The Navigator Read online

  Simon Cohen protested:

  ‘We didn’t go far. I had a knife.’

  ‘And Charlie’s got a fire axe and he’s twice your size and crazy as a coot where Barbara’s concerned. Don’t give me an argument! Just do as I ask, eh?’

  ‘Don’t blame him, Chief.’ Barbara grinned at him provocatively. ‘I suggested it. Where else would we go in daylight, eh?’

  ‘Anywhere you like – but not up the mountain.’

  Tioto, who had been hovering in the background, stepped into the group.

  ‘You listen to what the Chief says, woman! He’s seen Charlie – you haven’t. Besides, he’s not always up on the terrace. He’s moving around, now.’

  Thorkild swung round to confront him.

  ‘Say that again Tioto!’

  ‘He’s moving around Chief. The last tree we marked is about half-way up to the terrace. I found this caught on a thorn bush.’ He held out a scrap of white gauze, stained and discoloured. ‘That’s a piece of bandage, like the doctor has in her medicine chest!’

  ‘What does it mean?’ Barbara was visibly shaken.

  ‘What Tioto says. Charlie’s prowling, closer to the camp.’ He turned to face Simon Cohen. ‘What about you two? Are you pairing off?’

  Cohen grinned sheepishly.

  ‘Well, sort of, I guess.’

  ‘Fine! Barbara moves into the store-house with you and Tioto. Then there’ll be two of you to protect her.’

  ‘You mean …?’

  ‘You heard me sonny boy! I don’t give a damn about your sex life. I do care about keeping your woman alive.’

  He turned away and walked briskly across to Carl Magnusson who was reading Adam Briggs a lecture on moonshine and the making thereof. Thorkild asked him:

  ‘Feel like a long walk tomorrow Carl?’

  ‘To see Charlie? Sure, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.’

  ‘You come too Adam. You and Willy Kuhio. I may need you.’

  ‘Expecting trouble?’

  ‘I’m hoping Carl can help us avoid it.’

  Carl Magnusson gave him a shrewd, speculative look and grunted:

  ‘Don’t expect too much, Thorkild. When Charlie was a simple sailor, I could handle him; but madness and magic are way outside my territory. I’d like to get Sally’s advice.’

  When she heard the plan, Sally Anderton raged at them in total exasperation.

  ‘You men! You stand on your wooden heads and read the world upside down! There’s a poor devil, crazy because he’s lost his wife, working his guts out on a tropic mountain, all alone, surrounded by the ghouls and ghosts of the past – and suddenly, he wants to come home! He can’t do it all at once, because he’s haunted and scared. So he comes half-way and turns back, leaving a rag of himself hanging to a bush. Then, all of a sudden, it’s the Oxbow Incident – three bullies and Carl Magnusson for spokesman, striding out to subdue him. You make me sick!’

  ‘Easy, Sally! Easy!’ Carl Magnusson reached out to hold her. ‘What’s the shouting for? We came to ask your medical opinion.’

  ‘So I’ll give it to you!’ She stood straddle-legged in the middle of the hut, challenging them. ‘There’s four of you – Gunnar, Adam, Willy and you, Carl. Why so many? That’s no way to make a parley, even with a sane man! How would you feel, Carl, if you invited me to lunch, and I turned up with three attorneys and a stenographer? Madness! Pure madness!’

  ‘What do you suggest, ma’am?’ Adam Briggs was meticulously polite.

  ‘For a start, Adam, you stay home. You’re wise enough to know why. You’re more foreign to a Polynesian than you are to a Connecticut Yankee. I’m not insulting you. It’s a fact of life.’

  ‘I know it ma’am. But when the Chief gives an order, I obey. That’s the deal.’

  ‘When a life’s at stake, all deals are off. Gunnar?’

  ‘You’re the doctor, Sally. We’re waiting for the prescription.’

  ‘You go, Gunnar. You take food and liquor. No weapons. No threats. Nothing but soft words and gentleness…Talk him down, as they do a pilot lost in high weather. If he panics let him go back, and try again another time…God! Why do I have to spell it out like this?’

  ‘Because we’re dumb,’ said Willy Kuhio with a grin. ‘It’s like when my Eva asks me to hold the knitting wool. I’m all thumbs and tangles. But put me and her on a boat, she wouldn’t know a clove-hitch from a running bowline.’

