Both Sides of the Moon

by Duff, Alan

  Steam drifts across my vision wherever I look. The whistling is so lazy it has to be deliberate, an escape of his other intentions, I can feel it coming on. Then it abruptly stops and I see a shape coming towards me, down from a sulphur-yellowed rise as if he has been waiting for me knowing I would be alone.

  His features are a warrior of old except without the full facial tattoos warriors had, and they are of hate for me. Hate. For no reason I can figure except that I am outside his scope, his limited conceptual reach; he has seen much of my physical presence but not of me otherwise — on what does he base his hatred?

  Closer, this is a human dog snarlingly protective of his territory. Behind him I recognise the woman, Pare, crouched on haunches gently tugging the flax tie to her cooking hessian bag of vegetables in the boiling pool. I know the picture: green wisps of watercress stain in cobalt blue that plummets to the dark depths of the earth. And if you got closer you’d hear her humming, but not tune, rather the state of her contented existence, the security of it all. I know this place.

  I look up at Mereana’s verandah and she’s gone. I hear the washing women’s laughter. And now the bathers have broken out in another song. And me, I have the eyes of a human animal upon me with just as much unreasoning animal-blindness.

  Hey? He tries to halt me. Hey, you — kid … I am of a nature that I want to trust everyone, but not this one. He has absence of reason cut, like missing warrior tattoos, into his features. He could be a baboon with pulled-back facial tendrils; he has a big stomach stretching a stained singlet that used to be white, it cameos his belly button, it registers his breathing for him; his eyes are glassed over, not trying to conceal his hatred for me, and I in natural counter hate back, I want to kill him — before he can kill me. But then again, I only want to get past, to get out of that stare, those dangerous eyes, the possible reach of those fat hands hanging with an incredible looseness, like sausages on a fat-wrist string.

  But he mouths something first. What? I frown a repeat at him. Pare in my peripheral vision swishes on with her cooking bag. A mud pool pops thick breath into air. Steam curls at our feet. The bathers sing on. But Chumpy and I have our own world.

  He says with curling lips: You heard. I say back: No I didn’t.

  He says, I said: Your mother would fuck a dog. (A what!) What did you say? You heard. No I didn’t. Oh yes you did, I can see it in your eyes, kid. A what? A dog, little half-caste mister. (A dog. A dog!? Now she’s hardly the town innocent — but a dog? And what’s this half-caste shit?)

  More words come from him — he’s the dog with those pulled-back lips: And you don’t belong here, either. You’re a half-caste. Why you use our baths all the time? And so early in the morning, when good folks — us folks — real folks, are asleep? This belongs to us. We got a legal deed document, with our family names on it, I don’t see your fuckin’ name there.

  Well it will be. Look up Te Amo. My mother’s maiden name. Well it isn’t. Who’d put her dog-fucker name on a docu-ment? Don’t say that about my mother (even if it’s close to being true).

  You wake us up tramping past at that hour. No I don’t, I walk quietly. The fuck you do. I can hear you talking to yourself from before the bridge. You’re porangi, eh? You’re mad in the fuckin’ head, why you talk to yourself? And you better watch out: one day you might accident’ly fall into a boiling pool, you son of a dog-fucker. It’s a wonder you don’t bark. If I had a bone I’d throw it to you, ya fuckin’ pup son of a dog-fucker.

  If this wasn’t the most seriously awful thing said to me in my life, I’d have laughed. I should have let loose with barking, I should have snapped at him! But I did come back: Tell my Uncle Henry that. Come on, let’s walk up to the baths and you tell him that.

  But Chumpy smiles, a gleeful smile, and says, You think I’m fuckin’ stupid or something? I don’t know what you’re talking about — dog-fucker’s son!

  So I spit with my worst vehemence: And you’re a fuckin’ ugly fat cunt! And you’re too black to be a Maori, you must be a half-caste yourself — from a Negro soldier here during the war! Your mother went with a nigger! Go on, do a dance for me. Next time I’ll bring my whip. (When I thought I had an affinity for Negroes.)

