Visitants

by Randolph Stow

  After the burning of Obomatu, all returned to Wayouyo, where preparations had been made in and around the church for the next revelation. From this moment it becomes clear that the mind behind the destruction was that of the old chief, DIPAPA.

  BENONI

  In the clearing they had lighted a fire. It was the children who were feeding it at first, the small boys, running in out of the dark with bundles of wood and throwing them at the flames so that the sparks puffed upwards. Then they cheered and pushed each other about, full of excitement, but not knowing why or what to do.

  All the time men and women were passing them by, going to join the crowd that pressed about the church. They were packed in front of it so thick that you could not see in, and at the sides the walls were bending under the weight of the taller men, who jostled each other to get a sight, over the top of the walls, of the things and the people inside. Their shoulders shone with the firelight and their faces shone with the torches they were staring towards. They would turn back and call and beckon to one another, their faces hot and moved like boys watching a fight.

  Through the bodies came a quick, loud, confusing music, that was made, you knew, by people not listening to one another, but hearing only themselves; their own finger-drums, their own panpipes, or moaning to themselves the very old songs whose words nobody understands. It was a sound like I had never heard before, of very hungry, very lonely people. Now and again there was the sound of a conch, hollow and low.

  I left Saliba to push my way through the men by the walls, to look in over their shoulders. In front of me, in the middle of the church, my uncle was sitting on a carved stool. The side of his head was towards me, the side with the tattered ear-lobe. He stared over the heads of the crowd at the glow of the fire, making munching movements sometimes with his lips, and twisting his fingers together round the top of an ebony walking-stick carved with the leaves and tendrils of yam-vines.

  At each side of him, in two lines, the painted men sat cross-legged on the floor. They had driven their torches into the soft ground and the flames swayed in front of their faces. They were my uncle’s men, all of them, none of them young and none of them friends of mine. Like him, they stared ahead of them, drumming or piping or droning their songs, each one quiet, but together loud and vague like the sea.

  Near the back of the church the pilot was hanging from his rope, nailed to his aeroplane, which trembled. Because of the flickering of the light and the twisting of the rope his white eyes seemed to move and shine. Past him, against the back wall, someone had built a little hut of matting, round and pointed like a shell. Out of the hut, in the small silence between the other noises, came cries and moans, growing louder and faster: Ai! A’i! A’a’i! Then fading away: A! A’o! A-a-a!

  SALIBA

  Dipapa clenched his hands about his stick. He lifted himself to his feet, and stood looking at the people.

  All the sounds stopped. Everything but the cries in the little house, which grew and grew.

  ‘You hear,’ Dipapa called, in his tired, wandering old man’s voice. ‘A man will appear. A man will speak.’

  Then a great shout pierced through the hut of matting, deep like a conch, and as Dipapa turned back to it a man burst out, pushing away the flaps that were its doors, and stumbled, reeling, between the torches, to the front of the church. His head was lifted very high, towards the stars, and his eyes were nearly closed. Only a little white showed between the lids. In his two hands, lifted to the sky, he held the old sword of the King of France. All his body was trembling, and he clung to the sword as if he was afraid of what was happening to him and only had trust in that.

  Nobody said: It is Metusela. It was Metusela, and yet it was not.

  Our bones were tight with fear. We did not seem to breathe.

  ‘What man are you?’ called Dipapa across the church. ‘Speak, tell us. What is your name?’

  And then we heard the voice. Not Metusela’s voice. Metusela’s little body was shaking, the sweat made stripes on his face. But the voice that came out of his mouth was huge and deep and calm.

  ‘I am Taudoga,’ it said. ‘A man of the stars.’

  Behind Metusela, over his head, the pilot looked down on us. The voice seemed to come from him, not from the frightened little man in the torn Dimdim shorts.

  ‘Today I will speak to you,’ it said. ‘I will tell you of your ancestors and the ancestors of Dimdim.

  ‘Two brothers came from the stars and crashed at Odakuna. The older brother was Kulua’ibu. The younger brother was Dovana.

