The Navigator Page 19

  She rolled back to him, raised herself on one elbow and ran the tips of her fingers over his taut stubbled cheeks. She said, very softly:

  ‘You still don’t see it, do you?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘Jenny’s in love with you – has been from the day you picked her off the beach.’

  ‘That’s nonsense! I’m old enough to be her father.’

  ‘That’s part of it, probably.’

  ‘Then it’s…it’s damn near incest!’

  ‘Call it what you like, sweetheart. It’s very real. She can’t have you. She doesn’t want anyone else. So, as Adam put it, she’s going away – far and fast.’

  ‘Why did you have to tell me?’

  ‘Because I love you and I owe you the truth; and other people see it, even if you and Adam don’t!’

  ‘Oh Christ! What a mess! What a stinking, bloody mess! The crazy part is I’ve played around with all sorts of women, all my life, and the one I’ve never, never been drawn to, sexually, is Jenny. I’m fond of her yes – the way I’m fond of a child that’s alone and in need of protection.’

  ‘I know that. You know it. Jenny sees it differently.’

  She bent and kissed him on the lips, he clung to her in desperation.

  ‘It’s what Flanagan said: everyone leans, everyone clings, everyone wants me to set their world to rights. I can’t do it. There’s not enough of me!’

  ‘There’s two of us, darling. Remember?’

  ‘What do I do? Tell me!’

  ‘Go to Adam. Tell him you talked to me, and what I said.’

  ‘Why Adam?’

  ‘Because he’s as blind as you are. And one day he’s going to wake up to the gossip; and then you’ll lose the best friend you’ve got in this group. You need him. You’ll need him more and more as time goes on. Do it now. It’s not late. People are still stirring. Get it off your mind. Then come back and make love to your wife …’

  He found Adam Briggs knee-deep in the shallows, trying to spear flat-fish by torch-light. They walked up the sand together, and perched themselves like sea-birds on a flat rock. Briggs listened in silence as Thorkild laid out the story, flat and plain, without gloss or embellishment; then he said:

  ‘I’m glad you told me. Thank Sally for me. She’s a wise woman…It’s hard to know what to say. First, though, this makes no difference to you and me. I like you. I admire you. Always have, always will.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And I still feel the same way about Jenny. She’s not to blame. She’s done no wrong. She’s just got to where she can’t help herself.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it, Adam.’

  ‘But, I’m not going to let her lose herself…You understand that?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘No matter what I have to do. No matter what I’ve got to take.’

  ‘You may have to take an awful lot, man.’

  ‘You think I can’t?’

  ‘I know you can. If I can help, I’m always around. No place else to go.’

  ‘That’s my last point, Chief; so I’ll make it and then you can spit in my eye or feed me to the sharks out there…If it would help Jenny, to have you mate her and give her a baby, I’d be agreeable and I’d take ’em both and love ’em both ever after.’

  ‘That’s a crazy thought Adam. I don’t feel that way for Jenny.’

  ‘I know you don’t. All I said was “if”…Just so you know where I stand. Love’s a terrible thing, Chief; terrible and beautiful and …’ His voice cracked into a sob of utter anguish. ‘And just so goddam unfair!’

  ‘Did you know?’ asked Sally sleepily, ‘did you know that doctors make lousy lovers?’

  ‘Statement or question?’ Thorkild drew her close, to shield her from the first flurry of the land breezes, searching through the matting wall.

  ‘Statement.’

  ‘I’ve got no complaints, so far.’

  ‘That’s because I’m an exceptional doctor. No drugs, no books, no pretensions. But seriously…’

  ‘At this hour? It’s nearly sunrise.’

  ‘So rise up, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come …’

  ‘No way, Josephine! You’ve had me awake all night.’

  ‘So listen! Why do doctors make lousy lovers? Because their trade is mortality – with Latin names. They know all the parts and all the functions and all the pathology – and not one of them has ever seen a soul under the microscope. If they get mixed up with metaphysics – which some of them do – they tend to fall short on medicine. If they pin their faith to corpus hominis, they’ll become like breeders and butchers, totting life up by weight and market price…That’s why, in an odd way, I’m glad to be helpless here. I can just be a woman for a change.’

