Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  I tromped through the marsh on a Saturday morning earlier this month. The air was fresh and clean; on the other side of the road, a farmer hosed down his milking shed. I had woken up in a motel in Ohope. It was as silent as death. Ohope is a boring expensive ghetto. Its long seaside streets were full of holiday homes, closed and dark. There had been an incident at the motel a week before. The Armed Offenders Squad had busted a guest in possession of nine grams of methamphetamine, and a stun gun. A stun gun in Ohope: that might work.

  There was a ceremony to open the new boardwalk. About forty people stood on a hill above the marsh. There were speeches. Afterwards, I sat down on the bank with one of the speakers. He smoked Holiday menthol with his left hand, because his right hand was missing. He said he was the national president of the camellia society. He also said he was running for council at the local elections. He spoke with a woman called Ida. He told her he was going to Tauranga the next day, and did she want a lift? Yes please, she said. He said that should be fine, because he was going near her place anyway, to pick up Bubbles and Lois. What a genuinely nice man. I hope he won the election.

  There was a barbecue, an urn of boiling water. Volunteers were planting native trees and shrubs. It was a warm morning, the sky was pale, wind stroked the hairs of the salt marsh. An old rooster sat on the bank in work boots and wolfed down a sausage. He said he used to be a bridge builder. Anything you want to know about bridges, he said, I can tell you. I asked him why East Coast bridges—there was one in Whakatane, one in Opotiki—were painted green and white. That, he said, I can’t tell you.

  People poured the urn over tea and coffee, the chat was about children and livestock and pottery and chainsaws; all the friendliness in the world was spread out on a hill above a salt marsh. After a while, tables and chairs and gas cylinders were carefully packed up in the back of a trailer. I went to Whatakane and mooched around. I had given a speech the night before at a function to launch Whakatane’s sixth annual bird festival. The town felt different the next day. The streets were emptying, there was that familiar sleepiness and exhaustion of a New Zealand village just past midday on a Saturday. At the supermarket, a girl at checkout said, ‘What are these called?’ The boy filling the bags said, ‘Mandarins.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I thought they were something beginning with t.’ He said, ‘You’re thinking of tangelos.’ She said, ‘Whatever, same difference.’

  Slow, cramped, watery, the town lay between the Whakatane River and an abrupt cliff—you could see a waterfall showering down the rock face. I went to the information office and asked for a map of walks. A man gave me a leaflet with his left hand, because his right hand was missing. The river was at low tide. It looked brown and bleak; the water dragged its feet. Someone had poked a stick through the mud to write, I LOVE KYLIE. Out at sea was the hump of Whale Island. Inland was the hump of Mount Edgecumbe. Indoors was a long queue at Paper Plus to buy Lotto tickets.

  The airport terminal has turrets and oval windows, and looks like a children’s playground. Pohutukawa line the avenue leading to the aerodrome. On the way, there is a sign that reads, WELCOME TO MAIZE COUNTRY. Every Sunday night, a man dresses up as a fiend and invites children to wander through his cornfield, where they scream at frightening things. Before the sign, there is a landmark—Julian’s strawberry fields, open to the public, and said to grow the best strawberries in New Zealand. Just outside of town, there is The Hub, a new and rather arid retail centre—Kmart, Harvey Norman, Briscoes. It’s speculated that Farmers might up sticks from Whakatane township and move to The Hub. Front page headline, Whakatane Beacon: CBD UNDER THREAT?

  Beyond the aerodrome and Julian’s and cornfields and The Hub, up and over the cliff above Whakatane, up and over the hill above deadly Ohope, is the Nukuhou salt marsh. On a recent Saturday, the long grass was hot with colour, and I saw a fernbird, that shy warbler of wetlands, sit on top of a bush and sing for two, three, four minutes, as long as that, out in the open, white and chestnut, its long frayed tail twitching. I handed my binoculars to a man who was deaf as a post. ‘I’ll never hear a fernbird,’ he said, ‘but now I’ve seen one.’

