Euphoria

7

I didn’t meet Helen Benjamin until 1938 when we both attended the International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences conference in Copenhagen. I went to her panel discussion on eugenics, at which she was its only opponent and the only one who made sense. The way she spoke and moved her hands reminded me of Nell. I rose as soon as the discussion was over and made for the door. But somehow she got down off the stage and overtook me in the entrance hall before I could slip away. She seemed to know all my feelings, and merely thanked me for coming to her panel and handed me a large envelope. It was the kind of thing I’d grown used to, people hoping I’d help them publish their manuscripts, but from Helen it made no sense. Her Arc of Culture had been a great success, and whatever acclaim I had garnered by then, with the Grid and my book on the Kiona, owed a significant debt to her work.

I didn’t open the packet until I was on the train back to Calais. Such a cavalier gesture, my hand reaching into that brown envelope. It was not a manuscript. It was a booklet made of white typing paper covered by bark cloth, folded in half and sewn down the middle seam. Attached with a paper clip was a note from Helen: She made one of these each time she arrived in a new place, and kept them tucked in the fabric liner of a trunk, away from prying eyes. I have kept the others, but I thought you should have this one. There were no more than forty pages, a good many blank at the end. The writings spanned three and half months, beginning with her first days on Lake Tam.

1/3

1/4 Stitched up this new book yesterday then was too intimidated by all these fresh empty pages to put down any words. I wanted to write about Bankson but felt I shouldn’t. Wrote Helen instead & managed not to mention him once. My body feels better. Pitiful that a great amount of my pain disappeared when someone paid a bit of attention to it.

This temporary house they’ve given us is called the House of Zambun. Or maybe I should spell it Xambun — more Greek sounding. From the way they say it, Xambun, low & hopeful, as if its utterance could bring something powerful closer, I am certain it’s a spirit or ancestor, though I can’t feel anything in here the way I have in other houses reserved for the dead. And if it is a spirit, why would they let us desecrate its house?

I want to write more but too many feelings are bottlenecking somewhere near my collarbone.

1/6 But what was all the fuss about him anyway? If he was ever cold or arrogant or territorial his 25 months with the Kiona must have knocked it out of him. Hard to believe the stories about the string of broken hearts he’s left back in England. Plus Fen says he’s a deviant. What I saw was a teetering, disheveled, unaccountably vulnerable bargepole of a man. A skyscraper beside me. I’m not sure I’ve seen such height & sensitivity paired before. Very tall men are so often naturally removed and distant (William, Paul G., etc.). I am wearing his dead brother’s glasses.

We were standing in the shallows yesterday waving him off and I remembered a fall day when I was about 8 or 9 and my brother & I had played with some new children in our neighborhood for the first time and we were being called to dinner and we stood in the yard with them chilled by the sudden evening but warm from running and I had a terrible fear that we’d never play like that again, that it would never be the same. I don’t remember if my premonition proved true. I just remember the stonelike weight in my chest as I went up the back steps.

I am tired tonight. Trying to learn another language—3^rd one in 18 months — probing a new set of people who but for the matches & razors would rather be left alone — it has never felt more daunting to me before. What was it B said? Something about how all we’re watching is natives toadying to the white man. Glimpses of how it really was before us are rare, if not impossible. He despairs at the deepest level that this work has no meaning. Does it? Have I been deluding myself? Are these wasted years?

1/10 I think I have made a friend. A woman named Malun. She came by today with some lovely little coconut shell drinking cups for us, a few cooking pots, & a full bilum bag of yams & smoked fish. She speaks several local languages but only a small bit of pidgin so we mostly flapped our arms and laughed. She is older, past childbearing, head shaved like all married women here, muscular & stern until she breaks into giggles which seem against her strong will. By the end of the visit she was trying on my shoes.

I went down this afternoon to see how our real house is coming along. I like the spot we chose, right at the intersection of the women’s & men’s roads (the men of course have the best water views) where we will be able to keep an eye on the action. There are about 30 people on the job at this point and Fen bossing every last one of them around with only a handful of Tam words but a big barking voice when he needs it. So glad it is not directed at me.

