Euphoria

31

I have only been to America once. It is not easy to avoid the place, but for years I managed it. I declined invitations, turned down teaching posts. But when they sent me the announcement of the opening of the Peoples of the Pacific Hall at the American Museum of Natural History in the spring of 1971, which had a photograph of a ceremonial house on the front and a quote from my most recent book about Kiona below it, I felt obliged to make the journey.

I was given a private viewing before the event. Viewing me and my responses as we padded along on carpeted floors were the director of the museum, the president of its board, and several big donors. There were Balinese shadow puppets, a Maori pataka, Moro armor. There was a diorama of a Solomon Island village with a copy of The Children of Kirakira on a shelf behind it, overlooking the scene like a god.

‘And here,’ said the director as we turned a corner, ‘is your particular part of the world.’ It surprised me, a whole large annex devoted to the Sepik River tribes. Years earlier I’d donated my few Kiona-made possessions to the museum, never expecting to see them again, and there they all were now, pinned and labeled and under glass like Aunt Dottie’s beetles: my painted coconut cups, my stick and snail navigational chart, my shell money, the few clay figures given to me upon my departure. The pages from a November 1933 issue of Oceania containing the monograph about the Grid was under glass as well, torn to shreds as I had requested. Beside it was a placard noting the serendipity of the monograph’s three authors having met in Angoram on Christmas Eve, 1932, our theory’s misappropriation by the Nazis, my subsequent refusal of all reprinting requests, and my entreaties that it be permanently removed from all syllabi around the globe. According to the synopsis, those efforts had only enhanced its popularity. Beside the shredded Oceania article were my books and the book Nell’s publisher had shaped from Nell’s New Guinea notes, which was even more successful than her first. Another placard gave an account of Nell’s death at sea, Fen’s disappearance, and my long career. Though the museum had no Sepik artifacts directly from Nell or Fen, a young anthropologist had recently retraced their steps and brought back a number of items from the Anapa, Mumbanyo, and Tam.

Fen had indeed vanished. No one I know has heard from him in all these years. The only person ever to claim a sighting was Evans-Pritchard, who thought he saw him on the Omo River in Ethiopia in the late thirties, but when he called out Fen’s name, the man flinched and moved swiftly away.

Tears are not endless, I repeated to myself. That was how I made the long walk past these display cases, past an enormous blowup of the photograph Fen had taken of Nell and me with my big suitcase and his pipe and hat and sago fronds across our shoulders. I kept us moving swiftly. It was the only way to get through it. I paused, however, when I got to a Tam death mask. Mud had been smoothed on top of the bone to refashion the face, hair taken from a living head and glued on top. The mud had dried beige, and white warrior stripes were painted down the nose and across the cheeks and around the lips. In the socket of each eye was a small oval cowrie shell, underside up, the long slit with its toothed edges making an excellent likeness to a shut eye with lashes. Five more cowrie shells were placed across the forehead like a crown. It was this line of shells that caught my eye. Something irregular. The one in the middle was bigger, not a shell in fact but a button, a perfectly round ivory button embedded in this mud forehead. I reached for it. My hand slammed into the glass. It did not shatter, but it made a loud bang, which was followed by a sudden silence all around me.

‘See someone you know in there?’ one of the donors said, and the others laughed nervously.

Caught in the holes of the button were tufts of pale blue thread. I forced myself on to the next display. It was only a button. It was only a bit of thread. From a wrinkled blue dress I had once undone.