Both Sides of the Moon

by Duff, Alan

  A tattooed chin, tattooed mind, casts down to the river tumbling below. Around us: coughs, hisses and sighs. And she sighs and says, Your mother, aeee, poor child, poor children of hers, your mother. So I know we are thinking the same. On this we are. But she has rules and loyalty owings and deeply entrenched love for her people. She would die for them. I must be careful with her feelings, her inherited centuries of ways.

  She used to be suspicious of me, for a long time she was. Ask me questions in Maori, and when I couldn’t answer back she’d pour out a stream of, presumed, curses. But she got used to seeing me. In the bath. Or around. And one morning I’m humming a tune I know from my Uncle Henry’s constant singing, and she arrives shuffling across that soil and silica ground in slippers, and naturally I stopped humming but she took up the tune when she got in. With words. Love’s Roses, in English.

  Now I’m what she calls her sight familiar. Just me and her, that old naked form below the surface, those fallen breasts that once gave life to child after child and vitality to her man’s touch and pleasure to his eyes, but not on Fridays and Saturdays, she said, they were his drunk days. Legs long gone of their child-bearing strength and loving power, only the mind in more or less prime condition; that dark patch of tattoo imprint gaining definition, the sky spread all over with light. The air rent with sulphur and Sunlight soap. She asks me to wash her back. And I know she’ll show me a little more of the days of her Maori understanding.

  I see a village of a people sublime in their savagery, violently supreme of their times; a race of war-culled powerful physiques born into their fighting way — and yet of a crude nobility come of other cultural practices outside of war. Of carving art taken to high, abstract form. Of deep-meaning chants surrounding the carving being carried out.

  There is tapu, placed on object and man and site and deed, of meaning so untouchably sacred it fulfills the prophecy of its own power.

  I sit and idle with them in long periods between wars; see them play spinning-top games, stick games, knuckle bones with human knuckles. I hear their wooden flutes, the warbling chanting tones blown through large sea shells. And there is poetry escaping the fierce fighter mouths, eloquently shaped air bellowing from muscle-swollen chests, there are moments of philosophical thought and times of tenderness. (But not enough.) There is finest oratory. I see language revered for itself, how it plays off a man’s tongue, how it is a weapon but can be a flaw in a man’s exposed character, too.

  I see weaving patterns of much intricate complexity, even the stars depicted and in different times of season of their changing position. I hear tales told of seafarers crossing the vast ocean to this land, and the stars that guided them, and the ancestors who looked over them crossing the great unknown ocean.

  But then I see a people with too much of themselves on the dark side of the conceptual moon, like hapless animals in a deep forest trap, with daylight (and freedom) all around them — no, not entrapped animals, since none knows what is light, not true light of the mind; they are self-perpetuated to a state of permanent darkness. They have no written word, thus no means of looking at themselves.

  I see a tiny world within the whole world it has no conception of as existing — no influences thus, for better or for worse, of wider cultural contact. I see everything of group perception lumped as one, bound within the oral records of mighty orators; I hear secret thoughts drowned out by orator’s thunder and village’s echoing acquiescence and fierce assent and ferociously choreographed dances of war. I hear men tell and decree of other men that they must think thus. And I feel sad for the thinking person born into those times. Sad for the person born with too much sensibility in a culture of war. Sad and afraid for those whose fate that was, knowing they would have been young corpses put to death by their own as considered mad or misfit or possessed. At best the thinking person would be of little mana amongst their peers.

  5

  Another day we’re five full vessels of brown girth and mirth. Weight and body volume flood water over the edges; we are flooded in daylight, washed over in laughter.

  Our pool has a constant, slow-trickled feed, there is something akin to love trickling its warmth to us. Sometimes I can forget who and what I am or what I think I am. I simply exist with barely an inner thought; all of life with them goes on on the outside. Their analysis, for what it is, is simple. Their vapoury acres wrap them up like a grandmother. Near everyone is related, to each other and me. A community of blood and jealous guarding of their lucky thermal and communal existence. That is why I can’t stay away from here: but the day I think like them is the day they take me into the fold.