  ‘The older brother said: “I will make a net and go fishing. You open the box, and build us a house here at Odakuna.”

  ‘The older brother went away to fish. The younger brother opened their box of tools. In the box were nails, a hammer, a saw. He built a house and began to roof it, nailing down the corrugated iron.

  ‘Later the older brother came back from fishing. He looked for his younger brother and could not find him. But he just thought: “He is hiding from me,” and went away into the bush to gather vines.

  ‘But soon he began to grow suspicious, he began to grow angry, his belly was hot. He shouted: “While I was away, fishing for all of us, my brother was sleeping with my wife.”

  ‘When the younger brother heard that, he was mad with rage. He said: “Tomorrow I will pack up our belongings and go. If you take back what you said, I will give you the toolbox.” But the older brother was too angry, he would not take back what he said.

  ‘So one day the younger brother, Dovana, and his mother and his sister, packed up the belongings and went away to Dimdim.

  ‘And the older brother stayed. With vines alone he lashed together his house and his canoe. He went foraging in the forest and found nothing but vines.

  ‘Because the younger brother had taken away the iron, the saw, the nails, the hammer, everything. He had taken them all away to Dimdim.

  ‘That is why you have nothing. Your ancestor was foolish and angry, he let his younger brother take the things that belonged to him. The ancestor of the Dimdims was clever and a thief.

  ‘And when other star-machines came, with bully-beef and knives and axes and trousers and all those somethings for your ancestor, Dovana’s people tricked them into landing in Dimdim. They promised they would send those things to your people, but they stole them instead. So the Dimdims have everything, you have nothing.

  ‘They will steal even what you have. Misa Makadoneli lives on your land. He gives you orders. Misa Kodo gives you orders. If you have money, Misa Kodo is going to take it for the Government. He will take your shillings and give you instead a piece of paper, with writing on it, saying to himself: You fools.

  ‘But the people in the stars have found out what happened to the cargo they meant for Kailuana. We know that the Dimdims stole it. We are very angry.

  ‘That is why we have told you to burn Olumata and Obomatu. You do not need those houses. You will have houses with roofs of iron. You do not need yams or banana-palms or betelnut. You will have bully-beef and tinned peaches and rum. Burn your houses. Burn your food. Burn your skirts and yavis and ramis. Go hungry till we come. Go naked till we come. Dance, sing, make love. We are very near. We may come tomorrow. We are coming with trucks and shotguns and bombs. We are bringing the children of Kulua’ibu their cargo.’

  CAWDOR

  It has been very difficult to establish the substance of METUSELA’s message. His own extraordinary excitement (witnesses who have seen cases of epilepsy say that he appeared to be in a fit) induced a rather similar state in most of his audience, and it is doubtful whether many followed the details of his talk. The story itself is an old one, possibly very old indeed. It tells how an older brother (black), through his impetuous behaviour, lost his inheritance to a younger brother (white), who took away the family’s European tools and settled in Dimdim, the homeland of the Australians and various other white nations. As he also took away the mother and sister, these manufactured goods and skil
ls have remained, quite properly, in Dimdim, descending in the female line. On to this story METUSELA then grafted another one, slightly adapted to the new phenomenon of the space-craft, telling how the cargo intended for the elder brother’s descendants had been diverted and withheld by the Dimdims. His audience, if they followed him so far, would have found this quite credible. They do believe that a plane (and, presumably, a space-craft) has to be lured, like a bird, and that it is only the Dimdims who know the secret of the magic.

  It has been even more difficult to find out what happened after METUSELA reached the climax of his story. The situation is rather like the one which Dalwood and I struck at Kaga, very recently, when I put some questions about their comparatively long-lived ‘Government’ during the war. No Kaga man would talk of it in front of anyone else; their ‘shame’ was too great. In the same way, the Kailuana people cannot be made to speak. All I can do is put together a few hints and slips of the tongue that I noted in private conversations.