  ‘And forget the parts and the functions?’

  ‘No…the mortality. You’re dealing with that now.’

  ‘And hating it.’

  ‘Not all of it. You’re a high man because you’re made for it and called to it. I like it too, because I was made to mate with high men – though this is the first time I’ve fallen in love with one. And I like to know that I’m the one he needs when he topples off his perch. It’s all beautifully selfish; but not so selfish that I don’t know you’re my last and only.’

  ‘Why don’t you go to sleep?’

  ‘Because I haven’t finished. You told Carl once and he told me that you didn’t care about my past, because you understood the old way, where the chief or the father deflowered the virgins in a rite of passage…Now, I tell you. I don’t care what you do or with whom or why, so long as I’m the Chief’s woman, and I wait for him in his house.’

  ‘Still Jenny?’

  ‘Still …’

  ‘Don’t you think she might have something to say about it?’

  ‘As much as she wants – just so she says it and does it and gets it out of her system.’

  ‘Do you know what I’m going to do tomorrow – no, it’s today, already?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I’m going to take the canoe, all on my sweet lonesome, and paddle out through the channel, and circumnavigate the island.’

  ‘You can’t. That’s dangerous.’

  ‘For the grandson of Kaloni the Navigator?’

  ‘Take me with you?’

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because, lover, I just want to be alone.’

  ‘Is it so bad?’

  ‘So bad. Not with you, but with all the others. I’m like a kindergarten teacher dreaming up new games each day to keep the kiddies amused. Now you want to turn me into a stud for the lovelorn.’

  ‘I didn’t say that! I didn’t mean that!’

  ‘Whatever you meant, I mean this: for one day, just one single day, I want to be me – alone! No demands, no debates, no problems. Is that too much?’

  ‘Little enough.’ Sally Anderton’s voice was small and tremulous. ‘Come back safe, that’s all.’

  ‘Tell them I’ve gone,’ said Thorkild harshly. ‘Tell ’em why, if you want.’

  ‘Please, don’t go like this!’

  ‘Sally, sweetheart, it isn’t you. It’s this – this whole blasted tribe. Whether they know it or not – and some of them do know – they’re playing me like a fish, running me out, hauling me back for this problem or that debate. Even mad Charlie up on the mountain, he’s doing the same thing in his own way; give a little, take a little, snap when I say the wrong thing. Well, they’d better learn now! I’m only human. The mana dies with me unless I choose to pass it on. Let ’em show a little respect. Let them give me some cherishing for a change.’

  ‘I’ve heard that before,’ said Sally dryly. ‘From Charlie Kamakau. So, you go Gunnar! Go out and get clean and let me see you walk back like a king – not like some pint-sized executive with peptic ulcers!’

  Half a mile off-shore he ceased paddling and let the tiny craft lie, rocking like a piece of driftwood in the long swell. He was o
n the far side of the island, where the sides of the crater rose sheer into the cloud and plunged downwards in vast blue deeps. The sun was noon-high, the sea like a vast undulating mirror, save where the swell broke against the black walls and surged around the narrow inlets, between the humps of the old lava-flow. Behind him and on either hand, the sea was empty, save for a gaggle of sea-birds, squabbling over a shoal of fish, which were being harried by a brace of cruising sharks.

  The small drama of predation intrigued him for a moment; then he grew bored with it. He was not here to provide food, or to celebrate his manhood by the capture of a shark and shout it afterwards to the bucks and the women. He was here to restore himself, as his grandfather had taught him, long ago in the past, by a conscious act of withdrawal, a gathering-in of all the diffused and distended faculties, a shutting out of all intrusive sights and sounds.

