Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All

by Christina Thompson

  I was hardly surprised, then, to see what kind of a baby he turned out to be. Strong and solid, he was the most heavily muscled infant I had ever held. He had a head full of black hair and dark, ruddy skin, and two blue-black Mongolian spots on his buttocks. Our first child had been so fair as to pass for white; only the inky blackness of his irises and something about the shape of his face might have told you that he was not entirely Caucasian. But this one would certainly pass for Maori. There was even something of Seven’s mother about his face.

  I imagined then that he would be like his cousins, Seven’s brothers’ and sisters’ boys, one of whom, a handsome round-faced child with shining hair, had once met us at the airport by leaping out of the crowd and launching into a haka. He was about five years old at the time and fearless, slapping his thighs and stamping his feet and shouting, “Ka mate, ka mate, ka ora, ka oral” to the astonishment of everyone at international arrivals.

  When I tried to imagine Seven’s childhood, I always thought about these boys. It required no effort whatsoever to insert them into the stories he told. Like the one about the time he and his brother rode down the big hill in Mangonui on a bike with no seat, no pedals, and no brakes. There was a ninety-degree turn at the foot of the hill and his brother, being older and in control of the bicycle, jumped to safety at the last minute, while Seven flew straight into a fence post and ended up with fifty stitches in his knee.

  Or the time when he went out fishing, this time with a different brother, and threw out his line and hooked his own leg. They had just rowed out to the mouth of the inlet and neither one of them wanted to row all the way back in. Their first idea was to cut out the hook, but the knife was dull and so they decided to cut the line instead, leaving the hook where it was until they had finished fishing. Eventually, they got Seven to a doctor who tried to numb his leg by injecting an anesthetic into the bottom of his foot. But Seven had almost never worn shoes in his life and the calluses on his soles were so thick they broke the needle.

  All his stories were like this: tales of risk and survival, often with a darkly comic twist. He bore no grudge against the brother who’d jumped off the bike. He would probably have done the same thing; it was just his bad luck not to be steering. And there was something in the story of the fishhook that made a gentle mockery not only of his ineptitude in hooking his own leg but of the doctor’s in trying to jab the foot of a ten-year-old Maori boy from the country. They were often absurd, these stories of scrapes and mishaps and bad decisions, and the humor lay in the ratio of the teller’s nonchalance to the severity or magnitude of the event.

  The most extreme example of this I ever heard was a story that was told to me by one of Seven’s cousins. It had to do with a dog that had fallen off the back of a truck and was dragged by a rope for a quarter of a mile before anyone realized what had happened. The cousin seemed to find this uproariously funny. “It was a good dog,” he said when he finally stopped laughing. “It crawled off and licked itself clean.” Although I suspected at the time that this story was being told for my benefit, even so, I thought it was revealing. It was a good dog, in the cousin’s estimation, because it had suffered and survived, against all odds and with no help from anyone else.

  There is a word they use in New Zealand that I’ve never heard used quite the same way anywhere else. “Staunch” in ordinary English, means “trustworthy” or “loyal.” But when it is used in New Zealand, particularly by Maoris, it means something rather different. I would have said “strong,” or “fearless,” or maybe “unexcitable.” But, according to Seven, there were shades of meaning that I’d missed.

  “What does it mean,” I asked him, “when you say that someone is staunch?”

  “It means … holding their own ground,” he said. “Having a presence.”

  “Is it the same as fearless?”

  “Not really. People who do extreme sports are fearless. They’re not staunch.”

  “OK, so it’s not a matter of physical bravery. How about strong?”

  “Any kind of person can be staunch. Big people, little people …”

  “So it’s not a matter of being physically imposing. It’s an attitude.”

  “That’s it. It’s like a kind of power someone has that makes other people respect them.”

  This reminded me of something that happened, way back at the very beginning, when Seven had first come to Melbourne and we were just getting to know each other. We were walking together on a crowded sidewalk and I noticed that as people approached us, they veered out of our way. Nobody had ever done that when they saw me coming, so I said something like, “Gee, it must be good to be so big.” And Seven laughed and told me that he had a certain way of walking that made people get out of his way.

  “Really? Are you trying to intimidate them?”

  “Nah,” he said. “I just like walking in a straight line.”

  To be staunch in New Zealand, I eventually realized, is to have mana. Mana is variously translated as “authority,” “influence,” “prestige,” and “power,” but, in truth, we have no English word that fully expresses it. In the old days, writes Anne Salmond, mana was inherited at birth, but from then on “men were engaged in a contest for relative mana, and according to performances in war, marriage, feasting and on the marae, mana rose and fell.” It was associated with sacredness, like a divine touch or the idea of selection, and yet the path to achieving it was remarkably democratic.

  There is no necessary link between mana and physical power—some of the most feared and successful Maori leaders of the historical period, Hongi Hika for instance, were physically unprepossessing men—but it is historically bound up with violence through the concept of utu. Utu is another word for which we have no good translation. It refers essentially to the principle of reciprocity, the idea being that one is obliged to pay back in kind any slight to one’s mana. Usually, writes Salmond, “utu was exacted on the battlefield, where it was difficult to mete out precisely the right amount of punishment, and after every such encounter, new utu accounts were established. As a consequence groups were forever skirmishing; villages had to be fortified and in the more embattled areas people lived in constant expectation of attack.”