  METUSELA came to the end of his speech in a frenzy. He was shaking and dripping with sweat. But the voice which he had assumed, the voice that was supposed to be TAUDOGA’s, was not at all agitated. It was this peculiar contrast, between the hysteria of the little man and the calm (and very loud) authority of the voice, which seems to have had most effect on the crowd. They were convinced that they were hearing something uncanny. Even DIPAPA seems to have been unprepared for the power of METUSELA’s performance, and BENONI describes him as looking ‘at first stunned, and later mad, like the others’.

  Towards the end of the message from TAUDOGA, METUSELA moved out into the crowd, still clinging to the sword, and walked through it until he had reached the bonfire. When he had finished speaking, he drove the point of the sword into the ground. Then he tore off his shorts and threw them on the fire.

  I do not think that anyone was much surprised by this. If I am right, and all this has happened before, then it was probably one of the things they came to see. But it did certainly introduce a new element. As SALIBA puts it, in the rudest vernacular, METUSELA was in a state of sexual arousal.

  Up till this point, the crowd had been silent. But once METUSELA had made his gesture, a tremendous racket broke out; the ‘painted men’ rushed from the church, beating finger-drums and blowing conches, the women began to scream, and the younger men ran about making the ululating noise common here. Then a second person stripped. I think it hardly coincidence that this should have been BOULATA, a wife of DIPAPA’s, aged about 40.

  After BOULATA had burned her skirt, most of the crowd swarmed to the fire and followed her example. BENONI gives a dry description of the effect of all this on DIPAPA. The old man, he says, was watching from the front of the church with an expression of such intense excitement that BENONI expected, and rather hoped, to see him sprint across the clearing and sacrifice the Government’s rami, in which he received the Duke of Edinburgh at Port Moresby. But the mood could not be sustained, apparently, and soon afterwards he hobbled back to his stool inside the church, where he seemed, Benoni says, to doze off, with his chin on his walking-stick.

  I am not going to try to reconstruct what followed. BENONI is shy about describing it, even though he did not take part. Mr MacDonnell’s opinion is that it could not be called an orgy, as Kailuana people lack the necessary imagination. Whatever it was, it was initiated by METUSELA and BOULATA, almost certainly with DIPAPA’s blessing, and there are few people on the island who did not join in.

  One who did not was SALIBA, and considering the normal tone of her conversation she expresses herself rather primly about it. She speaks of people behaving ‘like dogs’ and ‘like pigs’. She says she felt ‘very great shame’ because BENONI was there and watching.

  The shame was shared, for various complicated reasons to do with kinship and other existing relationships, by a number of individuals scattered through the crowd. Most of them were young, falling within the age-group of BENONI and SALIBA. I have the impression that something similar happened in the wild days at Kaga. Perhaps the young are more inhibited than the middle-aged; or perhaps they were frightened or embarrassed by the sudden change, amounting almost to a change of personality, in their elders. It was precisely the people who had taught them the taboos who were seen that night to be publicly breaking them, and there was a violence about the celebrations which scared the children, in particular. As BENONI was alone by the church, and obviously not intending to join in, these people, who included SALIBA, began to gravitate towards him. Whether or not one sees this as the beginning of an organized resistance depends on whose half-truths and whose denials one accepts.

  SALIBA

  When he said to me what he said we were in garden-land near the path, out of breath with running, because the girls and older children had begun to run, and I answered at first: ‘No. No, I could not.’

  Clouds were rushing across the sky, but every little while the moon broke through and shone on the white coral-lumps in the soil, and shone upwards from the coral into his face, which was stern and bright-eyed, while he held my shoulders.

  ‘Why me?’ I said. ‘Beni, there are others.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There is only you. You are with me.’

  ‘But there are men,’ I said. ‘Over there, there is Tobeba’i, my aunt’s husband. He is a strong man, and fond of you. He will do anything you say.’

  ‘No one is with me like you,’ he said. ‘Tobeba’i will help me later. But you must help us first.’

  He is very beautiful. That night in the moonlight he was beautiful like ebony.

  ‘Ah, you speak like that,’ I said, ‘but how long will I be with you, after?’

