by Lawrence Osborne
From Fiction No. 58 (2012)
CASSIDY SARAH O'BRIAN was past thirty-eight and already divorced when she decided to write her thesis on the language of the Outer Citak. They were a remote people of the Maukele forests closely related to the Inner Citak and, more remotely, with the Korowai. She had studied them for some years, aware that they represented to the linguist a niche of underrepresented possibilities. They were Neolithic horticulturalists and no one knew whether they had a past imperfect tense in their language. They might be useful when it came time to post her mark on posterity.
She had begun a career as a doctor in a small town in the Midwest, and changed to linguistics in later life, dissatisfied with the medical life and also, contiguously, with her fading marriage to a dermatologist. The 60’s were not congenial to her. She was well into her thirties when they got underway, and the drugs and promiscuity struck her as idiotic and damaging. She lived with her husband in Chicago and as he became more left-wing and unhinged, she turned more to matters of the internal spirit. They split in 1966. Cassidy gave up medicine and decided to become an anthropologist. It was fashionable at the time. Tall, reed-thin, with freckles that suggested naivety, the uneasy but drily ethical Cassidy drifted into the mental worlds of structuralism and the masterpieces of Frenchmen she half understood. She became obsessed, like so many of her colleagues, with “the primitive” and its disappearance. She wanted its emotional vitality to be her own. The year following her divorce was one of sedatives, constant tears and breakdowns. She dreamed of escape to something purer.
The Citak language was a scientific challenge that life as a small town doctor would never have given her. It was a language for which no lexicon existed at that time, and for which one does not exist even now. A Dutch missionary posted to the Maukele between 1967 and 1971 wrote a short lexicon of four hundred words (De Winters, 1977), but his sole convert and source of linguistic information went mad and disappeared into the forest, “never,” De Winters writes, “to return.”
Cassidy obtained a grant from the University of Michigan in the summer of 1969 and flew to Bali to begin her immersion course in Bahasa, a language spoken here and there in the coastlands of the Bird’s Head and in Jayapura. It was therefore also spoken in the deep forests of the Maukele, in the opinion of the Seventh Day Adventists who agreed to fly her into mission at Bola. It was better than nothing at all.
By early December she was ready and she intended to arrive in the remote and abandoned mission at Bola for Christmas. There was a young Dutch family running the mission house here, Dr. Hollinger and his wife Daisy and their two small children, a boy and girl called Robert and Olga. They were, she gathered, the heirs of the intrepid De Winters. Through the Adventists a request from them reached her while she was still in Jayapura patiently waiting for her flight to Wamena: could she please bring them a gramophone player that didn’t need an electrical supply, an old wind-up model that could sometimes be found in the Muslim flea markets of the city center and similar to the one which old Pastor Bohrs had donated to them two years earlier? “It has worn through with damp and flies,” the letter read. “The children would love a new one.”
Cassidy searched the flea markets until she found a 1929 model made by the British Gramophone company itself, in virtually mint condition and sold with a slim collection of LP’s of Balinese court music from the 1940’s. The covers were grey cardboard with the disc centers exposed. A few discs of Verdi operas were thrown in, rich material for the jungles, she thought dryly. She took them with her on the hour-long flight to Wamena, where the Dani cultivate their sweet potatoes on terraces of liquid green, and she played it in her $1 a night hotel room near the air strip while Dani and Yali pygmies from the highlands stood outside her door, gently heaving from foot to foot in their pig grease second skins and moaning as if in pain, a pain leavened with a mysterious pleasure they could not divulge in the normal way.
They had never heard the gamelan music of the Hindu island, and speaking through the Javan owners of the hotel they asked her if this was music which she knew how to create herself. “Are they pigs singing in that music?” they asked and they touched the fine bones threaded through their ears. “Is it pig bones they are hitting with their magic bows?”
The next morning they flew through glaciers with the doors of the plane wide open so that the Dani porters could stick out their legs. Below them they could see terraces that reminded her of Peru. Beyond the mountains lay the forests, stretched from horizon to horizon, with cloud suspended only a few meters above the ironwood trees. It was a static field of luminosity that had no optical illusions at its edges.
At Balo there was a rectangular space cut into the sea of green. The airstrip was paid for by the Seventh Day Adventists, who used salt as their currency with the Citak. A bag of salt a year kept the air strip cropped. The Dutch family lived in a ramshackle house of tropical wood to one side of the lawn which the Outer Citak clipped every week with iron shears donated by the missionaries. They were waiting for the plane when it came down, though the Outer Citak ran away into the forest at the sound of the engine, a sound which they did know but to which they had not yet become accustomed. Pastor Hollinger was there with his pale, spindly wife with her reddish hair, an equally spindly man with a tuft of hair that made him look like an ornamental plant. Both in khakis, they had a soft, impenetrable look about them, like a couple who have been together on a life raft for years and survived by being amicable and just. They had set up a tressle table next to the air strip at which Robert and Olga had cut up huge jackfruits with a pair of penknives. The kids were blond and half naked and they moved like Papuans rather than Europeans. Eight or ten, she would have thought, and feral already.
Dr. Hollinger came up to the plane and shook hands with the pilot, while Cassidy was greeted by the wife and kids. She stepped into adhesive heat and was aware at once of the darkness between the trees, the orchids glittering in shadow. The children took her hands.
