by Carl Hoffman
Tobias Schneebaum had felt the same longing, had been driven to Asmat for many of the same reasons. “Throughout my life,” he wrote, “I have been searching for a way to connect with other human beings. Suddenly, I find myself in a forest among the Asmat, living in their world, where I lose my insecurities and am content.”
25
December 2012
ME WITH KOKAI (STANDING BEHIND ME, IN A BASEBALL CAP) AND HIS FAMILY, IN PIRIEN.
AS THE SECOND WEEK melted into the third, it was time to start asking questions. I was comfortable in the village, and the village seemed comfortable with me. I was welcome, and expected, in the drumming at the rising jeu in Jisar. Men, and even women, greeted me on my daily walks along the boardwalk, and I no longer attracted a crowd of onlookers for my daily bath in the river. I had made three trips in a small boat owned by one of Kokai’s nephews to Basim, an hour away, which had a few stores where I’d continually supplied the household with rice and ramen, tobacco and sugar, even lollipops and a soccer ball for the kids. I was feeding a family of fifty—we’d already been through ninety pounds of rice—and the more I bought, the faster it disappeared throughout Kokai’s fiefdom of Ufin. Within a family there was no private property; everything belonged to everyone and everything was shared, and the more important you were the more you were expected to give.
Ideas were beginning to form in my mind about Michael, about what could have happened, and how and why.
Kokai and I spoke more and more in the early mornings over our coffee and cigarettes, amid smoke and the tromping of children’s feet and their shrieks and cries. He often spoke of himself in the third person. “My grandfather and my father told me the history of Asmat, the history of the village. Songs, so many songs. Songs of the jeu, songs of sago, songs of paddling, songs about birds and fish and about bisj. Kokai listened. Always listened and watched.” Kokai’s father, it turned out, was Fom, one of the men named by van Kessel as having taken one of Michael’s ribs. If Fom had participated in the killing of Michael, Kokai knew it. I had no doubt.
Kokai told me how hard it had been to find a new wife. He hadn’t had any luck in the village of Pirien, where the women were afraid of him, he said, maybe because he was so old. He had found Maria in Basim, but it had taken a great deal of sago and sugar and dogs’ teeth necklaces to convince the men in the jeu to acquiesce. “They made Kokai wait and wait and wait,” he said.
He told me how boys’ septums were pierced by a sharp piece of bamboo as they lay on the ground, and how the hole was gradually widened over time. Change shadowed every story. No one pierced their septums anymore, and Kokai refused to join any of the drumming and singing. Instead, he would put on his feathers and cuscus headband and sit singing to himself and rocking back and forth for hours.
Kami is my love
You are my beloved
After your death you give me only memories
For my pride.
Kami is my love
And I long for you
For everything.
And Kami my wife
You are my first wife
Why did you die this time?
I need you.
But now you’re not living with me.
It’s a long time I live alone
Without you in my life.
I love you forever.
But my life is forever because
I am your beloved.
Forever in my life.
“I am sad,” he said. “In the past we had feasts for weeks and weeks. Gathering sago, gathering fish, and I would give and give and give, tobacco and sugar and sago and fish, and we would drum and sing for weeks, months. But now I sit and cry. I feel sad and tears stream down my face. I spread mud along my forehead and my hairline, and I cry and remember. Today I sing for my first daughter; she is dead and buried there,” he said, pointing toward a grave behind the house.
Bis is my wife
You are a beautiful wife
Now where have you gone?
Are you looking for sago?
Or are you looking for fish?
Why have you not come home?
Here, I am waiting for you.
Crying for you.
Because you’re my wife, my beautiful wife.
I am your husband crying for you
Forever.
And I will cry until I die.
Because you have made my life so difficult
And I cry, cry forever
And die for you.
I told Kokai I had some old photographs. Would he like to see them?
“Yes!” he said emphatically.
