by Carl Hoffman
The rooms themselves were empty, the walls black with soot and dirt. We sat on the floor, and Filo cooked lunch on his portable one-burner stove—white rice and freeze-dried ramen, with a few canned sardines mixed in. By now I had a clearer sense of who was who. We were in the house of one of Dombai’s sons, the man van Kessel said had Michael’s glasses. Dombai had eventually married four wives and produced fourteen children, and he’d died from being gored by a wild boar. Kokai, the man we’d met in Basim who told me the story of Lapré’s raid, was related to him somehow. Pep, Fin, and Ajim were all dead, but the sons of Pep and Ajim were here, alive and well.
“Come, we go to Otsjanep,” said Amates when we were done eating.
We tiptoed over the walkways again—well, I tiptoed, while Amates and Wilem and the Asmat scampered over the narrowest logs and boards with babies on their backs like they were walking on a three-foot-wide sidewalk. We jumped in the longboat and sped upriver a half-mile. The jungle cleared and Otsjanep appeared. We tied up at a low dock and climbed onto the right bank. Boardwalks ran over the swamp, and houses—thatch and palm and wood, with corrugated roofs—dotted a broad clearing. It was quiet and smelled of smoke and dampness. There were people everywhere, on every porch, in every doorway. Watching. A crowd of men and boys gathered, following us. A child saw me and started screaming, shaking violently, inconsolable, and then dived into a water-filled ditch, desperate to escape and hide.
Amates laughed. “She is afraid of you. She thinks you’re a ghost.”
The boardwalk ended, and we navigated across logs in the mud to a dilapidated and abandoned wooden house with a large covered porch. We sat down on the floor, our backs to its front door, and men began gathering. Five. Ten. Thirty. Soon there were fifty sitting around us. Waiting. In the front sat Tapep, son of Pep, now the head of Otsjanep.
Amates took two pouches of loose-leaf tobacco and pushed them into the circle. Wilem took another one and did the same. Tapep and the older men reached for the pouches, took fingerfuls of the brown leaves, divided them up, passed them around.
Out of nowhere, with no warning, with no apparent signal, a man yelled and started singing in the Asmat way—a long, mournful chant—and others joined in. “Yeh! Yeh,” they shouted in unison, all forty men in one voice, perfect harmony. It was powerful. Haunting. Beautiful.
Amates began talking. And talking. Sometimes in Indonesian, sometimes in Asmat. When he was done, there was a moment of silence, and then I heard a different kind of screaming. Hysterical wailing. The beat of a drum from across the village. Men turned their heads, spoke, began to stand and leave and stream toward the direction of the wails.
“Someone has died,” Amates said, rising. “A woman. We must go. We will come back this afternoon.”
Which we did. The same men gathered. We distributed tobacco again, and Amates gave his speech again, and with Hennah’s help, I did my best to capture what I could of what was said.
“We are all the same, Americans and Asmat. We Asmat have a proud history. We have nothing to be ashamed of. We do things different now, after the Bible came, but our past is who we are and we should talk about it. People in America are interested in Asmat. They want to know about us. Everyone in America already knows about what happened to Michael Rockefeller, so there’s nothing to be afraid of. It was a long time ago. Mister Carl has come a long way and he wants to know these old stories.” Then Amates said, “And we know Pep killed Michael Rockefeller.”
A stir went through the group. They fidgeted. Pep’s son, Tapep, spoke. “What happened here then was a long time ago. It is past. No one here remembers.”
An old man wearing a T-shirt that said SNIPER! on the front spoke. “Everyone in Otsjanep is young, and they are surprised at this story. I have heard it, but I was just a little boy, and I am afraid.”
I watched Tapep. He swallowed, looked at me, looked at Amates. He and the men started talking in Asmat, a quiet argument. “They’re worried,” said Amates. “Scared.”
“I heard these stories from my father,” said a man wearing a T-shirt in green and brown camouflage. And the next thing I knew he was talking about “the white man, Pastor Zegwaard,” bringing the Bible to Asmat. “This is all I can remember,” he said.
