by Carl Hoffman
Wilem and I walked across the rickety boardwalks of Agats toward my hotel. Everything was the same and yet different. People recognized me, waving and saying, “Hi, you’re back!” and I replied, this time in their own language. It had been seven months, but even the hotel desk clerk remembered me. Wilem and I sat in the front of my room, and I told him my plan.
“Kokai is here in Agats!” he said. “Tomorrow I will find him and bring him to your hotel.”
We shook hands, and as he left night closed in, the skies opened, and the rain pounded down. I fell asleep to that rain, mosquitoes buzzing in my ears.
I woke early, at dawn, and headed out, glad to be breathing the balmy air. The boardwalks were puddled and steaming. By the wharf I passed a man and did a double take. It was Kokai. He recognized me, and his eyes widened with surprise. I’d forgotten how wild he looked. Agats was full of Indonesians from all over the archipelago, as well as the much poorer Asmat; even the destitute of Agats looked citified, had an air of belonging, wore flip-flops. But Kokai had that reek of sweat and smoke that I’d forgotten. He was barefoot. His hair stuck out in willy-nilly tufts. The hole in his septum was the size of a dime. A woven bag thick with the feathers of cockatoo and cassowary hung over his chest. And his eyes—dark and brown, darting back and forth, taking everything in and giving nothing away.
Few Westerners came to Asmat, and certainly the vast majority who did never came back. They appeared, snapped photos, and were gone. But here I was again. I could sense the significance—I had never seen Kokai smile before, and now he did—and I could speak to him. I asked him what he was doing, when was he returning to Pirien.
“I came to see my son,” he said, “but I don’t know when I’m going back. I need a boat, and I don’t have any money.”
It was too good to be true, and I couldn’t help it, it all just poured out: I wanted to come to Pirien for a month, to live in his house, with him. Could I? We could go together, and get Wilem to take us.
“My house? For a month?” And then I couldn’t understand anything else, he was ripping along too fast in a gravelly slur.
“Wilem will find you,” I said, “and bring you to my hotel and we can talk.” He turned and walked away.
HE AND WILEM showed up a few hours later. Wilem and I could understand each other well; Kokai was a different matter. He spoke Indonesian fluently, could read and write, but it wasn’t his first language; he had a strange accent, and he couldn’t seem to grasp just how slowly he needed to speak when talking to me. I repeated my request—could I come live with him in Pirien for a month? No problem, he said. I could live with him, in his house.
“But what will he eat?” he said, looking at Wilem.
“Whatever you eat,” I said.
“Sago?” he said.
“Yes, sago. And whatever else.”
“I’ll go to the store,” said Wilem. “We’ll get some rice and SuperMi [the instant ramen noodles the Asmat love] and coffee and sugar and tobacco.”
It was done. Kokai never asked me why I wanted to come, but I’d told him I wanted to learn about Asmat culture, to know about the language, carving, everything. Though the last time we’d met I’d been asking about Michael, neither of us mentioned him. I handed a wad of cash to Wilem, a down payment for the boat and $100 for food. I had a satellite telephone; I told Wilem I’d call him when I wanted to be picked up, and that if he didn’t hear from me in three and a half weeks, he should come anyway. We would leave the next morning at six a.m.
24
November 2012
SAUER, THE HEAD OF THE JISAR JEU, DRAPED IN THE TEETH OF DOGS AND WILD BOARS.
THE WORLD IS always more beautiful at dawn and dusk, but nowhere more so than in the tropics. There the sun is so hot and bright and glaring you want to flee from it most of the day, and dawn and dusk are times of softness, when the blanched world becomes infused with color. As we slipped into Wilem’s boat, a wispy mist lay over the Asawets, sky blue in the morning light. Dawn, too, is windless in Asmat, and the river, a half-mile across here, was placid, not a ripple. Kokai was his usual inscrutable, silent, wild-eyed self; Wilem took the bow and his buddy the throttle. Piled amidships was a case of ramen, a thirty-pound bag of rice, two cases of Lampion (the loose-leaf tobacco the Asmat favored), five pounds of sugar, and a plastic sleeping mat sporting brightly colored Mickey Mouses that Wilem had bought for me.
