Both Sides of the Moon Read online

  Then Mereana said, You wanted her to jump up and run after you and say sorry, didn’t you?

  Sorry? Sorry for what?

  For being what she is. You want to forgive her. She’s your mother.

  No. No, it’s not a matter of forgiving — she is what she is. You told me so. Just help me understand, that’s all. (But I wish she had noticed me, I was looking right at her, the bitch.)

  Then Mereana’s face changed, it darkened, though the day was bright enough. An old woman’s face in anger looks more ugly than a younger face in anger does. She spat the word out. Outcasts! Most of them stayed outcasts. Which was quite an explanation of my mother. Then I got it: You mean …?

  I mean Tangiwai Kotuku, how they failed her, they let her, themselves, down. History therefore. They let themselves fade off into damned history, forgotten, nameless. Nothings.

  Oh, she was angry, muttering in Maori all the way home; past the symbolising bubbling mud pools, the hissing holes, our road pathway flanked by those carved figures of tekoteko sentinels with out-poking tongues. The carved front of the meeting house where it occurred to me she would soon lay in open state as male elders made speech of past and proud ancestry (and no mention would be made of outcasts or slaves, or thought of what becomes of the thinking, thought-stricken man), and their mass singing would define all our grief for a venerated departed and probably for themselves too, what they had become or were becoming. But never occurring to them of not becoming much at all. That much did occur to me.

  We passed tourists from other lands, like our soldiers had swarmed over foreign soil taking life and seized-back control from German empire-builders, and now we are all one again and yet each stays separate in his and her own world. The tattooed old woman in hers, me in mine (my shameful secret), they in theirs, my mother and company back there in another; there is irony, paradox at every step, with German tourists become Waiwera villagers for a day, and our war men singing, unbeknown to them, their borrowed German war songs learned as prisoners in war camps to be sung in their thermal baths or wherever the urge takes them.

  There is irony, or is it harsh poetry, in a slut and her slut son. And we have a proud old woman with tradition and history stained into her lips and chin and a youngster with wretchedness of sexual aberration stained into his mind. And geysers and mudholes and fissures constantly on the boil. And Chumpy who lives back there, I caught a glimpse of him staring at me from a window fluttering with yellowed gauze curtain partly eaten by the sulphur. And his and wife’s neglect.

  Trudge up her dirt footpath, up on to creaky verandah, a quick glance at her steaming acres and mine too, then out of the bright light into dark, cool passageway, mouldy, decaying, thermal rot spares nothing, except, it would seem, human life.

  Photographs of her several span eras, twenty years of last century; a hand-coloured photograph of the famous Pink and White Terraces buried when she was a little girl under a volcano explosion of 1886, not too far from here, from the same fault-line causing catastrophic destruction as what has so blessed Waiwera.

  Her basic kitchen, a woodfire stove, four chairs at a small round wooden table, the back door is open, there is steam rising from the bank, I know she has her own steambox around the back, where else in the world could this be, to step out your back door and get free cooking heat? Blackened pots and pans, a big pot on the stove simmering, pungent beef brisket bones with puha, the edible weed, a fat identity of blackened kettle pockmarked with dents. Makes herself a cup of tea, with milk from the old rattling fridge, which she still regards as the ultimate in luxury, her only one, one-two-three-four sugars, yet her own finest teeth, a heavy stir, sit down rest her legs a bit, put the cup to her inked-dark lips, make grateful ah sounds, mutter something in Maori, mouths in English again, this time with emphasis: a pack of outcasts.

  She stands up, doesn’t want my help, come on, e kare. We go and sit down in the front room, which she pronounces rim, like broom is brim, and we sit opposite each other on sofas both with springs showing, but each on the better side, I wonder if she is making these moments defining, or trying to slow down my perceptions so she might tell me something of importance.

  She sits under a portrait photograph of Queen Elizabeth II — our British Commonwealth monarch, a figurehead for, strangely, native loyalty — and photographs and memorabilia of a life and her family lives. Who would think she has met the Queen, hosted her for a short visit to these acres as one of the senior guides and most senior women, even though Her Majesty did not come to this most humble house.

  There are little framed homilies, A Clean House Is God’s House, a framed Lord’s Prayer, a funny homily: The Harder I Work, The More Tired I Get. A cloth Maori Battalion emblem, pictures of soldiers going off to war, they all look the same do men in tin helmets with big boyish unknowing smiles leaving here. Photographs of Waiwera’s famous tour guides, shots of Mereana when she was a guide, showing tourists and special visitors over her beloved place, I don’t know who most of the faces are she is pictured standing beside, she herself looks so different in her younger years, not beautiful not even attractive, but proud and her tattoo stands her out; she has always looked uncomplaining. Yet worried.

  I know who one of the people is: Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of the American President, who came to this country during the war to visit her country’s soldiers based here in training for the Pacific campaign against the Japanese. My mother was seen often in public jitterbugging with these smooth-talking, sweet-moving men with their supreme self-confidence. A seventeen-year-old precocity, she was famous on their party circuit. Infamous amongst her own kind. The Yanks were regular weekend visitors to this town, catching the train from their quite far-away training camps because Two Lakes had Waiwera and Two Lakes had women, Maori women the favourite, Maori woman made American fighter-boy laugh, good dancer too, she had an easiness about her, animal grace of movement like all darker-skin people. They must be good in bed.

