‘He want you be son,’ the young chief said, and the penny dropped that Kurum had decided to adopt me.
The Asmat have two ways of forming alliances outside their clan. The first is through a solemn wife-swapping rite, for which, being wifeless, I was (I thought rather unfairly) ineligible. The second method was through adoption. There was a spontaneously sunny and endearing side to Kurum, despite his dangerous unpredictability. My readiness to accept his invitation was based, I suspect, largely on vanity, for it is not every day that one gets a chance to become the child of a cannibal headhunter. I was also surprised by his offer, since only the previous day we had indulged in a flaring row over some tobacco that I had refused to give him. It was the sort of exchange which the Asmat seem frequently to enjoy, in which you stick your face a few inches from the opposition and work yourself into a howling rage, using the language of your choice. It’s a method of discourse which has a surprisingly refreshing after-effect. Kurum had failed to get the tobacco out of me, so perhaps his motives for adopting me were no more honourable than my own for accepting him. He knew, however, what the rite required…
He rushed delightedly off to his hut and reappeared again with his three embarrassed wives in tow. One was a ripe teenager with a baby on her hip, another was a world-worn 30-year-old, and the third was a charming shrivelled lady – indeterminably older – with skin like the Piltdown Man. Kurum pointed at their breasts and made earnest sucking gestures with his lips. To my horror I realized that if he was to be my father, then his wives would obviously become my mothers.
Bill and Jean-Pierre chortled at my discomfort but, being better mannered, I ignored them and leant dutifully towards the eldest lady first and took a half-hearted peck at a dangling rock-tipped dug, and began to move on.
An Asmat woman in full and splendid plumage. (LAWRENCE & LORNE BLAIR)
‘No! Both! Both! Suck! Suck!’ was the obvious meaning of their impatient husband’s shouts as he hopped up and down, becoming more and more angry. The eldest wife tenderly lifted the second pointed piece of anthracite for my attention. Things could only look up from here on, and I was getting into the stride of things by the time I got round to the youngest. But here there was a shock in store. I should have thought of the baby on her hip! How strange it was, after all those years, and in that setting, to sense the taste of my earliest childhood flooding into my mouth again. Jean-Pierre was later adopted by the master carver and humourist Agope, but he insisted on inspecting his future mothers by peeping through the slats in their hut before he deigned to accept the high honour. When Bill’s turn came to become the son of another warrior chieftain, he had 16 nipples to get past, and he moved so slowly that we virtually had to prise him off the poor youngest before gangrene set in.
By now we felt bold enough tactfully to broach the subject of Michael Rockefeller, whose fate had now become much more interesting to us. The three most tenable theories (in the absence of the suppressed Dutch information) were that he had drowned in what the press had reported was a six-mile swim to shore, or that he had been eaten by a crocodile or a shark.
We had established that salt-water crocodiles are fairly rare here, and the Asmat said they seldom saw them. Sharks, on the other hand, were plentiful, but there was not a single known incident of them attacking humans. This was confirmed by the Asmat women, who spend many hours a day netting fish while standing on the muddy sea-bottom which slopes so gradually that they can be up to a mile out to sea with the water still only reaching up to their chest. The only danger, they told us, was of stepping on stingrays, so they shuffled along the bottom without lifting their feet.
We had also noted that in the tropical haze this low-lying mangrove coast was no longer visible to the naked eye at sea-level much beyond three or four miles – which was therefore probably the maximum distance Rockefeller would have had to cover before reaching shore. In fact, from as much as two miles out a swimmer could already begin touching the muddy bottom with his feet and would be able to wade the rest of the way. We were now fairly certain that Rockefeller had succeeded in reaching land.
Sitting in the Leu with Kukoi one evening, I asked him what he knew about the event. Although only a child at the time, he remembered the excitement well.
‘There were many planes and boats everywhere,’ he said, indicating low-flying sea-planes with expressive hand and arm gestures. ‘All the other villages said we killed him. We were afraid and blocked our river with trees so that all those people wouldn’t come up here.
