Afterwards, when he was sitting on the bench again, he was looking at his arms.
The last time I spoke to Mister Cawdor was when he was getting into Keroni’s canoe to go ashore at Vilakota. I leaned out from the Igau and said, almost into his ear: ‘Very bad, taubada.’ But he pretended not to hear.
DALWOOD
From Keroni’s canoe we went straight to the resthouse, through the rain. The palms were thrashing overhead, and one nut just missed me. In the resthouse, Alistair wandered off without a word into the sleeping-room. All he had with him was that stupid blanket.
Not that I had much more, for once. Just my sponge-bag, two tins and a tin-opener, and it felt good to be without all the usual Government clutter. We were going to sleep on mats on the bare boards, and if the Igau had gone down overnight with the typewriter there would have been mixed feelings in me.
At first Keroni and I squatted on the veranda by the blaze of a torch, which flickered wildly in the growing wind, and exchanged polite mutters, from which I gathered that he was peeved about being ignored in that way by his friend Misa Kodo. But I explained: ‘Misa Kodo is sick,’ which was a word I had good reason to know by then, and he got all concerned and said a lot of things in which I picked out several times the words ‘my wife’. Remembering his wife and her teapot, I could imagine a banquet suddenly arriving, so it was a relief when Kailusa came ashore with the Tilley lamp and started explaining something about how things were.
I opened the two tins, one of sausages and one of beans, and went into the room. I said: ‘Are you still not eating?’
‘No, thanks,’ he said, from his mat on the floor. On that last patrol I don’t remember seeing him eat or drink at all, and he’d almost given up his foul tobacco. I had noticed that if he did smoke, the shaking of his hands got worse.
‘I won’t be long,’ I said. ‘When I’ve got rid of the locals and finished with the lamp, you can have a good night’s sleep.’
‘Thanks,’ he said.
But it took quite a while to lose them all, and even afterwards it was hardly peaceful. There was a lot of running around in the dark, and muttering and whispering, and the sound of the storm was growing tremendous.
So as not to disturb him, I turned out the lamp on the veranda, and groped my way through the dark to my mat in the room which was roaring with wind. That night even I felt cool, and lay down with all my clothes on.
Just before I went to sleep, he said: ‘Tim.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘I can’t go out,’ he said. ‘They’re watching. Osana is watching. I’m sorry, Tim.’
I didn’t know what he meant, and was too sleepy to wonder. I thought perhaps he was going to take a leak through a crack in the floor boards, which was hardly the sort of thing to bother me.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘You won’t forget?’
‘No,’ I said, just before falling asleep. ‘I won’t forget.’
SALIBA
That night I slept in the house with Keroni’s wife, because you never know about those mainland policemen, and I felt that I was Benoni’s woman. I say I slept, but there were so many noises that we two women both lay awake, and sometimes smoked and sometimes chewed. I do not know where Keroni was, but I could hear men moving about outside and talking, or calling quietly to each other.
The sound of the storm was very great, because two seas meet at Vilakota, and there is so little land between the sea and the cliffs that the palms are planted very thickly, like a Dimdim plantation. All night the nuts were thudding around us, and the branches crashing, and the two seas thundering together.
When the screaming began, I was wide awake, and ran immediately out of the house, and was one of the first people to see Kailusa.
He was just outside, lit up by the fire of Keroni’s torch. He was shining in the light. He was shining with blood.
‘O my taubada,’ he kept screaming. ‘I was sleeping underneath his house. O my taubada. His house is bleeding.’
DALWOOD
I can’t.
Anyway, you don’t need me to tell you what it looked like. You saw for yourself.
My first thought, when Keroni’s torch burst into the room, was that it had been done in frenzy, with exultation. I thought that it must have been with a sort of joy that he did it.
He had started on his wrists, and worked up to the big veins, arteries, whichever they are, inside his elbows. And then, I suppose because that wasn’t quick enough, he had done his throat. But his hands by then must have been nearly useless, which was why it took so long.
Through all the commotion of getting him to the Igau, getting everyone else to the Igau, he was still alive. In Keroni’s canoe he was even conscious for a moment, and whispered to me, in a high feeble voice: ‘Tim, don’t hurry.’ Or perhaps it was: ‘Don’t worry.’