  Once, after a great storm, which overtook a lugger full of people on their way to Raiatea, he had seen the old man perch himself on the foredeck, and sit there for nearly six hours, closed in by a silence that was tangible as a wall. Afterwards the old man had explained it to him: ‘It’s like the making of sennit rope. Each fibre is weak – so weak that a child can snap it. Plait them together, they will hold a mast against a hurricane…After a long, rough passage, I am like a rope that is strained and frayed. I sit and plait myself together again with new threads – I stare and dream and remember the counsels of my father and the words of the song-makers, and the cries of all the birds. I do not speak, because each word is a thread torn away. No one may touch me, because each touch robs me of a piece of myself. You too must learn this. Learn to be silent. Draw a circle around yourself and let no one step inside it…’

  It was for this reason that he had built the sound-proof room in the house in Honolulu. It was for this that he had fled, today, confining himself, yet opening himself in the vast circle of the sea. He was weaker than his grandfather, very much more vulnerable; and his need or renewal was the more urgent. The cosmogony of Kaloni Kienga was essentially fixed and simple. For all the multitude of gods and guardian spirits, everything was rooted in and related to Te Tumu, the Foundation. The roots were many, but the tree was one. The relationships were complex, but fixed and unalterable.

  For Gunnar Thorkild, there was not one cosmogony, not one morality, but many. His tribe was not a tribe, but demos, the people, hydra-headed, each head howling and snapping at the other in a cacophony of words, whose meanings changed with every whim and surge of passion. He himself was divided and subdivided. One part of him trapped by reason and the specious logic of scholarship, another lost and wandering among the expatriates of a twentieth-century city, another clinging child-like to a legendary past, another still, armed and watchful against the encroachment of anarchy on a beach-head in the middle of nowhere. Each part was threatened by a different menace: the scholar by irony and scepticism, the wanderer by a babel-madness of voices in conflict, the child by a terror of ridicule, the guardian by a draconian devil tempting to tyranny.

  Out here, at least, he was whole: a tiny man in a frail cockleshell, alone, untrammelled, at one with the vastness of sea and sky and a small land, thrust up from the deeps, unchanged since the first voyagers saw it, a long millennium ago. The harmony of the moment crept over him, and through him, grateful as sleep after long labour. He knew without knowing, saw without seeing, what had drawn his people out, centuries ago, from their island havens into immensity. He understood something else too: that for a small people, fragmented by migration and enormous distance, bound to a monotony of simple, concrete things, the fountain of dreaming was always the secret-ones, the remembering ones, the high men and the magical and the knowing. No matter that they were privileged, proud, tyrannical; they were set at the navel of things. Through them the past joined the present and the future was determined by the dead.

  He began to paddle again, steadily, rhythmically, to breast the current and follow the contour of the land. The sea-birds rose screaming at his approach and the two sharks left the shoal and began cruising near the canoe, circling wide at first and then coming closer, so that he could see the bluish sheen on their dorsal skin, and as they turned, the white flash of their underbellies. They were big fellows, twenty feet long at least; but they were gorged on the shoal and they would not attack; though more than one lone fisherman had had his paddle snapped when he struck, impudently, at a cruising monster.

  For Thorkild it was a reminder that the community was still unpractised in the skills of the big sea, still huddled on a small beach-head and feeding from the inner reef and the near hinterlands. Even the Kauai men were not as practised as the far islanders. They too had been civilized and citified and made dependent on store-bought comfort. It was time to push them all out, further and further, and practise them in the harsher arts of survival. The problem of Charlie Kamakau must be solved too, because he was an impediment to their outward thrust. He might become a threat to their safety. He would certainly become an object of fear and superstition, like a night-prowler or a denizen scavenger.

  The problem was what to do with him if he could not submit or respond to the therapy of normal community intercourse. Whether the community could provide such a therapy was another and more fundamental question. If Charlie proved an incurable and eccentric recluse, banishment was a possibility. He had enough skills to maintain himself. The problem was to find a place sufficiently removed to debar him from any future contact with the group. Remembering the old horrors of Molokai, the leper lazarette, Thorkild felt a sickening disgust at the brutality of the remedy. Nonetheless, he changed course and began paddling inshore to see if there might be another bay or beach-head where a lone man might survive. There was none. The coast was iron-bound, no haven for any creature but the sea-birds.