‘Later, when the padre from Basiem came and asked us what had happened to the white man, the elders were afraid to tell him. But what Ajam and the others who did it told me was that they were fishing and they saw this white man floating in the water. He was floating there, and he floated away to sea, and that’s the truth. But everything is all right now because afterwards, when the village split up, we killed Ajam and the others. So it’s all finished.’
Even the bravest warriors are vulnerable to psychic attack. This man sleeps on the skull of his father as a counter-measure (BILL & CLAIRE LEIMBACH)
Old Bertaham, a much-respected warrior, spoke less ambiguously. He is an adopted son, rather than a native of Otjanep, with a wife and children there, but he has wives and children in other villages, too, and no particular axe to grind for any of them.
‘Ah, yes, I have killed many men!’ He grinned. ‘And I ate them all. Delicious!’
But when asked about Rockefeller his attitude changed to one of blunt authority as he began naming villages.
‘Omanesep didn’t do it. Amanamkai didn’t do it. It was Otjanep and only Otjanep.’ He explained that Ajam and the others were returning from fishing when they found Rockefeller lying in the mud, breathing heavily. Two of them were related to the chiefs killed by the Dutch police, and an argument broke out. They speared him there in the mud and brought him back to the longhouse and cut him up.
‘They used a bamboo knife, like this one of mine, used only on people. You cut off his head, like this: his arms and his legs like this, and then you cut up here.’
Bertaham traced a line from his groin up his side and made a gesture of breaking his ribs and ripping open his torso.
‘Then you pull his body back, like this, and throw him on to the fire. Everyone eats, but only the important men get to eat the brain. The government won’t allow us to do this any more,’ he added wistfully. The skull of a revenge victim whose blood has been used to anoint a bis pole becomes an important trophy – necessary to the initiation rites of young boys. Rockefeller’s skull and steel-rimmed eyeglasses were two bits of hard evidence which we knew could back the villagers into an incriminating corner. We hesitated to ask about them, but kept our eyes peeled, particularly when the pole-carving was completed and the village adornments were brought out for display. There were now seven superb standing bis poles gazing formidably down on the drumming relatives. But no one would tell us who they were for specifically. Nor had we yet asked. For weeks we had shared with them the fun and excitement of the poles taking shape, and had grown forgetful of the harsh reality that the souls being drummed into them would give them no rest until avenged.
Poles for dead Asmat warriors are ready to stand and dance the dance of revenge. (LORNE BLAIR)
We wondered whether on this occasion the Otjaneps would merely fulfil the symbolic rather than the murderous obligations of the rite, and I felt, too, that they themselves were unsure.
A steady rain began to fall, and although they barely faltered in their drumming and dancing I now sensed a subtle unease pervading the village. Then the sky blackened and released a furious thunderstorm. All night it raged around Otjanep, as only a tropical storm can do. Lightning stabbed the mangroves, briefly illuminating the bis poles’ grotesque faces. Nobody slept. Bill, Jean-Pierre and I tossed in our hammocks that night without closing our eyes. Our hosts huddled over the embers; their occasional attempts at song were desultory and short-lived. They muttered amongst themse
lves in tones we had not heard before, and they periodically cast hard glances in our direction as if we were responsible for the elemental anger. They were afraid. And for the first time since our arrival in Otjanep we were afraid of them.
The following morning we packed up and left. They seemed relieved to help us on our way, out into the open Arafura Sea past where Michael had made his last swim, and down the coast to the mission post at Basiem.
By the time we reached Basiem’s river, everyone’s spirits had revived. We paddled upstream with them as warriors should: standing on the gunwales of our violently rocking canoe, Cassowari-bone knives tucked into our rattan armbands, dog-tooth and nautilus-shell necklaces jangling and egret-feather headdresses billowing, roaring the simple war-chants our friends had taught us. It was only when we saw the resigned worldly-wise face of the welcoming missionary father, that we became fully aware of how distant we had become from the twentieth century during our barely two months in Otjanep. We realized we had completely overlooked the fact that, apart from our tribal finery, we were as naked as the day we were born.
