We had touched down in the capital, in an Airbus painted not just with a bird of paradise, but as a bird of paradise and with the words “Niugini Airlines” splashed across the side. Another jet the following day flew us to Mt. Hagen up in the highlands where the weather thank God was permanently cooler and where at a dealer called Ela Motors we bought ourselves a truck: a vehicle painted a cheerful sunny yellow. And it was a few days later that my family of five took that truck westward ho into Enga Province where Dad and Mom would be working and where our home base would be. Enga was named for the people as well as for the language spoken there. In Enga, the Enga spoke Enga.
There was no hurry, it was decided. Dad didn’t have to start his job right away if he didn’t want to, and he didn’t. And I didn’t have to go to boarding school right away if I didn’t want to, and I didn’t. Instead our first job together as a family was really to get used to the province. Familiarize ourselves. Get the smells of Enga in our noses and the food of Enga in our guts and the rain and mist of Enga on our skin. And get a feel for the people too and what it might be like to be them. Otherwise what kind of missionaries would we be?
Our orientation would happen at an outstation called Mulitaka. And you wouldn't call Mulitaka quite the real bush, because it was right off the highlands highway. Still, not many foreigners ventured out that far west; I myself, in the six weeks I was there, saw only one other whiteskin besides ourselves. That was a shoestring traveller from Israel, who stayed with us a day or two. I had learned and forgotten that Hebrew was written from right to left, and I can still see him writing in his journal at the table, and I can still hear me thinking to myself "oh that's right, in Hebrew it's right to left." It's a funny thing, how re-learning a fact like "Hebrew is written right to left" can feel so much more rewarding than learning that same fact new, especially when what you're relearning was known before only abstractly, but is now being learned from lived experience. Somehow the concrete verification of the fact renders the fact itself instantly brighter. You'll remember it better. You'll prize it more.
At Mulitaka every morning just after breakfast there'd be a knock at the door. Open it and there would be Pastor Kaipas, usually with the vicar Lulyakalwe in tow. Pastor Kaipas had a scraggly goatee and a laugh all his own, a laugh that I loved to make happen even when what made it happen had to be a Pidgin mistake of mine: “Aiieee!” he would say as he slapped himself on the thigh and revved up his megawatt smile, just about whenever I said something idiotic or nonsensical or just plain wrong. As for the vicar Lulyakulwe, he was a good ten years younger than Pastor Kaipas and much quieter. I loved his name, which to me sounded like what a quiet river does to you when you sit down next to it for an hour and just watch and listen to the water flow by. Lulyakulwe. Lulyakulwe.
Kaipas and Lulyakulwe never taught us inside the house; I think it would have made them too self-conscious, and after all, the whole area was their home, river, mountains, sky and all, so why would they want to crawl inside our little white shell? Instead every morning we all went outside and sat on metal folding chairs out on the lawn, each of us with a white paperback textbook called Untangled New Guinea Pidgin open on our laps. I still have the copy I used back then. It's pretty beat up, but it still makes me happy to take it off the shelf and look at it. Holding it open on my lap makes it all come back to me, how it was, the whole arrangement of the instruction time on the lawn: Pastor taking Mom and Dad and me in a circle of four, and Lulyakalwe and my younger brother and sister in another circle of three. The teaching method was simple: we just read through the exercises in the book and then talked about whatever the exercises brought to mind. It was the conversation, as Pastor said, and not the exercises per se that would get us to learn.
It was just a fascinating invention, Pidgin was: a brand new language sprung up out of a nation of isolated language groups out of the need to communicate and mix and trade, but still not boringly pragmatic as you might imagine such a language might be, but instead full of color and character and imagination and fun. Every sentence was like a pile of fox cubs wrestling or say a school of dolphins zestfully beating up on a marauding shark, chasing him off to where he came from--some sharky elsewhere. Some of my favorite words:
mauswara: baloney, BS
bagarapim: to ruin, to destroy
raskelman: criminal, troublemaker
wantok: kin
asples: native place, home
papamama: parents
samtingnating: not much, no big deal
Longwe liklik: a bit of a long way
While we were being taught, people from the area would come up to the bamboo fence that surrounded the compound and lean on the fence and look on, talking in Enga. Once in awhile, a bit miffed, Pastor would stand up and try to shoo them off, and maybe for a time they would absent themselves. But then soon enough and maybe a bit self-consciously they'd trickle back laughing and smiling to the fence. Their time and again return to the fence made me think of water in the moat around a sandcastle, and how when the water is scooped from the moat it will always trickle back in, the source of it being something so much bigger than your hand. It also occurs to me today that the onlookers were probably amused not just at us, but also at Pastor.
