Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (27 page)

“I’d say our clever Mr. Fischer has been bamboozled,” Jimmy said. “And suddenly I don’t care so much about getting his permission for anything.”

An hour later, Fula had found us a local man with a four-by-four and a hole in his wallet. He made a big fuss about not wanting to get in trouble with Fischer. Then he said he could take us to the end of the most westerly road and demanded an outrageous fee. Jimmy haggled to no effect and agreed, and then the man said we’d need five gallons of diesel, which wasn’t included.

So as not to raise any eyebrows, we walked out of town and climbed into his machine only after we were well out of sight. Then, for fifty miles that felt like five hundred, we bashed around in the back seats like slugs in a fisherman’s bait box.

“Road in New Guinea is always like this?” Kit asked.

“Always.” I wanted to sound like the experienced traveler, unruffled by anything, but even I was alarmed. Even I, as the wheels clawed at yet another crumbling edge, kept thinking about hurtling upside down into a ravine.

“What’s the deal with Rosko?” I said, more to distract myself that anything. “Really?”

“Nothing. Not nothing, but nothing. We have kind of an argument I guess. I tell you later.” She threw me a look that meant either
I don’t want to talk about this
or
I don’t want to talk about this in front of your parents
. She was saved from saying anything else as we slithered to a halt at a tree trunk, which had been dragged across the way to mark the road’s end.

“You can leave us here,” Jimmy said, peering at an old map. “I know where we are, more or less.”

The driver got out and gestured at himself, at Jimmy, and then at a path through the trees beyond the downed trunk. “No rot, no rot, no rot,” he said with a toothless grin. It was a double pun, not a repetition. The word
rot
meant both “road” and “choice”: he was saying,
I don’t have a choice, because this is the end of the road. And you don’t have a choice either, because here, at the end of the road, there’s only one way to go.

After he drove away, leaving us in a gray cloud of flies and fumes, we hiked for three more hours on an easy path through a valley. At the end of the valley, the mountains began to loom clear and steep ahead of us in a green wall. As the afternoon light softened, we scrambled up a rise, five hundred feet maybe, onto a small, hidden plateau.

And smelled wood smoke.

C
HAPTER
18

O
MA
’
S
D
REAM

The first thing we saw was a clearing the size of a football pitch. Or do I mean soccer field—or football field? Anyway, a young woman about my age was seated on the ground near the edge of it, pounding at something with a rock. I could tell from her flat profile and exceptionally dark skin that she was Tainu. She had typical Tainu hair as well, a black mop cut into a bowl shape, similar to what I’d often seen in the Amazon, but with a long thin braid on the left side that had feathers woven into it.

The traditional Tainu covering, the same for men and women, was a short skirt made from the waxy, dagger-like, greenish-purple leaves of the tanket plant. This girl, like more and more tribal people, was wearing old clothes from the Western charity pile: a red cotton soccer shirt with the number “8” on the back, filthy running shorts that had once been blue. The missionary influence:
Dress modestly, like a European, or an Australian, or an American, in items made by Bangladeshi slave labor! So much better to do that than dress the way you’ve always dressed, using renewable local materials, and risk offending God with a buttock or a nipple.

I mean, how stupid can you—

Sorry, sorry. Must have fewer opinions. Must stick to the point.

At least the string
bilum
bag on her back, in which a baby lay sleeping, was traditional. So was the work: between her knees she held a three-foot length of sago palm, cut open and formed into a trough. Slowly but steadily she raised and lowered the rock, pounding the starchy insides of the plant into a pulp.

I hadn’t spoken Tain’iwa for years, so I rehearsed in my head how to say,
Excuse me, but I’m looking for a man called Oma.
Having thought it out, I hesitated, because Oma could be dead and referring to a dead man was the worst possible way to begin a conversation—you could speak of a dead man only after being introduced to the subject by his relatives. Before I had a chance to speak, she turned to look at us and opened her mouth in frightened surprise. But almost immediately her expression changed again.

“Morrrg?” she said. “Morrrg ekaba? Emakol diwo kim dawa. Em bivek, awa su bisu!”
Is it you? I can’t believe it. You came back!

It took me a moment to process, but when I recognized her, all the happy memories of being a kid up in those mountains came flooding back like it was yesterday. This was the little girl who, as much as anyone, had taught me Tain’iwa, and put up with my strange stupidity about local plants and animals, and enjoyed my crazy stories (which, like all the Tainu, she’d assumed were mainly inventions) about a wider world. I was so surprised to see an adult version of that same face that I only just managed to avoid saying something really dumb like
Wow, Isbet, I didn’t recognize you. You’ve grown up.
Instead, I said in Tain-iwa,
Yes, Isbet, it’s me. So wonderful to see you again! Are you well? Look, my parents are here too.
After the Tainu greeting—not cheek to cheek, but forehead pressed hard to the left shoulder—I introduced you as my friend. Brother would have been way too confusing to explain.

