The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  And yet after only an hour we were circling the abandoned missionary station; the house could be seen to one side of the strip, its roof covered with creepers and epiphytes. For some days I had felt increasingly unreal—an unreal man in an unreal place—and nothing could shake me out of this feeling. It had become a very real intuition. Those huts, that path, the swarming forest—it was not a part of my psyche.

  From the air, Wanggemalo appeared as an oblong hole in the canopy, at the bottom of which lay a grass runway as long as a suburban lawn. There were a few huts instead of tree houses, and a path ran between them. To land here was like simply dropping vertically out of the air like a stone. The pilot made a face. He would keep the engine running as we disembarked.

  In the forest, the drone of an airplane is a phenomenal event. It can be heard for half an hour before the plane itself arrives, and so the entire population of Wanggemalo—about the size of two rugby teams—had turned out at the end of the runway to greet us. They were a harrowing sight. Dressed in hand-me-down rags, they waited patiently for us, holding arrows, tethered flying foxes, and bundles of yellow flowers, their hair fluffed with chicken feathers, their legs spattered with toffee-colored mud. These were the “city” Kombai, if you will, the Wanggemalo clan, and in the hope of handouts they agreed to keep the airstrip grass trimmed so that planes could land. As we struggled up to the abandoned house, they followed without pestering us, fingering elegant arrows whitened at the tips and barbed like Gothic spires. Spontaneously, the boys carried the heavier bags.

  Suddenly we were in heat again. The forest sang with earsplitting cicadas. It was a sound unlike anything—unlike the russet cicadas of the American forest, unlike the sibilant creatures of the Andaman forests. This was a wall of sound made up of a dozen different pitches. I recognized at once the haunting, shrill sound of the cicadas that inhabit Japanese movies and that Japanese filmmakers have always used with such skill in creating sinister summer scenes. It sounds almost like a child crying. After a few minutes, this animal cacophony began to subdue something in my own mind; I gritted my teeth.

  The Kombai did not sweat in the heat, though butterflies and sweat flies swirled around their heads, and they flowed silently in and out from among the hardwood trees that stood around us like towering scaffolds. Or else like ruined apartment blocks. For the jungle is indeed a beautiful nightmare that makes me think of a destroyed city, Berlin 1945, perhaps, or a giant cemetery. It is not for our delectation, boys and girls. Tufts of flowering ginger baked in the sun. Ailanthus trees rubbed together in a hot wind like giant reeds.

  In the house, calendars frozen in the year 1994 still decorated the walls, along with children’s drawings illustrating the story of Noah’s Ark in Dutch. Outside, an abandoned baptismal font lay under the trees like a rotting swimming pool. It was as if the Lord and the jungle had struggled for dominion and the Lord had lost his footing. A piano still stood in the front room; a boy in parrot feathers sat in front of it, hammering a single out-of-tune key. But there was also a large verandah with decayed rattan chairs. In the children’s room, Juha and I could share a bunk bed colonized by small red spiders.

  The Kombai gathered in front of the verandah, arms filled with lizard-skin pipes and their sugarcane arrows. Women to one side, their hair shorn short with bamboo knives, men to the other. The latter stood hand in hand, dressed only in white kotekas made of hornbill beaks or halved acorn nuts, imposing bows slung across their backs. We stared at each other in silence, the whites’ skin crawling with flies; they frowned with a child’s intensity and watched our cigarettes and lighters carefully. For an hour no one much stirred. A drop of sweat fell into my eye. At the tops of the trees unknown birds came into focus, then dropped out again, as if departing from the present dimension.

  The men then loosened up a bit and came up to shake our hands. They murmured “Nari, nari,” Kombai for “father.” Their teeth were red from betel, the gums corroded; their skin bubbled with ringworm. There was a shy, fluttering quality to them, a nervous birdlike hopping and darting. The handshake was so limp that it was more like a mere brushing of the palms. No masculinity to be proved; the huge arrows were ubiquitous. They grinned, then stopped grinning, then grinned again. Our own grinning was the same. We stepped forward one by one and did the hand brushing. Soon, the women latched onto Theresia with cries of “Nani, nani,” or “mother.” It was a pattern of sexual division we would see again and again, the world divided into two halves. In their bushy sago fiber skirts, the women were wary of the strange males; they watched us for a long time before venturing a quick handshake. After some hours of this exhausting negotiation, the sun began to drop. At first it dropped imperceptibly, as always, but around four it plummeted rapidly into the tree line. Dusk on the equator lasts about ten minutes. Ominous clouds began to mass, prickly with electricity.

