Crossings

by Alex Landragin

  Finally, the government decided to capitulate to the Prussians. Parisians refused to go along with the capitulation and revolted, and the siege turned into the Commune. Throughout these upheavals, our doors remained open. The makeshift canteen, infirmary, school and nursery now tended to wounded Communards and their families. At the end of spring, at the time of the cherry blossoms, the soldiers of the Third Republic, fighting the Communards now rather than the Prussians, finally breached the city walls. Over the next week, Paris’s finest monuments were set ablaze and its walls were reddened with rebel blood. Tens of thousands of Communards were shot on sight, and tens of thousands more were taken prisoner. I was among them.

  Like so many others, I was sentenced to twenty years of hard labour and exiled to New Caledonia, leaving Mathilde in charge of my affairs. I departed for my exile convinced I would never see her, or Lucien, or Paris, or Oaeetee, again. My exile in the penal colony of New Caledonia comprised years of want and cruelty. But there were unexpected mercies too. Those female convicts who were literate became teachers, instructing the native children in reading, writing and arithmetic. In order to better forget my sufferings, I plunged myself into my work.

  Three years into our exile, we were given permission to bring our families to New Caledonia to be with us. I sent a letter to Mathilde inviting her to join me. From here, I wrote, we might sail on to Oaeetee, rather than return to France. Her reply arrived several months later. She had decided to decline my invitation, offering instead to stay in Paris and continue to manage my affairs in my absence. She never learned to read or write fluently, but through all those years she managed my business affairs with unfailing competence all the same. Later, when he was old enough, Lucien would stand in as her amanuensis.

  After ten years of exile, the Communards were granted amnesty. I was free to return to France. But I felt I was too close to Oaeetee not to continue onward, so once again I wrote to Mathilde to urge her to join me. Once again, she declined. And so I set off alone from Noumea bound first for Sydney and then for Auckland, from where I would, at long last, set sail for my final destination. It seems I was, as ever, destined for solitude.

  After a week of voluntary captivity at the Hibiscus, I could suffer my confinement at the King’s behest no longer. On the morning of the following Sunday, 3 April 1881, I finally summoned the courage to disobey His Majesty’s orders. Knowing it was within walking distance of the settlement, I determined to visit the mission. I left the Hibiscus at a time I knew most people would be at church, using the back entrance reserved for the hotel staff. Soon, I entered into bedraggled fields pocked with coconut and breadfruit trees, goats, pigs and an occasional buffalo. I approached a squat brick building that I supposed was the prison. It had few windows and from the inside emanated sorrowful groans. Next, I came upon a little wooden church, inside of which I heard the incantations of a priest and, in reply, the singing of a congregation in harmonies so rich and consoling I stopped a while to listen, and was reduced to tears.

  Soon thereafter I stepped through the mission’s entrance and looked about. It had been built on the very location of the graveyard, where, a century before, our sages had been buried. I had only ever set foot upon this once-sacred ground a handful of times, always at the express invitation of Fetu for some ritual. Our holiest and most secret ceremonies had been conducted here, hidden by the lush forest. But where trees had teemed, there were now four rows of six two-roomed, open-windowed cabins. In the centre of the mission village, deserted other than for some mangy dogs sitting in the shade, was a planting of great breadfruit trees growing around a belltower.

  I approached the nearest of these cabins. It had bamboo walls and a roof of pandanus leaves. I peered into an open window. At first, with my eyes habituated to the dazzling sun, I saw only darkness. I raised my veil in order to see better and a stifling heat beat against my face. The hut had an earthen floor, with straw mats overlaid upon it. Lengths of tapa cloth were stretched out to mark the place where the hut’s residents slept at night. I peered into several huts until, through the window of one such cabin, I breathed in a fetid stench I recognised as that of a body long unwashed. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I noticed, stirring from a corner, a silhouette of a body lying on its side, its back facing me, under a length of cloth on the ground. Stepping through a doorway, I entered the hut. I approached the body and knelt over it. It was a very old man. I could not see his face but, as he was not moving, I presumed he was asleep. Only his limbs, sticking out from under the tapa cloth, were visible. I gently lifted the cloth and saw that he was in a state of advanced decrepitude, his muscles wasted, his joints swollen, his skin covered in sores. He appeared to be at death’s threshold. I heard him whisper something. Unable to make out what he was saying, I lowered my head to hear him better and realised he was repeating the following words as if they were an incantation: ‘I welcome you, spirit, and beg you to guide me to the spirit world.’