Lorne returned to Otjanep a year later, and on that occasion I went with him. We arrived as lecturers aboard Lindblad Explorer, which was the first passenger-ship to venture into the region. The waters were so shallow that the 2,500 tons of steel (the most precious of Asmat substances) could anchor no closer than nine miles from shore. Thus Explorer appeared to the Asmat as a kind of ‘close encounter of the First Kind’, where the superstructure of another dimension was visible only as the smallest spot at the edge of their horizon.
Lorne was persuaded to lead us into the twin villages of Otjanep, but it was to turn into a tour guide’s nightmare. We walked into a war.
I found myself piloting 18 rich, pink and elderly passengers eight miles through the pre-dawn mist to an unseen shore, in a fragile rubber boat powered by a stuttering outboard. We were a ragged train of four such craft, and quickly lost sight of each other, so I glued my eyes to the compass course given by Explorer’s captain while maintaining a constant running commentary based on the little I knew of the Asmat, to prevent my canny protégés from suspecting my unease.
After several hours the mist lifted to reveal that we were all within a few hundred yards of each other, and already entering the mouth of the Etwa river – or so we could only assume, since it was indistinguishable from any other opening in this now limitless mangrove forest which sprawled as easily over the sea as upon the land, concealing beneath its many legs just where the one met the other.
We had entered the river and rounded the first bend in a tight convoy of slowly puttering and heavily laden Zodiacs, when from the mangrove roots behind and ahead of us surged some 30 canoe-loads of howling, painted, naked warriors. Paddling with enormous strength and speed they swept round us with inches to spare, while flourishing their genitals at the horrified day-trippers as they passed. They towered over us, 10 standing men to a canoe, grasping the narrow freeboard with their prehensile toes, as we cringed in our floating rubber mattresses, four hours distant from our mother ship.
This was the traditional Asmat greeting, a ferocious show of strength, which they performed with a vengeance, fully aware of the impression they were making, for they cracked not a smile – until they recognized Lorne, piloting the lead Zodiac. Kukoi leapt excitedly aboard and shouted that they had been waiting all night since spotting Explorer on the horizon the previous evening.
With Lorne at our head we were escorted most dramatically upriver. He had warned us of the rivalries existing between Upper and Lower Otjanep, and had insisted that we should take gifts and passengers in equal amounts to both of them to avoid friction. On reaching Lower Otjanep we dismounted into mud up to our knees – those of us, that is, who were prepared to dismount at all, for there were several who now voiced the opinion that, though they had flown 12,000 miles to catch a ship for 2,000 miles to take a Zodiac ride for five hours to see the Asmat, they were already well and truly satisfied. Although we planned to stay here two hours, they refused to budge from their protective rubber sheaths tethered in the mud. An illusory protection, alas, for they sustained a blitzkrieg from midday mosquitoes from which the rest of us, milling about in the smoke-filled Leu cheek by jowl with our excitable hosts, were quite immune.
Lorne was surrounded by a pawing throng, and was quite the man of the moment. Kurum, his adopted father, ran out and greeted him warmly, showing him a baby born shortly after Lorne’s departure the previous year, and named after him: Tuan Satu or ‘Mr One’.
‘A bit paler than most, isn’t it?’ one of the passengers commented drily.
‘All Asmat babies are light-skinned for a start,’ Lorne hurriedly but truthfully explained. But this plump symbol of new life was mixed, as we soon discovered, with the spectre of death, for when most of these Lower Otjaneps had come down to greet us at the rivermouth, the warriors of Upper Otjanep had seized the opportunity to attack their village and, while we were being proudly shown baby Tuan Satu on the riverbank, behind the Leu a loud commotion was taking place where Kukoi’s elder brother was still lying in the mud with a fatal arrow through his throat, surrounded by wailing mourners. Young Kukoi was distraught. It seemed a bitter irony that this pain was being borne by the one member of the community who was genuinely committed to its evolutionary change. Kukoi touched Lorne tenderly in greeting.
‘It was Ari who killed him,’ he wept, ‘war-leader of Upper Otjanep. Always makes trouble. Now this.’ Perhaps it was the carelessness of grief which made him suddenly blurt out: ‘It was Ari, you know, who helped kill the white man.’ We both stared at him in amazement.
‘And did they eat him?’ Lorne asked. Kukoi looked him directly and sadly in the eyes.