  Cultures, seen from the outside, often seem to have a pattern to them, a shape, an ethos, a characteristic spirit, a disposition. I once looked up the word “belligerence” in an American dictionary and found the following sentence illustrating how the word was used: “among the Native American tribes of the Colonial period, the Iroquois were known for their belligerence.” If this dictionary had been written on the other side of the world, it might have said “Maori” instead of “Iroquois.” But the thing about stereotypes is that, while they contain some information—the extent to which pre-contact Maori or Iroquois cultures enshrined the act of war—they also obscure all those qualities that might contradict or complicate the dominant idea: the value of aroha, or love, for instance, the importance of children, respect for the aged, all that pertains to the domestic side of life, the gentler virtues of friendship, kindness, charity, and cooperation.

  One of the men in my experience who exemplified these other qualities was Seven’s father. I had heard that in his younger days he was more of a terror, but I always found him gentle and reserved. Seven, although much bigger and stronger, seemed to take after him in this respect (his size came from his mother’s side of the family, as did, perhaps, the fiercer temperament of some of his siblings). He was mild in much the same way as his father, and he often played this mildness off against his strength.

  At some point Seven’s stories about his youth stopped being about bikes and fishhooks and started being about fights. He liked these stories and told them often, but as if they were part of some mythic past—like the one about the time all the boys at school gathered in a ring down on the playing field to watch him fight a notorious bully. With his big hands, long arms, and fast reflexes, he was a formidable opponent and he often seemed to attract the attent
ion of large, belligerent men. Once, when we were traveling in Australia, we were sitting in a restaurant in some country town and a big guy walked up to him and tried to step him out.

  “Does that happen to you often?” I asked, when the man had finally given up and gone away.

  But Seven wasn’t, in essence, a fighter. He had the capacity but not the impulse, the ability but not (or at least not often) the desire. He was potentially quite dangerous but, unless he were exceedingly angry, to be with him felt completely safe. He was, I used to think, like the flip side of the coin, a reminder that things are always more complex than they seem.

  This also seemed to me true of Matiu, our second son. I had thought briefly of calling him Mao Mao, when I was still thinking of fish; or Makoare, a family name that might almost be rendered “Macquarie” in English; or Kingi, which is a fairly common Maori name (there is also a girl’s name Kuini, which sounds to English ears like “Queenie”). But in the end we called him Matiu—the Maori form of Matthew, pronounced like Machu in Machu Pichu—because I liked the sound.

  Some very physical babies are always straining, squirming, pushing away, as though they cannot bear to be constrained. But Matiu was never physical in that way. He was a profoundly powerful baby—he could hold his head up and sit and stand long before he should have been able to—but he had a deep, physical kind of calm. He would go all soft and quiet when you held him and nestle into the crook of your arm and lie there for hours with his head under your chin, listening to the thump-thump of your heart. We used to take him with us to parties and pass him around so that all the women could take a turn at holding him and carry on about what a lovely, snuggly baby he was.

  It was clear as he grew older that he would never be a fierce child, a fighter. He was gentle and cooperative, affectionate and kind. He was like his father and his grandfather and, for all I knew, his great-grandfather before them. And yet he had the physical power, the quick reflexes, the heavy muscles, the big bones. He would always be able to throw his weight around if he wanted, though it seemed unlikely to me that he ever would. Then, every once in a while, out of the blue, there’d be a flash of something almost atavistic.

  One day when Matiu was about three years old, he came home from preschool, planted himself with his legs apart, punched the air, and shouted, “Gu! Choki! Pa!”

  I was sitting in the kitchen with my next-door neighbor and we just looked at each other and laughed. Neither of us had the slightest idea what he was doing.

  There were hand motions that went with the words. Gu was a fist stuck straight out. Choki was two fingers in a V. Pa was the hand open, palm outward, fingers spread wide. Each gesture was made with the arm extended out in front of the body.

  “It’s the Maori in him,” said my neighbor. “He’s a born warrior.”

  It did look like a haka when Matiu did it, but, as we found out some time later, it was just rock-paper-scissors in Japanese.

  There wasn’t a new baby in our family every time we moved, but each time we had a baby we were in the process of moving. Matiu was conceived in Queensland, but by the time he was born, we had moved back to Melbourne. I had been offered a job there as an editor and, though it meant leaving my fellowship early, it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Kura had finished her course and Seven was not unhappy to be leaving Brisbane. He had never succeeded in finding work that he liked and, to add insult to injury, he’d hurt his back at the salad factory and was spending weeks at a time lying on the living room floor growing increasingly despondent.

  We drove down from Queensland—Seven, Kura, Aperahama, and me, stopping for a box of Bowen mangoes at the state line and camping in a park full of kangaroos along the north coast of New South Wales. It was spring and at first the temperature was lovely, cool in the mornings, hot in the afternoons, brilliantly clear and sunny. But as we traveled south, the weather deteriorated and, by the time we reached Victoria, it was raining and cold.