  The older ones switch easily from English to Maori, they play it like a game between the languages, speaking rapid-fire Maori and suddenly throwing in long phrases in English. They pretend to the younger ones to be speaking serious Maori matters, and then suddenly launch into names of horses and how much was bet and lost on a certain race. Maori tongues speak of white cultural experiences, in and out of the two languages, as outsiders with noses pressed against the window pane. White man is a mystery to them: his relentless pursuit of material wealth; his understandings of all the complex rules he has surrounded himself with; his occupational confusion of diverse jobs. Maori people simple people. Sport the Maori does understand, he and she is a born natural at anything. Rugby he loves and is supreme in.

  Hear them laugh and speak of mighty tackles of mighty men dropped in their tracks, hear them laugh of swift deceiving feet leaving opponents trailing in their wake; hear the sound re-enacted of opposing scrums thudding together and an accompanying geyser roar to support the told image.

  Women do early morning clothes washing in the close-by open-air pool with its own channelled feed of travel-cooled boiling water. Cooled also by cold water piped over the warm ground. The pool is a scooped shape of concrete with an outlet for the soapy water to drain down to the river. They rub garments together and slap them on wooden washer boards in time-honoured fashion of women the world over, sharing gossip, telling of children, easing of womanly burden in their exchanges. They call jokingly to the bathers, make fun of a body growing fatter and promise there’ll be no more pork-bones for breakfast. Even important man is not spared their jibing tongues, though no harm is ever intended, and anyway no man is as important without his clothes on, they will tell you publicly as they know privately.

  I’m trying to see them objectively for what they are, which is not culpable, not unless you call staying more or less what you are as culpable. And who says a people must seethe with questioning thought, be ambitious, have lofty life goals? Who says being troubled is a more desirable state to be in?

  See a woman across the saucer-feeding lake tending to food put in the ngawha steam-box, a pudding for slow cooking, meat for hours of tendering, vegetables steamed. Another woman squats patiently holding a flax line to her bag of vegetables cooking in a massive boiling pool of water thrown up from far below. She is a brown-skinned, tartan-shawled, pipe-smoking portrait beside a pool of simmering cobalt-blue sided in silica white against the broken blue of first morning sky.

  Five full vessels of talk and constant laughter in the black-haired, brown-skinned, sunlit steamy waters; everyone the same, man and woman, babe and child, even village idiot has happy place amongst his blood-related own. Most of the war men gone off to manual work, in the forests, at factories, not much moment in their work. But here, same mould, same as a line of puddings steaming under a sacking cover, everyone same as each other, more strength that way, cold and lonely on your own, warm and easy this collective way, no need to think, thinking’s bad for you. Ask the half-caste relative over there.

  Houses up there, spread around, clinging to banks, on ridges, ramshackle humble dwellings surrendering to the corroding sulphur, everywhere issuing with steam, in their simple houses fronted with Maori carved gable ends, inside simple austere furnishings, an old sofa or two, dining table and chairs, beds, drawers, who needs trappings in a nature-ble
ssed place like this, who needs possessions when a member of a contented tribe? But what of the possessions of mind?

  My Auntie Bubs has slid her bulk, like a fat seal, into the vessel beside me. She reaches and ruffles my hair, checks to see I’ve washed it with our all-purpose Sunlight soap, saying she doesn’t want to send me home to my Pakeha father thinking they, Maoris, don’t live clean. Not us, we bath twice a day. Bathing is part of our life ritual, cleanliness has found us a Godliness.

  Now my goddess auntie of food has done with me, I’m clean, she has her own to tend to; my youngest cousin Tona first, she soaps his back, I can see the gesture imparting what I’ve never had — no, I mustn’t be wishing for what cannot be. Can’t expect what you can’t have.

  My same-age cousin Mat, for Matiu, being bastard Maori for Matthew, is in my bath and already asked why I didn’t wake him to join me for earliest bath, that I may as well be back at my own home if I’m not going to do things with him.