  But he only advances on me, words choke out his twisted lips like steam through a fissure. Gonna throw you into a boiling pool, ya li’l cunt!

  I’m swiftly away, taking the turn down the dusty road and on to the rickety bridge. I am furious more than scared. I just run from the immediate danger. I am used to comments made about my mother. Funny, though, how stale news like her still hurts. And I wonder then at how he fucks his wife, since they’re both hugely fat. Smell their breakfast on the boil or fry on any morning going past. See it growing them like fattening cattle. Fuckin’ fat bastard.

  I stop and give him the fingers. Or I give the space I glanced back at a moment ago the up-your-fat-arse gesture. But he’s not there. So I yell at him: Ya big fat cunt! Wait’ll I tell my Uncle Henry about what you said about — his sister! I’m enjoying my moment of using Uncle Henry’s power without his permission. Yeah, you tell Uncle Henry that to his face and see what he does!

  I know he’s still there somewhere in the steam. Then I hear him yell, Run, mangy dog, run! You’re the son of a dog and you run just like your cowardly ancestor did! Ya hear?

  I hear all right. A voice normally does not echo over this damp-sodden place, but Chumpy’s voice has. My what ancestor?

  I start walking back. My breath is trying to catch up, or it’s emotion, or it’s all my instincts telling me the man has said something significant about me, my possible understanding of myself, and certainly my mother.

  Yeah, run like your ancestor did … I hear it again, a man but not Chumpy’s voice. I spin around. No one there. Just carved faces of tekoteko wooden warrior sentinels flanking the roadway to the bridge staring at me with fixed, widened eyes and stabbed tongues in warning: Be not foe nor threat. Each is armed with bone club or hardest-wood spear and his thousand years of cultured hatred formed in permanent expression of pop-eyes and ejected tongue. I tell them — assure the carved lines of figures — I am not foe, I am blood-related friend, if a little on the different, lonely side. They are my ancestors in carved form, they represent the warrior guards of whatever one half of me holds precious, being life being food supply being tribal pride being territory being blessed watery heated location like this. Being the thinking (but how can they read my thoughts? They wouldn’t know what I think, would they?). Which of them in real-life form would have run? None, I am quite certain. It is not in the culture, it is act unthinkable.

  I stare at them, these fixed ferocious faces, and I know it is their thinking more than anything that they protect. Which makes me feel the more estranged, even as I stand there appealing to them.

  I hear it again, this time returned to a male’s voice, it seems to come from one of the tekoteko sentinels, that one there with the chasm of mud pool behind him, centre of the manuka-stick fence, with the rainbow shining eyes of paua shell inset: Run away like your ancestor did, child. Run.

  Well, I’m not running, I’m walking. And I have to go past Chumpy’s house but for some reason my legs feel like steel, so does my mind. Let him come at me and it’ll be me throwing him into a boiling pool. I head for old Mereana’s house. I must know about this ancestor — my ancestry. The past of the confused side of me, Maori. My ancestor, of whom Uncle Henry is a descendent — hah! He would hardly have been a coward. No. They’d not have let it die, not ever. My mother’s maiden name, Uncle Henry’s name, would be in the oral legends, the spoken annals of shame. See what Mereana has to say about this, and then I’m going to tell Uncle Henry.

  She’s not pleased to see me, she clicks her tongue and says in Maori and then in English, Aee, more questions I s’pose. Questions, questions — when you gonna stop questioning everything, child? How many times I have to tell you, this is not the place for a questioning mind — go back to your father’s people.


  But she’s washing a couple of plates when I arrive, and I grab the tea towel and start drying them, fall into stride with her, even though I’m imagining my mother and a dog. And I can hardly ask Mereana about that. But I do ask, very casually, in case it is of deepest offence: Did one of my Te Amo ancestors run away from some battle — or something?

  And her reaction is sudden stopping of hands in soapy stone sink. Who told you that? She’s pretending to be casual back.