We sped down the river straight out to sea—the day was so calm we were taking the direct ocean route, the same that Michael and Wassing had navigated almost exactly fifty-one years before. It felt good to be out on the water, the sky huge and arching overhead, the sea as still as a pond, and I thought of Michael on that last day, here in this same spot, and how good he, too, must have felt heading south to meet van Kessel in Basim. He was still so young, and though he was making mistakes and he never could have been here without his family’s money, I couldn’t help admiring him. There were a million places easier than Asmat, especially in 1961, for a child of wealth and privilege. He’d had a vision and was following his passion, striving for something original and deep, carving out a place for himself that was of his father, his family, yet was different too, that was his own. If one wave had been shaped differently, if the wind had been softer, if he’d taken the inland route, who knows how long he would have stayed in Asmat, how many times he might have returned, how much he might have understood and perhaps even given back to the place and its people.
But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment—that was the lesson of middle age I thought about as we sped toward Otsjanep and I tried to calm my nerves. Asmat was like no other place I’d ever been. The men could be so friendly and so closed. I longed for a rawness, for this thing I called “primitive” in my mind and had been romantic about for so long, this thing I had experienced during short plunges but never for a month straight. And I still didn’t even really know what it meant—to be primitive, although I was beginning to understand that word’s inadequacy. I hoped my month living in Pirien among these people who had been headhunters and cannibals just a generation ago, and who still lived largely removed from the developed world, would help me understand them better. And to be there to investigate a possible murder, to ask about secrets—I wondered if they’d remember me and what I’d been pursuing before. Would they shun me because of it? Would I be able to communicate with them? How would they react to my questions? Otsjanep and Pirien had made my hair stand up during my previous, albeit short, visits.
Yet even as I felt anxious, if not a little frightened, to be heading toward a remote village with such a fearsome reputation, in a world of mud and heat, I had to remember that van Kessel had been there in 1955, van de Wouw had been in and out between 1962 and 1968, van de Waal was there in 1962, and Tobias Schneebaum in the 1970s and 1980s. Otsjanep-Pirien was far away. It had no services, no electricity, no plumbing, no stores, but it was full of real people, and I was convinced that more than anything else it was my own fear I was afraid of. If I approached my stay with humility and grace, and could win over Kokai, everything would be all right. Somehow the answers were right here, waiting to be unraveled.
Michael had loved Asmat, and I felt incredulous that no one from his immediate family had made the effort to see it and know it for themselves.
A HUGE EAGLE with wide wings and great, sharp talons swept near the boat and gracefully plucked a fish from the sea, bringing me out of my reverie. We were zipping past the mouth of the Betsj, where Michael had capsized, and there wasn’t a wave. I was writing Indonesian words in my notebook, and Wilem was writing their Asmat equivalents. At ten-thirty we turned inland, toward the mouth of the Ewta. Here, still a half-mile out, the sea looked like a toothpick farm: thin poles, with nets tied to them, stood out of the water, and women stood up to their necks in the shallow water, pairs of them walking along the botto
m working oval shrimp nets.
The tide was beginning to ebb. When it was high, the sea inundated the land, and the river mouth itself was an indistinct opening. Now glistening banks of mud extended hundreds of feet from shore, the river still a narrow cut in the black ooze a hundred yards out. Egrets paced the flats, terns zipped overhead, and then the jungle swallowed us up.