Silence. No one said anything more. We sat and stared at each other, and I had no idea if they were telling the truth or not. Was I imagining their skittishness? Was I imagining that they were deflecting the conversation on purpose to Zegwaard?
“Let’s go,” said Amates. “That is enough for the day.”
THAT NIGHT WE sat on the floor around the flickering lights of two tin cans filled with kerosene, a column of black smoke rising into the darkness. Shadows danced across the dirty walls. Rain poured down, the way it does only in Asmat, a shattering, pummeling onslaught. A few men from Pirien sat there too, the women and children, at least a dozen of them, out in the kitchen. We smoked. We looked at each other. It all felt untouchable to me.
“Do you think they were telling the truth today?” I asked Amates.
“Two men said, ‘We know this story, but we are afraid to talk,’ ” Hennah said.
“What?” I said. “When did they say that? Why didn’t you translate it?”
She shrugged.
“Yes,” Amates said. “They know, but they are just afraid.”
“They are afraid of America,” Wilem said. “Of the American army. Tomorrow some men are going to Basim for tobacco and sugar. Amates and I should go with them, to talk with them alone.”
In the darkness and dancing light, Amates and Wilem whispered, kneeling close to me. “Manu has been hearing things. People are afraid to be seen talking, so we will go out tomorrow night and talk to people.”
Then Amates said, “The glasses are here. Dombai’s son says he has seen them. They are in his family. His father was killed when he was a small boy, by a bite from a pig.” He paused. “If I was teaching these people, I would go crazy! They answer a question with a question. They say nothing!”
I don’t know what time it was when I fell asleep in a corner on the floor. I was jarred awake by chanting and drumming. It was close by. I got up, tiptoed past ten bodies on the floor—Dombai’s son and his family, all squished together on palm mats, babies and children in the pile—and went outside. The rain had long since stopped, and there was no moon. It was pitch-black. Warm. Still. The chanting and drumming were right there, right in front of the house on the boardwalk, but I couldn’t see anything. When lightning flashed on the horizon, there they were, a circle of a dozen men thirty feet away. Over the drumming, staccato and deep, a voice would begin and others would join in, the sound seeming to come up from the very center of the earth. I sat down transfixed. Why was this happening here, in front of my house? I wanted to go over to them, but wasn’t sure if I should. As the sound went through me I looked at the sky, the Milky Way thick overhead, a trillion stars. I don’t know how long I sat and listened. An hour. Two. It went on and on, with the occasional pause, the flash of a match lighting a face, a red glowing; a laugh here, a low voice there, and then the drums beat again and the voices rang on even as I tried to go back to sleep.
AMATES AND WILEM disappeared at four a.m., and I spent the day sitting on the porch and walking through the village. Children ran wildly, everywhere. They climbed palm trees and swam in the river and rolled in the mud. Gangs of them walked holding hands and covered in white, dried mud. A few chickens and huge black pigs scrunched through the swamp. The flies were incessant, swarming onto my hands, legs, arms, eyes, and mouth. In the afternoon everyone just went to sleep. The whole village ceased to move.
When Amates returned late that morning, he was angry. Frustrated. “They say nothing,” he said. “They say they know but are too afraid to say. They say, ‘Maybe tomorrow.’ But we’ll go to Otsjanep again in a little while. The man we went to Basim with is afraid the other elders will get mad. It’s a problem with our own history. We don’t have a problem talking about it, he
said, but the elders don’t want to.”
Around noon, an old man walked into the house. He whispered to Amates, who took him into the other room. They sat on the floor, smoked and whispered. It was such a big, deep secret, this thing that had happened so long ago and that everyone knew about but no one wanted to speak of. And the reasons were so complex. The young felt connected to a past that carried deep shame; they feared the wrath of the Indonesian government, the American government, and probably the Catholic Church and God himself. If they had killed Michael, it had been an act of tremendous defiance, something they’d never done before and knew wouldn’t go over well with their white overlords. But I suspected there was more to it than that, more than concerns about legal consequences or Christian wrath. If Michael had been killed by Otsjanep, it wasn’t as simple a matter as revenge in the Western sense. It was spiritual, sacred, a rebalancing, and there were probably elements that went so deep they couldn’t be shared without repercussions from the spirit world itself. Balance in Asmat was a precarious thing because it was based on opposites: if they had killed Michael, then they would be waiting, waiting for the response, a response literal and metaphysical.
