The Whale Rider

by Witi Ihimaera

  ‘Big brown eyes and fantastic figure, huh?’

  ‘Jeff, no —’ In his hands he had a soggy apple pie.

  ‘Lips just waiting to be kissed?’ His eyes gleamed with vengeance.

  I should count myself lucky that I had cooked dinner the night before. Had it been Jeff, that apple pie wouldn’t have been so scrumptious.

  Not long after that Jeff also got a phone call, but the news wasn’t so good. His mother called from Papua New Guinea to ask him to come home.

  ‘Your father’s too proud to ring himself,’ she said, ‘but he’s getting on, Jeff, and he needs you to help him run the coffee plantation. He’s had a run of rotten luck with the workers this year and you know what the natives are like, always drinking.’

  ‘I’ll have to go,’ said Jeff. I knew he was reluctant to do so. Indeed, one of the reasons why he had come to Sydney was that it was as far from his family as he could get. He loved them deeply, but sometimes love becomes a power game between the ambitions that parents have for their children and the ambitions that children have for themselves. ‘But it looks like all my chickens are coming home to roost,’ Jeff said ruefully.

  ‘Family is family,’ I said.

  ‘Say,’ he interrupted. ‘You wouldn’t like to come with me?’

  I hesitated. Ever since speaking to Porourangi I had actually been thinking of going back to Aotearoa. Instead, I said, ‘Sure, I’ve been a cowboy all my life. Let’s saddle up, partner.’ So we started to pack up ready to move on out. I rang Whangara to tell Nanny Flowers.

  ‘You’re going where?’ she yelled. As usual she was holding the phone at arm’s length.

  ‘To Papua New Guinea.’

  ‘What!’ she said. ‘You’ll get eaten up by all them cannibals. What’s at Papua New Guinea’ — I mouthed the words along with her — ‘that you can’t get in Whangara? You should come home instead of gallivanting all over the world.’

  ‘I’ll be home next summer. I promise.’ There was silence at the other end. ‘Hullo?’

  Koro Apirana came to the telephone. ‘Rawiri?’ he said loudly. ‘What did you say? Your Nanny is crying.’ There was a tussle at the other end and Nanny Flowers returned.

  ‘I can speak for myself,’ she said in a huff. Then, in a soft voice, full of longing, she added, ‘All right, boy. You go to Papua New Guinea. But don’t make promises about next summer. Otherwise I will be watching the road, and going down to the bus every day to see if you are on it.’

  Tears began to mist my vision. I could just imagine my Nanny walking down the road in summer, Kahu skipping beside her, and sitting on the verge watching the cars going past, and asking the bus driver —

  ‘We love you,’ Nanny said.

  Waiting and waiting. Then the phone clicked on the handset and she was gone.

  eleven

  I was two years with Jeff in Papua New Guinea and while they were productive years, they were not always happy. Jeff’s father couldn’t come down to Port Moresby to meet us but his mother, Clara, did. Although Jeff had told her I was a Maori it was obvious that I was still too dark. As soon as I stepped off the plane I could almost hear her wondering, ‘Oh, my goodness, how am I going to explain this to the women at the Bridge Club?’ But she was polite and gracious and kept up a lively chatter on the plane to Mount Hagen.

  Tom, Jeff’s father, was another story, and I liked him from the start. He was a self-made man whose confidence had not been shattered by his long and debilitating illness. But it was clear that he needed his son to help him. I can still remember the first time I saw Tom. He was standing on the verandah of the homestead, resting his weight on two callipers. He wasn’t embarrassed by his disability and when Jeff went up to greet him he simply said, ‘Gidday young fella. Glad to have you home.’

  Tom had contracted Parkinson’s disease. It wasn’t until weeks later that I discovered the disease had not only struck at his limbs but also had rendered him partially blind.

  The situation was clear. Jeff would have to act as an extension to his father, his arms and legs and eyes. Deskbound, Tom would run the plantation from the homestead and Jeff would translate the instructions into action. As for me, I’ve always been pretty good at hard work, so it was simply a matter of spitting on my hands and getting down to business.

