by Nahum Megged
“No,” answered Xnen decisively. “You will stay here. They think you are an etuko, a great sorcerer. You will keep our women safe, and Yakura will keep you safe.”
“But what about those whose bodies must be burned?” I asked. “All the men will leave the camp, and I cannot burn them on my own…”
“The elderly will stay behind, those who can no longer fight,” answered Xnen. “They will burn the bodies with the women, and our bodies will receive the ashes when we come back.”
There was a great commotion. Everyone felt something significant was underway, that Omauha had returned. Xnen promised to go up to the god’s mountain after the battle and thank him but made it clear that now everyone must go out to war — all the men who could carry arms. A great uproar also broke out among the women. They would need to build the new village while the warriors were gone. I decided to allow them the use of my hut. Xnen was probably right, I thought, I must remain in the camp. The elderly and the women might also have thought I was a kind of shaman that could protect them and they felt safer around me.
“And what about the prisoner?”
“He will come with us and show us the way,” answered Xnen.
Such is the power of war. Peace does not bring such tremendous emotional strength, I thought. The remains of the disaster that had struck them now seemed to vanish. Forgotten were those who had died prematurely, forgotten were the ruined village and the spoiled food, because war was coming, and it brought new strength and erased the suffering. It was terrible. Only suffering had the strength to erase suffering. Only blood could wash blood. Only life-claiming war gives the strength to cling to life.
Preparations were hastily made. The vihu that had been unearthed during the Mashko invasion was passed from hand to hand, from bamboo reed to bamboo reed, from nose to nose. The warriors bound the young prisoner and left the camp with unimaginable speed. The place was now completely quiet. Only two men had remained with me and the women, but they were not old, as Xnen had said they would be, and looked fit to fight. I suppose there were other wars awaiting them, other battlefields. The women continued to prepare the bonfires. Soon, the bodies would be set on fire, and only the voices of the wailers would be heard.
I wanted to save myself the terrible sight and the smell of burning bodies and got ready to leave the camp. Yakura immediately stood and followed me, as if I had given her a hint.
“What will you do if I go down the road to that mountain?” I asked her.
“You won’t!” she answered with a determined smile.
It appeared that Xnen had returned to being the all-mighty shaman, the echo of Omauha’s voice. Now Yakura, a manifestation of Minare, according to their beliefs, knew exactly how to treat me again, what should and shouldn’t be done before the warriors returned.
We walked to the stream together. We passed the ancient temple. The clasped hands were still there, hinting at something whose meaning eluded me. I heard someone sighing between the trees.
“Do you hear a voice too, Yakura?” I asked the girl.
She narrowed her eyes, listening attentively to the crackling emerging from the bushes struggling for sunlight above the stream. Hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence, Yakura walked toward the source of the sound. I followed her. I stared in amazement at the sight that greeted us. A young white woman was lying in the bushes, her hands tied behind her back, her feet bound, and her mouth covered with a banana leaf tied behind her head. She wore the clothes of a forest hiker: pants with wide pockets, a plaid shirt, and rubber boots worn by those who feared snakes. Her clothes were torn. Her eyes were black like the local women’s, her hair black as well, her nose slightly turned up. I immediately went to release her.
I tore off the ropes and removed the gag from her mouth. Yakura brought her water in an empty coconut she found beside the stream. The young woman drank thirstily, as if cleansing her body from the inside. I splashed a little water on her face and she looked at me in bewilderment. I helped her sit up, supporting her back. She looked at the naked Yakura, who sat at her feet.
“You don’t have to speak if you can’t,” I said.
Her eyes told me she didn’t understand my English. I addressed her in Spanish, and the corners of her mouth turned up in a small smile. She covered the tears in her clothes, hiding her exposed body with her hands.
“You have nothing to worry about,” I told her, “you are among friends. The Yarkiti will care for you until we can take you back to your home.”
The young woman’s eyes narrowed with fear.
I pointed at Yakura. “This girl is about your age. Does she look dangerous to you? Don’t believe the stories about the Yarkiti. The village warriors have just gone out to take vengeance in your name.” Something told me the girl had been attacked, even raped, by the young Mashko warriors and left bound and abandoned during their flight.
We helped her to her feet and took her to our camp. Yakura led the young woman to her hut, served her bananas, and sat next to the her, her kind hands stroking the stranger’s hair.
The unmistakable smell of burnt flesh from the funeral pyres engulfed the camp. I was troubled by a shapeless dread and did not know if it was caused by concern for the warriors who might not return or the presence of the young white woman whose identity and reasons for being in the forest were unknown to me. I assumed she had been raped and knew if we hadn’t found her shortly after she’d been left there, the jungle animals would have attacked her.
The wailers’ cries and the acrid smoke had turned the barren camp into a nightmare realm. I walked about the camp in a daze, and each time I neared the village limits the two men who had remained behind showed up, as if they, just like Yakura, had been ordered to watch over me. I returned to my hut to put everything in writing, and discovered I had lost my sense of time, that I could not mark the day in the journal’s calendar, because that day was already gone, and even if it still existed, I knew not where or what it was.