“You’re huge,” the little girl said, looking up at her and leading her towards the table where the fruit lay dismembered in a cloud of wasps.
“Did you bring the gramophone?” the boy asked.
Though it was under a pale and clear sky, there was a rumble of thunder which turned her head. The Pastor kissed her on both cheeks and watched the plane circle, re-start its engine and then take off again. Soon enough it was a mere speck on the horizon.
“Won’t see them for six months,” the Pastor remarked in his sing-song English, and they sat down on rickety deck chairs to eat the jackfruit. He was slightly sarcastic in his manner, as if she had yet to prove herself.
Since she had held the boy’s question in suspension, she now said, “Yes I did. I got it in Jayapura.”
“Wow,” he said.
“It was a business getting it into that plane.”
“Thanks,” they said together, and gave each other a knowing look.
She realized now what an event it was for this family to have her living among them. They had built a small house for her near the school room and the chapel, a half mile away on the far side of the air strip. The children frisked around her excitedly. The Pastor absorbed her exotic prettiness fresh from the outside world—the world of milk and honey—which was so unlike the weathered, jungle-resistant toughness of his wife. Daisy seemed to accept this alteration in her symbolic status because it would have no consequences. The Pastor would not be received hospitably by a cute young woman like Cassidy, even if his God would let him put himself forward. Their dry love-making was assured a long future.
After a lunch of canned Spam sandwiches, they walked over to the schoolhouse. They were followed by three or four Citak children from the village. The children were always the first to lose their fear of a new arrival. They were dark in the Papuan way, but less thickset than the Dani children. They were slender and delicate, with little chicken feathers scattered over their heads. They had toy bows and sugarcane arrows carved with mice teeth, the rows of barbs whitened with ground oyster shells. Their shoulders were pale with ringworm.
The white children had begun to speak Citak with them, and her expert ear caught it at once, a language that ran with the contiguous mobility of liquid mercury, rippling and tripping and rolling its r’s. Language like silver that shines and then is turned away from the light and goes duller. One of the Citak children came up and brushed a finger against Cassidy’s wrist, hastily withdrawing it and then conferring with her companions.
“She says you’re not cold,” Robert said. “They touched a block of ice once, from the airplane.”
“Hot like a pig,” the Citak girl was saying.
“Well,” Cassidy said, “they can touch me as much as they want. They’ll get bored of me.”
“Don’t give them your pens,” Robert whispered.
And the children laughed, a little maliciously.
It was the Pastor who carried the gramophone. They labored over a wide field of flowering grass in which the song of insects was deafening. He hauled it on his shoulder. The schoolhouse and the chapel stood at the edge of this dazzling field. Their roofs were pitched steeply in a vaguely ‘native’ way copied from the architecture of the coast. The Citak lived in tree houses. The schoolhouse itself was open to the air, its benches made of roughly planed logs and her new house was little more than a cube of logs with a bark mat rolled across its floor. The evangelists apologized in their ironic way and then the family got on their knees and prayed for “Sister Cassidy’s” happiness in the land of the Outer Citak.
“We’ll leave you now,” Daisy said, touching her arm. “Come up to the house for dinner when the sun goes down. We’ll let you settle in.”
“We have an electronic clock,” the Pastor put in. “You’ll hear the chime when it’s dinner hour.”
“Thank you all so much.”
She lay on her sleeping bag. The heat of the afternoon declined. Where am I? she thought wildly. At length, after a long sleep, she heard people moving across the field, swishing their way through the waist-tall grass. She emerged into an opal dusk on the edges of which storm clouds had massed. Green lightning flashed down into the thimbok trees and by its light she could see a dozen men with bows, painted white and blue, standing at the edge of the schoolhouse clearing in an attitude of tense curiosity. They wore penis gourds made from acorns and wore fiber bands around their heads. There was a mad, languid elegance to them. Two of them had adorned themselves with bird of paradise feathers, turning their heads into Edwardian high society hats, and they watched her with the attentiveness with which children will track the movement of plates of apple pie. Night fell in five minutes, but they swung bundles of dry grass from side to side, the tips of the bushels alight with a slow burning fire that cast a dim orange light.
She walked up to the missionary house as gobs of rain began to fall. The Hollingers were accustomed to eating on their cranky verandah, where parrots had nested and where the Citak women came at nightfall with flying foxes to sell as dinner. The Pastor would sit at the piano in the main room behind them and the family would sing their hymns, which the Citak among themselves called the “the disastrous sound of witchcraft.” The Dutch Reformed Church was the only missionary force in this part of the Maukele sago swamps, and they prided themselves on persisting where no other Christian groups even dared set foot. That night, they had paid the Citak women to make a flying-fox stew. The Pastor had some sodas delivered by the plane, cans of winter melon tea from Java whose pale green cans caused some consternation among the women gathering around the house. They sat at table in the European way, slightly stiff and formal, as if resisting the Citak tendency to informality, and the family cook brought out two saucepans of the stew, which was heavily scented with cloves. The children looked glum. Never mind, Cassidy thought grimly, it won’t be as bad as all that. The Pastor ladled it out into china plates which they must have brought all the way from Holland with considerable trouble. He alone seemed genuinely gay and optimistic, as if it had been he who had dragged everyone here and it had been for his reasons and no one else’s.