  Putting the plantation back on its feet was a challenge which the countryside really threw at us; I have never known a country which has fought back as hard as Papua New Guinea. I doubt if it can ever be tamed of its temperatures, soaring into sweat zones, for its terrain, so much a crucible of crusted plateaus and valleys, and its tribalism. But we tried, and I think we won some respite from the land, even if only for a short time. Man might carve his identification mark on the earth but, once he ceases to be vigilant, Nature will take back what man had once achieved to please his vanity.

  Sometimes, when you yourself are living life to the full, you forget that life elsewhere also continues to change like a chameleon. For instance, I used to marvel at the nationalism sweeping Papua New Guinea and the attempts by the Government to transplant national identity and customs onto the colonial face of the land. They were doing so despite an amazing set of difficulties: first, Papua New Guinea was fractionalised into hundreds of tribal groups and their language was spoken in a thousand different tongues; second, there were so many outside influences on Papua New Guinea’s inheritance, including their neighbours across the border in Irian Jaya; and, third, the new technology demanded that the people literally had to live ‘one thousand years in one lifetime’, from loincloth to the three-piece suit and computer knowledge in a simple step.

  In many respects the parallels with the Maori in New Zealand were very close, except that we didn’t have to advance as many years in one lifetime. However, our journey was possibly more difficult because it had to be undertaken within European terms of acceptability. We were a minority and much of our progress was dependent on European goodwill. And there was no doubt that in New Zealand, just as in Papua New Guinea, our nationalism was also galvanising the people to become one Maori nation.

  So it was that in Australia and Papua New Guinea I grew into an understanding of myself as a Maori and, I guess, was being prepared for my date with destiny. Whether it had anything to do with Kahu’s destiny, I don’t know, but just as I was maturing in my own understanding she too was moving closer and closer to that point where she was in the right place, at the right time, with the right understanding to accomplish the task which had been assigned to her. In this respect there is no doubt in my mind that she had always been the right person.

  My brother Porourangi has always been a good letter writer and he kept me in touch with the affairs of the people at home. I could tell that his chiefly prestige was growing, his spirit, and I appreciated the chiefly kindliness he felt in wanting me to know that although I was far from the family I was not forgotten. Apparently Koro Apirana had now begun a second series of schools for the young people of the Coast. Our Koro had accepted that Porourangi would be ‘the one’ in our generation to carry on the leadership of the people, but he was still looking for ‘the one’ in the present generation. ‘He wants to find a young boy,’ Porourangi jested, ‘to pull the sword out of the stone, someone who has been marked by the Gods for the task. Nobody has so far been able to satisfy him.’ Then, in one of his letters, Porourangi made my heart leap with joy. Ana had told him it was about time that Kahu came back to stay in Whangara, with her and Porourangi.

  Kahu was then six years old; Rehua’s mother had agreed and so Kahu returned. ‘Well,’ Porourangi wrote, ‘you should have seen us all having a cry at the bus stop. Kahu got off the bus and she has grown so much, you wouldn’t recognise her. Her first question, after all the hugging, was ‘Where’s Paka? Is Paka here?’ Nanny Flowers said he was fishing, so she waited and waited all day down at the beach for him. When he came in, she leapt into his arms. But you know our Koro, as gruff as usual. Still, it is really good to have Kahu home.’
r />   In his later letters Porourangi wrote about the problems he felt were facing the Maori people. He had gone with Koro Apirana to Raukawa country and had been very impressed with the way in which Raukawa was organising its youth resources to be in a position to help the people in the century beginning with the year 2000. ‘Will we be ready?’ he asked. ‘Will we have prepared the people to cope with the new challenges and the new technology? And will they still be Maori?’ I could tell that the last question was weighing heavily on his mind. In this respect we both recognised that the answer lay in Koro Apirana’s persistence with the school sessions, for he was one of the very few who could pass on the sacred knowledge, to us. Our Koro was like an old whale stranded in an alien present, but that was how it was supposed to be because he also had his role in the pattern of things, in the tides of the future.

  Near the middle of our second year in Papua New Guinea Jeff and I could afford to relax a little. We took trips to Manus Island and it was there that Jeff put into words the thoughts that had been on my mind for some months.