  ‘I am no spirit,’ I said in the island language, unable to tell if he was talking to me or to an imagined being. ‘I am a creature of the real world.’

  The old man’s eyes blinked open. The whites of his eyes were yellowed, while the irises, once brown, seemed covered over with a greying hue. ‘I cannot see you,’ he said after a pause. I realised he was blind. ‘But I can hear you, and I know you are a spirit.’

  ‘And yet I have a body, just like you.’ I took his hand in mine by way of evidence.

  ‘Then you are a spirit in disguise. You have taken on bodily form, but you are not of this world.’

  ‘Why do you accuse me of such deception?’

  ‘Because you speak the language of the ancestors.’

  The dying man before me recognised my speech from his youth. ‘It is true,’ I said, ‘I speak the language of our ancestors.’

  ‘Where have you come from?’ he asked.

  I considered my reply for some time. Where had I come from? ‘I have come from the spirit world,’ I said at length, ‘just as you said.’

  ‘Ha!’ He chuckled almost imperceptibly. ‘I knew it. About such things I am never wrong.’ He slipped into a paroxysm of coughing. When it had passed, he whispered, even more softly than before, so softly I had to raise my veil and lower my ear so that it was next to his lips. He repeated his question. ‘And have you come to avenge us?’

  ‘Avenge whom?’

  ‘My people – your people. The People of the Albatross.’

  ‘Against the foreigners?’ I gave him the answer I presumed he wanted to hear. ‘Yes,’ I said, taking his hand and squeezing it. ‘Yes, I have.’

  ‘What is your name?’ he asked.

  I paused. ‘My name is Alula.’

  The old man’s eyes opened fully with surprise, and his mouth widened into an astonished smile. ‘So you have returned!’ he said, instantly revived by the news. ‘Fetu was right after all!’

  ‘He was,’ I replied, my eyes welling up with tears. ‘And what is your name?’

  ‘My name is Koroli.’

  ‘Koroli, the son of Nani?’

  ‘Yes, that was my mother’s name.’

  The hand I was holding I had held once before, when the wizened man before me was but a newborn child, ninety years earlier.

  At that moment, we were interrupted by the tolling of bells from the nearby tower and, soon after, the laughter of liberated children could be heard pealing across the mission as congregants spilled from the church. Mass had just ended.

  ‘Go,’ Koroli hissed. ‘Go quickly. Don’t let anyone see you here. There are enemies all around us.’

  ‘But I must talk with you more.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘we will talk, but not now. Come back tonight, late, after dark. I will be waiting for you. We will talk then. But go now, while you can, and take care not to be seen.’

  As I made my way out of the mission, walking back in the direction of Louisville, every passer-by stared at me as if they had never seen such a sight in their l
ives. Other than the priest in his black cassock, all were dressed identically – women in white muslin tunics and men in white muslin shirts and trousers.

  I spent the rest of the day pacing to and fro in my room at the Hibiscus. Finally, well after dark, I returned to the mission. The entrance gate was shut, but a boy was waiting to greet me. He guided me to a hole in the fence hidden by a mimosa shrub. Once inside the compound, the boy took me by the hand and led me in the near-complete darkness to a clearing in a copse of breadfruit trees near the old man’s cabin. All was dark and silent except for the soft light of candles burning in the cabins and, drifting from a distant place, the sound of voices singing in melancholic harmony.

