Both Sides of the Moon Read online

  I have strained eyes at the jagged pencil-line of tree-covered hill, trying to catch the erupting water cutting the hill breasts in two. I have come an hour before dawn and stared till my eyes water to pick out the faintest sign of charged eruption breaking the black, becoming the cleavage between those hilly breasts. I have ached my eyes to catch the evidence of blocked-out section of stars; turned myself into a rigid statue of stare to catch a missing sliver of star-sprinkled sky so to claim back lost sight of a geyser blooming. I don’t know why, unless to capture the elusive. To confirm, or answer, a question.

  Geyser roar and choked stranglings (He’s coming! The man is coming!) from ground fissures, of heated pressure squeezing through cracks, and tourists make much the same fuss of an exit from a ground eye-hole as a man in private makes of sperm exit from his cock-hole. They gasp. So did he. Oh, this is some place to find meanings and metaphors, parallels and paradoxes. The more when you have to relate. And a mind that tends that way.

  Mud-laden thermal breath struggles and fights up through thick, bubbling fluid clay and sits, suspended for a last held moment, a bubble, a bubblegum blow, a set of swollen cheeks and pursed lips, a statement about to be made to the upper-world as it pops into the infinity of sky, slish, slish. All over the grey fluid surfaces it does this. (All over the town, we her children had to find out, she and men were doing that, slishing in the groaning dark.)

  It is angry struggle here: roars, hisses, squeaks, screams, moans and gargles. See the metaphor, grab a comparison, of rock and water and a molten inner core far below the cause of it, it could be society, it could human life. Hear the same seething surface echo with actual song, and laughter, and tales being told, and lovings being made, and funerals carried out. Hear the villagers in their own eruptive outbursts of being what we all are. So, of lovings all over again. (And questions never answered.)

  It used to be the duty of the first arrival at the changing shed to light the single kerosine lamp. But Uncle Henry persuaded the town council to run an electric cable along the river bank and up to the shed.

  The better to choose from a row of five small warm water vessels, each large enough to take seven, eight, ten at a happy squeeze, sited here on this blessed, free-heated soil, and a ceiling of stars when they are not over with cloud. Slide into warmth fed from a large pool down concrete channels, dark feeding shadows arrow-straight along the ground and, when first light comes, like mercury flowing, thick and graceful and silvery. And then the sun moves to higher angle and it is like rivulets of gold running into your submerged lap. This is some place even without imagination.

  The shed, like the houses, is being rotted by its surroundings; the timbers are giving, the wooden hardness is surrendering a little more each day to the unceasing attack from soft of water and sting of sulphur. My own thoughts attack the life here, telling how it has a certain rotting to it, pays not enough mind to the wider world, which yet presents itself for the taking from every foreign tourist. Like ships being waved away when they could be laden with treasures. I look at them, my related villagers, and think of their history: it is too singular to be a means of adaption to the modern. I feel like a heretic, that my thinking betrays these who make up half my existence. I feel the person not of his times. But a yearning to be of them.

  I am Maori in this place by dint of my Uncle Henry being my mother’s respected brother. My own brothers and home are a half hour walk away. I have always been drawn to this place. I wish Warren had been. But, with his responsibilities … The arrangement has become that I move between my two worlds, my two homes, as if no one really misses me so much that any makes stronger claim to me. But for which I am glad. I have to be, or what point in being not one nor the other?

  Wai means water. Wera means hot. Waiwera is situated on the outskirts of Two Lakes sited about the middle of the North Island, of the two islands that make up New Zealand, south of the Equator in the Pacific (this is for the tourists, you understand, who haven’t read the brochures). I don’t know about the rest of the country, let alone the world, only that it feels part of a universal state. The world is right where you happen to be, is it not, it cannot be any other?