  [October 28]

  Tide

  They said the tide going out could romp along as fast as nine knots. On a recent warm afternoon, the Waimea estuary tore past the Mapua wharf, kicking and grabbing, elbowing itself out of the way. You didn’t expect that kind of action in such a soft, quiet glade. The story about an old man who lived on the estuary shore was more appealing. They said he liked to swim on the turning tide. He waited until it was exactly right—he tested the current with a stick—before stepping in, floating lazily upstream and around the peninsula, and then, a few precise minutes later, enjoying the outgoing tide float him lazily back down again to his house, where his wife waited on the shore with a towel.

  Visitors want it slow. I was visiting, on holiday for a week, a North Islander wanting the indulgences of the South Island. There was talk about the ongoing clean-up of the former Fruitgrowers Chemical Company site—New Zealand’s most contaminated place, its soils sickened with over fifty years of pesticides. There was talk about population demographics—you could go to a party in Mapua, see maybe fifty, sixty people, and count only two or three New Zealanders among the newly arrived English migrants. But that was Mapua’s business. I just wanted to scoff a fresh farm egg for breakfast, and to show my baby daughter two spring lambs born in the night—one pitch-black, one snow-white. Only time will tell which offers the better chop.

  It felt like Christmas before we left. There was that same lightheadedness, that same crackle of anticipation and excitement as we packed bags, made careful lists, asked the neighbours to feed the goldfish. And, just like Christmas in New Zealand, we got to Mapua and it blew a storm, it was cold, the days were narrow with rain. But there were also days as round and shiny as a marble, like the day of the day trip to Golden Bay—my first visit to that paradise, up and over Takaka Hill, and into a long valley, as green and lush and content as Eden. Actually, it must have been Eden, because just about the first thing you come across in the valley is a salami vending machine. It was nice doing business with it.

  Being away felt like a rehearsal for Christmas, for summer, for the rest of my life. This was my first family holiday, our rental car mowing down the miles as the baby chattered and squealed in the back seat. Road signs pointed to Excellent Street, Marriage Avenue, Pigville Gully. ‘Chickens,’ I said each morning, as I carried the baby past the coop by our Mapua cottage. ‘Wine,’ said an uncle in Golden Bay, as he dipped her snout in a glass of Parr & Simpson chardonnay. The outdoors and the booze turned her the colour of a golden peach.

  Kaiteriteri, Upper Moutere, Nelson. What a beautiful part of the world. Tasman is the lucky province. Tasman, where the pretty bridges are painted blue and white; Tasman, where the whole world—from England, South Africa, Las Vegas, Korea, Sydney, Wellington, even ex-convicts from the penal colony of Grey Lynn—come to live, gasping for sunlight and wine. Do they still come for work? I visited my uncles Trevor and Keith. They told a story. As kids—Keith left school in standard six, he said—they went to the Labour Department in Rotorua to look for jobs. Well, they were told, apple-pickers are needed in Hawke’s Bay or Nelson. Where do you want to go? They flipped a coin. That was sixty years ago, and there they were, still in Nelson, these two cards with the same wide happy faces I hadn’t seen since my childhood.

  Mapua’s chemical plant, which doused apples, was closed down twenty years ago. The old coolstore at the wharf is now a very good art gallery. The fields are dominated by vineyards— all those boring efficient lines forming a kind of louche satanic mill. But there are still acres of apple orchards; in blossom, they are the most feminine thing you ever did see.

  What a sensual part of the world. I took to it the only way I know how—I’m from Auckland, so I went shopping. I bought a 6lb block splitter. Each day I brought the blade back past my shoulder in a wide, slow arc, and brought it down at the rate of a
t least nine knots. I was putting myself to some use, I was violently happy—I wanted the axe to continue floating wood into the fireplace for my fiancée and our daughter, for my family, for the rest of my life.

  [November 4]

  Cousin Frank

  They do a very good Rheinischer sauerbraten—pickled horse meat—in Düsseldorf. Van Gogh painted a still life of the city’s famous hot mustard. ‘Over a thousand trains stop here every day,’ says the tourist office. And: ‘The custom of performing cartwheels dates back to 1288.’ The first Neanderthal fossils were discovered in Düsseldorf. It’s on the east side of the Rhine. It has castles and parks and riverside promenades. Goethe came from Düsseldorf. So have Claudia Schiffer, Kraftwerk, Wim Wenders, Anne of Cleves, and Frank Braunias.