  Chumpy, I say. Chumpy? That fat useless thing? All he does is live on land cheques for his family-leased land. The Pakeha farmer turned it from bush and scrub into a farm whilst he turned himself into a fat pig on the rent money. What would he know?

  Well, he knows something. Well, he doesn’t. I think he does, kui.

  Then how come he doesn’t know your ancestor wasn’t a Te Amo? How come he doesn’t know the history behind the Te Amo name? No Te Amo ran.

  So who did? And was he related to me?

  He might have been … She got guarded, defensive. Most Maoris are related, if they want to be. And more often when they don’t want to be, you want to know the truth. You did have an ancestor with an interesting story. By the name of Te Aranui Kapi.

  7

  He would not have run, he could not have run, not from anything; the village, the tribal collective — the absolute, unchallengeable notion of manhood being warriorhood being war, being life of those times — would not have even allowed thought of running. This much I know from Mereana and anyway of and from every Maori, that he never runs. Not from a fight.

  It would be worse than death, where would he take himself, what tribe, what village would ever accept a warrior coward? No tribe, no village would, Mereana had reassured me. Not a coward. Not in those days.

  The picture she paints for me has anyway been read up on at our school library, in my home. I have been more than curious about it from a young age. It is half my existence after all. Written records on the Maori are no more than accounts gleaned from oral knowledge, folklore passed down.

  I see a long-established settlement atop a hill of strategic strength, of steep cliff faces in all but one sloping direction upon which generations have constructed ingenious protective devices and deadly traps, making a cunning trail up the only access to the village. The pathway is kept secret in its entirety by the knowledge of a single section only being given to each family, so that no captured single man can be forced under any duress of torture or threat of eating to reveal the entire route. Only the tohunga priest alone has knowledge of the entire way through the traps. But he has been trained to endure much pain.

  And even should the unthinkable happen that an enemy overcome the pathway, there are yet deep trenches embedded with sharpened stakes at every angle, and then the higher-raised banking lanced with perfectly measured and cone-entranced spearing holes to make difficult a penetration from the enemy side, and easy thrust the other. Then there is another wall, with sentry-manned towers, to overcome.

  Along the wall, I see columns of giant tekoteko figures carved in unwelcome posture, of fiercest feature of spat-out tongue and erect penises and bulging, paua-shell eyes shining murder most gruesome for any intruder — should he ever manage to get thus far. Within the double-walled space would be time to pour the permanently ready hot embers and boiling fat atop intruder heads. It is unthinkable that even the cleverest enemy should penetrate this, and yet construction within has been done on the unthinkable happening.

  Over at the farthest wall is a cleverly concealed entrance to an escape tunnel. It is sited right beside a latrine hole. An entire generation back in time of foresight dug it down the steep slopes to the east. Handholds of scraped-out rock were dug to save fall, so steep its descent. And should this escape not be the choice, there is the series of trenches of apparent escape in which an enemy would believe he had the residents in last desperate flee: deepening pathways that draw pursuers beneath dark-covering of timber-framed roof, go a little farther before suddenly dipping to irreversible angle-slide, down and out into space of fatal fall off sheer cliff edges. My ancestral village of a mind that if, at the last, they should die, then so too should their yelling, pursuing, blood-thirsting enemy.

  I see that most of life is lived within these walls, of sweet potato planted area, of vast storage pits covered in earth layering for keeping over the winter; an area of retained forest alive with singing, edible birds and ample edible plant life, stored mountains of cooked birds preserved in their own fat. Human parts stored in their own cooked fat.

  I see people play clever games with sticks that hone catching and throwing skills in complex variations. I hear the practice clish and clash of weaponry skills being perfected. Hear the chipping and hacking of carvers bringing life forms from great timbers, of great warriors remembered, and ancient chants intoning protection over the carvers and their mighty works.

  … And I see in the shadow of soaring trees at forest edge a slave compound, where slaves hard-dwell in their menial, despised lives; doing rank latrine tasks, corpse preparation of killed enemy, killed fellow slave, for the cooking fires. I see blood-red eyes in permanent smarting from the cooking-fire smoke it is their duty to keep alive, men of filthy matted hair, lost of their former pride. I know that from moment of capture the slave begins the rapid process of shutting down his thoughts.