  ‘You’re getting homesick, aren’t you Rawiri?’ he said.

  We had been diving in the lagoon, and in that wondrous blue water, I had picked up a shining silver shell from the reef. I had taken it back to the beach and was listening to the sea whispering to me from the shell’s silver whorls.

  ‘A little,’ I replied. Many things were coming to a head for me on the plantation, and I wanted to avoid a collision. Jeff and I were getting along okay but his parents were pushing him ever so gently in the right direction, to consort with his own kind in the clubs and all the parties of the aggressively expatriate. On my part, this had thrown me more into the company of the ‘natives’, like Bernard who had more degrees than Clara had chins, and Joshua, who both worked on the farm. In so doing I had broken a cardinal rule and my punishment was ostracism.

  ‘We’ve come a long way together,’ Jeff said.

  ‘We sure have,’ I laughed. ‘And there’s still a way to go yet.’

  Then Jeff said, ‘I want to thank you. For everything. But if you have to go, I’ll understand.’

  I smiled at him, reflectively. I placed the shell back to my ear. Hoki mai, hoki mai ki te wa kainga, the sea whispered, come home.

  Jeff and I returned to the plantation the next day. There was a letter waiting from Porourangi. Ana was expecting a baby, and the whole family were hoping that the child would be a son. ‘Of all of us,’ Porourangi wrote, ‘Kahu seems to be the most excited. Koro Apirana, too, is over the moon.’

  The letter had the effect of making me realise how much time had passed since I had been in the company of my whanau, and I felt a sudden keenness, like pincers squeezing my heart, to hold them all in my arms. Hoki mai, hoki mai. Come home.

  Then three events occurred which convinced me that I should be homeward bound. The first happened when Jeff and his parents were invited to a reception hosted in Port Moresby for a young expatriate couple who’d just been wed. At first Clara’s assumption was that I would stay back and look after the plantation, but Jeff said I was ‘one of the family’ and insisted I accompany them. Clara made it perfectly obvious that she was embarrassed by my presence and I was very saddened, at the reception, to hear her say to another guest, ‘He’s a friend of Jeff’s. You know our Jeff, always bringing home dogs and strays. But at least he’s not a native.’ Her laughter glittered like knives.

  But that was only harbinger to the tragedy which took place when we returned to Mount Hagen. We had parked the station wagon at the airport and were driving home to the plantation. Jeff was at the wheel. We were all of us in a merry mood. The road was silver with moonlight. Suddenly, in front of us, I saw a man walking along the verge. I thought Jeff had seen him too and would move over to the middle of the road to pass him. But Jeff kept the station wagon pointed straight ahead.

  The man turned. His arms came up, as if he was trying to defend himself. The front bumper crunched into his thighs and legs and he was catapulted into the windscreen which smashed into a thousand fragments. Jeff braked. The glass was suddenly splashed with blood. I saw a body being thrown ten metres to smash on the road. In the headlights and steam, the body moved. Clara screamed. Tom said, ‘Oh my God.’

  I went to get out. Clara screamed again, ‘Oh no. No. His tribe could be on us any second. Payback, it could be payback for us. It’s only a native.’

  I pushed her away. Tom yelled, ‘For God’s sake, Rawiri, try to understand. You’ve heard the stories —’

  I couldn’t comprehend their fear. I looked at Jeff but he was just sitting there, stunned, staring at that broken body moving fitfully in the headlights. Then, suddenly Jeff began to whimper. He started the motor.

  ‘Let me out,’ I hissed. ‘Let me out. That’s no native out there. That’s Bernard.’ A cous is a cous.

  I yanked the door open. Clara yelled out to Jeff, ‘Oh, I can see them.’ Shadows on the road. ‘Leave him here. Leave him.’ Her words were high-pitched, frenzied. ‘Oh. Oh. Oh.’

  The station wagon careered past me. I will never forget Jeff’s white face, so pallid, so fearful.

  The second event occurred after the inquest. Bernard had died on the road that night. Who’s to say that he would have lived had we taken him to hospital?