My eyes fell on William’s pair of pens. I considered the possibility the raiders who had attacked the young woman had captured him as well and left a few of his possessions behind, those that appeared worthless to them, like the pens and the walking stick I had seen in the main hut.
Suddenly, I remembered you. You appeared in front of me, and in your eyes I saw a terrible secret you were unwilling to betray… I couldn’t stop my tears.
I left my hut and went to Yakura’s. I thought she and the nameless woman could use my help. I quickly walked past the funeral pyres, averting my eyes. A terrible spell of dizziness overcame me, and I felt my knees were about to buckle. I forced myself to continue to the shaded hut. Yakura sat next to the young woman, stroking her head like a mother. I felt like an unnecessary, perhaps even harmful, intruder. Still, I couldn’t overcome my desire to get closer to them. Yakura turned her head to me. With the hand that wasn’t stroking, she motioned for me to keep silent and invited me to stay.
I sat on a mat and looked around the walls of the hut. They were covered with pictures and complex textures Yakura had woven with her ropes. Slowly, the shapes became clearer to me, and I recognized the images of spirits. I remembered how Yakura had woven those ropes while the Mashko youths raided the camp. I thought she must have hoped to welcome the spirits with the ropes and even protect the mysterious young woman who now slept in her hut.
I pressed my lips against Yakura’s ear and said in a whisper that when the girl awoke she should probably be taken to the small stream. Bathing with another woman should have a healing effect.
Curious eyes occasionally peeked in the opening of the hut. The women tending the pyres wanted to know what was taking place in the magical hut that hadn’t been damaged by the storm and which now held the forest goddess Minare, a powerful white sorcerer, and another Nave, a foreign white woman, who had been brought into the camp by the other two.
The
young woman opened her eyes then closed them right away. When she slowly reopened them, they were tiny, almost invisible slits. I concentrated on the girl’s face; fine worry lines on the sides of her mouth had ruined her innocence. At last, she opened her eyes wide. “Water… water…” she whispered in Spanish, and Yakura, without understanding her language, immediately brought a coconut shell containing the life-giving drink to her lips. Her misfortune had taken place next to a stream, I thought, and the water of the stream will now accompany her for good and ill, until the end of all roads.
The girl looked at the hut decorated with the spirit images Yakura had created, and the ghost of a smile shaped her lips. “Beautiful,” she whispered. “A beautiful place.”
Yakura smiled too, as if she understood every word the stranger was saying, or at least her meaning. The voices of the wailers drifted into the hut along with the odor of charred flesh.
“What is going on here?” the girl asked and looked at me. I explained to her that a disaster had struck our camp and that the villagers were mourning their dead according to their traditions.
The foreigner raised her head and leaned on her elbows, slightly sunken in the net of the hammock. “You are alive, then?” She stared at me, waiting.
The question was so unexpected, I asked her to explain.
“Before we headed into the forest, we received a request from the Institute for the Preservation of the Forests, our employers, to find out what had become of you. That is, I assume you are the researcher who went into the heart of the forest long ago, severing all contact with his family and friends. You should know that your children and your friends have written to the institute and asked that we try to locate you.”
She had come here to find out what had happened to me, I thought to myself, and had already suffered much as a result.
“We had already come close to the Yarkiti territory several times. The other tribes tried to dissuade us from continuing. They said the Yarkiti are dangerous cannibals. We were five researchers. I was the only woman on the expedition. We were led by twelve local guides who live in the town of Ciudad Don Pedro. The journey was hard. We camped in small clearings that seemed to have been made for us, about a day or half a day’s walk from here. We covered the boats and hid them next to the river, even though we knew there were eyes watching us everywhere, tracking our every move. We heard drums and calls imitating howler monkeys spreading throughout the forest, letting the locals know we had entered their world.
“Our purpose was to investigate intriguing reports we had received from the forest inhabitants and archeologists who had already done surveys here. There were various signs that a large, unknown civilization had existed in the forest in the past. There was talk of stone building remains, and of a cave system connecting them. We theorized that the priests must have used these caves on their way to the temples, and the believers thought they emerged from the bottom of the earth. Before heading out, we saw stone tools collected from this part of the forest being sold in the town by the natives. The tools echoed those made by the great civilizations in the continent’s northern and southern zones.”
She stopped her story and shut her eyes tightly, as if trying to banish difficult images haunting her. She angrily clenched both hands into fists, then spread her fingers to hold the coconut shell and drink some water before continuing.
“The leader of our expedition is Herbert William, Jr., son of the renowned anthropologist who disappeared in New Guinea a few years ago. I don’t know why, but Herbert was convinced that his father had disappeared here, in this forest. It was clear to me that it wasn’t the relics of the ancient past that really interested him, but those of the recent past, and his main purpose was to find out what had happened to his father.”
Yakura watched the girl attentively and gave me an occasional glance, as if trying to guess what was being said between us.