Slowly winning over a few children. I go up to the field behind the women’s sleeping houses where they play or down to the lake where they swim and I squat on the ground and wait. Today I brought a bright red toy train and pushed it through the sand, making it rumble. Their curiosity was stronger than their fear and they approached until I said “Toot toot!” and they scattered and I laughed and eventually the train lured them back. I added at least 50 new words to my little lexicon while I sat with them. All the body parts plus landscape terms. They don’t tire as adults do explaining things. They like to be experts. And these are little kids 3 to 8 maybe. They’re an independent bunch, so different from the Kirakira with their protective adolescent guardians. Here those older girls are meant to start fishing & weaving by 9 or 10 it seems, and the boys apprenticing in the pottery & painting trades. So the little children roam free. Oh little Piya & Amini with their round bellies & tulip bark belts. I just want to scoop them up and carry them about, but for now they keep several yards between us, wary, looking up the beach, making sure there is an adult within sight.

1/11 This afternoon Fen brought home a houseboy, a shoot boy & a cookboy. He had his pick down at the construction site, though the shoot boy seems too delicate to bring us much more than a duck or a shrew and the houseboy Wanji tied a dishrag on his head and raced off to show his friends and never came back. But the cookboy saw the yams & the fish and got to work without a word. His name is Bani and he is serious & quiet and I think a bit of a misfit here among the loud chatty men. If he were a little older he’d make a good informant, but I don’t think he’s more than 14. Fen & I haven’t had the informant battle yet. I told him today at lunch that he could have first pick. He said it didn’t matter who he picked because he’d just want who I had in the end. So I said he could choose then I’d choose then he could choose again. We had a laugh about it. I told him that my next book would be How to Handle Your Man in the Bush.

I have found a language teacher. Karu. He knows some pidgin from a childhood spent near the patrol station in Ambunti. Thanks to him my lexicon has over 1000 words in it now & I quiz myself morning & night though part of me wishes I could have more time without the language. There is such careful mutual observing that goes on without it. My new friend Malun took me today to a women’s house where they were weaving & repairing fishing nets and we sat with her pregnant daughter Sali & Sali’s paternal aunt & the aunt’s four grown daughters. I am learning the chopped rhythm of their talk, the sound of their laughter, the cant of their heads. I can feel the relationships, the likes & dislikes in the room in a way I never could if I could speak. You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.

1/13 Have just spent 4 hours typing up 2 days’ worth of notes. Completed census today, 17 houses, 228 people. Had to pry Fen away from housebuilding to get the numbers from the men’s houses, which I cannot enter.

Every now and then, if I am not careful, I think of B patching me up that first night and everything goes a little wobbly inside me for a few seconds. It is probably good that he has not come back as soon as he promised he would.

1/17 Malun came over today with an enormous basket and a very serious expression on her face. Xambun, she explained, is her son. She opened the basket and showed me hundreds of lengths of knotted palm fronds, a knot for every day he’s been gone. I felt like I grew 4 new ears trying to piece together what she was telling me. It took a while, but I learned that Xambun is not dead. He was lured away by blackbirders to work in a mine, Edie Creek is my guess. He is a big man, a tall man, a wise man, a fast runner, a good swimmer, an excellent hunter, she told me. (Both Bani & Wanji have since confirmed these things and more. Xambun seems to be their Paul Bunyan, George Washington, & John Henry all in one.) Malun wanted to know if we knew the men he went off with. I’m starting to think this is why they took us in so readily, they thought we had information about Xambun. I wish we did. What a treasure trove a man like that would be, what perspective he would have on his own people. Malun believes he is coming home very soon. I didn’t have words or the heart to tell her what I know of those gold mines. I didn’t tell her he might not be free to leave. Oh the love & fear in her eyes as she stroked her basket stuffed with knots.