  Frank Braunias! What a name. It sounds so … right, a good fit, absolutely correct. I wish I’d been called Frank. But I’m happy just to know that a long-lost relative has been found, even though I had no idea he was lost in the first place. Frank came into my life in August. My book publisher forwarded an email. It began with a flourish: ‘Dear Ladies and Gentleman.’ And then it announced, ‘My name is Frank Braunias, and I’m writing you from Düsseldorf, Germany.’

  He wanted to get in touch. I got in touch. He replied, ‘I’m trying to find out if we are related.’ He thought there might be a good chance: ‘Our name isn’t represented quite often in the world.’ He had a point. There are only fourteen people who answer to that name in New Zealand, and I’ve always doubted it was a household name in many households in Germany or Austria.

  But tracing my family tree has never held any particular appeal. The past is other countries. I’m more curious about modern life in New Zealand. It’s true though that when my daughter was born this year, and she got landed with my surname, I took an interest on her behalf in finding out something about her heritage on my father’s side. I didn’t get very far. I found passing references to people called Helmut, Artikel, Bernhard, Katharina, Sandra, Petra, Christiana, and Friedrich Braunias. An art director called Ernst Braunias has his own web page, which rather reveals him as something of a blowhard. The only person of any particular distinction was a former diplomat and parliamentary reformer, Karl Braunias, who can lay claim to being the father of MMP. I think of him sometimes when I wonder about the continued existence of the Act Party.

  I passed on a few family details to Frank. He wrote back: ‘I’m very happy! Your father is the brother of my grandpa.’ He welcomed me into the family. I welcomed him, too. His next email began: ‘Today, I met my aunt Christel. She told me many things, even about you…’ It turned out she had met my father when he returned to Europe for a holiday in 1966. But I was more interested to learn about Frank. He said he was thirty-one. He has two older brothers. And: ‘I work as a police officer here in Düsseldorf.’

  A cop in the family! At last. I was now really warming to Frank; I sent him photos of my daughter and fiancée, and told him about Karl, the architect of MMP and the Act Party. Frank replied in what may have been an example of that fabulous new language known as Google English: ‘I learned so much about your, and so they are also my Ancestors, it’s wonderful. A Braunias was a diplomat. Whaaao!’ He attached photographs I had never seen before of my great-grandfather, my grandmother, and a family portrait taken in Mount Maunganui when I was six. Whaaao.

  His most recent email provided a brief but illuminating autobiography. He wrote, ‘I am working since twelve years for the Düsseldorf Police Department. The first years in a emergency call response unit. After this, I was in a unit which was responsible for demonstrations, soccer games, nuclear waste transports through Germany and so on.’ Nuclear waste transports! It gives me the creeps to think about the exact nature of his blithe ‘and so on’. He continued, ‘In this unit there are about 120 police officers. We had special weapons like police batons … Since last year I am in a special unit who is responsible for reducing the youth crime in Düsseldorf.’

  Good old Frank; there is something about his emails that tells me he’s a good cop. I wouldn’t trust myself with a police baton, but Frank most likely swings it with lethal force only when absolutely necessary. And I know that his heart’s in the right place. We exchanged addresses via that fabulous new geography known as Google Earth. Cleverly, he marked his satellite photograph of Düsseldorf with a graphic of a drawing pin, and the message: ‘I live here.’ It seemed to be right beside an autobahn. Not very far away, also marked with a drawing pin, he wrote: ‘My mum lives here.’

  I like looking at that Google Earth view of Düsseldorf. There is the Rhine, wide and looping and brown, with a barge in it; there are industrial complexes and parks and, possibly, nuclear waste transports ‘and so on’; when you operate the toggles and go close in, you can almost taste the mustard, smell the pickled horse. And somewhere in there, right now, is the Braunias family of my cousin Frank and his two brothers and their mum, nine days away from celebrating Christmas Day. Frohe Weihnachten, Frank!