We passed a hut where a man was lounging on the veranda. Wilem bellowed a short song; the man sang back. It all happened fast then. The narrow river, enclosed by a wall of green jungle and hanging vines, twisted and turned for three miles and then opened to a clearing of thatch and palm huts on stilts, the shouts of children jumping in the brown river, the smell of smoke, and we pulled up at a mud bank in front of a small wood plank house with a corrugated metal roof. Men, children, surged. Everything was grabbed, carried off, Kokai barking directions.
The house was three rooms without furniture, its bare walls gray with years of dirt, soot, grime. Traditional handwoven palm mats covered the floors. In the front room stood three six-foot-high shields, a six-foot-long bow and bundle of arrows, a handful of spears, and two twelve-foot-long paddles. A back door led to an open-sided, thatch-roofed kitchen, its floorboards spaced a couple inches apart, a smoldering fire on a square of river mud, one blackened pot. Stick-thin women emptied the front room of sleeping mats and swept it with a bundle of sticks.
“You can have my room,” said Kokai.
“Come,” said Wilem, thrusting a case of Lampion tobacco in my hands. “We must go to Otsjanep.”
He and Kokai and I jumped back in the boat and headed five minutes upstream, past a brief no-man’s-land, to Otsjanep. Even now, fifty years later, the other side had to be placated to keep antipathies at bay. Men surrounded us as we walked to a thatch house, climbed a ladder of notched logs, and entered.
“Mister Karo has come to Pirien for a month,” Wilem said. “He eats everything—fish and even sago—and he is interested in seeing Asmat.”
The thick press of men nodded, looked at me. I recognized many of them from when Amates and I had been questioning them about Michael. “Thank you so much for the big welcome,” I said, handing them the box of tobacco.
We left quickly, and Wilem dropped us back in Pirien and left. I was alone. Unsure of what to do next. Then men started arriving. Old men like Kokai, barbed-wire thin and muscled, with holes in their septums and bags hanging from their necks and cuscus fur headbands with the ubiquitous white cockatoo feathers. Age was hard to tell in Asmat—people tended to look older than they were—but all had to be over fifty, some a decade or two older. All would have been alive when Lapré came to the village, when Michael had swung through three years later, and when he vanished a few months after that. The chances were high that the oldest among them had probably consumed human flesh. I was dying to see inside their minds, to know what they knew, not just about Michael but everything—how they saw the world now and how much of the traditional world of the spirits remained. They each shook my hand, patted me on the shoulder. We sat cross-legged in a circle on the floor. Kokai brought out tobacco—the tobacco I’d given him—and the men divided it up further, each man taking a palmful. They talked and smoked, knocking the ashes onto the floor and into its cracks, adding to the dried mud and dust that covered everything. They talked and talked and talked, and I listened, as best I could, catching only the occasional word. Though they mostly spoke in Indonesian, it was too fast, too colloquial, for me to understand. This time I had vowed to myself to not ask anything, to not mention Michael or Lapré or any of the events surrounding Michael’s disappearance, for at least a week or more. I was just there, and it felt totally different from before and made me realize again how much of a mistake I’d made—and Michael before me—by just swooping in for a quick visit. Now I belonged to Kokai, to the village itself. I was under their protection. I was their responsibility.
When they finally trickled away, Kokai’s wife set out two plastic bowls of rice and ramen and a single spoon before disappearing into the back kitchen again. No salt. No seasoning. Kokai ate with his fingers. The light was dying, the sun setting. Flies buzzed and landed on my hands, arms, legs, the food. We sat alone.
“Adik,” he said to me. Younger brother. “You are my younger brother.” Then we smoked on the front porch.
Other than the passing of a boat once a day or so, there were no sounds of engines, just the constant shriek of children playing—and almost every day and night there was like this first one. A few men came by, sat and smoked with us. Packs of dogs loped along the boardwalks, through the swampy ground beneath the houses, sometimes attacked each other in a wild scrum of barking and howling and yelping. The air reeked of human shit—the moldy, always wet outhouse was in the kitchen and the hole dropped straight to the ground beneath the kitchen, with those widely spaced boards. There were houses next to Kokai’s, behind it, and in front of it across a small creek, the houses were everywhere, and each one was filled with people shitting onto the ground. The rich, pungent smell pervaded the village, and I never quite grew used to it.
