attempt, then went to Auden’s flat to get him to finish him off. Leonie says Auden was sorely tempted, but he ended up taking him to the hospital. Then he flew back to England where he’s stolen Doris from Eric.’

Doris and Eric Dingwall were anthropologists at University College in London — and known for their open marriage.

‘What are we doing in November?’ she asked Fen.

‘Buggered if I know. Why?’

‘They’ve asked me to give the keynote at the International Congress.’ She was trying to keep her voice modulated for Fen’s sake.

‘That’s fantastic!’ I said, trying on some American enthusiasm. ‘Quite an honor.’

‘And they’ve asked me to be an assistant curator at the museum. They’re going to give me an office in the turret.’

‘Good onya, Nellie. How’s our bank account?’

She gave him a cautious smile. ‘Very healthy.’

‘Is this what I think it is?’ Fen said. He tapped Helen’s package on the floor with his toe. ‘You haven’t opened it.’

‘No.’

Fen looked at me sharply, as if I knew what that meant. I did not.

‘Come on, Nellie.’ He bent down and put it in her lap. ‘Let’s have a look. Plus we could use this.’ He plucked at the heavy grey twine it was wrapped up in.

Beneath the brown post paper was a box. Inside the box was a slim manuscript, not more than three hundred pages. Its pages were flat, its edges perfectly aligned. We stood in slight awe of it, as if it might speak or burst into flames. Nell had already done this, taken her hundreds of notebooks and magically compressed them into a stack of clean, unbuckled sheets of paper, taken millions of details and slotted them into some sort of order to make a book, but Fen and I had not. From this vantage point that transformation seemed impossible.

On top of the stack was a note in small thick writing.

Dear Nell,

Finally. Hope you and Fen will have time to take a look. No enormous hurry. Am giving it to Papa today and I’m sure he’ll have me revising through the summer. If Fen has trouble with my presentation of the Dobu he needs to tell me honestly and unsparingly. I just received your first letter with the Mumbanyo. They sound appalling. I’m sure you’ve tamed them by now. All love, H

They both looked at this note for a long while, as long as it would take to read a full page of writing. The silence was not still — it was the opposite of stillness. As if the three of them, Nell, Fen, and Helen, were having a conversation I couldn’t hear.

‘Shall we have a look?’ I said. ‘I’ll make the tea’.

‘Teatime!’ Fen said in the voice of a Cambridge tea lady. ‘Make haste!’

‘All of us read it? Together?’ Nell said, coming out of her trance.

‘Why not?’

I was hungry for it. I ached for a new idea, a new thought in my head. I made the tea quickly, scooting around Bani as unobtrusively as I could in that small corner of the house.

Nell began reading as soon as I set the pot and cups down on the trunk. On the first pages Helen declared Western civilization’s lack of understanding of other peoples’ customs to be the world’s greatest and gravest social problem. By page twenty she had brought in Copernicus, Dewey, Darwin, Rousseau, and Linnaeus’ Homo ferus, swept around the globe a few times, and asserted that the notion of racial heredity, of a pure race, is bunk, that culture is not biologically transmitted, and that Western civilization is not the end result of an evolution of culture, nor is the study of primitive societies the study of our origins.

In this first chapter she had laid down in simple honest language many of the tenets our generation of anthropologists felt but had never put on the page so clearly. But it was impossible to stop there. We took turns reading. We devoured her words. It felt as if she had written the book for us and only us, a fat message that said: Carry on. You can do this. This is important. You are not wasting your time.

The most intoxicating drug could not have had a stronger effect on me. A few chapters in and Bani was standing over us, speaking loudly. Apparently he’d been trying to tell us dinner was ready. We took the book with us to the table which had been set with linens and platters of food. Fen took over the reading, managing bites between sentences, and I supposed we didn’t appreciate the meal sufficiently, for Bani left without saying goodbye or doing the washing up.

Fen read on, standing up in the little kitchen area, while Nell and I cleaned the dishes. When he got to the part about where Helen accuses Malinowski of treating his Trobriands as generic primitives, he fairly screamed it. And then he looked up from the page, eyes ablaze. ‘Is it my imagination or did she just take down Frazer, Spengler, and Malinowski in those three pages?’

We laughed all three as one loud person. We were giddy with her iconoclasm, her courage, her ambition. Fen read on. Primitive societies, she allowed, were easier to study than our more complex Western civilization, much like the beetle was easier for Darwin when establishing his theories than the human being.