  [December 9]

  Christmas Baby

  This will be her first Christmas. She is—I love this statistic— zero years. Brand new. A spring chicken, smooth as an egg. February baby, born on the day an earthquake was felt in Auckland, delivered when a quack said very good words: ‘We have a baby.’ Born despite the superstitions of a midwife who believed in ‘natural birth’, born thanks to the expertise and medical sense of trained health professionals. It was what is delicately known as a difficult birth; there seemed to be a great many trained health professionals in that white room. One handed me a pair of scissors. Another ordered me to sit down. He was reading a thriller by Dean Koontz. Someone else handed over a baby. The earth moved. Yes, quite a day.

  But she makes her debut every day. She is a constant event, always in the news. Robert Lowell wrote a famous line about his nine-month-old daughter: ‘Like the sun she rises in her flame-flamingo infants wear.’ Our daughter looks best in pale limes, and wakes like the dawn, fresh and full of promise, a smile on her dial. Before she was born I used to think of the happiness that waited in our spare room. I had no idea how much happiness, no idea of the little stranger who was about to take possession.

  A friend posted me an amazing passage by Laurie Lee on the birth of his child: ‘She was convulsed as an Aztec idol. Was this really my daughter, this purple concentration of anguish, this blind and protesting dwarf? … Newborn, she looked already like a centenarian, tottering on the brink of an old crone’s grave, exhausted, shrunken, bald as Voltaire, twisting wrinkled claws in speechless spasms of querulous doom.’ Perhaps I lack imagination, but the star attraction of that day in February—and for the rest of her parents’ life—arrived looking baby-faced, if a little tired.

  The fantastic irrelevance of the father in those circumstances cannot be overestimated. As a mere bystander to proceedings, my only role was to observe the golden rule: no fears for steady men. I did not observe the golden rule. I was deeply afraid. All mothers deserve more than anyone can possibly give. No one can give more than birth.

  That seems a long time ago, and so do the first weeks with her at home, then her first smile, then her first teeth. How old was your baby when that happened, I’d ask other parents, and they’d all say, Don’t know, you just forget. I was appalled at their bland indifference. All love affairs have important dates; how could anyone forget a single intense moment? But they were right. I can’t remember when anything happened. All I know is that she has stayed a baby her whole life.

  In love with floors, strawberries, books, sleep, baths and mirrors, she has moved through 2007 with patience and good grace. Nothing happens fast. Nothing much happens at all; very nearly a complete oaf, drooling, happy, easily surprised, she won’t have a clue it’s Christmas. Doesn’t know one day from the next. Couldn’t tell you where she lives. She couldn’t tell you anything, that great dunce, banging a spoon on the table of her high chair and clawing at the pages of The Sunday Star-Times.

  But she knows her n
ame. She has friends—soft toys like Maria’s monkey, and Gary’s mutant. She has family. Her parents, gigantic and close at hand; and she loves her cousins, two adoring girls. How old will she be when I’m nineteen? asked Heidi. She’ll be fourteen. Oh great! she said, I can take her for drives. Her favourite song is ‘Sara’ by Fleetwood Mac—that always shuts her up in the car.

  Precious goods, a high-security inmate, she travels trussed up in straps and buckles. You can take her anywhere. To the shops, where the barber closed down after a customer stabbed him in the neck; to the liquor store, which was held up at knifepoint. One of the best walks in the neighbourhood is a track beside a creek. It goes past a lunatic asylum. Look, sweetheart, the criminally insane. The track also leads to a waterfall, and a picnic spot by a bridge. We sit beneath the oak trees in agreeable silence. Listen, sweetheart, birds. She gnaws on rusks, scatters the pine needles. Darling companion.

  She gets called Goosey, Mouse, Fat Owl, Boris, all the usual names. She remains a stranger, mysterious and concealed, a secret who gives just a few hints and clues about herself. We peer, and wonder, and endlessly discuss—all new parents are shocking bores. She speaks in squeals and sighs. She may get a doll on Tuesday morning; the main thing is to give her lots of wrapping paper. There are moments when you can detect a little girl, someone pretty and kind and on her own two feet. There are moments when you want with all your heart for her to stop growing, to stay as she is in year zero, poised, tender, immaculate, a baby at Christmas.

  She has other plans. Excited, dreamy, never one to say no at mealtimes, she plots her future, moves remorselessly forward. She has learned to clap. Come and see this, I roared. I watched her and her mother together, laughing at this new hilarity, two beautiful girls.