“We’re impressed you came,” he said now as he poured them glasses of the canned winter melon tea and gave them each a straw for hygienic reasons. “Few people have the fortitude unless Jesus is with them. Is Jesus with you?”
“Sometimes,” she said, and a smile went the round.
The Pastor was not discouraged.
“I do believe we can improve things on that front. Nothing concentrates the spirit so wonderfully as this forsaken place. It has made us all, I dare say, a little holier. The Citak inspire us, and I am sure they will inspire you as well.”
She nodded, with a show of agreement. She would depend on this homely family for survival, she didn’t want to annoy them in any way. And, in a sense, she felt that he might be right.
“I can see that.”
“Well,” the Pastor said, “you’ll find Him more easily here than you would in other places. We all see Him readily here. He is close by to protect us.”
“I see him every day,” the little girl said, and she pointed across the darkened air strip to the forest.
“Amen,” they all said.
“My wife has seen him twice this week. He is here alright.”
“Amen.”
“He is here to encourage us. Cassidy, you’ll see him too.”
“I might too,” she said.
“You will. The Citak see Him too.”
“Have you converted many?”
It was an innocent question, uttered without much forethought. But the Pastor stiffened and raised his glass as if to signify that it did not require a totally honest reply. He pursed his lips and jiggled his head to suggest “One or two, one or two.” Daisy smiled. Lighting forked down revealing the jagged top edge of the canopy. The humidity of the forest misted the shells of the oil lamps. She could taste the scent of decomposing orchids, the sweetness of fermented sago rolling across the darkness and turning her stomach. Her nostrils filled with sugary, lazy aromas that had no edge to them.
The house was lit by a single oil lamp. When they had finished, the Pastor leaned down to this lamp, which sat on the floor, and said, “Watch this.” He then lowered the flame until it was virtually invisible. Almost immediately a line of people stepped out of the facing forest and walked slowly towards the house. They carried the same burning branches which they swung across their knees, lighting the ground with an ineffectual glow, and within a minute they had reached the veranda. The Pastor went down to greet them. He brushed his great white hand against their tiny black ones and spoke to them in fluent Citak laced with English words which they now appeared to understand. Pool, generator, candle, don’t touch, knife. Hands were grasped more firmly then and there were grins flashed towards the new-come woman. “He is telling them,” Daisy said to her in a whisper, “that you have come from outside the forest, beyond even the Great Dog. He says you come to play some music to them from a metal dog that doesn’t wag its tail. He says you are Jesus number one woman and that Jesus has put His confidence in you and that they must listen to the words you speak.”
“That’s a bit of a liberty,” she blurted out.
“The gramophone?”
“I thought it was for you.”
“It’s for all of us,” Daisy assured her. “We do get terribly bored here. The children have been looking forward to it so much.”
The Citak warriors stepped gingerly onto the verandah, edging themselves forward into the alien dimension of European order. They ventured to touch the white hand of the new woman. They were eager and tender in their way. Their eyes were bloodshot and opened wide, like crude windows. Their skin was scaled with ringworm, faintly fragrant and unctuous despite the scaling of the surface epithelium. Gesturing to the schoolhouse they asked the Pastor with an elaborate protocol if the new woman would play the dog to them right now. “Could you?” the Pastor asked hopefully, turning to her with his pale Dutch eyes. “Play something, I mean? The children would love it, and the Citak too it would seem.”
She walked back to her house in the rain with a warrior whose body was covered with white spots dabbed onto his skin with the point of a stick. She took a flashlight with her, and as the rain whistled around them she watched with care the muscular backs of his calves and the long feathers trailing down his back. It was striking how the men and women stood so far apart at all times, never touching, never exchanging intimate words.
At the house he laid his bow on the ground and watched as she cranked the machine and placed upon its turntable a copy of Nabucco. Shortly, the cracked strains of Libiamo ne’ lieti calici rose from the horn, echoing with incredible effect through the forest.
She left the disc playing and they returned to the house, where the Citak had all laid down their utensils and were sitting on the ground with their lizardskin pipes puffing silently among themselves. “It is a tremendous noise. But never have we been so happy!”
Her dreams seesawed and rain pattered on her roof all night. A melancholy singing came through the trees, a music unlike anything she had ever heard. At dawn she was awake, with the thunder echoing. The Pastor was already there in the schoolhouse with three Citak women with whom she was going to start her studies. His son was with them as translator.
“I brought you some Nescafe,” he said playfully, holding up a thermos. “But I thought you would turn down the fried bat.”
Instead, he gave her some malted biscuits.
The women were middle-aged and their hands were broken in from handling the stone clubs with which they pulped the insides of sago palms. Their eyes were heavy, unemotional and suspicious. The lids drooped a little as they stared at the paper and pencil which had wilted in the humidity.
Cassidy had come to think that one had to maintain a certain bearing at all times with such people in order to win their respect. She wanted their respect more than anything else. She made the boy ask them if they were suffering from any diseases and the responses filled the better part of an hour. She jotted down the words for ringworm and malaria, for headache and arthritis. She got them to tell her about cooking, children and sago processing. Sago was the staple of their diet, made into a white paste that could be rolled into balls.