‘Rot!’ Nell yelled at the page. ‘We’ve had that beetle argument a million times. And I always win. But she puts that in there anyway.’ She pulled a short pencil out from somewhere in her hair and made to cross out the last sentences.

‘Hey ho,’ Fen said, blocking her. ‘Let her have her full say before you start blanking it all out.’

We moved back to the sofa and I brought out a jug of Kiona ‘wine’ that tasted like sweetened rubber. Fen passed the manuscript to me and I began reading. This section was about the Zuni of New Mexico, who carved out an existence and an ‘attitude towards existence’ that was completely at odds with the rest of the tribes of North America, who often used drugs and fermented cactus juice to ‘get religious.’

‘I’m feeling a bit religious myself,’ Fen said. ‘This wretched stuff is potent.’

Nell didn’t say anything — she was scribbling notes on a pad — but her cup was half empty and her cheeks blazed. The top of her pencil was wet and chewed.

Other tribes danced until their mouths frothed or they had seizures or visions, but the Zuni simply danced to methodically alter nature. ‘The tireless pounding of their feet draws together the mist in the sky and heaps it into the piled rain clouds. It forces out the rain upon the earth.’

Nell was nodding as I read. ‘Beautiful,’ she said.

‘Terrible!’ Fen hopped to his feet, pointing at the page. ‘That’s it right there. That’s the line she can’t cross. She loses all her authority right there.’

‘She is bringing us into the moment,’ Nell said. ‘Into the heart of the culture.’

‘It’s a fake. She knows full well the pounding of the feet doesn’t bring the rain.’

‘Of course, Fen. But she is capturing right there how the Zuni see it, telling it from their point of view.’

‘That’s just sloppy. It’s catering to a mass audience and not the scholar. She’s too good to make that mistake.’

This last shut Nell up.

‘What do you think, Bankson?’ Fen said. ‘Yes or no on the rain being forced from the earth? Is the good scientist allowed artistic license?’

I chose to continue reading. It was the Dobu section. Fen was the only anthropologist to have ever studied the Dobu, so Helen’s entire portrait of the culture came from his monograph published in Oceania and a series of interviews she conducted with him in New York. I braced myself for Fen’s protests, but he cheered Helen on as she plunged into a disturbing description of a lawless society whose chief virtues were ill will and treachery. Instead of an open communal dance plaza, the center of the village was a graveyard. Instead of communal gardens, each family planted its own yams on rocky private terrain and relied on magic and magic alone for their growth, believing that the yam tubers wandered at night below the ground and only charms and countercharms would entice them home — that the growth of one’s garden depended solely on magic, and not on the amount of seeds one planted.

‘That cannot be true,’ Nell said, slapping the page.

‘Are you doubting your dear friend Helen or your beloved husband or both?’

‘This wasn’t in your monograph. Did you tell her this?’

‘Of course I did.’

‘And you honestly believe that the Dobu did not see a correlation between number of seeds and number of crops?’

‘That is correct.’

I hurried on. Because there was never enough food and they were often half starving, the Dobu had developed a great many superstitions around cultivation. They also felt that the yams didn’t like playing, singing, laughing, or any form of happiness, but that having sex in the garden was essential for growth. Wives were always blamed for the death of their spouse, and it was believed that women could leave their sleeping bodies and do deadly deeds, and as a result, women were deeply feared. They were also deeply desired, and no woman without a chaperone was safe from male advances. They were prudish and reluctant to discuss sex, but they had a lot of it and reported great satisfaction. Mutual sexual satisfaction was important to the Dobu. I could feel my skin burning as I read. Fortunately Fen was concentrating on Helen’s words too closely to tease me about it. One of their most important spells was the spell of invisibility, used primarily for thieving and adultery.

‘They taught me that one,’ Fen said. ‘I still know it by heart. Come in handy someday.’

‘ “The Dobuan,” Helen concluded, “lives out without repression man’s worst nightmares of the ill-will of the universe.” ’

‘I think they’re the most terrifying people I’ve ever read about,’ I said.

‘Fen was a little unstable when I met him,’ Nell said. ‘His eyes were like this.’ She stretched her eyelids as open as possible.

‘I’d been frightened out of my mind every day for two years,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t have lasted half that,’ I said, but it occurred to me that the Dobu sounded a lot like him: his paranoid streak, his dark humor, his distrust of pleasure, his secrecy. I couldn’t help questioning the research. When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis? As usual, I found myself more interested in that intersection than anything else.

