by John Boyne
While I remained quiet through most of our sailing, doing little more than identifying different species of fish, offering the names of animals that stared at us from the riverbanks and pointing out which were more dangerous than others, I grew friendly with one of the colonizers, a man named O’Hara. He seemed more respectful of the terrain and the people than most of his shipmates and, because of this, we fell into an easy companionship. O’Hara was from a place called Ireland, he told me, another land whose name had not, until now, reached my ears.
“Is it in Italy?” I asked, and he shook his head. He had a thick red beard, ginger eyebrows and the whitest skin I had ever seen. It was hard to believe that such coloring could even exist on a living creature and I found myself staring at him, wondering whether he was even human. Was it a curse of some sort, I asked myself? Had he angered God and been poisoned in his mother’s womb to be left so repulsively pale?
“No, it’s far enough away from Italy,” he told me. “Closer to England. They’d be our nearest neighbors, although we’ve been at each other’s throats this long time. That’s where the captain’s from, of course. England. They despise the Irish and we despise them back on account of how they took our land from us. He only hired me for this voyage because I can read the stars better than any lad alive, but he knows that if I had more shillings at my disposal, then I’d as soon stick a knife up my own arse than do anything to help him. But a man has to earn his keep and so here I am.”
O’Hara had brought a musical instrument with him, he called it a fiddle, and in the evenings he would play tunes on it, horrible discordant melodies that made me want to stick leaves in my ears, but the men would dance to give their legs something to do.
“Will you remain here to build the settlement?” I asked O’Hara one evening as we lay back in the rear of the boat, looking up at the stars.
“We Irish don’t colonize,” he grunted. “We get colonized. We’re just a small country, that’s the problem.”
“But here, we are a big country,” I said.
“So stop them. Don’t let them in.”
“How do we do this?”
“Fight them. Fight them until every man, woman and child is dead on one side or the other. Then fight among yourselves a little longer, just to be on the safe side. There’ll always be a few traitors that need weeding out. The enemy within.”
I nodded. I cared about my land, of course, but the tribes in my country had stopped warring with each other a century or more earlier and we had been happy when the wars finally came to an end. We were a peaceful people now and saw no reason to live anything but nonviolent lives. But while my mind was focused on my own revenge, I worried about what the future might bring, should we allow these Europeans further ingress into our dominion. I did not understand how they could come here and simply assume that what was ours could suddenly become theirs.
“And you,” he asked me. “Did you leave a family behind when you took on this voyage?”
“A son,” I said. “But I left him in the care of someone I trust.”
“You need the money, I suppose? Sure we all need the money,” he said, answering his own question.
“It’s not about money,” I told him, choosing my words carefully, for I had told no one on the boat about my true intentions. “I go in search of someone.”
“A woman, I suppose?”
“No, a man. Someone I used to call a friend many years ago.”
“Did you fall out with him, is that it?”
I frowned, uncertain what the phrase meant.
“Did you have an argument, the pair of you? Did he do something dastardly to you?”
“He committed an unforgivable act,” I said. “And I mean to hold him to account for it.”
“You do right,” said O’Hara, lying back and glancing warily at the heads of the alligators that were making their presence felt in the waters around us. “I had a friend once and he went in for a kiss with my wife and I took the head off him.”
“You decapitated him?” I asked, my eyes opening wide.
“No,” he said, laughing. “It’s just a phrase. I meant I beat the shit out of him, that’s all.”
“Oh,” I said.
“And is that what you plan on doing?”
“No,” I replied, shaking my head. “No, I mean to literally take the head off him.”
* * *
• • •
After sailing for more than a week, stopping at dozens of villages and encountering hundreds of my countrymen and -women, I grew to despise Captain Thornton, who liked to treat everyone he met as if they were barely human. At every stop, however, I would leave him to attend to his inhuman intentions while I sought out villagers old and young, taking them to one side and asking them my familiar questions.
“I travel in search of a man.”
“His name?”
“Hernán.”
A shake of the head. “I know no Hernán.”
“He’s not from here but grew up on the other side of the country. About my age but with twisted legs. He walks on sticks.”
“This man has hurt you in some way?”
“He has.”
“Do you mean to kill him?”
“Will my answer affect your memory?”
But I had no success. Some would claim that they might have seen him but wanted money to reveal what they knew and I could tell that they were simply inventing a tale for a reward. Some seemed to know more but were reluctant to tell me anything, as if they feared the earthly consequences for my cousin. I began to despair that my search would once again prove fruitless.
But then, one cold evening, as we docked our vessel at one of the larger villages along the river, luck finally came my way. The elders came out to welcome us and the women placed garlands of flowers around our necks. The timber there was very fine and it irritated me to see Thornton examining it, carefully slicing some off with his knife and chewing it between his yellow teeth, then making notes in his journal as if this might be the place that he could obliterate for the sake of increasing the felonious Italian king’s wealth.