  The current was stronger at this end of the island and the noon wind was springing up and blowing against it. This, with the rising tide and the back-wash from the cliffs, forced him to paddle harder, to round the point with sea-room and make passage home to the reef-channel. There was a heady joy in the exercise, a feeling not of mastery but of complicity with the elements. He remembered the old chant which Kaloni had taught him, the song of the sea-feelers to the sea itself.

  ‘I know you,

  O sea,

  Home of the sea-god.

  I do not fight you Like a warrior,

  O sea.

  I do not sing to you Like a woman,

  O sea.

  I swim in you

  Like the white shark. I ride on you Like the fisher-bird,

  O sea.

  I live in you

  As I live in the house of my father,

  O mirror of Hiva and the night-eyes.’

  It was mid-afternoon before he lay off the reef again, a long way out, now seeing, now losing the beach and the huts and the small ant-figures moving between them. Their diminishment pleased him. They were removed, unreal, like manikins in a primitive picture. They were bound, locked between the mountain and the reef. He was free, large, strong, the king that Sally dreamed and he had almost forgotten.

  He paddled inshore, steadily, easily, watching how the current swirled through the channel, and how the reef was buried under the high tide, and where the rollers broke evenly and where they crashed, turbulent and destructive, over the coral outcrops…He would show them something now! He would not run the channel. He would ride in over the reef itself. If he misjudged the wave, if it failed to run right – so be it! – he would never know! If he made it, then, by God they would know why a feeler-of-the-sea was different from other men!

  It was a wild, drunken moment, but he surrendered himself to it, shouting with exultation as he paddled to the spot where the big rollers shaped themselves before the surf-line. He hung there a while, backing against the swell, feeling the surge and the lift, waiting for the fractional moment in which he must commit himself.

  When it came, he gave a shout and plunged his paddle and felt himself heaved and
carried, up and up, on a great hump of water. For one heart-stopping moment he thought it would break too soon and capsize him; but it held and curled like a long drum-roll under the hull, and carried him forward over the reef, and weltered into a foam that swept him fast as a running horse on to the shingle!

  There should have been paeans and a chant of women welcoming the Koa – the superman of the sea. Instead there was only a rasping shout from Lorillard:

  ‘You’re an idiot, Thorkild. You could have broken your bloody neck!’

  They had not been idle in his absence. Indeed, as Sally told him with a lover’s malice, they had been glad to be rid of him for a while and tend to their private business. Willy Kuhio and Tioto had walked inland, found the trees he had marked, rejected them as too big and hard to work, chosen others and slashed out a track for the log-slide. Franz Harsanyi and Hernan Castillo had completed a small assortment of tools – adzes, scrapers, fish-spears and even a primitive pump drill made from wood and cord and a pointed piece of basalt.

  Adam Briggs was boiling up a foul-looking mess of coconut, breadfruit, bananas and assorted fruit scraps which, he claimed, would ultimately ferment into drinkable spirit – though Lorillard averred sceptically that it would make fusel-oil look like medical alcohol. Eva Kuhio and Barbara had finished the matting sail for the canoe, and were now lacing it to the bamboo frame. Lorillard himself, with Martha and Mark, had made a small, rough kiln in which wood charcoal could be made for a forge – and even, God willing, to filter the witches’ brew which Briggs was cooking. Yoko and Ellen and Jenny had found a new taro patch and were transplanting some of the tubers to the soft ground near the waterfall. Simon Cohen and Barbara Kamakau had gone out to gather fruit and were not yet returned. Thorkild frowned over this last piece of news; and when they came back, an hour later, laden with papaya and mangoes and a big head of bananas, he accosted them and read them a quiet lecture.

  ‘Barbara, until I give the word, I want you to stay down here on the beach. So long as Charlie’s up there, the mountain’s a dangerous place for you.’