I didn’t answer. I was angry with him, furiously angry.
When we were well out on the lagoon, I was standing at his head, and old Boitoku came and looked at his throat. Boitoku said to himself in a wondering way: ‘Makawala lekoleko,’ and I understood that. He meant like a chicken, one that had had its head cut off with a bushknife.
The last time he was conscious he said to me, in that falsetto whisper: ‘I saw. Timi, I saw. Down the tunnel. My body. Atoms. Stars.’
I bent over to look at his black face. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was open. There was blood even on his teeth. In his paralysed right hand the razor-blade was still gripped between thumb and forefinger, glued there with blood. I couldn’t bring myself to touch him, not even his forehead, because his hair was soaked with blood.
He reached out his useless left hand and laid it on my arm. He said: ‘I can never die.’ Then he died.
I left him to Kailusa and Biyu. I saw them hide him away, under the red blanket with the almost obliterated tiger.
I went up to the bow, and watched the boat butt its way over the rough, milky-green lagoon. I thought: I will be different now. See nothing by accident. Hear nothing by accident. Say nothing by accident. Move through the villages like royalty, like a wooden figurehead.
I remembered his asking, when I stood in that place, what did I think I was, the boat’s figurehead? I lifted my arm to my eyes, and saw on my skin the marks of his four fingers, stamped in his dead blood.
BROWNE
I am now in a position to submit a brief preliminary report on the recent events at Kailuana, in the resthouse at Vilakota and on board the Government work-boat Eagle. The enquiry was held on Kailuana, at Wayouyo village and in Mr MacDonnell’s house, most of the witnesses being natives of the island, and Mr MacDonnell feeling unable to make the journey to Osiwa. [You in Samarai will be sorry to hear that ‘King Mak’ has become rather frail.]
Because of my colleague’s death, I have been obliged to depend more than I should have wished on the Government Interpreter OSANA. He is, however, increasingly indispensable.
Through OSANA, I have collected much direct testimony, and more rumours, concerning the events leading up to the rioting.
It now seems clear that the instigator of all the trouble was DIPAPA, the former chief. The man METUSELA, who was almost certainly insane, was merely a cats’-paw. DIPAPA saw in METUSELA’s embryo cargo-cult a chance to destroy the institution of the chieftainship itself. In this he was motivated by spite against his heir, the present chief, BENONI.
Rumours that METUSELA was removed by a ‘flying saucer’ will probably persist for a long time, as DIPAPA, their originator, intended. I myself have little doubt that METUSELA was murdered, either by DIPAPA himself or by people acting on his behalf.
DIPAPA died on November 17th, 1959, three days after Mr Cawdor, and there is a strong suspicion that he was poisoned by his youngest wife, SENUBETA, using part of a well-known local fish. However, out of respect for local sensitivities, I have cancelled plans for a post-mortem. This would almost certainly be inconclusive, given the limited facilities at our disposal and the likely s
tate of the body, which was interred 12 hours after death.
Though the woman SENUBETA was once the mistress of the new chief, BENONI, there is no suggestion from any quarter that BENONI was implicated in his uncle’s removal. I have the highest hopes of this young man, who is personally and intellectually impressive. Under his leadership much of the damage caused by the rioting has been repaired, and though not himself a Christian, he has sent messengers by canoe to both the Methodist and Roman Catholic Missions at Osiwa, with a view to restoring the church used by METUSELA to its original purpose.
The illness and death of Mr Alistair Cawdor, PO Osiwa, has distressed people throughout the islands. Though his irrational mental state in the last weeks of his life has contributed to our difficulties, we remember him as a tireless worker, and a remarkable diplomat. It could perhaps be said that he came on the scene a little too early in the Territory’s history.
According to Dr Johannes Buchmann, MO Osiwa, Mr Cawdor would have been unlikely to survive this form of malaria, and had probably already suffered brain damage. The injuries inflicted were appalling, at least to the eye of a layman like myself. I saw the body on board the Eagle as soon as she arrived at Osiwa. It was so covered with dried blood that it was unrecognizable as the body of a European. The effect was best summed up by SAYAM, native skipper of the Eagle, who said to me: ‘Now he is a black man true.’