I was making my usual inquiries when I heard the sound of children playing in the distance and wandered in that direction, happy to be separated from the world of men for a time in favor of the solace of the young. There were perhaps seven or eight of them, boys and girls running around at their games, each one overflowing with energy, but I took particular note of a girl sitting alone by one of the huts, not taking part in the activities but just watching, and made my way toward her, sitting down next to her in the dust.
“You aren’t playing with your friends?” I asked, and she turned to look at me, not even slightly frightened to find a stranger addressing her.
“No,” she said.
“Don’t you feel the urge to run around as they do?”
She shook her head before nodding toward the wall, where I saw two sticks with handles at the top balanced against the woodwork, sticks similar to the ones that Hernán used.
“I cannot run,” she told me. “My legs don’t work as other people’s do. I can only walk with the help of those.”
I reached over and picked one up. It had been fashioned from the wood of the local trees and was very fine. Hernán himself had always designed his own sticks, fashioning new ones every few months when he’d grown a little taller, the old ones proving no longer fit for purpose. As a craftsman myself, I’d always admired the detail he put into each one. His signature was an elaborate H at the end of each stick, where the vertical lines of the letter were grooved into the wood in the shape of snakes. To my knowledge, he had never created one without adding this adornment to the base and, turning the girl’s stick over in my hands now out of habit, I was taken aback to see that same symbol there. I felt excited, frightened and horrified all at once.
&nbs
p; “Where did you get these?” I asked, turning to her, and she looked a little intimidated now, perhaps by the force in my voice.
“My sticks?” she asked.
“Yes, you didn’t make them. Who made them for you?”
“A man,” she told me.
“Which man?”
“I don’t know his name. He was here a few weeks ago. He arrived on a boat. He needed new sticks and used the wood from here to make them. I sat and watched and thought they were very beautiful. I asked whether he might make some for me and he said yes. Until now, my own had been nothing more than heavy branches of trees that cut into my palms, but he used his knives to make something better, something smoother, then he taught me how to make new ones when I grow.”
“He created these for you?”
“Yes. He was very kind.”
I could scarcely believe it. After all this time, I was finally closer to Hernán than I had been in years.
“And is he still here?” I asked, looking around and hoping against hope itself that I might see him hobbling around in the distance. “Did he remain in the village?”
“No,” she said. “He left some weeks ago.”
“Which way did he go?”
“West,” she said, pointing toward the horizon, where the sun was beginning to set.
I stood up and handed her back her stick. West was the direction in which Captain Thornton was heading, too.
“And was he alone?” I asked. “Was the man with the twisted legs traveling on his own?”
She thought about it for a moment, before shaking her head. “No,” she replied. “He had a woman with him. And a girl.”
NEW ZEALAND
A.D. 1642
THE NEXT MORNING, it was the Irish sailor, O’Brien, who first caught sight of land, and we immediately set course for the shore. Arriving at a beach, we looked around in awe at the beauty of this new territory and there was not a man among us who did not think that we had discovered paradise on Earth.
“Completely unspoilt,” remarked one of the sailors.
“For now,” I replied.
“What was that, sir?” roared Captain Tasman, who seemed capable of hearing every word that any of us said, whether it was spoken aloud, beneath our breaths, or existed as nothing more than a random thought passing through our minds.
“I said it’s unspoilt for now, Captain,” I replied, less confidently.
“And I suppose you think that I’m here to spoil it,” he said with an unpleasant smile. “Because I’m such a scoundrel, taking land that isn’t mine to take. You have a comment for everything, don’t you, sir? Anyone would think that you weren’t being paid to guide us.”
“I only meant—”
“I know what you meant, sir, and I reject the charge. I reject it utterly. So spare me your sermons, as I have little patience for hypocrisy.”
It was hard to argue with this assessment. I could hardly condemn his actions, after all, when I was happy enough to profit from them.
“Where do you suppose we are, Captain?” asked O’Brien, and Tasman drew in his breath, looking around at the mountain, the forests, the golden sand.
“You know the story of Columbus, I suppose?” he asked.
“A little.”
“Spanish sailor. Left Madrid in 1490 to chart a new course for the Indies in the hope of finding a faster route to the Orient. Only he bumped into the Americas instead and claimed it for his King. The luckiest mistake a man ever made.”
“He was Italian,” I said, the words coming out of my mouth before I could consider the wisdom of aggravating him further. “And it wasn’t Madrid that he departed from. It was Huelva. In 1492.”
Tasman glared at me—the man hated to be contradicted—and I would have been more concerned about his retribution, had I not been wondering how I had come to know these facts in the first place, for I had never read or heard much about Christopher Columbus and yet seemed to know the details of his voyage as if I had been standing on the dock to wave him off.