  I’ve told him the lie he looked so peaceful fast asleep I didn’t want to wake him, but he knows I’m selfish with my early morning time. I like the fear of walking up here in the dark. I like the stars. I like crossing the bridge to the flanking carved sentinels representing warriors, with paua-shell eyes shining in the dark warning me that I better not be foe. I like the growling discordant sounds of thermal activity. And seeing house lights made lemonyellow by the steam. And human shapes moving about in them.

  Girl cousins Ri and Hana are in the end bath closest the changing shed, they rarely vary it unless it’s too hot because someone forgot to put the rag stopper in the channel feed. They’re like small whale shapes in the steamed-over distance, fat is forming like swollen steamed puddings on their necks; I worry who will want them. I’d like to reassure them that it will work out, now that they are at boyfriend-wanting age. Observation tells me that their community forgives size, most deeds, most personalities. It is thinkers they are less sure about.

  But see how the community embrace includes even Joppy, the village retard, just look at how content he is, how his uneven eyes gain a steadiness, and the smile is fixed on his surrounded face and he joins the laughter as if he is the cause, an arm goes round him, he’s one of theirs.

  Uncle Henry is in the bath beside his daughters; he is the only presence who imposes something a little different: everyone defers to him even though he’s smiling and has taken someone’s baby and cradled it just beneath the surface, smiling beatifically down upon it like the god of love.

  He cooes to it and speaks a soft Maori and sings it several lines of a lullaby, and everybody stops talking to listen. Yet the way he had his head, it seemed he sang defiance to another people, with his Maori song. Like a man who should have been invited to their party. Then he hands it like a fragile, precious vessel back to its mother (the same hands that can pulverise a man who has insulted, upset him, the same hands formed into fists that have crashed against the jaw and into the face of the woman, wife, now lovingly soaping their next child’s back).

  He is a man apart even though he’s called one of his girls into his vessel and washes her fat back and holds her against his own food-enlarging form with a glad father’s love. He is no emperor shed of his clothing even when he is; he has muscle power, and reputation, mitigating for it and him. He is what he is, a slightly higher form of existence. (And let any man dare speak badly of his slut sister within his hearing or knowing, and that fat-layered muscle will explode in violence. We hate and love his violence so much that just looking at him is like being in love with a person you greatly fear.)

  He holds back his memories of war more than other men. They say it was all his great pride could bear to be a prisoner of German captors; they say he regarded it as disgracing his Maori warrior status and he would show defiance at every turn. They say. A captain then, Henry Te Amo pushed German tolerance, German sense of superior manhood, higher culture, superior genes, to the limit. A dark-skinned solider, a prisoner, daring to assert himself with such cocky arrogance. A man who won his captors’ respect — no submissive slave captive he … but something within him broke, all could see it written on him like an explanation.

  A far-sighted man, too, he saw leadership meant he should stay to help other prisoners escape. They say he spent his time in constant planning and construction of escape routes, which is probably where he learned to keep his own counsel since he held many men’s fates in his hands. But when he returned home to find himself ordinary, a Maori of average education and no job training, he became resentful. His far-sightedness did not extend to seeing that his German enemy would respect him more than his own white countrymen.

  They say, more secretly, that something happened to him during his war duration but none have dared put word to it. Is that the brooding man I happen upon in least expected times? Uncle, I have asked him with my eyes, what is it you are thinking? Wanted to tell him that of all the people who would understand, no matter what it is, I would. Why is it that I see him as me in these moments? As if he is as vulnerable as any, or caught by thought or heart and troubled by something deep inside him? But I cannot say and nor does he think to invite my comment. It could be one of those secrets, those private thoughts, that go to the grave.