  He would deny himself even simple contemplation. He would go about his enslaved life with the dullness of a mental retard. His warriorhood would cease the day he surrendered himself to be taken rather than die honourably in battle. Slave’s knowing that his fate should be for the cooking ovens till his flesh melts off his bones would be uncontemplatable. How could he picture himself as the same human, long tendering in the heated river stones covered by fern and earth, his very soul consumed by the people he sees every day around him, by children he has come to know even though they mostly tease and taunt or disregard him, there is always one who gives unto his innocence. The knowing that all should be feasting on his cooked flesh, that even a child or two of secret mutual affection should gnaw indifferently on his bones — such fated man would not surrender to thought. He would just be. In every moment. And when it is warrior man given himself to enslaved captivity, his once mighty sense of himself would have taken flight with his capacity for self-contemplation. It must have been that way, or what point in living?

  I see the randomly selected slave on any given day buried to his neck in the nearby earth oven and the free, unthinking (unthoughtful) villagers checking if his nose is running to know the cooking process is complete. I see captured man’s dirt-encased humiliation as cause of ribald laughter from children growing up knowing no better, and anyway in their own existences accepting that life, at any time, can come to violent end or, worse, continuation as slave.

  I see and hear them, the wild, free, but disciplined children, practising to be skilled fighters, enacting to be the arrogant contemptuous warrior of all who are not his own, in their tease and spitting taunt that the buried slave’s eyes are popping out from his ugly slave head! So I see inurement to pain, everywhere inurement, but I can’t see sensibilities, as they do not and cannot exist. I think I see why love is an indulgence only the foolhardy dare; love for children in particular.

  To carry love of child into battle is to carry a weight. Love evolves a different concept — it must. It is rough love, explosive love. Love that reflects the warrior father’s short duration: he makes it monumental of notion but necessarily slight of practice. He hands its responsibility to the mother, to those who do not participate in active battle, he tells them look out well for his child, remember his name, who he is named after. But he does not love with the weakening ache of the non-fighter — he cannot. No. The warrior man’s every moment must be on preserving his life and yet always in honourable manner. Why would such a man burden himself with love?

  I see and hear the clash of weapons in war-practice combat, as deemed by the ancient chief who wanted not that his villag
e tribe become complacent with such impregnable hilltop fortress, a chief who looked far into the future and saw no change to the warfare culture, that no peace would ever come, and so inserted himself, his wise words, into their daily oral history, of warning a people of their certain vanquishment and thus vanishment should they forget one moment their place in the times of their war-ravaged land. Of tribe against tribe, of inherited enemy, passed down grudge, every oral instruction pointed towards Tu, the God of War. I hear the frequent break-out of screamed refrain: Life, it is war! war! war! And I tremble.

  Hear the chop and chipping of bone tool to wood and see the rhythmic classical patterns based on fern-leaf curl, lip curl, and the meaning-laden lines and markings emerged as each a story in the wood; elaborately carved meeting house frontispiece, upright columns, wooden and stone weaponry, carved images of ancestor and ancestry. Hear the endless times of practised chant and oral legend being learned by chosen males of mind enough to absorb and retain, the select older females soaking up the learning as receptacles of knowledge should the male line make call on them. How the chant of knowledge reverberates like a missing beat of drums that never reached these sea-travelled shores from the original homeplace of Hawaiiki; the beat comes of voice intoning over this village, how it promises to placate warrior’s fighting desires, when placating is asked for.

  Down in the dark the war party is taken in turn by a member of each family with the knowledge of their part of the dangerously trapped route. Silently, swiftly, through the forest, over sea-wave hills, down shallow riverbed, to a waiting place — of all night discipline, this small, mighty sub-tribe of a powerful main tribe kept their blood-thirsting desires in check until the first bird signalled morning was soon to come.