When Amates and the man emerged, Amates said we’d go back to Otsjanep in a bit. To the man’s house. There he would tell us what he remembered.
THE HOUSE WAS a timeless place, all sticks and thatch and open fireplaces. Smoke curled from the hearth, and the floor was bark, covered with sweet-smelling palm fronds. We could not pass unnoticed. Walking from the boat to the house, we picked people up, the crowd grew, and by the time I was sitting on the palm floor there were twenty of us. And more coming all the time. The man looked nervous. He was tall, skinny, with a hole in his ear and one in his septum, and tight curls of gray. “He says okay, he will tell the story, but we must go, there are too many people,” Amates said.
We moved to the front veranda of the abandoned house again, and again there was a huge crowd. We passed out the tobacco. Everyone rolled cigarettes, and we waited. Pep’s son Tapep arrived. The man who said he’d tell us the story rose and went into the house with a few others. I heard low voices. He walked out and kept walking and he was gone.
Tapep took over. “We know this story about Michael Rockefeller,” he said. “He was in a boat, and he was coming to visit Otsjanep, and his boat turned over, and he disappeared. That’s all we know, and if we knew anything else we’d be afraid to say.”
“Why are you afraid?” I asked.
“We are not afraid,” he said. “We do not know the story.” We were getting nowhere. Or maybe somewhere; he’d said more than he’d said yesterday.
“We must go,” said Amates again, a refrain I was getting used to. We got up to leave, and another old man came up to me. Stuck out his hand. I took it to shake it, to say “thank you” in Asmat, and he looked me in the eye and wouldn’t let go of my hand. Held it. Held my eyes. Was it my imagination? Or was he trying to tell me something?
THAT NIGHT WE were sitting around candles stuck to the floor when Manu said, “I spoke to a man who said they took the spear that hit Michael Rockefeller and threw it into a deep pool. They were scared of it.”
Amates and Wilem talked. “We will go out and see if we can find people to talk,” Amates said. “In the dark. Without you.”
An hour later, Amates returned; Wilem was still out there somewhere. “Fin and Pep took his skull and hid it. They took it to a small creek up the Ewta and hid it in a tree. A man named Saket told me this. They are afraid to talk about it, in case there’s retaliation from other people in the village.”
Over four days we got no further. What was being told to us just to fill the void, to sate my insistent curiosity, and what was real? I had no idea. What the man Saket had told Amates, though, was interesting, for it corresponded with von Peij’s report that the head had been moved from Fin’s house to a tree farther upriver, deep in the jungle. “This head wasn’t an Asmat head,” Amates said. “It was too much, the people were too afraid.”
I wasn’t sure what to do next. There seemed no reason to stay longer. The next day no one came to the house; we were left alone, and the calling of further meetings felt pointless. Amates kept saying Dombai’s family had the glasses. I told him I’d pay $100 for them, which seemed like a lot of money, but nothing turned up. There was nothing left to do but return to Agats. As we departed, six men stood on the banks and watched us go, saying nothing, not even waving good-bye.
BACK AT MY hotel in Agats, I fell into conversation with Amates, who seemed sure he could find Michael’s glasses. Bones were everywhere in Asmat; anyone could produce a skull or a thighbone and I’d have no way of knowing who it belonged to without DNA from the Rockefellers themselves. The glasses would be irrefutable proof that Michael had made it to shore and been killed. Amates wanted to go back to Pirien by himself, talk to Dombai’s sons, and see what he could come up with. I should offer $1,000 for them, he said. It seemed like a lot of money, and it made me uncomfortable. But I was exhausted, had lost ten pounds, wanted a hot shower and a break; if the glasses were real, it seemed well worth it—if the glasses were real. I gave Amates $300 for travel money and headed up to the Baliem Valley to scope out Michael’s old stomping grounds for a few days, then took a break in Bali.