  I’m too long in here now, I’ve set these people out as best I can, at least in their bathing environment. I anyway have got that feeling of being too square-edged in the round hole of community. Mereana is right, she told me this morning I have a mind too different from them. Which is an inconvenient, alienating thought to get in the middle of mass song break-out, started by my Uncle Henry — for I love music, I love their singing, I love his voice, I wish to be nowhere else on this earth than here, with voices bursting free from steaming water vessels to the morning sky, the sunlight glared-out stars.

  I listen to them in the changing shed, glad my uncle was singing with his eyes closed when I slid past. I’m hearing and feeling it wash over me in the roofed cool, the pale shadow, amongst the heap of discarded clothes the smelly shoes, smelly socks, of sweaty arses and secreting vaginas, pungent young cock stink.

  The heat comes up through the concrete floor, there is no escaping it, not even with concrete layering over, you have to move from foot to foot and get your shoes on fast.

  Nor escaping the communal claim now twenty, thirty voices joined in British-composed song: When the lights go on again! When my own has rather suddenly dimmed — but that’s all right (It’s all right, child, I hear the old woman say. You must take shape from everything).

  Take my eyes up there through the doorway of this changing shed, to a ramshackle dwelling being inexorably brought down by the steaming sulphurous seethings — startled to see her shape standing out on her verandah, as if she has heard my mental call.

  But I look harder and it is her beloved boiling below she gazes at, it is her beloved people she listens to, even though it’s not traditional nor Maori, she’s not strict on that, she’s said some of the old, Maori same-toning chant stuff is monotonous. It’s the embrace of universal music that brings her from her dwelling, it’s the embrace of her universe reached and found of her, their own, her own kind. Not me.

  A breeze from the hills pushes across the steam curtain so I have longer glimpse of her: a steadfast pose on high, being reached by the notes of her people, her people, whilst this person has quickly dried and dressed and now stands, alone, shoe-protected from the hot concrete, in the same preoccupied listening as she. But knowing this can never be his — and nor, for that matter, ought he wish it otherwise. I must keep telling myself that, or why not wish to be a king, or taller or brighter than you are — time to go, kid.

  Song finished, everyone happy, happiness of simple people, good people, salt of the earth, basic beings. The surface of their every filled bathing vessel is a ripple with the slight heave of their collective weights and song-inspired beating hearts.

  A woman’s voice can’t let it go, she continues to hum the war tune: hmm-hmm-himm-himm-him, duh-d
uh-duhduh-duh-duh, as I step out, like an outcast. I tell Uncle I had better go home, my own home, I’ve been away three days now, and he says yes and asks, Did you enjoy the singing, you always enjoy your uncle’s singing, eh boy? And I can but nod, Oh, yes I did (if only I wasn’t with this mind I have).

  And he holds out an empty hand then dips it briefly into the water then presses into my hand a miraculously produced two shilling coin. For you, boy, from Uncle. With the word boy echoing like one of his songs in my glad heart (oh, Uncle). He’s bought me.

  I go to Auntie’s bath and she growls me to bend down and kiss her goodbye, do the proper thing and how she shouldn’t have to be telling me this. She’s strong on what is proper. Not that I mind. I kiss her, she pats my face with a wet hand, tells me I’m a pretty good nephew and can come any time, don’t even have to ring, even though I know she likes having the telephone ring (it tells her they have one of the few phones in Waiwera). In those days they did. Calls to tell me to remind Warren it’s about time he visited his auntie.

  Now I’m walking away and then I remember, so I turn back and tell my closest first cousin Mat I’ll be seeing him and he says, Yeah, with doubt, so he’s sulking with me, and we both know that there’s developed this distance between us, from all our cousin days of telling we’d die for each other that we’re not actually in common, except by his father and my mother’s blood.

  I hurry away before I start crying or, worse, laughing hysterically at us: me and my cousin, our dying dream of being best mates, the world was ours, until we die. Because we saw it so clearly then.

  Over the steamy ground, past growls and hisses. Then I hear whistling.

  6

  A lazy whistling. Which makes me aware, suspicious. It’s the sound of someone passing the time, not making a tune. The end notes are held on to, of a man who is not bothered with making melody just monotonic air flow.