Whose is the baby?
I asked in Tain’iwa.

“Ewa’o,” she said casually.
Mine.

Oh yes. Isbet was seventeen, like me. But seventeen was thirty here.

Wonderful! That’s, uh, wonderful. And your husband?
I said.

A dismissive gesture with her hand: a twist of the wrist with the fingers splayed. It might have meant
Who knows? Who cares?
But then she made a sort of low mewing sound: “Me’iy’ih. Me’iy’ih.”

I’d made the mistake I’d just avoided a minute earlier.

Me’iy’ih
meant “he’s not.” But what it really meant was “he’s dead.” No reason given, both because it was something Tainu never talked about, and paradoxically because it was too ordinary. Poor nutrition, no antibiotics, frequent fighting, and frequent hunting accidents. Jimmy’d calculated that the average life expectancy for a male Tainu was thirty-nine years. I tried not to think about the fact that the baby’s father was probably already well-preserved and doing scarecrow duty.

She showed us around the village. Most of the women were planting taro farther down the valley, she said, and the men were out hunting. The few women and children who were around rose and scattered like birds as they saw us, though I could tell they were watching from the tree line. The absence of people gave the village an even more desolate, abandoned feel. It was nothing more than a dozen sagging huts scattered through the clearing: not so different from the way they’d lived for countless thousands of years before, except that then they’d moved and rebuilt every month or so. Like so many before him, Kurtz had worked to settle them in this one place, so that the work of civilizing them, and saving their souls, would be easier, but the only physical sign of it was more trash, more mud, and more decay.

She took us through a stringy patch of tobacco plants to one of the larger huts on the edge of the clearing. “Wewa ina ge’je,” she said, and translated by pointing to each of us in turn and putting her head sideways on her hands as if they were a pillow. We ducked under the dripping grass lintel and stepped inside. It was the church—a shabby wooden building the size of a suburban living room. A glass bottle stood on a folding table at one end. There were no chairs or benches, just bare beaten earth under an apologetic sprinkling of grass. Despite my months of living with the Tainu before, it was hard to imagine sleeping in this sad, mold-infested space.

“Ogme deg etwi’u balam?” I said.
Where is the man who built this?

She was matter-of-fact about it:
missinari
had been here
longtaim
, after persuading them to stay in one place so that God could find them more easily. Did she mean the one who had found her tribe years before and tried then to convert them to
Jisas Kraist stori
, and given so many of the villagers, like Isbet herself, new names? Yes, the same man. And when he came back, she said, and persuaded them to settle, he also told them they must forget about their forest gods: the forest gods were not real.

So they were all Christian now?

She shrugged. She was repeating what she was supposed to say.

Why wasn’t
missinari
there? I asked. Because they didn’t believe in his god?

That wasn’t it, she said. The trouble was he’d insisted that the I’iwa and their volcano weren’t real either—but the Tainu wouldn’t give up those two beliefs. So Kurtz had demanded they show him, and they had said if he went there, he would be killed. And he became angry, and said that he would prove there was no volcano, no I’iwa.

“Epe din ba’ooten madanu, warai da kem-kem pewanat.”

He marched off to the waterfall and didn’t come back.

Marched
: she made him sound like a petulant boy playing soldiers.

We were interrupted by the sound of the men returning. Oma came first, wearing the traditional Tainu leaf skirt, plus several elaborate necklaces and a beard interlaced with small pink flowers. The long leaves bounced as he walked.

“Blind,” you said.

Yes. You’d noticed it first, but even from a distance I could see that his eyes were the same milk white as his hair. But he didn’t walk like a blind person. He strolled into the clearing confidently and turned toward us as if sensing our presence. Two younger men walked half a step behind him on either side like bodyguards. They were dressed the same, except that one of them was wearing a knee-length lilac skirt under the tanket leaves. I recognized them as grown versions of Willem and Yosep, the two boys who had brought Iona to our encampment. Yosep had a long bow over his shoulder, and the bamboo fiber cord dug into his chest. He also carried two bags that looked as if they contained dinner. Cuscus, as it turned out. Later that evening, Kit looked glumly at the hunk of half-raw fatty meat in her hand and said it was “cutest, most helpless-looking animal I am ever eating.”