  A toothless midget appeared in a shredded bomber jacket. He strode up with a posse of young men as prospective porters, crowding onto the verandah in plastic flip-flops and galoshes, laying down their bows first. His arms were thin and strong as metal rods. Wanggemalo’s chief, Brimob, is a legend among the Kombai—he gained his name by shooting the Indonesian captain of a Brimob mobile militia unit through the eye with an arrow. Papua’s war of secession from Indonesia simmers always in the background, though is rarely discussed with foreigners. Occasionally, the Indonesians get the worst of it. The chief was all cackles and gags, horseplay, and fast-changing moods.

  Brimob: “If you fuck our women, we’ll cut your head off.”

  We all laughed. Brimob rocked back on his heels.

  “No, actually”—he laughed along—“we will cut your head off.”

  The sun sank into the ironwoods, blazing its last flames. The horizon became one of gaunt arboreal silhouettes.

  Juha turned quietly to me. “He says he’ll cut our heads off. Fortunately, I would have to say that the girls are not a temptation.”

  “What if they were a temptation?”

  They stared back, potbellied, their legs looking somehow frail beneath the formless sago skirts.

  Darkness shot outward from the forest. It was like a hand swallowing up the house.

  An oil lamp was lit. Brimob and Kelly picked out our porters, and I noticed that many of them had missionary names: a small boy called Nehemiah, another called Josiah. My own porter-to-be was Stephanus. There was even, alas, a Judas. They had seen white people before and they knew how to horse around with us. Nehemiah began to follow me around and pull faces, so I showed him some boogie-woogie moves and decided to call him Boogie-Woogie Baby. He must have been about six, but the Kombai never know how old they are.

  There was no doubt a subtle colonial whiff about us as we sat in our cane chairs surveying the scene, though this time the gin and tonics would not be forthcoming. In the flare of the oil lamp, a circle of mute faces watched us—Wanggemalo’s only entertainment.

  I asked Georg what he was feeling.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “The great weirdness of this. I have been to jungles before. The Amazon, Borneo—but not like this. Nothing like this.”

  “And who is that?” It was Theresia’s voice and her finger pointed at two shadows sauntering across the airstrip. They were visible only when a flash of lightning erupted.

  It was only now we realized that Brimob had departed and only a few Kombai were left lounging on the porch on their sides, elegantly smoking their pipes. A raffish adolescent sauntered onto the verandah, followed by a barefoot companion in a shaggy green jacket, on one arm of which could be read the word LINMAS. The latter was the village policeman—if that is the right word—shadowing an “arrested person” in a forest form of house arrest. They sat down gaily enough and took the pipe being passed around. The man in the LINMAS jacket was talkative and suave. He talked excitedly, thrusting his hands left and right as if indicating things unseen far off in the forest. The boy, he said, was a suspected witch. A suangi.

  Suangi is the In
donesian term for a witch. The Kombai are obsessed with witches, for which their own term is kakua-kumu. Kakua-kumu are thought to be demons living in the forest who can assume human form, but equally those of a mouse, a cuscus, or a bird. The dying often name a kakua-kumu as responsible for their illness. The Kombai then form a hunting party and track down the witch to kill him. The kakua-kumu is cut into four parts; his brains and viscera are cooked on hot stones and eaten, after which the four parts are buried in the corners of the clan’s territory. There was one thing that we had to avoid being called in the forest: a kakua-kumu. It was almost as bad as being an Indonesian.

  “Oh, the Indonesians,” the men said. “We just kill them as soon as they get off the plane.”

  The boy bared his teeth and a demented titter came out of him. They began to eat some cooked bat and, looking up a little fearfully, I noted the instantaneous disappearance of the last patch of lit blueness.