Thereafter she spent her time in these three-way conversations, sitting in the schoolhouse in the sunshine of the mornings and then relaxing in the cooling downpours of the afternoon. They ate little wild pineapples. The three women were close friends and one of them, Timi, had a fifteen year old son whom the Pastor had named Judas. Judas came to the sessions sometimes in the afternoons. He was a tall boy with close-cropped hair which he fussily sheared every day with a bamboo knife. He took to the white woman at once, paying her compliments and asking to see the dog that made enormous sounds. After class, around three o’clock, he took her with Robert to the watering hole where the people in the four tree houses bathed and collected water. It lay at the bottom of a long, winding path between sago swamps that smelled of stale beer.
Its water was colored like stagnant tea, deliciously cold. There was a small beach of sugar-white sand. Behind it stood a field of immense cane. While the boys pretended to turn their backs, she sank naked into the shallow pool clogged with leaves and washed off the sweat and mosquito repellent that accumulated every day.
It was during those moments in the pool that she began to find the forests less inhospitable. What struck her about the Citak was their strong sense of fear. It was a fear directed towards animals, darkness and the dead. One day one of the women told her that the dead walked about in the forest all night and that they were colored white. They were white as Capricorn larva. It was why the people of Balo never ventured out alone after dark, and they certainly never ventured far into the forest. But, Cassidy said, the dead lived in the belly of the Great Dog didn’t they? They came out of it to wander in the forests, the woman said. But it was possible, she thought, that in the garbled translations she had not understood this correctly.
“When a person is dying,” Judas said to her on their way to the watering hole later that day, “they can name someone as the witch who killed them. The witch has to be present as the person is dying, but he is always disguised as an animal. He can be a bird, a worm, a dog, anything, Then the relatives must find the witch, kill him and eat his insides. They must cut the body into four parts and bury each part at the edge of their territory.”
The following Sunday the Pastor made a feast from roasted cassowary. The quills were given out to the Citak women who with considerable pomp and vanity stuck them through their noses and walked about like queens.
“You seem to be making some progress with the women,” he said to Cassidy as they carved up the oddball meat on the verandah table and prepared to say prayers. “They say you are like an infant with all your questions.”
Daisy served her plate and when they said grace she held her hand very firmly, almost too firmly. There was a cool inquiry in the Dutch woman’s eye and it had to do with Judas.
“He’s a strange one, don’t you think? He keeps swimming in our water tank. When I tell him not to he lurks around all day in the trees nearby. He misses his father I suppose.”
“Perhaps,” Cassidy thought, “they don’t like our religion.”
“I was hoping,” the Pastor said mildly, “that the gramophone might help us in that respect. It introduces an element of novelty, of astonishment. I’ve found that those things are very important in the conversion process. Of course, it’s not what counts in the end. But it’s a weapon in the gentle war for souls. I hope you don’t mind.”
When they played Verdi that night the entire population of Balo sat on the air strip and moaned. They swayed from side to side as they puffed at their long lizardskin pipes and their minds filled with fantastic images derived from the strains of Nabucco. Moreover the sound carried very far in the stillness of the night, even with the background of the thunder that never seemed to stop. It echoed long and far and seemed to spread itself over vast areas. Several miles away, in fact, at the tree house cluster of Makalepup, the people heard those echoes rolling across the canopy, above which they sat on their bamboo platforms, gazing across the sea of green which the lightning illumined. A woman was dying of malaria here, left alone in one of the huts on the ground, which is where the women always had to sleep while the men kept to the treetops. The men of Makalepup talked among themselves when they heard the strains of Nabucco reaching them from Balo. Sounds of derangement, of hysteria, of women, sounds of spirits that were coming back to claim something but who, alas, knew what? They knew the giant birds landed at Balo and that the Citak who lived there used steel axes to cut down their sago, though they hid them from the Jesus number one man. Perhaps, they said to themselves, the great noise coming from Balo was a form of medicine which could be used to heal the fevers of their sister Natewe.
They smoked in silence, deep in thought. The boy Judas from there had come by the day before and said that it was a dog shaped like a box. “Aha,” they cried, “it must be connected to the Great Dog!” The Great Dog lay around the forest, with the dead in its stomach.
They dreamed on their sides as the tree house swayed in the storm like a giant bamboo. The sound from Balo stopped. All night the woman dying of malaria writhed on her bark bed. She sweated and coughed. She dreamed that witches circled her house disguised as little birds. In her dream she was walking downhill towards Balo, where she had been once as a child, her hand held by her father.
By the second week, Cassidy had annotated almost a thousand words. The grammar of Citak was beginning to crystallize in her mind and she was beginning to piece together simple sentences. “I run fast like dog.” “You like water.” But even her little sentences only approximated the real ones, which contained inflections she could not grasp. A hundred words for every species of grass. It was a language of long compound words, of convoluted sentences, baroque ornamentation, with none of the syntactic simplicity of other languages. It was web-like, subtle in its modulations, and its words stuck to the roof of her mouth like something physically sticky.