Two days after my arrival, I received a text from Amates. Kokai, the older man from Pirien we’d met in Basim, who had witnessed Lapré’s raid and was somehow related to Dombai, had the glasses, Amates said. If I could get him another couple hundred, he’d return again to Pirien, pick up the glasses and Kokai, and bring them both back to Agats for me, arriving Friday. It seemed too good to be true. But I had to see it through. In a frantic day of running around Denpasar, Bali, I wired Amates $200 through the Indonesian post office system (the only way to send money to Agats), and texted Ainum, my old taxi driver in Timika, to get me a ticket on the Thursday flight into Agats. At one a.m. I jumped on the overnight flight to Timika. Ainum was there with someone else’s ticket in hand, and three hours later I was inbound to Asmat again.
I fidgeted all day Thursday and Friday morning. Finally, my telephone rang Friday afternoon. It was Amates; he’d just gotten a cell signal. “I am on the boat and near Agats, and Kokai is with me and we have the glasses and he will tell you everything!”
Thirty minutes later, Amates walked into my hotel. Alone. “Where’s Kokai?” I said.
“Home. He’s tired. I’ll bring him back here at six-thirty.”
“The glasses?”
“I have them!”
I had purposefully avoided showing him a photo of Michael wearing his glasses. Although almost no one in Asmat wore them, and Michael’s were distinctive 1960s-era glasses with big black frames and thick lenses, I hadn’t wanted to give Amates an opportunity to find something similar.
“What do they look like?” I said.
“They are big!” he said. “Thick.”
My heart hammered. I couldn’t believe it. Proof. The first concrete evidence of Michael’s fate, evidence that would tie him to the village.
That evening Amates arrived. Kokai was with him, as well as another older man named Beatus Usain and one of Amates’s brothers. If Kokai had looked wild in Basim, here in Agats he looked as feral as a wild bat. His clothes were filthy, and he smelled like sweat and smoke and damp. A bag of dangling cockatoo feathers hung on his chest.
I broke out the packages of Lampion, the tobacco they loved, and passed them around. We rolled cigarettes, smoked, gazed at each other. “So,” I said, “tell me the story. How was Michael Rockefeller killed?”
Kokai looked at me, stone-faced. Started talking in his gravelly voice. “The American tourist came to Otsjanep, and he was there three days. He promised to build a big post here, and said he’d go to Agats and come back. On his way back here, his boat overturned and he was never seen again. Zegwaard came with the Bible, and we are Catholics now. I remember meeting him; he patted me on the head and said I should go to school.”
> It was the same boilerplate story they’d told before. Nothing new, and always immediately segueing into the Bible. Amates exploded. “They said they’d tell me the story,” he said, “so tell it, not this!” The past was the past, nothing bad would happen, Asmat were now friends with America, and on and on, but Kokai just sat there staring at me, sweating, swallowing, saying nothing.
Finally, I asked about the glasses. Kokai reached into a bag and brought out a bundle wrapped in dirty cloth. I opened it.
A pair of 1990s-style plastic wraparound sunglasses.
“No!” I said. “These are not the glasses. These are modern. They are not his glasses.”
The tension in the room was so high it might have been a horror movie. We all drew long drafts off our cigarettes. Rain pounded on the tin roof. The room was stifling, sweat soaking all of us.
The old man next to Kokai, Beatus Usain, spoke. “I am a teacher,” he said. “Kokai is the catechist in Pirien. We are Catholics now.” He paused, waited, wanted to make sure I understood that. He had short hair, a strong cleft chin, and cheekbones so high they might have been stuffed with rolls of pennies. He was bold and handsome. “Pep and Fin were at the mouth of the Ewta River. ‘Look,’ said Pep, ‘a crocodile.’ ” He paused again, so Amates could translate, the first time that had ever happened. “But it wasn’t a crocodile, it was a man. He was swimming on his back. He saw them and stood up and yelled, ‘Help me Tuan! Help me Tuan!’ Pep drove his spear into his side. They took him to the Kali Jawor.”