  We had arranged to take a serviced flat not far from the university while we looked for someplace to live. Knowing the city as we did, we figured it would take at most a couple of weeks. But it had been years since we lived in Melbourne, and the real estate market had changed: there were fewer places to rent and the prices were higher. Plus, there had only been two of us the last time; now we were four, almost five. That meant three bedrooms, which put all the neighborhoods we’d lived in previously completely out of reach.

  We looked and looked and I got more and more worried and then, one day, I had an idea. We would take the house of an academic on sabbatical, a short-term lease, just a semester or, if we were lucky, a whole academic year. It would be entirely furnished, down to the sheets and crockery, which was helpful, and, because of the length of the lease, would be offered at a below-market rate. We could get our three bedrooms in any neighborhood we liked, so long as every six or twelve months we were willing to pack up and move.

  And so, for the next four years, we lived in a series of other people’s houses. One belonged to a chemical engineer, another to a lecturer in accounting, the third was owned by a woman who made films, the fourth by a man who was leaving the university to work for some corporation overseas. They took their families, their pets, and their personal belongings, but they left everything else: their furniture, their appliances, their pots and pans, their gardening tools, their towels and bedding, even their videos and books.

  It was always peculiar at first. We crept round the houses, opening drawers and cupboards, trying to figure out where everything was: which sheets belonged on the trundle bed and which were for the double; where they kept the hammer and the corkscrew; which pots fit comfortably in the cupboard and which were better underneath the stove. It was like learning the Dewey decimal system: the only sense it made was internal and the only way you could understand it was to surrender yourself to its logic. There was no point in trying to impose one’s own order on a house that was already so completely inhabited, albeit by people who were no longer there. The trick was not to resist them but, rather, to try to figure them out, to do things the way they would have done them. After a while we got used to it, not only to each of the houses in turn, but to the process of serial adaptation.

  Up until the time I went to college, I had lived my entire life in a single house—the house my parents continued to live in and the one that Seven and I had visited when he first came to the States. The only exception was a year when my family went to live in Switzerland for what must have been my father’s own sabbatical. It was the year that I turned eight, and it is the only year of my childhood that I can remember distinctly. I remember the school I went to and the row in which I sat. I remember the daffodil-colored coat I wore at Easter and the smell of the shop downstairs in our building that sold candy and cigarettes. It is all still perfectly crisp and vivid, like a stone lodged in the middle of a stream, while the rest of my childhood seems like an unbroken flow of experience in which I can hardly pinpoint a single detail.

  This, I suppose, is one of the advantages of moving: the creation of these spatiotemporal markers in the mind. But there is a reason these markers get created; it is not simply a matter of the difference between one place and the next. Moving is inherently traumatic, and one of the reasons we remember it is that it is always a kind of shock.

  Matiu was born in the second of these houses; Aperahama began school in the third. By the time we faced our fourth it was clear that we couldn’t keep going in this fashion. It was one thing to schlep ourselves about, or even ourselves and a baby, but it was another thing entirely to move school-age children. Aperahama had gone to kindergarten in a nice little school just down the road from the house we’d been renting when he turned five. But as he approached his sixth birthday, and the beginning of first grade, the owners returned from abroad. I was resigned to moving—I didn’t much like the house anyway—but I really didn’t want my son to have to start changing schools.

  Of course, I had seen this coming and all the su
mmer we had looked for someplace else to live. But the rental market was the worst I’d ever known it. There was nothing out there: nothing that we could afford, nothing that we couldn’t. Two weeks before the start of school I was on the verge of panic. And then, out of the blue, someone called who’d seen a sign I’d posted near the school. They were just about to move to England. Would we be interested in renting their house while they were away?

  It was a godsend. The house was wonderful, with a beautiful garden, a bright, open kitchen, and central heating (a bonus in Melbourne that we’d never enjoyed). It was a solidly middle-class dwelling and a huge step up from the cavernous, drafty, unrenovated Victorian we’d been rattling around in for the past year. Best of all, it was just blocks from Aperahama’s school. But for how long would we have it? The owners had said a year, maybe two, maybe three if we were really lucky. But there was not much point in getting attached to it. Sooner or later, we were going to have to move.

  At first, moving back to Melbourne had felt like coming home. But time had done its work and things had changed. Surprisingly few of our friends had children, and the fact that we had no extended family—apart from Kura, who was now going to college and living in a shared house full of students—made everything more difficult. There was no one to babysit for us or pass on hand-me-downs, no one to get together with for holidays or help with celebrations.

  Few things are harder than raising children in a vacuum. I was already worried about the fact that we were raising the boys outside New Zealand. On the one hand, this meant that they would not have to deal with the domestic politics of being Maori, but then there was the problem of all the things they wouldn’t know. They would never learn to do a haka; they wouldn’t know how to behave on the marae. They would never have a proper accent in Maori or hear the sound of the language in their heads. They would be strangers when they went back to New Zealand; they wouldn’t know any of the customs or protocols and would make all the dumb mistakes that I had made. But there was little that I could do about any of this so long as Seven didn’t mind.