The Pastor sometimes took her down to the swamps to watch the men cutting down sago, and he helped her write down the words of the work songs. The women then split the trunks open and pounded the insides with their clubs, singing just as the men did. They filtered the pounded fibers with water and compacted them into a mush, working in the terrible heat like automata, with fibrous noken bags tied around their heads. At length, after six hours of labor, the men and women packed up their tools together and wrapped the sago in leaves. They walked back to Balo, the men carrying dead monitor lizards over their shoulders. And for all these things there were precise words, phrases and ritual descriptions which had to be learned one by one. They formed a tapestry of meanings that had to be pieced together with great patience. One false move and you missed the point, the tapestry fell apart.
She set up another desk in the open-air schoolhouse. It was cooler and she could think more fluently with the breeze coursing continuously through the wooden structures. They seemed to come from afar, from a deeper core of the forest that might be cooler. By now the heat no longer oppressed her as it had during her first days. She could handle the orb weaver spiders that seemed to be attracted to the wood of her house, and the sago grubs she had to eat from time to time for sustaining protein, their fat like runny rancid butter. In her house she set up a second work desk for the duration of the sudden and violent storms. She had brought an oil lamp with her from Wamena and a supply of oil, so she could work after dinner, while the Hollingers sang hymns with cups of Nescafe. She learned to work naked, in her underpants, and to concentrate also in bed, lying on her side under the mosquito net like an Egyptian scribe, as she thought of it. “And to think,” she wrote to her mother, “that I am writing the first lexicon of an entire language. Sometimes one’s breath is taken away. I cannot put a foot wrong, can I?”
Her eye picked out the Photinus fireflies that danced through the trees at night. She began to love the sudden shock of starlight that could appear as the clouds parted. She was exactly on the Equator, at that point where the galaxies were most visible, though the Citak seemed to have few words for them. She wrote letters to her mother in Delaware, and her estranged husband in San Francisco, the man who had left her for another woman. The more she did so the more obvious it was to her that she was now alone in a permanent sense. And she could not even send the letters she wrote until the airplane returned after Christmas. So she wrote in a void. She poured out her heart to Robert, as if he was still there, as if he was listening to her deep in the night with his head against a shared pillow. It was futile. The ghost of the lover no longer there. She told these absent loved ones about everything she did. She had to tell someone, she had to tell them. How the Citak women cut up the pineapples with bamboo blades. How the honey from the deep forest tasted like cold tea and how the crocodiles, the boya, lay at the bottom of the pools waiting for impatient white women to slip into their element. How this world had closed in around her “like treacle.” How the butterflies were black as powdered coal.
“How the Citak have no word for us,” she wrote. “They have no idea what we are. Not who, but what. They thought at first that we were kakua--witches. But the Pastor heals their cuts with Bactrine swabs and they changed their minds. Now we are just people-from-outside-the-forest.”
In the third week of December a suffocating heat descended from the east. The men lay impassively in their tree houses trying desperately to catch a breeze. The women complained as they cooked at the edge of the swamp. The Hollingers went butterfly collecting and invited Cassidy to come along. They knew a trail that the hunters used which wound along a creek with slippery mud banks. If you sat still in this place the butterflies would come and alight on your head, attracted by the heat of your hair. As they were walking slowly along this trail, the children skipping ahead of them with their empty nets, Judas appeared walking with a determined gravity towards Balo, as if he had come from far away.
He was profusely decorated with bundles of small orchids and he looked a little stoned. When the Pastor stopped him and asked him where he’d been he became slightly insolent. He waved a hand towards Makalepup and said that his cousin lived there. The Pastor had not heard of this cousin, so he asked about her. She was dying of malaria, Judas said, and the traditional remedies were doing nothing. The Pastor turned to Cassidy and Daisy. “No surprise there. I suppose they’ll want me to go up there with the Larium. I can use the occasion to preach the Word a little.”
“They are all talking about the dog that cries,” Judas said secretively, covering his mouth with his hand for a moment. “They want to know if it’s the voice of Jesus.”
“Verdi?” Daisy laughed.
But the Pastor suddenly grew serious, as if a terrific idea had just occurred to him and he should seize the moment.
“Judas,” he said. “Go back to Makalepup and say to them that what they are hearing at night is indeed the voice of Jesus. Tell them I have been waiting a long time to bring it to them. I know it’s why they never believed me when I told them that Jesus had a voice like music. But now they can hear it every night, because Jesus is now among us.”
Inspired, the Pastor winked at his wife. Before long Judas had agreed to escort Cassidy to Makalepup the following morning.
“It’ll be interesting for you,” the Pastor said on the way down, and for the first time she glimpsed a cruel, duplicitous side to him. “They are two degrees more remote than the people of Balo, and so they have some words which I suspect the Balo lot have forgotten. In any case, you’ll be doing us an enormous favor, and you’ll be doing the Lord a favor as well. If you don’t want to go, of course—”
“No, no. It would be interesting, as you say.”
The butterflies that the children had captured were spiked onto large cork boards in the main room. Supper that night was chicken soup from Campbell’s cans and unmoldy crackers from plastic sachets. Daisy made it pretty, adorning the plates with leaves and petals, and they made a pitcher of Rose’s lime cordial which was chilled in the small fridge which the generator could nourish for an hour a day. The Citak, as always, watched them eating from afar, noticeable only by the reflections of their eyes.