  He did run, your ancestor. (Oh …) Ae, he ran. He must have run, for it was a trap they’d set that only had to be carried out. They were under his orders. He was supposed to lead the attack. But he didn’t.

  Why? (Oh why?) Why, because he became with too much thought, too much up here for the times, the thinking — the way — of that era. The way … the way of the culture, she cried — Aee, child, you cannot be in a war culture, where war is held highest above all else, and be of thought too deep.

  But then the white man came along with his different laws, that stopped a Maori killing another who was his enemy, that told a Maori all he had been previously doing was unlawful and they would throw him into jail, or hang him for what had made him man of highest standing. Understand that of your Maori half before you let those eyes be judge and jury.

  Her tangi brings people from all over. They found her dead in her bed; they said her face looked troubled. But I don’t think they guessed why.

  Of course her farewell is of finest dignity, she is the last of her era, she is several generations gone, her kind won’t ever be back. Her tattoo-adorned presence will be seen no more. She is a beautiful huia bird. A species extinct. This is why the men’s speeches find ancestral tale of highest mana and lineage connection to her. She would have told them to gather more numbers of themselves, proud and dignified like this, and work towards higher goals, I know she would. It was in her last urgent words to me. (But would they have listened, would they have heard?)

  She has a quilted white satin surround and a cloak of kiwi feathers with pattern touches of extinct huia. Her people weep and speech and sing to that extinction. Why, the Queen of England is here at her funeral, in the framed photograph there, a royal in commoner royal company with a backdrop of steam and a geyser like a roaring tribute behind them. And the telegram condolence from the monarch herself sits proudly atop the end of the casket. So is the good Eleanor Roosevelt in framed image here to pay respects: good woman to good woman, they would see it no different.

  She has seve
ral photographs of her late husband, with her and alone. And the children they bore of that marriage. And they her people are at their finest, their proudest when they are saying farewell to such as her.

  She is being lowered into the ground, down into her boiling beloved below. She had told me she cried for the warriors they once were who could not make adjustment. She spoke of the warrior man not knowing enough love, not for what man should value most.

  And yet it was World War II warriors who sang her favourite song over her thermal ground grave. Come Unto Me, they sang. Meaning God, meaning this time the eternally steaming ground.

  23

  He made himself known well before the place they were camped, approaching from a high rise at slow, unthreatening pace. He wasn’t much closer before he became aware of a presence near to him, and soon that he was shadowed by many men. Many silent and invisible men. He expected them to start taunting him, as outcasts do. But they stayed silent and unseen.

  The descent seemed to take for ever; and yet in another way it was over too soon. More than a year had the cowardice eaten more of him. He was knowing a little fear, though not like the fear he had felt that fateful day.

  They rose off their haunches and were standing with surprising unguardedness as he stopped at an imaginary boundary line of no marking but his assuming. There were bones at his feet and flies feeding on them, and then they fed on his sweat. He swatted at them not. Nor spoke; let them run their array of abnormal eyes over him, let the leader make himself known. Let them know he came alone and not with foe’s intentions. Let them consider his fine tattoo markings, and so know that he could only be here now as one of them. A prospective one.

  The leader was not the one Kapi had picked in the group of a good fifty men: a tall man younger than himself, powerful of build, rather handsome if it weren’t for absence of facial tattoos, without which no man can be considered truly handsome. No man. Instead it was one of perhaps forty years, with a wild crop of grey-flecked hair, and for whom the people were moving aside for his probable haka to begin. A man of as much considering gaze as ever had been upon Te Aranui Kapi. A gaze, though, with cocked curiosity, perhaps amusement. But as to his near-naked body, Kapi could not help it, he regarded the man’s unmuscular body as no possible challenge should this be man against man. Though Kapi dared not smile nor give facial expression to show any threatening nor questioning thought might be going on within. Not a man alone with no people, none else to turn to.

  But no haka broke forth. The man said, We know who you are. You have kept yourself well concealed, even our best eyes only saw you in a far distance. Though we could have observed you had we been so interested. We had only wondering thought of you.

  Kapi spoke — and for the first time in that season cycle and more heard his own voice in speaking to others, and nor had he hardly even muttered to himself, unless it was in his troubled sleep — Why did you wonder of me when I am not of your — He stopped, not sure if to call them tribe or group or what identifying name they went by.

  Leader answered that: We are we. Belonging to no tribe, nor owing to any edict or law or tapu or code of conduct, except that which we have imposed upon ourselves — then he chuckled — which is not so restrictive.

  We wondered of you because it is so unusual. Though of course we are the unusual ourselves — how we are the unusual! Are we not, people? And they all smiled and a few howled with strange laughter, like that of the hurt. Though for that, Kapi thought they did not act like outcasts living life in permanent misery for many were without strain and many had grinned openly.

  Nor are we subject to a chief’s reign, so do not think it is I to whom these people are subjected. Nor do we have a council of elders. And a woman she may speak up no differently to a man.