A Papuan hunting dog came out from behind the group and bounded over the grass toward us. It was the size of a big terrier, but it had the inquisitive, pointed face and triangular ears of a fox. Its coat was a dull gold, with matching white flashes on muzzle and tail. A couple of feet from Isbet, it stopped and rose on its hind legs, making a strangely articulate sound—
wrark?
—as it demanded to be noticed.

“Ga’iwa jam’eyep,” she said. It was Tain’iwa for
dog
, but literally it meant
bad voice, good nose
. Which was right: they could track prey at speed, even in total darkness, but instead of barking they went in for a cracked wail.
Singing dog
was the optimistic term the lowlanders used.

The way you looked at the dog, and then at me, made me wonder: Did you remember how I’d pined for one? Did you remember how, living on the road with Jimmy and Lorna, any real pet was out of the question, and I made do with an ever-changing menagerie of caterpillars, beetles, snakes, and frogs? Well, Dog, as I named it, seemed to adopt me immediately. “Hello, Dog,” I said, crouching down so that my eyes were on its level. “I probably knew your parents. Nice to meet you.” It looked at me with its head to one side, as if carefully taking the measure of my voice. Then it sniffed both my hands, my arms, my feet, my face, my hair, and, aye, of course, it was a dog, so it had to maneuver around and check out my bum too. Satisfied, it sat down next to me with its eyes on me, as if awaiting instruction.

“That’s about the most intelligent-looking animal I’ve ever seen,” Jimmy said, and I translated for Isbet.

“Lopsom ikel dala,” she said. “Mesomom kavi dala.”
It looks intelligent because it is intelligent.
She ran over to her father, chattering with excitement.

“Morrrg wayu! Utmen Lona wayu! Utmen Gimmi!”

His eyebrows went up and he smiled, opening out his hands in a gesture that needed no translating. He was polite to Kit and very formally polite to Jimmy and Lorna, as befitted older people who were my parents. His reaction to you was very different, though. He seemed frightened of your presence at first, but afterward I came to see that he was not so much frightened as shocked—not quite prepared to believe what I was saying about you. He held you by the shoulders for a long time, repeating your name many times until he got the pronunciation right and touching your face with his fingertips as if to memorize it. Your reaction was almost as strange: instead of resisting his touch, you leaned into it, accepting it, and murmuring encouragement in a language that of course he couldn’t understand.

“We need you, Oma,” you said. “We need you. Your blind eyes will lead us.” Then you reached into your sketch pad and handed Isbet the drawing you’d made outside Johannes Fischer’s office. She gripped the sides of the sheet so hard that I thought it would tear and started talking very quickly.

Five men,
she said.
This one and four more.
With guns. They went beyond, to the waterfall. We told them not to go. My father said, we exist only to protect the I’iwa, and they exist only to protect us, and they don’t like to be seen. He said, you must not go. He said, if you find the volcano, they will kill you. But their leader, the one with the ruined face, said, the volcano is what we are looking for.

I asked her what she meant by “ruined face.”
Him,
she said, pointing at the drawing.
His face is
—it was something that frightened or disgusted her. She made frantic clawing gestures all over her head, but she couldn’t explain.

I wanted to take up what you had started—the tricky task of persuading them to guide us when I knew they wouldn’t want to. As I fumbled for a way to explain myself, Oma pointed his white blind eyes at me and interrupted me with a long, complicated stream of Tain’iwa. He spoke in a singsong whisper, and it was hard to follow; I kept up with him only because I’d heard some of it before, and because he gestured so eloquently with his big, knobby, callused hands:

Our land is shaped like a ring,
he said.
It encircles the valley of the I’iwa, and the place of smoke, which lies at the center of the ring. We do not go to the center, because the I’iwa will protect us only if they are left alone. So for generation after generation, the purpose of our life has been to circle endlessly. Always staying close, and always watching for outsiders, but never getting too close.

It sounded like the refusal we’d heard before. He stopped, apparently too embarrassed to go on, and began to clean some mud from under a fingernail. I was wondering what other strategy I could use to persuade him, when he continued.

We did not want to stop circling the I’iwa. And we did want to stop Kurtz from looking for them. But he was angry with us, and determined, and I was frightened and weak. He never came back. Then the Seraphim came, the five men as Isbet said. We wanted to stop them too, but they had guns and we were frightened. We showed them to the waterfall because they said they would kill us if we didn’t, but we felt bad about that. It was betraying the I’iwa.