“I must say,” Daisy remarked as they were eating, “the ruse with the gramophone was pretty unethical, Daniel. I am sure I have read of missionaries doing that in Africa. Cassidy must think we are idiots.”
“It was a spontaneous inspiration,” her husband replied indifferently. “An on the spur of the moment thing. One always has to be open to the spontaneous in our line of work. I think it will work well enough. I know it’s a trick, but one shouldn’t get bogged down in the idea of respect no matter what. I am trying to save them first. After we’ve saved them we can worry about respecting them.”
Because then, his tone implied, it would be worth it.
The next morning they got up early. The boys loaded the gramophone onto a bamboo palette they could carry on their shoulders. It rained heavily, and the sago swamps were hard going. They balanced their way along rotting tree trunks laid across the marsh, the boys singing their marching chant, the gramophone teetering under a canvas wrap. It was a six hour walk to Makalepup. At the beginning of the afternoon they came to an imposing cane field at the edge of which two men stood with elegant bows. The white woman and the gramophone were shown to them, and their origins explained. The men sat down in the cane and smoked their pipes.
During the afternoon the rain intensified. The gramophone was transported to the sick woman’s hut, and Cassidy went with it. Inside, the hut was plunged in darkness. Pieces of animal bone were threaded to the ceiling, tibias and femurs of lizards and rodents, and tiny simian skulls knocked together in the breezes that swept up from the gaps between the bamboo slats. They asked her to sit next to the woman so that the dying one could see who it was that had come to rescue her. It was a woman of about forty, in advanced old age in Citak terms, and she lay swaddled in charms and flowers on a piece of tree bark. Her wasted form was immobilized by the last stages of encephalitic malaria. Her eyes seemed to be held open with invisible threads, and they never blinked as they tracked the tall white woman invading her miserable death scene. Judas, meanwhile, was allowed to enter so that he could translate into Bahasa. Cassidy was as gentle as she could be. She asked the woman her name, and what came back, garbled by Judas, was something like “Kasop.”
“Why are you white?” Kasop asked. “Are you dead?”
“I am alive.”
“She is from beyond the Great Dog,” Judas said quietly.
“So she is dead,” Kasop said to him. She appeared unsurprised.
The woman was going to die later that night. Her eyes were already wild, lost. Cassidy opened her basic medical kit and took the Larium pills in her hand to offer. She opened the wet lid of the gramophone player. The family gathered around as the machine was cranked to life, the needle lowering slowly onto the vinyl that was already distending a little in the heat. Kasop swallowed the pills of the white sorcerers. She lay waiting for the sound of the dog that she had been hearing every night from her bed, and which she could not forget or stop thinking about.
Now it was inside her own room and the sound was proportionately more immense. She lay wild-eyed listening to Verdi. A light foam began to form upon her lips. Cassidy prepared an injection with a disposable syringe which she knew how to prepare, a sedative which would help. As she flicked its tip, she wondered what the Pastor had wanted her to do here. Save the woman? That was obviously not possible. Save her soul. That was still possible. Cassidy was an atheist. Her mind was a scientist’s. But what mattered to the Pastor was the influence he might exert in the coming months. If the dying woman gave him her soul to save it would be a sensation for years to come, let alone months. It would bring the Citak over to him with a single stroke. He was right. It was brilliant, and time-tested. People waiting to be converted and saved were like mechanisms. A simple adjustment, the tipping of a lever, changed everything.
She sat by the woman’s bed. They listened to Narbucco while she held her hand and rain thundered in the mangosteen groves behind the hut. Death here was wretched and raw. There was no alleviation. They died without ceremony. Yet the woman seemed alive with blunt curiosity.
“They say the white men eat Jesus every week. Is it true?”
Cassidy had to choose between a yes and a no.
“Yes,” she murmured, unsurely. “In a way.”
“Is Jesus the owner of the Dutch man at Balo?”
“Yes. He talks through him.”
“I am going to have a dream tonight. It will be my last night. Perhaps I will eat some Jesus too.”
It was sometimes hard to hear through the noise of the rain. Faces peered through the cracks in the walls, through the open door. The children were curious. After a little while, the woman turned her face towards Cassidy and said that by this time tomorrow night she would be living in the forest with the other ghosts.
A fire burned in the longhouse and the men lay around it. Judas told ridiculous tall stories to keep them away. Between tales they sang, mournfully and idly. They smoked their lizardskin pipes as large as didgeridoos. They were wary of the white woman, alien and untouchable on two counts, but they let her sit by herself while she read by the light of her battery torch. They would have preferred that she sleep with the sick woman, but they assumed that she was afraid. Whereas she was not. She was merely apprehensive about the effect of the morphine. Fear was not the emotion that gripped her.
As the night wore on, the men fell asleep. She was left alone in her wakefulness. The rain did not ease. Barbed vines dripped in the dark. It was then a voice rose from inside the hut and she went over quickly to see the sick woman turning painfully on her side and sticking out her tongue. Another old woman sat with her, listening intently as Kasop talked. She said that the Pastor’s dog was inside her and was eating her insides. Cassidy didn’t understand what they were saying, but she could tell that things had taken a wrong turn. She heard the word kakua. They both looked up at the white woman standing there with her flashlight, and there was some indecision in their expression. The other woman stood up and walked towards her. She said, very calmly, “The owner of the little dog that sings is the witch who has made Kasop die. Its singing is inside her and is making her die.” Kasop raised a finger and pointed at the gramophone.