“Just testing, sir, just testing,” the captain replied, grinning through his yellow teeth as he put one of his meaty hands down the front of his trousers and gave his nether regions a lengthy and apparently enjoyable scratch. “My point being that Señor Columbus discovered something unexpected on his travels and we might have done the same thing. We’ll claim it as our own anyway. What do you say, lads? And we’ll put a name to it later.”
“Could it be the Province of Beach, do you think, Captain?” asked one of the men.
“Do you see any gold hereabouts, Mr. Harkin?” roared Tasman. “If you can, then you have better eyes than me, for all I can see is sand and mountains.”
“But it may be further along,” said another, Meijer. “Hidden in the center of the island. Out of sight from here.”
The captain considered this. “Aye, it might be,” he agreed. “It very well might be.”
A silence descended on us then as we wondered whether we might soon be rich men. When the Dutch East India Company had commissioned Abel Tasman to explore this part of the world, one of their objectives was to discover the famed province described in Marco Polo’s work, where gold, he said, was so plentiful that only those who laid eyes on it could believe that it existed.
“Has anyone ever wondered,” asked O’Brien, “how we’d get it all back home in our ship anyway? The weight of it would sink us, surely?”
All heads turned toward him, for it was not an unreasonable question, but the captain said that we would put all our tenders out to sea and fill them with our haul, dragging them back to Europe with the sun sparkling off their burnished surfaces, and this seemed to put the minds of the men at rest.
Our mood shifted a few minutes later, however, when a group of men and women emerged from over the sand dunes, perhaps one hundred of them, barely dressed but with their skin covered in the most elaborate tattoos, and each one carrying a fine-pointed spear in his hand.
“Stand easy, men,” said Captain Tasman quietly. I glanced in his direction as he stood his ground, holding a determined arm in the air and waving it back and forth as he beckoned them forward in a gesture intended to signify friendship. The group moved toward us in a similar formation to a flock of birds in the sky, with one of their number leading the way and the rest spread out behind him so they resembled an arrowhead ready to pierce our core.
When they came closer, Tasman bowed his head and introduced himself, extending a hand, but the chief of these people, who we were later to discover were called Māori, simply stared at it, uncertain what was expected of him. The captain continued to talk, explaining our reasons for being there, but it was a fool’s errand since none of them spoke our language and they seemed as baffled by his words as we were by their replies. He reached back into the tender and removed a handful of trinkets and jewels and instructed me to distribute them among the natives. I did so carefully, for I did not want to be perceived as a threat and pierced with a spear, but they seemed delighted by the baubles, hanging them around their necks and grinning broadly. Finally, I had only one piece left, a colorful necklace that I handed to the chieftain, who, from the way he spoke and pointed at himself, appeared to be named Kalawai’a. He snatched it from my hands, examined it and placed it around his neck and, although he wore a smile, he still seemed uncertain whether he approved of our landing or not.
Tasman made some indications that we would like to rest on the beach for the evening and the chief understood, for he nodded and indicated that we might go where we wished, before turning and leading his people back in the direction from which they had come.
“Savages,” Tasman said to their retreating backs. “Absolute savages.”
The chief turned then and stared at him before continuing on his way. Of course, he could not possibly have understood the word but clearly the man was no
fool and he recognized the insult embedded in his intonation.
* * *
• • •
It had been a long time since I had last slept with a woman, but I did so that night, betraying my wife for the first time since she went missing. The girl’s name was Laka’sha and she approached me while I was sitting alone in the sand dunes, staring out into the vast expanse of sea. She wore only a thin cloth around her waist and her breasts were full and rounded, so much so that I found myself instantly aroused by her presence.
I told her my name, pointing at my chest as I said it, and she tried to pronounce it but the syllables proved too complicated for her tongue and she could not repeat it back to me with any proficiency. And then, to my surprise, she took my hand and placed it on her heart. I had heard stories among sailors of how friendly the native women in these parts could be, but little imagined that I would find myself in such a situation. As I lifted my other hand to touch her, she looked me in the eye, leaned forward and pressed her lips against my own.
Soon we stood up and made our way toward a clearing that was surrounded by rushes and, when she lay down, I found myself intrigued by the many tattoos and piercings that adorned her body. While she was nowhere near as elaborately ornamented as some of the men I had seen earlier, there was still an extraordinary amount of ink embedded in her skin. Each image fascinated me and I couldn’t help but run my fingers along the designs. They revealed ideas and images that only the members of her tribe could fully understand but somehow I felt moved by them. She ran her fingers along my body, too, as if she could scarcely comprehend how a grown man’s pelt could remain a blank canvas; I suspected that the only times she had seen such unmarked flesh was on the skin of babies and small children. What elaborate ceremonies and initiations did these people have to go through, I wondered, in order to mark their transition from childhood to adulthood?