  The old man was waiting for me in the moonlight. He was lying on the same blanket as before and was somewhat revived from the near-cadaverous state I had witnessed earlier. He had been carried here on the pretext that it was time for his passage into the spirit world, and that he wished to die alone and in sight of the spirits in the sky. I told him I had held him in my arms once, only days before my departure. He replied that, although he could not remember me, he remembered the old people speaking of me in his childhood, awaiting my return.

  ‘Why did you wait so long?’ he asked. ‘All the old people are gone.’ I told him about what had happened at the time of the crossing, that there had been two crossings, that Alula had crossed with Joubert and Koahu had crossed with Roblet. He was not surprised by this, and he explained that the sage Fetu had guessed that this was what must have happened. Then I explained all that had happened to me as Joubert, how Koahu’s crossing with the surgeon Roblet had been incomplete, and how I had become separated from Roblet. I told him about Jean-François Feuille and Jeanne Duval and finally I told him my story, and that of Charles and Mathilde. At the completion of my tale, Koroli shook his head in astonishment. ‘You have seen much and suffered much. But let me tell you what happened to us after you left.’ He proceeded, in his soft, rasping voice, to tell me his story.

  ‘In the hours after you left, the old people did not suspect that there had been even one crossing, let alone two. Koahu was mortally injured. That was all they knew. No one noticed Alula was missing. It was only the following day that she was discovered, wandering along the beach, lost and confused. She was brought to Fetu, who spoke with her in his hut for an entire afternoon. When he finally emerged, he declared two crossings had taken place. You had committed a great crime against the Law, he declared, as had Koahu. It was futile to punish them, for the soul in their bodies had committed no crime. Alula was to be treated by all as if nothing had happened. There was no choice but to hope and wait for the return of those who had made the crossing. ‘They know the Law,’ said Fetu, ‘and when they realise their mistake they will return. Of that I am certain.’ Fetu was greatly wounded by your betrayal as you had been his favourite, but he resolved to look after the new Alula, to nurse her to health, to teach her the ways of the people, to explain what had happened to her, and to wait patiently for your return, when you would restore the world to its natural order.

  ‘Alas, the body of Koahu never recovered from the blast of the musket. Several days after the feast, Koahu died of his injuries. This caused great sadness among us, as we understood what his death meant: there would be no return crossing. The Law had been irretrievably broken.

  ‘Still we waited for your return. Over the years, more ships arrived, but you were on none of them. Some simply sailed on without stopping. Others traded with us. Soon enough, only the children considered these ships a novelty. When the strangers came ashore, they, too, carried muskets. Now that we knew the power of the musket we were more careful not to startle them. They traded with us: for water, meat and fruit, they gave us nails and hammers, mirrors and beads. They told us with gestures that they were hunting seals and asked where they were to be found.

  ‘The incident that had killed Koahu was soon forgotten. The people welcomed the arrival of every ship. New worlds appeared to open up for us. It seemed anything was possible, and everything that was new was desirable. The people became emboldened. The women began to disregard Otahu’s orders and brazenly swam to the ship to trade for mirrors, beads and cloth. The men paddled to the ships in their pirogues filled with pigs, fowl, breadfruit and coconuts. The sailors taught them to smoke tobacco and drink rum. But of all their possessions, none was more highly prized by the people than the strangers’ muskets. They could kill and maim better than any spear, and from a great distance. And whereas the crossing was a discipline that required many years of training from the youngest age, the foreigners’ magic simply resided in an object.

  ‘It was a woman who first traded for such a thing, holding it above the water like a trophy as she swam one-armed back to shore. It was coveted among the people and studied among the elders, but no matter how closely they imitated the strangers it would not explode with thunder and lightning. They could not understand how to make the magic work. So Fetu crossed with Alula to explore Joubert’s memories, and learned that, in order to make the musket’s magic work, a musket ball and gunpowder are necessary. From that day on, whenever a ship arrived, Fetu sent the women with the instruction to bring back more than trinkets with which to adorn themselves. They were to trade for ammunition.