She died an hour later. The journey back to Balo was wordless, weighed down by the heavy rain and the mood of unease created by the death. They stopped halfway by the edge of a pineapple glade and the boys quietly washed their hands in the brackish pools. She sat by the gramophone and let the water drip off the rim of her waterproof hat, trying to dispel the sadness which had now taken hold of her. The whole episode had seemed like a pathetic charade with no ostensible outcome. There was something ignoble about it. Her grasp of the language was still so tenuous that she had no clear idea what their feelings had been, and if she had known them what would she have done with them? Warned them against Jesus Number One Man, as they called the implacable Dutchman? The idea that the Pastor was trying to communicate to them was too complex to be communicable at all. She watched the boys at their ablutions, slow and serious in their movements. She was convinced that in some spontaneous way she had been used. They knew it too. She had been used. They looked in her direction with a puzzled pity. She was not as strange and formidable as she looked. She was, like them, the tool of a superior, more organized will.
The Pastor was not at all surprised by the turn of events. Secretly, he congratulated himself on his grasp of native psychology. The slow decline of the Maukele mission was about to be reversed.
He had set the dinner table outside for Cassidy’s sorry return, protecting it with a ring of mosquito coils. The smell of paraffin hung across the verandah, repelling the ever-curious Citak just as he intended (they held their noses with two fingers and kept their distance ). The family prayed at twilight with the candles lit while Cassidy washed in the outside shower nourished by a full cistern. The sky above the shower burned indigo for a while, with the stars spread out. Daisy served them Spam and garden lettuce and sago fritters cooked in their own corn coil which made them crispy-black at the edges. They said grace with interlocked hands and Cassidy’s wet hair dripped onto the verandah floor, a circle of dark stains which drew the children’s gaze. They ate the revolting food with a humorous stoicism, a relish for difficulties endured for the sake of the Lord. The Pastor heard out her account of the death of Kasop, which sounded even worse in the retelling by candlelight. “Remarkable,” he said, appealing to his wife’s cool eyes. Daisy served them the cut up Spam, her hands puckered with fresh insect bites. The Pastor wiped his mouth.
“I’ve heard a lot about that woman, as it happens. I’ve heard that she was a malevolent type through and through. A gossip. They were all afraid of her up there.”
“I got her soul anyway.”
The Pastor laughed very loud.
“I hope you’re giving it to me for safe keeping.”
A dark scruple suddenly moved him, and he pushed his own jollity away from himself. He wanted to know if Cassidy had in all seriousness received Kasop’s conversion. Naturally, he said, between them, she did not have the authority to receive it, but up there in the cane fields they didn’t know that. The important thing was that the others heard Kasop convert on her deathbed. Had they? She said, honestly, that she didn’t really know. It had seemed that way. Over the next few days she kept to herself in her house. She walked across to the schoolhouse at first light with an umbrella. The women were more morose and tight-lipped, though they would not reveal why. News of the death of Kasop had come down to the lower forests, and an unpleasant rumor had attended it. The children came down at lunchtime to join in lessons, and the boy whispered to her what the Citak children were saying. A kakua had killed Kasop.
“Who is the kakua?” she asked him.
He shrugged, and there was a delicate, quivering fear in his eye.
“Me?” she thought uneasily.
A witch had to be male. But perhaps they had misunderstood.
“They say it was the music.”
“They probably saw me give the injection,” she said softly, stroking his hair to reassure him. “It’s a mistake.”
In the heat of the day, as the flowers blazed around the crudely cropped runway, she saw the Pastor taking earnestly with Citak men in the shade of the veranda. Puffs of smoke rose above the sago fronds. When she had finished her work she walked around the edge of the clearings which the missionaries had made. The musky smell of vanilla orchids attacked her, and she felt a tremendous claustrophobia building up inside her. The sheer darkness of the interior jungle, with its smell of pools and decaying bark, tempted her in, yet she could sense eyes watching her from this depth, a constant surveillance. She never dared to step inwards away from the sun. Soon, she heard the Pastor calling her name and she came up to the house through the tall weeds, with a fetid sun beating on her head. The Citak had disappeared and the Pastor sat alone on the veranda in his rocking chair smoking a pipe. The children, too, had gone off somewhere with their mother. The Pastor rose and shot her a sarcastic smile. He offered her a glass of lemonade made from syrup and sterilized water. As they drank together she noticed how empty the village appeared. They were off in the forest cutting down sago and processing it, the Pastor said. It was one of the rituals that demanded everyone’s presence. His wife always took the children. It was, he said, one of the few entertaining things for them.
He had her sit on the floor on cushions and he sat with her, as if in solidarity.
“The people of Makalepup are in quite a stir,” he said. “You made quite an impression on them.”
“I hope they don’t think I was the cause of her death.”
“Oh, they jump to all kinds of conclusions. Some of the men were just here. I calmed them down. They just wanted an explanation. You can see their point of view.”
“Yes, I can.”