  ‘You’re not a psychiatrist, Sally,’ said Gunnar Thorkild flatly. ‘You said that yourself. You can’t insure us against all the risks. So, Willy and I will go up with Carl and try to coax Charlie down. If he won’t come, we bring him back by force. We’ve got to start working that mountain, for food and timber. More! We can’t have this whole community living in fear, with Charlie free, and the rest of us pinned down to a beach-head like the goddam Marines on Okinawa!’

  ‘Why can’t we?’ Sally faced him, flushed and furious. ‘What do we lack? What do we need that we can’t have?’

  ‘Security,’ said Thorkild. ‘People safe in their beds.’

  ‘Balls!’ said Sally Anderton. ‘Have they been threatened yet?’

  ‘No. But…’

  ‘But what? They could be drowned by another tidal wave, strangled by a giant octopus!…But they won’t be. You’re fighting phantoms. I pray you don’t end killing a man!’

  ‘Sally, please …!’

  ‘I’ve said it, sweetheart. I’ve said it all, backwards and frontwards. Now I’ve run out of words. Why don’t you three men walk down to the beach and think it out together. I’m tired. I’d like to go to bed.’

  ‘One last word ma’am, if you’ll be so kind.’

  ‘What’s that Adam?’

  ‘Your husband…the Chief here …

  ‘Let him speak for himself!’

  ‘Ma’am, a man can’t do that. What does he say? He’s right? You’re wrong? Or maybe you’re both right and wrong at once? But because he’s the Chief, he just can’t bet everything on the nose. He’s got to lay off, up and down the card. He can’t think just about Charlie, or just about himself. It’s you, and Barbara and Jenny…all of us! When you had a patient dying, you had to think of the ones left, just as much as the one going. Or maybe you didn’t – I wouldn’t know. But you see what I mean…’

  ‘Don’t plead for me,’ said Thorkild brusquely. ‘It’s settled.’

  ‘When a man does you a kindness,’ said Carl Magnusson gruffly, ‘you tell him, thank you. And when a woman says hard words with love, you listen with respect! Come with me, Mister Briggs. Let’s look at that mash of yours!’

  7

  The terrace was cleared; the last brushwood burnt away, the ground open for the cultivators; but Charlie Kamakau was gone. His hut was empty, the ashes of his fire were long cold; the food-scraps decomposed. His tools were gone too and, with them, the relics he had uncovered and cherished as signs of his sacred calling. Only the skull remained, shattered now and strewn in fragments on the sacrificial stone.

  Thorkild and Kuhio combed the terrace and the surrounding bush, but the undergrowth was too dense and lush to show traces of his passing. They shouted for him over and over again, but the only answer was a flutter of wings and the shrilling of startled birds. Thorkild was troubled. The last vestiges of logic had been destroyed. Charlie Kamakau had achieved his aim. The clearing was a monument to his prowess and endurance; but he no longer wanted to demonstrate it. Or was his flight only another anguished cry for help?: ‘See! You need me! Come find me!’ The smashed skull spoke of violence; but whether it was a symbolic act or a simple outburst of anger, there was no way to tell. Where was he now? Had he retreated to higher ground – even to the place of the navigators itself? Or was he hovering round the lower slopes, too afraid – or too hostile – to rejoin the group? Carl Magnusson summed up the situation tersely.

  ‘No point in beating around any longer, Thorkild. You could have the whole camp looking for him and still lose him in that jungle. Let’s go back.
You can set a night-watch, and instruct everybody to treat him gently if he’s seen. When you put work-parties up here, and on the timber-slide, you give them the same instruction…If he’s gone bush for good, then there’s nothing more to be done. If he’s working his way home, he’ll communicate in his own time…Sally’s right in one thing. He hasn’t committed any hostile act. You’re right in another. We can’t immobilize ourselves any longer.’

  ‘Why not leave him a message?’ asked Willy Kuhio in his mild fashion.

  Thorkild took out his knife and scratched on the surface of the sacrificial stone: ‘Great work Charlie! Come down and celebrate – Thorkild, Willy, Carl!’

  ‘That say it, Willy?’