Arrangements are being made through Konedobu for the transfer of Mr T. A. Dalwood, CPO Osiwa, to a posting in the Southern Highlands. He had coped admirably with this crisis, and is in every way one of the most promising young officers I have known.
A sad sequel to the event at Vilakota was the death of Mr Cawdor’s houseboy, KAILUSA, who committed suicide by leaping from a coconut-palm on November 16th. He was deformed, and his exact age is given by the Methodist Mission as 37. According to OSANA, such a man could never have had any kind of sexual experience in his life, and his devotion to Mr Cawdor, and previously to Mr Cawdor’s estranged wife, reflected this.
Prayers were said for the repose of the souls of Mr Cawdor and KAILUSA at both Missions. At the request of Mrs Alison Cawdor they were buried in the same grave, near the house formerly occupied by Mr and Mrs Cawdor, and beside the young American anthropologist who died of blackwater fever. The funeral, among this naturally demonstrative people, was very moving.
It is an indication of Mr Cawdor’s confusion of mind that his last note, scribbled on the fly-leaf of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, was written in the local language, though addressed to Mr Dalwood, who does not speak it. As translated by OSANA, it reads:
‘Timi, my younger brother Timi:
Do not be sorry. Everything will be good, yes,
everything will be good, yes, every kind of
thing will be good.’
Father Galagher believes that this note contains a quotation from English. When the exact words have been ascertained, they will be inscribed on the stone which Mrs Cawdor proposes to erect.
[I can guess what impression you in Samarai must have of Alistair. I only ask you to consider that it could have happened to you.]
OSANA
Who spoke to the people about the star-machine and the Minauluwa?
Mister Cawdor.
Who caused the destruction of Olumata and Obomatu?
Mister Cawdor.
Who caused the death of the boy Teava at Olumata?
Mister Cawdor.
Who caused somebody to murder Metusela?
Mister Cawdor.
Who caused Senubeta to poison Dipapa?
Naibusi, because of Mister Cawdor.
Who killed Kailusa?
Mister Cawdor.
What caused Mister Cawdor?
NAIBUSI
Alistea i lukwegu, tuta ka sisu o veranda, i livala: ‘O Naibus’, nanogu sena mwau.’ I livala: ‘A katoulo.’ I livala: ‘A doki ba kaliga. Magigu ba kaliga. Gala magigu ba nagowa…
OSANA
The old woman say: Alistair said to me, when we were on the veranda, he said: ‘O Naibusi, my mind is very heavy.’ He said: ‘I am sick.’ He said: ‘I think I am going to die. I want to die. I do not want to be mad. I am mad now, Naibusi, and I will not be better. It is like somebody inside me, like a visitor. It is like my body is a house, and some visitor has come, and attacked the person who lived there.’ He said: ‘O Naibus’. O my mother. My house is echoing with the footsteps of the visitor, and the person who lived there before is dying. That person is bleeding. My house is bleeding to death.’
NOTE
The incident described in the prologue is not fictitious, but was widely reported in the press in 1959. It is discussed by Jacques Vallee in his Anatomy of a Phenomenon (New York: Henry Regnery, 1965; London: Neville Spearman, 1966). As I was then out of any sort of contact with the world beyond my own sub-district, I was in no position to connect that phenomenon with the one described to me at the time by the inhabitants of the island of Kitava, nor with the disappearance, a few weeks earlier, of three men from the island of Tuma. Both incidents are incorporated in the novel without comment. Like William of Newburgh, recording a strange aerial apparition over Dunstable in 1189, ‘I design to be the simple narrator, not the prophetic interpreter; for what the Divinity wished to signify by this I do not know.’
It is a pleasure to thank the Literature Board of the Australia Council for a grant held in 1973–4, during the heady early days of the Whitlam government.
R.S.
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The Idea of Perfection
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The Quiet Earth
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Down in the City
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The Long Prospect
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The Catherine Wheel
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The Watch Tower
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The Long Green Shore
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The Unknown Industrial Prisoner
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Visitants Page 22