When darkness fell, small bats the size of mice poured out of the eaves and heavy-footed lizards hammered across the ceilings, sounding infinitely bigger than they were. Without a moon, the village was pitch-black; I could see nothing but the glow of Kokai’s cigarette and the heat lightning that flashed across the horizon like a World War I artillery barrage. It was all a mystery to me, everything. When the mosquitoes grew intense, we went inside, to the light of a single kerosene flame, and sat amid a houseful of people, men and women and naked children, green, viscous snot pouring from their noses, their bellies distended.
People came and went in a constant stream. Time inched by, each minute like an hour. I was in a place without things. No chairs, beds, tables, books, no blankets or sheets, no pictures on the walls, never mind televisions or computers or radios or telephones. Kokai was an important elder, but he and his wife had nothing but a knapsack, a battered suitcase full of a few plastic bowls and cups, a sleeping mat, and a soiled pillow. No one had a bed. Slowly, they just sort of dropped off, falling to the floor and falling asleep, and I slipped into my room, hung my mosquito net from a nail, and fell asleep too.
DAWN HIT JUST before five a.m., and with it the children started screaming—as they did virtually every morning, pounding the floor with their feet, their fists, hollering and crying and bellowing, as if their limbs were being torn from their bodies, and they did so for an entire hour. Kokai hissed; their mothers and aunts hissed; but as I soon learned, it didn’t matter much whether they were put to the breast or struck or hugged and cradled—they screamed uncontrollably, and nothing could be done about it. It figured into my deepening understanding of what I came to call the inside-out people, and it exemplified who the Asmat were, a vestige of the consciousness that underlay the cannibalism they’d practiced for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years: a consciousness of emotional extremes, a bipolar duality. The Asmat have no inherent balance in their lives, no synthesis. Children and parents share an intense closeness. Parents—men and women both—hold and cuddle their children constantly, carry them in their arms, on their backs, lounge with them, sleep with them, and laugh when their children pee on them, and women nurse their children until they are three and four years old. They sing to their children, but they also wallop them like prizefighters on their backs and chests, so hard it’s difficult to believe no bones are broken. Adults and children howl with laughter and scream in despair. They fight with each other and can yell and stomp their feet for hours.
I saw boys fight, viciously, smashing their fists into each other’s faces, or they walked and leapt holding hands, hugging each other. I saw a woman strike her husband with a two-by-four. I watched a man stand outside of a house and shout for two hours straight, until Kokai finally went out and shouted back at him. These confrontations seemed inches away from turning deadly. If they had tobacco, they’d smoke it all right away until it was gone a
nd then pace in despair and withdrawal. If they had sugar, they’d pour it into coffee or tea, so much that it would be gone in a day. They would drum and sing all day and all night, and then sleep all the next day or crash on the floor at sunset. To achieve any sort of balance always required the opposite. To right a death had required another death. If they seemed to have no boundaries, perhaps their boundaries were so porous they tumbled right over them, becoming themselves only by consuming the other. It was all part of the same thing.
BY SIX, I’D given up on sleep, and I emerged to find Kokai slipping three-foot-long tassels of cockatoo feathers over the tops of the paddles he’d carved. His wife brought us coffee, and he introduced her—Maria, his third wife; his first two were dead. She was about twenty-five, maybe younger, with a pretty, round face. They had two young boys. His oldest daughter from his first wife was also dead; his oldest son lived in Agats, and then he and wife number two had three other children: a son who had died; a daughter who lived in the house with us with her three children; and a slightly mentally retarded son who looked normal but wasn’t and who lived in Otsjanep, though no one knew why. Kokai would sell the paddles, the shields, the spears in Agats, his only way of earning money.