  ‘One woman swam to a ship and never returned. On another occasion, one of the men joined the ship and sailed away with it. With every ship the authority of Otahu and Fetu, of the Law itself, was weakened. Children were born who could not be conjoined by blood with the other children. Soon, like a stone under a waterfall, the Law was gradually reduced to a grain of sand, until even that grain was washed away.

  ‘Then the tide began to turn. First the visitors hunted the seals until none were left alive. Then sickness came upon us. People would find wounds on their skin that would not heal. Day after day Fetu would apply ointments and tinctures, but the sores grew larger, and opened like a flower, and wept tears of their own, and multiplied in number, and when the sick finally died it was a blessing that their suffering was over.

  ‘Others noticed a cough that would not go away. Over time the coughs grew broader and deeper and began to rattle, and their lungs seemed to be slowly filling up with water. Eventually, they drowned from all the water that had filled up inside them. Fetu nursed the sick as well as he could, without saying what was on his mind, but his thoughts could be read in the frown on his face: this was the Law’s retribution for our sacrilege.

  ‘Fetu lived a long life, longer than most. Each time another ship was sighted, he welcomed all who visited the island in the hope that one of them was the one he was waiting for. But there was no return. Eventually he died one morning, in the company only of Alula. She came back to the village in tears, telling us Fetu had died of one of the mysterious new illnesses, before they could make a crossing. The line of succession was broken once and for all. As Fetu’s favourite, Alula appointed herself the new sage.

  ‘By this time, I was a youth, on the cusp of manhood. I had been studying the crossing for some years. Fetu had taught me well, and he died just as I was preparing for my first unassisted crossing. Out of respect for Fetu, Alula said, there were to be no more crossings for twelve moons. This was not in our tradition, but as she was the new sage, the people respected her decision. Alula had become feared for her temper. Any perceived slight would send her into a rage that lasted days. By the time twelve moons had passed, the young people, having lost their appetite for the rigours of its instruction, never sought to resume their education. Thus the teaching of the crossing fell away, and I never made an unassisted crossing.

  ‘After the sealers, other ships came in search of whale oil or sandalwood. Sometimes they stayed a day or two, when they were in a hurry, and sometimes they stayed for weeks, when rest and repairs were needed. They cavorted with the women, and traded with us; sometimes they would get drunk and occasionally a musket would be fired and cause heartbreak among us. Every once in a while, one of the people would leave with a
ship, only to return years later, or never at all. Sometimes, one among us would cross with a stranger and thus leave the island. Whenever such a thing occurred, Alula’s reaction was different from Fetu’s. She insisted that, after such a crossing, the old body be sacrificed. After the sacrifice, she ostracised the family of the one who had crossed, banishing them to live on the far side of the island, where the breadfruit trees are fewer. And so we learned to keep the crossing to ourselves.

  ‘The next calamity to befall us was the death of Otahu, whose lungs, like those of so many others among us, slowly filled with water, until he, too, drowned from the inside out. Before he died, Otahu designated his favourite child, his daughter Fayawaye, to be his successor, as was the tradition.

  ‘The first foreigner to stay and live among us arrived at the time when I was a father of my own young family. Much taken with the easy life here compared with that of a sailor, he jumped from the ship as it began to leave and swam to shore. We welcomed him as one of our own. He married and begat children, but several years later he joined the crew of another ship and returned to his faraway place. After him, there were others. They introduced us to their ways, and we became accustomed to them.

  ‘Next to arrive were the missionaries – a dozen French priests. By this time, I was a grandfather already. They took possession of this place, our sacred ground, and destroyed the old, sacred statues that stood upon the graves. In its place, they raised this mission, and built walls around it. They taught us how to dress, how to plant vegetables and how to read their sacred book. Again and again, they urged us to abandon our Law, promising their heaven in exchange. Several among us were persuaded, especially those who were afflicted with the foreigners’ new diseases. They went to live on the mission. But the strange clothes they were made to wear chafed, the vegetables they planted wilted, and their sacred book made no sense. What’s more, at the mission it was forbidden to sing our songs and dance our dances. So these people came back to be among their own, and we waited for the missionaries to leave.