She avoided his searching blue eye, now filled with a curious ambivalence. He said his wife and children would be away until dark. The villagers sought the succulent sago of a quite distant part of the forest and it took the men the better part of an hour to cut down a single tree with their stone axes. The sago parties always came back late, singing to allay their terror of the forest. She saw the tall ironwood waving slowly above the sago thatch of the huts which now stood temporarily empty. She felt the Pastor draw a little closer, testing her out inch by inch and her recoil was just as hesitant, as slow and as probing. The syrupy drink stuck to her teeth and she felt faint.
“Still,” he was saying, his eyes boring into the shape of her breasts slung within a soaked shirt. “I would feel happier if you stayed in your house during daylight for the time being. Some of them were hotheads.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they may have jumped to the wrong conclusions.”
“I gave her an injection, that’s all.”
“You did nothing wrong. Nothing at all. They’re superstitious and we have to work with that.”
“Like children?” she blurted out in disgust.
“Yes, like children.”
He smiled and tilted his eyes.
“It’s not an insult to call them children. Children are the preferred of God.”
“I don’t think of them as children.”
“You’re an anthropologist. Strange creatures, anthropologists. I have tried explaining your profession to the Citak. They were not amused.”
“I don’t care if they were amused or not—”
He seemed about to reach out and touch her, without a reason for doing so, just like that. But before he could she visibly shifted away from him and her hostility was unmistakable.
“Ah,” he let slip, and his look was ironic, almost contemptuous.
She got up brusquely and lingered because she wanted to speak her mind truthfully.
“That was a low trick you pulled on them with the gramophone,” she said icily. “You’re playing with their heads.”
“Yes,” he said. “You are.”
“What do you mean, me?”
“It was you who played it for them.”
Now she understood.
“You gangster,” she thought.
She walked off without a word, knowing that she was now trapped in a low-key antagonism with the only man who could get her out of there in one piece. She walked furiously into the white-flowering weeds and the crickets buzzing away from her in great singing arcs, sparkling in the sun for a moment. The shadows of the taller trees were changing their angles on the low cut grass around the schoolhouse and she could feel the Pastor watching her intently as she strode into its welcome shade. She had a splitting headache and wanted to lie down and sleep, to forget the whole thing. She sat instead on one of the benches and caught her breath. She suddenly felt tremendously alone.
The afternoon dimmed and the butterflies came out. They fussed around the edges of the pineapple glades, around the lips of the ceraceous orchids whose flesh was beginning to brown. There was a distant rumble of thunder from a perfectly clear sky. She went to her house and lay on her hard pallet with the sleeping bag. She wept and her tears were of pure, bright anger.
The Pastor, meanwhile, lit his pipe again and relished the hours of solitude that were upon him. No wife, no children, no snotty Citaks to bother with. He smelled the fragrance of the Woodbine and looked lazily across at the shack where the succulent white woman was lying down. What if he dropped all shame and went over there and forced the matter? There was nothing she could do. The Citak were on his side, not on hers. That fact had been agreeably impressed upon him by the delegation from Makalepup. They had been so comically grave and upset, so desirous of accurate information, for which they regarded him as the official source. That woman, they said, killed Kasop with her musical dog and her little witchcraft dagger. They had come to the Pastor to hear what he had to say.
“Well,” he had said in his quite fluent Citak, “Jesus works with opposites. There are angels and there are demons. Ministers like myself and kakua. One reveals the other.”
They did not understand. They listened sitting cross-legged on the verandah, smoking thoughtfully. It was an absurd argument, they thought to themselves, but the Pastor knew what she was, and not they. They listened. It was entirely possible, the Pastor said, that the white woman had practiced magic upon Kasop. How could he say? He did not know her. Perhaps he and his wife had harbored a witch without knowing it. But if that was so, he could prove the good faith of Jesus number one man by letting them hunt down the witch herself. It would, he knew, make a tremendous impression on them.
They agreed that this was undeniable proof of the Pastor’s integrity. They said they were sorry to disrupt his life at Balo in this way, and when there had been enough talk and enough PG Tips they extinguished their pipes, tucked their weed into their arm bands and gently, quietly dispersed into the forest where they were going to wait until the moment of sundown.
The Pastor waited for it as well. He felt an almost sexual anticipation as the light began to drain away from the maddening panorama of high trees. The insects shrilled with new intensity, as if sensing the approach of a storm. He leaned back in his rocking chair and waited for the next rumble of thunder to roll in from the wild east. Months later, a head was found suspended in a noken bag nailed to the underside of an abandoned tree house five miles to the south. The flies buzzed around it for a few days then lost interest. The mothers of Balo told their children not to go there, not to go near that festering head. The hair that clung to it was straight and fair, and it decayed very slowly. To his own children, the Pastor patiently explained that Cassidy had suddenly left. The forest, he said, had gotten to her and she had decided that enough was enough. They nodded meekly, and nothing more was said. The Pastor never went to see the head, but the elders told him where it was. They had eaten the kakua during the night, and the memory of it lasted well into their conversion to the Lord of Light.
Lawrence Osborne has been published in the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Harper’s, Newsweek, Tin House, the Wall Street Journal and many other magazines. He is the author, most recently, of the memoir Bangkok Days, published by Farrar Straus and Giroux. His novel, The Forgiven will be published by Hogarth in Fall 2012 and a book about drinking, The Wet and the Dry, will be published by Harvill in Spring 2013.