  ‘While we live,’ he said. ‘If you say no, perhaps I will not live long.’

  Around us, in the bushes, girls were hushing the children, and the men were muttering together, low and fierce.

  ‘Now we have refused,’ Benoni said. ‘We have said no to Dipapa and gone away. Before the Dimdims hear of this and come, there is time for people to be killed. There is time for Wayouyo to be destroyed, and Rotten Wood. Do you want that—more hunger, more people sleeping in the rain, because you are afraid? Do you want me dead, Salib’?’

  ‘It is not fear,’ I said. ‘It is—like sickness. My belly was sick when you spoke of it. I cannot.’

  ‘You will,’ he said, stroking my shoulder. ‘O, I have seen; you will.’ Suddenly his eyes were full of the moon and his teeth shone. ‘I am going with the men to Rotten Wood. I can trust only you. It is bad, but this is a bad time. You must have a hard mind, tonight, and later we can forget.’

  ‘If not—’ I said. ‘If not, I—’

  ‘We will forget,’ he said, ‘we two. When the sun rises tomorrow, all this will be finished. Do you hear that?—finished. Now you understand my mind.’

  Then he dropped his hand, brushing my arm, and turned away towards the shadow of a tree where Tobeba’i, my aunt’s husband, was waiting. He went to lean on Tobeba’i’s shoulder, and they were whispering together, like two small brothers with a secret behind a house. And I thought: No, no, I do not understand your mind. For a moment I had seemed to understand, but not then, hearing them laugh.

  MACDONNELL

  I must have rolled over in my sleep, and as I did the light hit my eyelids and startled me awake. Naibusi was beside my bed, a hissing lamp in her hand, dressed as if for the morning in her blue scarecrow’s cassock, and looking down at me out of a face like a thoughtful prune.

  ‘Naibus’!’ I said. ‘What is it? Is the house on fire?’

  ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘By and by.’

  ‘What are you saying? The house will be on fire by and by?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Soon Dipapa’s people will burn it.’

  I couldn’t doubt her or question that, hearing the calm rage in her voice. How she hated Dipapa. He was the enemy. Once before, she claims, while I was evacuated during the war, he planned to sack the place. Then she foiled him with magic. But bulle
ts and strychnine, her face was saying that night, would make a cleaner solution the second time round.

  As for me, I felt more surprise than funk. If the house didn’t go up in flames, it was bound to go down, sooner or later, with white-ants. And Naibusi and I were on our way out, anyway. But old Dipapa, who couldn’t hobble a yard without his walking-stalk—why should a ruin like that take it into his head to burn my bed under me?

  ‘So there is trouble,’ I said.

  ‘O, very great trouble,’ said Naibusi. ‘Madness. They have burned Olumata. They have burned Obomatu. Now they are all copulating together, like dogs.’

  ‘Ki! I would like to see that.’

  ‘There is no reason to laugh,’ she said. ‘It is truly disgusting. And they are going to burn Wayouyo too, I think tomorrow night.’

  ‘I am not laughing,’ I said. ‘Olumata and Obomatu both burned, you say? There is going to be hunger. And sickness too. The Government will be angry. The idiots. What is it—do they say Jesus is coming?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘I have not asked. Taubada, it is better that we do not understand, we two.’

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘Well—what have you come to tell me to do, old woman?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘you will talk to the wireless, to Samarai.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And now?’

  ‘Give me the keys,’ she said, ‘for the store.’

  She knew where they were, under my pillow, with the revolver. I fished them out and dangled them between us, watching her face.

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘There are some men outside,’ she said. ‘They are going to surprise Dipapa.’

  ‘What men?’ I said. ‘Benoni, eh? And which others?’

  She shrugged her sharp shoulders. ‘I do not know all their names. There is Tobeba’i,’ she said, and I thought of course, there would be, smiling to think of him, still boisterous and eager, running with the younger ones until they had him panting. And if Tobeba’i, I thought, isn’t copulating like a dog at Wayouyo, then there’s something even more interesting in the wind, which Naibusi and I had better not know of, just in case.