The young woman went silent. I did not rush her to continue her story. As I watched and waited, thoughts frantically ran around in my head. Herbert William’s son believed his father’s life had not ended in New Guinea. He believed William was here, somewhere in this section of the forest. Could the objects I had found, the pens and the journal, confirm the son’s theory? There was another possible conclusion to be drawn from the young woman’s story — that it wasn’t the father who had left those objects behind, but the son walking in his footsteps. Would that disperse the mists of mystery cloaking me? I went to the young woman, held her hands and gently pressed them. She gave me a soft, but focused look, and her eyes traveled across the hut and rested on Yakura’s naked body.
“I never imagined the Yarkiti women were so beautiful,” she said. “I’ve always imagined them looking like the women I saw in photographs at the institute, skinny with a swollen belly, legs as thin as toothpicks, eyes sunken behind black eyelashes… And here is such a lovely young woman. She looks like a goddess.”
I kept holding her hands but said nothing. I could have told her everything I had discovered about Yakura, but the latter would immediately notice we were talking about her, although it was not likely she would understand my words. I could have told her about Yakura’s role as the manifestation of the forest goddess, not only in the eyes of the Yarkiti, but also in the eyes of the people of other tribes, like the ones who had invaded the village. I could have told her she was an angel who had accompanied me since I’d joined the tribe, describe the unique, intimate relationship we had, and admit my feelings sometimes got confused when I looked at her brown, willowy body, even though I am almost three times her age…
We sat quietly, each lost in his own thoughts and secret wishes. Now and then, village women stared from the doorway, as if they wanted to tell, to ask, to say something, or just to find out what was happening there, inside the hut. Outside, the men and women of the tribe were all struggling, each in his own way, with bitter death. An especially bold woman stuck her head into the hut and signaled something to Yakura.
“What happened?” I asked Yakura.
“I will go find out,” she answered and went to the curious crowd waiting for her outside and then disappeared into the smoky village. Only the two of us remained in the hut, two white people. The girl was sunk in her hammock and her bitter memories, while I sat on an alligator-shaped stool one of the villagers had carved to show his respect to the all-mighty animal-god.
“What is your name?” I asked her.
“Marina,” the girl answered in a whisper.
“Where do you live?”
“Not far. In Ciudad Don Pedro. I learned everything that could be learned there about the forest dwellers. I learned the languages of the major tribes and their customs… my father taught me.”
Her father? “And what does your father do?” I asked.
Silence. More silence.
She closed her eyes as if she were trying not to betray a dark and terrible secret. “There will be time enough to tell you about him,” she said briefly. A few long moments later, she added, “My mother was also an anthropologist who was greatly revered by a few of the tribes. She fought the gold and oil seekers, the polluters of rivers and destroyers of the forest. One day, she went to a protest arranged by a leader of the Bororo tribe who had studied the language and customs of white people. The army, or two men disguised as soldiers, attacked the rally and shot the demonstrators indiscriminately. One of the first bullets wounded my mother, and she never fully recovered from her injury. When my father, who at the time dwelt far from our house, heard about what had happened, he quickly returned to Don Pedro and swore to avenge her injury, the death of Charape, the Indian leader, and the death of those murdered with him. He immediately set out to discover who had been behind the assassination, whether to the villages bordering the forest, or to the forest that swallows everything…either way, he never came back. This is how I lost both my mother and my father.
“A long time l
ater, a handsome young man arrived in town. He spoke broken Spanish, but it was enough. We could understand him, and he understood us. In his determination and love for the people of the forest, he was much like my father. We had much in common, and we fell in love. We dreamed of building a house together beside one of the rivers, surrounded by the people of the tribes who would love us as much as we loved them. But for now, so he explained to me, he had to form an expedition and go into the forest. Many secrets waited to be discovered there.
“I knew he was hiding something from me, and when I managed to coax it from him, my whole world collapsed for the third time. That young man I loved and planned to build my home with, was my brother, my father’s son. He never imagined I might be his sister, because he knew nothing of the life of our father in Don Pedro, and I hadn’t told him what I’d discovered. My father had lived a double life: He had two houses, two wives, and two families. I continued to live as the handsome young man’s lover and future wife, while he had no idea that during our passionate lovemaking he was committing incest with his sister.
“I had committed a great sin. If everything had gone according to my plan, I would have married my brother… and this is the reason behind everything that has recently happened to me. To stop me, perhaps to punish me…” She broke into anguished tears, buried her face in her hands, and sank into her grief.
Just then, Yakura returned and said excitedly, “The drums of the camp warriors’ messenger tell us that Xnen and the warriors have crossed the river separating us from the Mashko. We must prepare those who remain in the camp to go up to Omauha’s mountain and plead for his help! Perhaps this time he will listen to the voices of the survivors. I’m afraid there will be many more funeral pyres when the warriors return.”
I explained to Marina what Yakura had said, because even though she had learned a few of the languages of the tribes in the region, she had never studied the Yarkiti language. It could be that her father had regarded the Yarkiti domain as a kind of private district, a secret he kept for himself, hidden from his wife and daughter.