  A witch among the Kombai is tried in ways that medieval Europeans would have found familiar. It is essentially a trial by ordeal. The suspect is made to eat vile things: frogs, pig shit, or even the human variety. His vomiting pattern will decide his fate. Omens and signs are taken into consideration. As for us, the Kombai might not always know we were entirely human, for we certainly didn’t look human to them. It was best to wash as little as possible, even avoiding shampoo and shaving products for a while, for the forest people sometimes think that shampoo smells suangi-like. The less chemical we smelled, the more normal we would seem, the more human. The Kombai were known to get unpredictably aggressive when they smelled shampoo. Woolford winked at me and then at the kakua-kumu. The latter laughed again, baring betel-red gums. His eyes were indeed slightly insane. “Nari,” he said.

  “Do you think he really is a witch?” Juha asked urbanely.

  The “policeman” looked up, and smoke drifted out of his nostrils.

  “Kakua.” The voice was a tense murmur.

  Our sorcerer cheerfully asked for another cigarette. A ripple of anxiety touched the others as he walked among them. He and his warden stayed for an hour, then, presumably bored, sauntered off again across the airstrip.

  The other boys got up and yawned. There is no electricity in Wanggemalo, and its people are too poor to own candles, let alone flashlights—they cannot get batteries, anyway. When the lightning flashed—as it did mutely, with no thunder—we saw the Kombai still standing there watching us. Our skins dripped. Woolford reached up and turned off the oil lamp.

  “If there’s a light they’ll stay all night. Leave your flashlights off and they’ll go away.”

  But an old woman remained on the verandah until nine, her nose bristling with cassowary quills, holding a live bat on a tether. From time to time, her eyes lowered, she asked us if we would like to buy it for dinner. Receiving no reply, she nonchalantly cut off its head and sat there with it in the burned grass, until fat warm raindrops came down and made her rise.

  The missionaries would have called this monsoon “biblical.” On the bunk bed, I was unable to sleep. Water crashed down from the rickety eaves of the porch on the far side of the glassless windows and formed black pools in the grass. The lightning was pink, then green—the green of a cheap candy. Juha snored. I got up in my socks and wandered out to feel the cool of the storm, a break in the unbearable heat. The runway seemed to have turned into a lake. The rain collected in three or four buckets laid around the house; I stepped out to catch the water and cool down. It was only when I was here that I remembered that I had been dreaming about the agonizing death of my grandfather. I stepped back onto the porch and saw at once that an old man was sitting cross-legged in a corner on some palm fronds, his face lit by the glow of a lizard-skin pipe.

  “Pagi,” I said, trying Indonesian. Good morning.

  “Umbiago.”

  By the side of the house, Penus was battling in the downpour to build a large cooking fire under a piece of bark. Kombai stood about in the mist, holding banana leaves above their heads. I sat in one of the rattan chairs and ate a box of my own Fig Newtons. It was the only one I had brought with me and now it was gone. Penus came up with a cup of hot chocolate, made from an Indonesian powdered mix called Milo, of which we had about four thousand sachets.

  “You up four o’clock. Now we leave one hour. Get dressed!”

  “Will the rain stop?”

  “Always stop.” The Jolly Green Giant guffaw. “Look-a mud.”

  “Can we walk in that?”

  Penus scratched his beautiful head. One could not say. As if mud was a fickle spirit.

  Porters now began to appear on the porch, kicking off soaked Wellies. They were very good-humored. Pagi! Umbiago! Nari! This time they had fewer bows, and balls of sago palm fiber flour wrapped in leaves. Traveling food. Was it the rain that put them in so good a mood? Or the thought of weeks of free food and a wage? There was a powwow at five and Woolford discussed the trail with a guide who had appeared out of the early morning: a tiny, slippery man called Yanbu. Yanbu knew all the most desolate, remote tree houses. A little over five feet, old by Kombai standards though probably not past forty, Yanbu wore a pair of Arsenal shorts, a dapper dog-tooth necklace, and a pair of rubber galoshes: jungle chic. A palm fiber noken bag hung from his forehead and he carried a large wok above it like a helmet. Impossible not to think of a crazy black Don Quixote searching not for windmills but for brides—because Yanbu was on the hunt for a paramour. A previous candidate had died, and he had relatives dispersed throughout the forest. He passed his pipe around and somehow the smoke dried out the spirit after all the rain. He stroked our arms and muttered things in Kombai. He had the frame of a fourteen-year-old boy; he spoke some crude Bahasa Indonesian and Kombai and flipped between them in every sentence—the indispensable jungle interpreter. Fortunately, Bahasa is an easy language for a European to learn, being neither tonal nor grammatically complex. Kombai, by contrast, is a trial. Apart from its complexity, it is all but impossible to find a written grammar or lexicon for it. Yanbu walked out into the mud and held out a hand. The rain was not as strong. We had to leave now, anyway, because it would take eight hours to reach the first tree house and the Kombai will not bivouac in the open forest for fear of kakua-kumu. We drank some Milo and ate some bright purple fried taro, heavily salted. The rain would not stop all day.