I brought them out, a stack of fifty or so photocopies of black-and-white shots Michael Rockefeller had taken during his trip to Otsjanep in the summer of 1961. We were sitting on the ash-covered floor, by the door to the kitchen. By the time I’d handed them to him the space was crowded, the women and children rushing over, and almost instantly men appeared from all over the village, including Kokai’s brother. Each photo had a few accompanying words of description—the place and sometimes a jeu were identified, but the men in them were almost all unnamed. They were naked, proud, smiling, their hair in long ringlets, and the shells of triton hung on the abdomen of some—the sign of a great headhunter. Other photos showed men drumming naked in jeus, or elaborate bisj poles, both on the floor of the jeu and erected on scaffolding outside it.
The women and girls giggled and twittered at the nakedness, but Kokai became silent. Reverent. He stared and stared, held the photos up to the light, as if gazing through a doorway to a past that was long gone, that he must have pictured in his memory but that he hadn’t seen in a half-century.
“Hmmm,” he mumbled, tracing the lines of the men with his long fingernail. Then he began naming people. Dombai, with heavy eyebrows and a flashing smile and a pig’s bone in his nose, named in van Kessel’s original report, the former kepala perang of Pirien, the man who had been cuckolded, the father of Ber, who lived fifty feet away. (Kokai called Ber “my brother,” though exactly how they were related I could never quite untangle; both of their parents were different, and they lived in different clans within the village.) Tatsji, one of the Omadesep and Otsjanep go-betweens and one of the men who had reported to von Peij that Michael had been killed. The chief from Omadesep, Faniptas, who had started it all by convincing the men from Otsjanep to accompany him to Wagin in 1957. Mighty he looked: in his late forties or early fifties, naked and tall and thickly muscled, his hair lengthened with sago fibers to his shoulders, covered with dogs’ teeth and boar tusks and dangling shells and ornaments, wearing a thick rattan bracelet to protect his left wrist from the bowstring. Kokai pointed out Jane and Bese, also named in van Kessel’s report. Kokai knew which jeu was which, and he knew the jeu to which every man he recognized belonged.
I asked him about Faniptas. “After the trip to Wagin,” Kokai said, “he gave one of his daughters to Dombai to make peace.” Faniptas and his men had murdered six from Otsjanep, and the men from Otsjanep had massacred dozens of men from Omadesep, but balance had been restored. The Asmat had not needed Max Lapré or his government. They had done it themselves, and I thought of Father Vince Cole’s words: despite (or perhaps because of) their constant warfare, the Asmat had always created some connection, some strategy, that left open avenues of communication, that cemented relationships and kept them from all being annihilated.
“And what about these bisj poles?” I said. “Why are they still in the jeu?”
“The bisj festival was not finished.”
“Who were the poles for?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Word swept through Pirien and Jisar quickly. Over the next few days, amid the drumming and singing in the jeu, and in Ber’s house in Pirien itself, where the men of Pirien had also begun drumming and singing in celebration of Jisar and a new idea—that they, too, would build a new jeu—the men wanted to see the photos.
They identified six of the fifteen me
n named by van Kessel and von Peij as having parts of Michael’s skeleton, which confirmed that the men named by both priests had, in fact, met him. Which meant that if Michael had made it to shore, he had encountered men who knew him, knew his name. I asked again and again about the bisj poles, and always the answer was the same: the bisj festival wasn’t finished, and they didn’t know who the poles had been made for. That was possible; it was fifty years ago. But it seemed unlikely. They remembered everything, knew hundreds of songs by heart, knew their family lineages back generations, knew how to carve a drum or a spear or construct a one-hundred-foot-long, thirty-foot-high longhouse without a nail or a drawing.
One afternoon I walked to Otsjanep. Pirien was spread down one side of the river, only a couple of houses deep; Otsjanep, much more spread out, lay on both sides of the Ewta. Pirien had grown used to me. Every house I passed had men and women and children sitting on its front porch, and everyone waved, said “good afternoon” or “good evening” to me. But Otsjanep was silent, the people staring. Near the river I encountered an old man with one eye sitting on the boardwalk. I sat down with him, brought out some tobacco. His name was Petrus. A few other men sat down with us. I told them I was living with Kokai in Pirien. They nodded, said little. I left a few minutes later.