One part of me did want to go to the singsing, or celebration. Pastor Kaipas told us all about it and what it would be like: all the people from two villages, he said, would be gussied up in their best traditional bilas, or decoration: the men especially, they would wear their huge ceremonial wigs: collocations and assemblages of ancestral hair. Generations after generations of hair went into those wigs and most of that hair would have come from people who lived long before first contact. And there would be a feast. Pigs would be butchered and split and a pit dug and lined with heated stones and filled with greens and cooking bananas and breadfruit and sweet potato and large hunks of the pork. Then it would all be covered up and allowed to cook in its own steam. Finally when the time was right, the whole business would be pulled apart and all the food shared all around.
“It’s part of what this place is about,” Dad said. “And you’re withdrawing yourself from it.”
I knew. I knew. But I was like a tender new moon setting early–not able to take more than a short look at the earth that night. Maybe this was out of shyness, maybe just out of sadness. Maybe I just wanted to be alone. But anyway I didn't want to go. And I just told my folks that I didn't, and they let me stay, which I appreciated.
The other four left in the truck in the early afternoon. I read in my room for a long time--I was big into Dostoysevsky at the time and couldn't stop; those novels were like a existential drug to me, those novels by Mr. big FD. At five o’clock though, sated with Russian angst, I went out to the garage (just beyond the fence) to crank up the diesel generator. I was starting it up about an hour earlier than we usually did, but I figured that hey this was no big deal–just a little extra diesel. Back inside and with a bunch of lights on in the house I switched my boom box on to play a cassette of Schubert’s Unfinished to the beautiful end of the impossibly beautiful second movement and that's all folks, it's unfinished. I also recall tuning the shortwave to the BBC to everyone talking about Gorbachev freeing up the Soviet Union and thawing out relations with the West. I decided that even out in the bush of New Guinea I was happy about the East-West thaw, and it's a funny thing how your concerns and viewpoints follow you everywhere, like a moon along the highway or like discrimination through US history; there's just no such thing as blanking your slate. Something always stays indelibly you.
At dusk it began to rain hard, which put an end to any listening, the reason being that the roof protecting me from the rain was nothing more than a sheet of galvanized tin, so that the white noise of the rain was just overwhelming. As for that though, I was satisfied; I'd had enough music and radio for now. More to the point it was time to eat. An ancient refrigerator in our kitchen ran on a kerosene flame. No electricity. Nothing but a flame! I couldn’t explain this, but it worked, and in any case, on the top shelf of this miracle appliance was a leftover rice casserole my mother had left for me, and I was just getting down to eating some of it bachelor style at the sink when there was a good hard knocking at the study door. Sighing, I went to answer it.
“Husat i stap?" I called out from my side.
“Mi tasol.” Oh Pastor Kaipas. I turned the skeleton key in its chamber. The door opened inward.
“Yu laik i kam insait?” I asked.
“Nogat, mi stap orait.”
“Tasol yumi no ken toktok stret.”
He hesitated, then stepped in. The previous night he had come and told us he would not be able to come to the sing-sing, though Lulyakulwe would. He, Kaipas, had some sick people way out in the bush to visit--members of his parish. So that's where he had been all this day and why he was just getting back: the ways muddy and the weather wet.
Just inside the door lay a large oval throw rug–one of those rugs made of multi-colored fabric-extras all tied together. Kaipas chose to stand on that rug–an island of sorts, in the way that New Guinea was an island. As I shut the door, he folded his black umbrella and shook it gently so the water drops fell onto the rug. By this time it was raining more gently on the roof, in a kind of pattery whisper--Lulyakulwe's acoustic cousin. Kaipas asked how I was doing. Fine, I answered, fine. What about the house, he asked. Was everything at the house okay, or had anything happened nearby while he was away? I told him no, no, everything was fine.
"Olsem wanem na yu no go wantaim papamama bilong yu?"
Then why had I not gone with my parents? Well that was a question wasn't it? The sixty four thousand dollar question. And I was still considering how to answer it and what sort of excuse to give when I found myself under the full bemused and magnifying power of his gaze. Yes there in the study Kaipas studied me, cocking his head like a bird. It was as if he had noticed something on my chin: a bug maybe or a maybe the smear of something, or heck maybe the smear of a bug. The rice casserole, I thought. A grain of rice casserole was stuck to my face. I tried to brush it off with my hand.
“Nogat, nogat,” he said. Smiling unwaveringly, he reached out and touched my chin. The touch of a bird’s feather couldn’t have been lighter.
“Mausgras bilong yu i kamap,” he said. Your beard is coming.
And that was the end of our conversation, the simple answer to everything: "mausgras bilong yu i kamap." My visitor wished me good night--
"Gunait."
"Gunait."
--opened the door, spread his umbrella, drew out his flashlight, and set off again out into the rain: O voyager, O shepherd of souls, O comforter of the sick and teacher of pidgin to me. His light-beam bobbed in the wet dark until it disappeared, and then I shut the door. Mausgras bilong mi i kamap. Good phrase. I was a lucky man: young, white, manly at the chin, with people who understood me.
HB
No comments:
Post a Comment