  ‘That says it,’ said Willy unhappily. ‘We can’t know whether he’ll believe it.’

  ‘We’ll go home, then.’

  ‘Let’s take it easy on the way back,’ said Carl Magnusson. ‘I’m not as young as I used to be.’

  ‘There’s no hurry Carl. I want to have a look at the timber they’ve marked.’

  As they plodded down the hillside, it was a relief to talk about simple, concrete things. The boat, they agreed, should be designed by Hernan Castillo, who had made models of almost every craft in the Pacific; the Pahi of the Societies, the Ndrua of Fiji, the Waka Taurua of the Cook Islanders. But before they chose the craft, they must decide, in concert, the nature of the voyage. Would they commit the whole group in a single attempt to return to the nearest known port? Would they send out a small party, two or three, to make the perilous voyage and send back rescuers?

  If they chose to set out, all together, they would need a large vessel, double-hulled and decked, to carry them and their water and provisions. To build it would take a long time, much longer than the year that Thorkild had projected. If they chose to send out a small advance party, they must consent to lose skilled and valuable manpower, and resign themselves to a long period of uncertainty about their fate. As they sat, resting under one of the marked trees, Carl Magnusson made a comment which gave Thorkild matter for long reflection.

  ‘… Once the goal is clear, and is recognized as attainable, I think it’s important to forget the time element altogether. How can I put it? The work is more important than what it produces. The journey is more important than the arrival. It’s an art of living we’ve lost in our mechanic age. I’ve rediscovered it too late, I’m afraid. Even Peter André Lorillard – God wash his starchy soul – has begun to want it…That argument the other night, about too much regulation, is part of the same pattern…People wanting to grow instead of accomplish. They’re beginning to feel, however vaguely, that they could fulfil themselves quite happily on this island…Have you been down to the graves lately, Thorkild?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘There are fresh flowers on them every day.’

  ‘Molly Kaapu and my Eva put them there,’ said Willy Kuhio. ‘When they go to bathe or look at the fish-traps. It’s a pleasant thing. A kind of prayer, I guess.’

  ‘That’s what I was coming to.’ Magnusson plucked at an overhanging orchid and held the small purple bloom in his hands. ‘The thing that’s happening to us all. Time is stopping; life is flowering. We’re beginning to contemplate the mysteries. Some of us anyway. I keep wondering who will be our first prophet – and what will waken him and set him speaking.’

  ‘I hope he doesn’t come too soon.’ Thorkild laughed. ‘I’ve got enough troubles on my plate.’

  ‘That’s queer …’ Willy Kuhio seized on the thought. ‘My Eva said the other night, the one thing she misses is Church and the prayer meeting on Sunday. I told her we were all different religions, and some people had none at all, so it was best to keep it a private thing.’

  ‘I haven’t been near a Church in twenty years,’ said Magnusson lightly. ‘But I wonder sometimes about what Kaloni Kienga said, the day he left us: “Each man goes to his god by his own road; but all the gods are images of one”…What do you think, Thorkild?’

  Thorkild shrugged and toyed a moment with the thought before he answered.

  ‘I rejected Christianity when I left the Sisters. Mostly, I guess, because I didn’t want to live up to it. With my grandfather I was drawn back to the old ways – but that’s an emotional, a poetic thing if you want; although the mana is something very real to me. In that sense, I suppose I’m still a religious man. I have reverence. I have respect. But I don’t think I have anything to teach anybody. However, if Eva, or anyone else, wants to pray or meet or meditate, I’ll join them, gladly.’

  ‘It helps a lot of folk,’ said Willy Kuhio simply. ‘A hymn to lift up the heart, a prayer against the dark. There’s always a fear in people – and sometimes God is the only one they can tell it to.’

  ‘I’m rested now.’ Carl Magnusson heaved himself to his feet. ‘Reach me down those orchids, Thorkild. We’ll take some flowers back to the ladies.’