I returned the next afternoon with the photos. The village boardwalks were deserted. In the afternoon heat, it was as still as still could be, the only trace of movement and sound coming from a few children following me. I decided to head back. I was nearly at the village edge when the boys caught up to me. They grabbed me, pointed to a man a few hundred yards away. “He wants to talk to you.” I turned around, walked back, found Petrus coming toward me. “Do you like sago?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Come to my house.”
I followed him to a traditional palm-and-gabagaba structure entered by climbing up a notched log. Smoke rose from two fireplaces. It was dark, full of languishing bodies and their acrid sweet smell, babies latched on to drooping breasts. We sat cross-legged, I handed out some tobacco, and we smoked, sweat rolling off my forehead. A woman brought two rolls of sago. It was warm, gummy and dry and slightly nutty, hard to get down. I took the photos out of my knapsack, and somehow the word went out. Men, women, and children streamed in from all directions. Crack! There were so many crowding into the house that the floor broke, shifted, dropped three inches under me. “Sorry! So sorry!” I said.
“Tidak apa apa!” Petrus said, laughing, pulling me away. “Never mind!”
We went outside, and a hundred people clustered around, the pages flying away in a sea of hands and pressing bodies. An old man edged in and was fixated on one of the photos of the bisj poles, tracing his fingers over them. “He carved that pole,” someone said.
“You carved that?” I said.
He looked at me. It was crazy. There was so much jostling, so many people, I could barely stand my ground. I tried to stay close to him, tried to keep track of the photos so I wouldn’t lose them. I pushed closer to him. It wasn’t an ideal time, but I had to ask.
“Which pole did you carve? Who was it for?”
He looked at me again. Caught my eyes for the briefest moment. Turned, pushed through, walked away, and disappeared. I couldn’t follow him—everyone had the photos and I was caught in the bodies.
There was that wall again, that doorway that wouldn’t open, that I couldn’t get through, still. I just couldn’t believe that the men, especially the old ones, could know so much, could so readily identify men and jeus in fifty-year-old photos—even men from Omadesep, a different village—and know nothing about the bisj poles themselves. But whatever they knew, they wouldn’t say. None of them.
OTHER PIECES WERE falling into place. As we sat smoking, my chest feeling like I’d soon need a lung transplant, I asked Kokai and Ber about the men killed by Lapré. I wanted to know exactly who they were, what their positions in the village had been, and how they’d been related to the men named as having taken body parts of Michael. Their answers were remarkable. Foretsjbai had been kepala perang of Kajerpis. Osom was kepala perang of Otsjanep. Akon the kepala perang of Bakyer, and Samut the kepala perang of Jisar. Of the five people Lapré had shot, four had been the most important men in the village, the heads of four out of the five jeus. Either he’d targeted them or they had been out front, the most visible and perhaps threatening—to him at least. He had killed, in effect, the president, the vice president, the speaker of the house, and the president pro tempore of the Senate. It was hard for me to fathom how the village must have felt. Many of the strongest, most able warriors of one of the strongest, most traditional villages in all of Asmat, killed in an instant. By an outsider no less.
And the men who had taken their places? Fin replaced Osom as the head of the Otsjanep jeu. Ajim and Pep replaced Akon; Kokai said (and Amates later agreed) that it wasn’t uncommon for two men to hold the position if both were powerful. Not only that, but Pep had married Osom’s widow. Sauer, the kepala perang of Jisar, who I sat next to nearly every day, had replaced Samut. And Jane, one of the men named by van Kessel as having one of Michael’s tibia? He was married to Samut’s sister, and Samut had been married to Jane’s sister. Dombai was already kepala perang of Pirien, the only jeu from which Lapré had killed no one—and the jeu that van Kessel and von Peij reported had been against Michael’s killing.
Not every death could be avenged, not every death could have a full bisj ceremony. A bisj required months of feasting and carving, during which the carvers could not hunt or go into the jungle to collect sago. To support a bisj festival required power, influence, the ability to organize men and inspire them and take leadership, and then, ultimately, to plan and lead an attack. The kepala perangs were the most powerful men in the village, and the men who took their places were related to them and would have had the power and the drive and charisma (tes) to respond. Even more, they had an obligation to do so; their whole standing as men desirable to women and as leaders who commanded the respect of others depended on it.