‘Yes, they did. If you go up there, he will kill you, too.’
Now that the passengers were beginning to appreciate what we had got them into they were no longer enjoying their little outing so much, and were even becoming somewhat rebellious. But Lorne seemed far more concerned with the broader equilibrium than with the immediate welfare of us pinkies, and was still determined to go to Upper Otjanep. Since it was clearly unwise to take any of our passengers further upriver, and out of the question to leave them unattended in Lower Otjanep, Lorne would have to go alone.
‘It’s quite OK,’ he whispered to me. ‘I’m just as friendly with that lot as I am with these. We went to a lot of trouble last year to divide our attentions between the two of them so they wouldn’t get too jealous.’
‘Yes,’ I put in. ‘It’s worked wonderfully!’
‘Ari shouldn’t be any problem,’ he said. ‘Keep everyone calm, show them the art, and the babies, and keep them away from the corpse. If I’m not back in half an hour, take them all home to the ship and come back with some serious help.’
You may know what it is like: there is nothing one can say.
I watched him slip down to the bank, make some soothing sounds to the mosquito-blistered stick-in-the-boats, liberate one of the empty Zodiacs and disappear up-river with it behind a rooster-tail wake.
From Lorne’s Notes
I reached Upper Otjanep to a scene of such turmoil that my arrival was almost unnoticed. A wailing crowd on the bank surged around a fallen figure. They paid little attention to me as I climbed ashore and joined them. At their feet lay a teenage boy – the second corpse I’d seen in 15 minutes. His head had been partly severed by an axe blow to the back of the neck. He had joined the raid to Lower Otjanep that morning and been killed with the village’s sole metal axe (the miracle of steel!). His mother was violently breaking up his shield and weapons, and together with her relatives and friends was screaming and moaning and rolling in the deep mud. I remembered Ari as combining the powerful physique and slow wits of the stereotypical circus strong man with the unexpected ability to speak almost as much Indonesian as Kukoi. Ari spotted me first, and instantly left the agitated group of warriors he was standing with and came running purposefully in my direction. He w
as also in a high state of excitement, and Kukoi’s warning was very fresh in my mind, but Ari’s embrace was warm and strong, and I knew I had nothing to fear from him.
‘Did the white man taste good, Ari?’ I asked him, only dimly aware that the offensiveness of my greeting must have sprung from the defensiveness of my inner feeling.
My brashness took us both off-guard, but after a moment Ari began to laugh. It was a laugh from the heart and belly – as only the Asmat know how – so infectious that I began laughing too. We clung to each other, howling with the sort of release which comes from extreme tension. That shared mirth, with the tears streaming down our faces, was to me more convincing than any verbal confession.
Back in Lower Otjanep, I was wondering if I really would take us all on the four-hour journey back to the ship if Lorne failed to reappear in 30 minutes. I consoled myself with the hope that Kukoi had told the truth about Ari eating Rockefeller, and that there were no further hidden outstanding debts between our tribes. To distract Kukoi from his grief, I encouraged him to sit with us and interpret questions and answers between the visitors and their hosts, and soon both sides relaxed a good deal and were communicating loudly and unselfconsciously with each other through imaginative sign language. I was sitting with Kurum, Lorne’s adoptive father, who still cradled the baby they had named after him. It was coming up to the half-hour, and I was in no mood for hedging my questions. With Kukoi’s help, I now asked Kurum not whether he had eaten human flesh, but how it compared, say, to pork or fish. The answer was either a leg-pull, or else startlingly well informed.
‘Our own flesh is too tough, the Malay’s is too sweet, the white man’s too salty – but the Chinese is perfectly delicious!’ Howls of laughter all round, which became quickly mitigated by a certain sheepish realization that we were not alone, and that the joke might be a touch close to the bone. They had momentarily forgotten, it seemed, that they were now surrounded by several dozen of our white brethren to whom, strictly speaking, the Otjaneps now owed a few heads of their own. It was this guileless sensitivity to their own joke which most convinced me of their honest guilt, and of Lorne’s case for the prosecution. I promised my own tribe that I would translate the joke later.
Ring of Fire Page 19