  The news of Charlie Kamakau’s disappearance made everyone uneasy; but Thorkild took pains to abate their fears. So long as people were moving about the camp there was no danger. A watch would be kept from midnight until dawn, two men dividing it between them. No knives or other evident weapons would be carried; but a bamboo stave could be kept handy for any unlikely emergency. If Charlie were seen, he should be addressed calmly and invited to eat and drink at the fire-pit. He should not be challenged or pursued, but made to feel free to come and go at will. Barbara Kamakau’s movements were restricted to the campsite and to the beach. If, after a period, there were no signs of Charlie, the precautions might be relaxed. The first night watch would be split between Lorillard and Tioto…Thorkild would share the roster with the rest. It was agreed that, with these simple precautions, everyone could relax and sleep quietly at night.

  Franz Harsanyi profited by their good humour to press for a trial of his memory game. So, Thorkild began with a simple lesson on the stars of the southern hemisphere, their movements and the legends associated with them in the folk-lore of the Polynesians. He made them cover their eyes and then draw the constellations in the sand, then lift their heads and identify them and name the stars in the order of their magnitude. By the end, even Simon Cohen had joined the game, singing the names into a pattern which they chanted in unison.

  Aldebaran, Alrilam

  Betelgeuse and Bellatrix

  Pollux and Procyon …

  As Ellen Ching remarked afterwards, it was strictly a kid’s game, but it beat hell out of mugging or campus cocktail parties. Yoko Nagamuna, who had done well at the recognition, made a prim little lecture about the long tradition of geisha games, and how people – especially men! – were always children at heart. Thorkild nodded and smiled and then walked down to the beach with Sally. They pushed out the canoe and paddled across the lagoon, away from the inrush of the channel, and into the slack water where they could lie, cradled in the wooden shell, drifting slowly under the stars.

  ‘Last night,’ said Sally drowsily, ‘I was so miserable I wanted to dig a hole in the sand and bury myself. You and I were fighting about poor Charlie Kamakau. I was jealous of Martha Gilman, because she’s started a baby to Peter Lorillard, and so far I haven’t been able to give you anything but sex and arguments. I was so mad with Jenny, I wanted to shake her and tell her, for God’s sake, to go out and get laid and come back smiling for once! And to add to it all I had the curse and had to improvise napkins – which is one of the problems the great Chief ignores in this primitive kingdom!…But today, everything was different. For the first time I found myself singing, and gossiping like a housewife with Molly Kaapu, and making jokes with Adam Briggs. I felt all cuddly and domestic; and I couldn’t wait for you to get home…Silly, isn’t it?’

  ‘Not to me, girl. When I took off around the island yesterday, I was desperate, chewed up like shark-bait. Now, I’m better too.’

  ‘Tell me something, honestly. Would you really like a child of your own?…I mean here, in this place.’

  ‘Yes, I would. Better here than any
where, I think. He’d have so much love spent on him…Did I ever tell you how it was in the old days?’

  ‘Tell me now.’

  ‘Well, you know, in spite of all the violence and the cruelty and the tyranny, there was always a sense of grace and beauty and generosity…Strangers came; you invited them to food and drink. At the meal, no one must talk of sour or sad things. Troubles, like food, must be shared…They called it “putting together again”. If a woman couldn’t have a child, she was given one by another family…As for sex, it was the most natural thing in the world. It was everywhere, even in shells and stones. A pregnant woman looked for a female god-stone on which to give birth. If a man-child was born, his piko – the navel-cord and the after-birth – were buried in a cave, so that he would remain bound to the ancestral earth. When he was circumcised they tied a flower to the wound, to say that he was a man and his maleness was beautiful…One of the things I’ve never understood is the madness that makes us demand to kill the unborn. At the same time, I understand the anarchist who wants to blow up our midden cities and let grass and trees grow through the ruins. Rousseau’s noble savage wasn’t just a romantic fiction; but we’ve put men on the moon and elevated torture to a fine art…Yes, I’d like our child to be born here! And I’d like to keep him and his mother here, always.’

  ‘It’s a beautiful dream, my love; but don’t build too much on it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because once we make contact with the outside world everything will change – even thee and me!’

  ‘But we’ll never be the same people again.’

  ‘I’ll still be a doctor. You’ll be the great scholar, with tenure and a Chair and a world-wide reputation.’

  ‘And my heart always flying southwards like the frigate bird.’

  ‘Mine too!…Why do I fight you so hard, when I love you so much?’

  ‘One man failed you. Now, you want to know how much the new one can take.’

  ‘And the answer?’