Yet they were rendered impotent by their inability to respond. It must have been a festering wound that wouldn’t, couldn’t heal. Even starker: in the six years before Michael arrived in Otsjanep, seventeen people had been murdered. Eight by the crocodile hunters, four by Omadesep, and five by Lapré. Michael had reported finding seventeen bisj poles in the jeus, seven of which he’d “bought” and only three of which had been delivered. Perhaps one of those three had been satisfied by the killing of Sanpai in September 1961, a partial revenge against Lapré by taking one of the men from Atsj who’d accompanied him. Taken together with the political and sacred positions of the men killed by Lapré and their relationship to the men at the mouth of the Ewta the morning Michael swam to shore, the motive for Michael’s killing felt increasingly solid.
Early the next morning a man named John dropped in for a visit. I’d met him on my second night in Pirien, and he seemed different from the others in the village. The Asmat asked me nothing about who I was or what America was like other than how long I was staying and whether I would return. But in the darkness on Kokai’s front porch, John had peppered me with questions: What city I was from. Whether it was night in America right now. What the weather was like. What I did for work. All the normal questions that people, anywhere in the world, always asked. And then he’d asked me the strangest thing of all, for an Asmat: would I like to come over to his house for dinner the next evening?
Which I’d done, and everything about it was different from everything else in Pirien. He lived in a claptrap wooden frame house that sat alone in the no-man’s-land between Otsjanep and Pirien. It was spotless inside, as was his outhouse. A few photos hung on the walls; a longboat with an outboard engine floated in the creek out front. His wife greeted me openly, with a big smile, and he lined up his three children and they looked me in the eye and shook my hand. They cuddled the puppies tumbling around the house instead of kicking them. For dinner, John
’s wife served eggs and green vegetables, grown in a garden behind the house. They had a pig in a wooden pen on the side porch. I could easily understand John’s Indonesian. And craziest of all, John had a generator the size of a car engine that powered not only a few electric lightbulbs but a TV hooked up to a satellite dish.
The explanation turned out to be simple: John and his wife weren’t Asmat. They were Bofun Digul people, and John’s father had come to Pirien as the catechist in the early 1970s. John had been born in Pirien, had grown up there, but the contrast between him and the other villagers was shocking. Every few weeks he worked for a logging company, which brought him astounding riches (relative to everyone else in the village), and without fifty family members surrounding him, whatever he earned stayed with him. He watched the BBC and CNN; he ate vegetables; he acted curious. I often dropped in at his house to chat.
This morning he and Kokai and I were talking, and somehow I asked Kokai about the first time he’d seen white people. His response was strange, something about “tourists.”
“No,” I said, “long before tourists—maybe the first pastor or policeman who came here long ago, when you were a boy.”
He and John started speaking quickly to each other, and I couldn’t keep up. I heard the words “tourist” and “Pep” and “Dombai,” the word “mati”—dead—and then “Rockefeller.” I froze. I was sure Kokai was telling the story of Michael Rockefeller. Finally! I didn’t want to interject, to tell him to slow down, I was afraid he might clam up. He was speaking more to John than to me, and I just wanted it to roll out. Kokai pantomimed shooting an arrow, and I heard the word “polisi,” and he was talking about helicopters coming in and people running into the jungle to hide—Kokai in his dynamic storytelling was a boy hiding behind a tree, the jungle, peering out into the sky in fear. Not for the first time I imagined how frightening and otherworldly those throbbing, powerful machines in the sky must have seemed. Without missing a beat, he segued into the next part of the story, an event that I knew about but had never connected before to Michael. From the helicopter and hiding in the jungle, Kokai talked about the cholera epidemic that swept through all of Asmat and hit Otsjanep particularly hard. “Dead, dead,” Kokai said, repeatedly placing one hand over the other, a demonstration of the bodies piling up on top of each other. “So many dead. Bensin,” the Indonesian word for gasoline.