  As the sky lightened and the trees became green again, hazed behind heavy mists, we struck out through the wet huts toward the sago swamps. The twenty-five porters formed a column a quarter mile long, bristling with weapons, woks, biscuit tins, and tent bags. The boys sang and twanged bamboo harps. Boogie-Woogie Baby did the boogie-woogie. In the doors of the shacks, the women sat with their children, staring but not waving, and soon we were on the other side, in the dripping rattan glades that seemed to guard the entrance to the forest.

  Wanggemalo is surrounded by dense sago palm swamps, miles of thick slime that have to be crossed over a network of fallen logs. Soaked in a toxic mix of sweat, deet repellent, and black mud smelling of fermenting beer—the rotting sago palms—we struggled through them like high-wire artists without poles. It was a point of anticolonial pride for me to carry my own pack; why else had I labored on the beach in Seminyak for so many weeks? The boys protested, but I faced them down. Heaving the pack onto both shoulders, I mounted the first log, which rolled under pressure, and made the dare. Halfway across I felt my legs giving out. The log rolled again, and I crashed into the swamp. Stephanus whipped away the pack as I fell and nimbly spirited it across to the next log. I climbed back on and had to lie for a while getting my breath back.

  Lashed by the rain, I lay there like a stricken pig, watching the boys laughing, though not cruelly. I wondered if I could do this. If I gave up here, however, I would have to spend a month in Wanggemalo, probably eating flying foxes in exchange for a wristwatch. I was not fat, but I was too fat. I would have to lose ten pounds quickly, to acquire the Kombai body, which is built for speed and the avoidance of error. Even withou
t the pack, I was the slowest, the most buffoonish, and Yanbu stopped frequently to let me catch up, a delicate look of pity on his face. What manner of man was this that could not walk on slippery logs? Who could not race up sudden inclines laced with gigantic armor-piercing thorns? He did not approve of shoes or clothes, since they were clearly a hindrance of the highest order. I often wondered what Yanbu thought of us. His face was mostly amused, perplexed, on the border of some kind of disbelief.

  Yanbu was an indispensable ambassador, for there is a protocol for visiting tree houses, a delicate diplomacy whose rules must be followed to the letter. Emissaries would be sent to the tree house the day before, offering gifts—usually tobacco—and asking permission to enter the premises. The Kombai love to smoke, though usually they use raw leaves; in remoter tree houses, tobacco is at first unfamiliar but quickly acquires a certain prestige. If the men in the tree houses like the tobacco and permission is granted, Yanbu will then approach the place and try to calm the excited occupants. There would usually be a brief display of ritual force, a standoff that might express complex anxieties: strangers roaming where they do not belong, religious sacrilege, or even the belief that we might be sorcerers. Throughout our trek, in fact, Yanbu was a key figure, and an enigmatic one. Was he uncomfortable between the two worlds? When I looked at my photographs later, I noticed that Yanbu was the only Kombai who looked into the camera. A smile always bent the mouth, but downward.

  The swamp was cleared in three hours. We collapsed among some rotting sago set in a series of swamp pools and reapplied the deet. Encephalitic malaria roams the Papua forest. The boys loafed and it was clear they were only slightly winded. The little ones went off to hunt for lizards, and we mastered our first Kombai and Bahasa words, exchanging them with the porters while smoking. Their average age was probably about eighteen. They began to yell our names. Ju-ha. Lo-rry. Bellicose foot stamping, warlike cries of uey, uey! The moroseness of Wanggemalo wore off, and suddenly this tangled submarine forest filled with arpeggios of laughter. We had to eat our first sago balls. It was like munching on pieces of damp house plaster, the starch sucking all the moisture out of the mouth and leaving it tastelessly dry.