  Why do you frown like that? Does frown form on me? Kapi pretended not to know. Ae, frown exposes you. Why do you?

  I tell truth here, spokesman of these people, that what I have known of people is with rules and chiefly leadership. Tell me this, have you a tohunga to give you at least spiritual guidance?

  Tohunga? It was Wild Hair’s turn to frown.

  And what would a priest have to offer us with his craftily designed gods and cunningly chosen omens? What would a tohunga’s ways of trickery and word-disguised lies and manipulations have to give us? Who is he that he nominates one object as tapu and death to the person who breaks it, when his latrine smell is the same as any of us? Is it because you have had tohunga training? Did one tell you delusion that you believe? No mere man has contact with the gods. Indeed, we are of the thinking that gods’ only contact with man is in man’s mind. Why would we have a tohunga who practises deceit and visits death upon those who do not cave in to his orders, bow to his manipulations?

  And Kapi was hardly blind to the change of mood from these people, especially those with obvious facial postures of misaligned and deformed features and the nakedly misfitting that said why they were here as outcasts: for they liked not the mention of tohunga. With their faces, he thought they could not be of anyone else but the bedraggled outcast tribe. Some were clearly quite mad. And to be equal with other men? Puh! Kapi struggled in his old mind with this, that persons of mental defect should be killed or at least cast out.

  No, Kapi finally answered, I am of no priestly training, my only knowing is warrior.

  Was warrior.

  Kapi sighed. Ae, when I was warrior. But the tohunga is a central part of the life I knew, so now I ask whose role it is to interpret the signs and omens of the gods, of our ancestors looking over us?

  Over us? Or down on us — laughing at us?

  And so did every one of them break out in most derisive howling laughter. Kapi, despite his much changed existence, was nonetheless outraged. He said: Surely there are some who are entitled to think of their tupuna looking after them? It is what has held peoples together, kept them strong, a pride in the names they carry, pride in continuing? Surely?

  Surely for them. But what of those without ancestors to imitate? Wild Hair gestured around him, as if such was necessary. These were no descendants of proudly deeded warrior ancestors, not offspring of respected carvers of history and name and legend into wood. Not the children of most eloquent orators — or if they were then none who should get mention as existing. These were accidents of birth and adverse happenings of life. And in the people’s eyes, of the tribes they had belonged to, they did not measure up to the standard. Of every person having a contribution to make. Kapi thought that some were so gross of appearance they would not be fit even to be cooked and eaten. Their flesh would taste foul, the mental condition would run sour through every bitten mouthful.

  Ancestor worship is part of us, answered Kapi. Like the leaf is part of the tree. No, like sap juice that feeds it.

  Worship of ancestors is part of what you were. But now surely you are another? Is that why you come here in your submission to us — for submission is what you came to make, is it not? To tell us of your ways?

  It is submission I would wish to present. But not submissive.

  Oh? You dare to present yourself with warrior vanity intact? In doing so, you present foolishness, and a failed man who has not learned in this last season and more of your exile. Tell us, what does warriorhood have to offer us?

  I have training and experience that would stand you here in good stead in times of danger, of threat.

  Threat? Threat is what is in a people’s head. We are not a people, we are single existences banded together to share food, share thought, share bodily needs. Danger is what we have trained ourselves to keep at a safe distance — it is why we have made practice of taunting it. We have done so to the war parties you yourself have led home in this triumph you all have spent wasted lifetimes pursuing. Yet what single, gloriously won battle of your battle triumphs did save you from being here like this, with your manhood offered to us like groups we have negotiated food exchange with, who think we have the lower, shorter end of the rope? It takes but an un
expected, strong pull of a rope to turn negotiation around. Better to lay down your offerings and let the sun’s light tell you what is their exchange point. What now do you offer, Te Aranui Kapi?

  They knew his name. What else did they know? I have known no other, nothing to lay down in the sun to show you exchange worth.

  Nothing? So what brought you here? What took you away from all that you lived for, all that you knew, if not now an offering to lay down in this light of our eyes under the giving sun?

  I am confused. I have already told you, I am what you see standing before you but reduced of what I was. Yet not so reduced I am lessened much of my fighting ability. If I were a fisherman offering fish, it is all I have to offer. And would you not understand that?

  Understand, yes. But what if we have enough fish?

  Fish can be dried for another day. Warriorhood it keeps like embers ready to be turned to flame. I tell you, I come only with fish of warrior self to offer. If you have more than enough in storage also, then I shall make my leave.

  And you will be free to go. None here will kill you, even though collectively we can. Killing is not amongst our ways. Nor … it has been clear to us for this last season of hearing your reviled name from the runners between your tribes of acceptable people, nor is killing now your way. And yet that is what you offered us.

  Kapi’s shame returned. That day, that unforgettable moment, that long instant in time, it came back. And Wild Hair pointed: See, it gives you away, Kapi, in turning your skin to bumps.

  And what name may I call you?

  I had a name. But that resides where I was banished from. We have made another continuance from within. He tapped his head. As to name, I had a name but took another. He pointed: I am Wild Hair. You were naming me correct in your mind, were you not?