At some point Fen brought out cans of sardines and apricots that we ate with our fingers, our stomachs suddenly as ravenous as our minds. We all had our notebooks out by then, making notes for Helen and notes for ourselves, and everything got stained as we tried to read and write and argue and eat all at the same time.

Looking at our faces you might have said we were all feverish and half mad, and perhaps you would have been right, but Helen’s book made us feel we could rip the stars from the sky and write the world anew. For the first time I saw how I might write a book about the Kiona. I even made a small outline of how it might be shaped. And just these few words in my notebook made many things feel possible.

There was a pale violet light in the sky when Fen read the last pages, Helen’s final push toward the understanding that every culture has its own unique goals and orients its society in the direction of those goals. She described the whole set of human potentialities as a great arc, and each culture a selection of traits from that arc. These last pages reminded me of the finale of a fireworks show, many flares sent up at once, exploding one after the other. She claimed that because of the emphasis in the West on private property, our freedom was restricted much more than in many primitive societies. She said that it was often taboo in a culture to have a real discussion of the dominant traits; in our culture, for example, a real discussion of capitalism or war was not permitted, suggesting that these dominant traits had become compulsive and overgrown. Homosexuality and trance were considered abnormalities now, while in the Middle Ages people had been made saints for their trances, which were considered the highest state of being, and in Ancient Greece, as Plato makes clear, homosexuality was ‘a major means to the good life.’ She claimed that conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.

‘Written by a true deviant,’ Fen said, tossing the last page down. ‘A true paranoid deviant. She gets a little hysterical at the end there, as if the whole world’s just about to go down the gurgler.’

Nell caught me looking at her. ‘What?’

‘You look like you are trying to follow about nine different strands of thought.’

‘More like forty-three. We should go to bed before our heads explode.’ She went down the ladder to drape a banana leaf across the bottom rung, which discouraged visitors. ‘All right. We are closed for business until further notice.’

Fen drained the last of the rubber wine into his mouth. It dribbled down his chin and he wiped it with the back of his hand. He took off his shirt, scrubbed his armpits with it, and tossed it in a pile for Wanji.

‘To Bedfordshire, my lady,’ he said in my accent, taking her arm as they moved to their room. ‘Nighty-nighty.’

I went off to my mat in their study feeling a bit like the family pet who’d been put outside for the night. I lay awake as the animals woke up first, snapping branches and blundering through leaves and hollering out and the greeet greeet greeet of the monkeys, then the humans, coughing, grunting, whining, shouting. Cackles from the women going down to their canoes and their paddling and their songs that carried across the water. Gongs and scoldings and laughter, the thunk of gulls into the water and flying foxes smashing into trees. Finally, I fell asleep. I dreamt I was on an ice floe, squatting like a native, carving a large symbol into the ice. But it was melting, and though I carved deeply — something with two lines crossed in the middle, a glyph representative of whole paragraphs of thought — the ice was turning to slush, and my feet slipped into the sea.

I woke up to the sound of writing, the scrape of the pencil and the softer susurrations of the hand following along. I rolled over, expecting to see Nell at the kitchen table, but it was Fen. He didn’t stop. He didn’t see me watching. He bent close to the paper and his face was contorted in concentration, and he held his breath for far too long then released it through his nose loudly. If I hadn’t known better, I would have said he was sitting on the loo. When there was stirring in the bedroom, he stopped, gathered his pages, and left the house with them.

Nell came out wearing what she must have slept in, large cotton pants and a light green shirt. She fixed us tall mugs of coffee with evaporated milk, and sat where Fen had been. I didn’t know if it was ten in the morning or four in the afternoon. Light came through in slits and spackles from no particular direction. I felt like a boy on holiday from school. She sat with both feet up on her seat, her mug on one knee. I sat across from her, Helen’s transcript between us.

She bent one corner of the pages with her thumb then let them tick slowly back into place. ‘She was always writing a book, but after a while, I began to assume she’d never finish it. I thought I’d moved past her in that way. And now — this makes mine look like a child’s scrapbook of souvenirs from a trip to Cincinnati. She’s done some head-splitting thinking here. While I’ve been collecting pretty little stones, she’s built a whole cathedral.’

I still felt the tension of the dream in my body, the symbol I was trying to etch in the softening ice. It struck me as funny that she aspired to create a cathedral and I had struggled to carve out one symbol.

‘You’re laughing at me and my pity party.’

‘No.’ I thought of the story she told me about running out of spit in the closet. I could see that four-year-old so clearly now.

‘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.

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.