  It was an accident, of course. A native walking carelessly on the side of the road. A cloud covering the moon for a moment. The native shouldn’t have been there anyway. It could have happened to anybody.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ I said to Jeff. ‘You can’t help being who you are.’ But all I could think of was the waste of a young man who had come one thousand years to his death on a moonlit road, the manner in which the earth must be mourning for one of its hopes and its sons in the new world, and the sadness that a friend I thought I had would so automatically react to the assumptions of his culture. And would I be next? There was nothing further to keep me here.

  It was then that another letter came from Porourangi. The child, a girl, had been born. Naturally, Koro Apirana was disappointed and had blamed Nanny Flowers again. In the same envelope was another letter, this one from Kahu.

  ‘Dear Uncle Rawiri, how are you? We are well at Whangara. I have a baby sister. I like her very much. I am seven. Guess what, I am in the front row of our Maori culture group at school. I can do the poi. We are all lonesome for you. Don’t forget me, will you. Love. Kahutia Te Rangi.’

  Right at the bottom of Kahu’s letter Nanny Flowers had added just one word to express her irritation with my long absence from Whangara. Bang.

  I flew out of Mount Hagen the following month. Jeff and I had a fond farewell, but already I could feel the strain between us. Clara was as polite and scintillating as usual. Tom was bluff and hearty.

  ‘Goodbye, fella,’ Tom said. ‘You’re always welcome.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jeff said. ‘Always.’ Each to his own.

  The plane lifted into the air. Buffetted by the winds it finally stabilised and speared through the clouds.

  Ah yes, the clouds. The third event had been a strange cloud formation I had seen a month before above the mountains. The clouds looked like a surging sea and through them from far away a dark shape was approaching, slowly plunging. As it came closer and closer I saw that it was a giant whale. On its head was a sacred sign, a gleaming moko.

  Haumi e, hui e, taiki e.

  Let it be done.

  twelve

  I wish I could say that I had a rapturous return. Instead, Nanny Flowers growled at me for taking so long getting home, saying, ‘I don’t know why you wanted to go away in the first place. After all —’

  ‘I know, Nanny,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing out there that I can’t get here in Whangara.’

  Bang came her hand. ‘Don’t you make fun of me too,’ she said, and she glared at Koro Apirana.

  ‘Huh?’ Koro said. ‘I didn’t say nothing.’

  ‘But I can hear you thinking,’ Nanny Flowers said, ‘and I know when you’re funning me
, you old paka.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Koro Apirana said. ‘Te mea te mea.’

  Before Nanny Flowers could explode I gathered all of her in my arms, and there was much more of her now than there had been before, and kissed her. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t care if you’re not glad to see me, because I’m glad to see you.’

  Then I handed her the present I had bought her on my stopover in Sydney. You would have thought she’d be pleased but instead, smack came her hand again.

  ‘You think you’re smart, don’t you,’ she said.

  I couldn’t help it, but I had to laugh. ‘Well how was I to know you’d put on weight!’ My present had been a beautiful dress which was now three sizes too small.

  That afternoon I was looking out the window when I saw Kahu running along the road. School had just finished.

  I went to the verandah to watch her arrival. Was this the same little girl whose afterbirth had been put in the earth those many years ago? Had seven years really gone past so quickly? I felt a lump at my throat. Then she saw me.

  ‘Uncle Rawiri!’ she cried ‘You’re back!’

  The little baby had turned into a doe-eyed, long-legged beauty with a sparkle and infectious giggle in her voice. Her hair was unruly, like an afro, but she had tamed it into two plaits today. She was wearing a white dress and sandals. She ran up the steps and put her arms around my neck.

  ‘Hullo,’ she breathed as she gave me a kiss.

  I held her tightly and closed my eyes. I hadn’t realised how much I had missed the kid. Then Nanny Flowers came out and said to Kahu, ‘Enough of the loving. You and me are working girls! Come here! Be quick!’

  ‘Nanny and me are hoeing the vegetable garden,’ Kahu smiled. ‘I come very Wednesday to be her mate, when she wants a rest from Koro.’ Then she gave a little gasp and took my hand and pulled me around to the shed at the back of the house.

  ‘Don’t be too long, Kahu,’ Nanny Flowers shouted. ‘Those potatoes won’t wait all day.’