  Listen, I need ears to tell that I understand the world is but the private perception of each individual child and man and woman, but that it could be broadened. My father knows, so we his children know, that humans, all of life, are star dust. But these people don’t. That they emerged out of the celestial ferment. They are not conscious that we were billions of years in the womb of space before we became this. Look, we’re right here and they don’t know, they don’t think of it like that, that we are where the Earth’s thin crust has cracks that let the fiery inner core of our beginnings manifest. They’re a simple people who only care that they are alive and well enough to continue as what they were yesterday. They would laugh at my struggling mind-torment with everything and them. Laugh, and then scorn me.

  I am here when the former war men come to bathe, feet on the reminder war-march on the silica home surface; they were warriors once, in their hundred-years-ago-and-beyond ancestral past, then their 1940s World War II duration. Now they’re Waiwera contented, war-sated feet marching to this their peace-stationing place to relive the scenes of war sweet war, memory stained in blood, minds etched in battle happiness. But they talk about rugby a lot. The whole country does. But the Maori more; it’s where Maori man best flourishes, on the rugby field — and when chance comes along, on war fields. They say it themselves: A Maori is warrior before anything. A thousand years’ history has been lived in the making of them (us?). Physicality is like moving in a dream to them.

  Old young men come to soak old war wounds, soak in war memories. They hardly ever talk about killed brothers and cousins and village mates; only brief emotional mentions, let grief stay deep within man, be the engraved name on the bronze plaque on the Archway of Remembrance. Ae, better to speak of slain enemies, good to speak of killed Germans, but even some of them admired. Once they came round to seeing Maori fighter men’s fighting superiority.

  They remember the good times of their long, five- and six-year duration, on Greek soil, Tunisian, Libyan, Egyptian, even in German prison camps. But it ended and they came home and found that warrior glory does not provide, except with what he can’t feed a family on. Not even pride. For the second time in their history, they learned the lesson that warrior man is worthless in a modern world. Confused at being inside so flush with warrior pride; frustrated that such uplifted sense of self could not be valid, carries no weight. Just as they were the first time, when the white man arrived in his growing numbers that could no longer be argued with.

  But warrior men had music. They gave it and they took it. Of songs in foreign language so easily learnt by easy-flowing Maori tongues. Italian songs the best, so suited to passionate, volatile, musical, young Maori men fighting in that country. They laugh that if Maori men were born Italian they would run the Mafia. Maori men better suited to simple life, simple solutions, love and violence dispensed and despatched with simple passion and intuitive understanding of justice. And if no justice then bad luck, boy. Don’t mess with a Maori. It’s what they say. And laugh about in their mateship togetherness. Here in their thermal baths breaking out in Italian love songs.

  Imagine: Maori men in steaming mineral water under stars singing love odes to Italian women twelve thousand miles away, having war-murdered their male kith and kin.

  A voice cries out, Remember that time? And time stands still then; only the stirring of re-positioning bodies in the concrete tubs, big powerful arms out of the water rested on tub edge, settling back for time to be turned back. This listener in his next-door pool, the river gurgling below us, the stars glassed over by morning blue, my eyes glassed over by pretending not to be listening too hard; the landscape in choked cry. A voice stifling its own choking and changing the story he was about to tell. Too sad. Too sad. Life is for the living.

  They remember the little Italian village wher
e they killed the mayor’s pet pig. Feels just like yesterday that they solemnly carried the pig carcass under a blanket on a stretcher, and the heartfelt villagers took off their hats and lowered heads in respect to this assumed killed Maori soldier.

  We consigned that beast to our God of food with barely a squeal, eh boys? Like night action against Jerry. He departs this mortal coil without right of even a last cry. That’s what they get when they go to war with a Maori. (And I, the spy-child in witness to this, wondering what it made of them that otherwise should not have been. Maori village boys, wholly unsophisticated, marching war boots over Italian soil in town-to-town, village-to-village battle with the German army. Maori boys discovering their genetic sophisticated understanding of war. Maori boys becoming big hero boys in the arena of war.) But Maori boys, still boys at heart, clear of the village and free to fall over themselves with laughter.

  1941/2 Italian pork cooked in a Maori hangi earth oven of olive firewood heating Italian stones to be covered by Italian soil, cooking three hours tender in the ground. So far from Maori homeland, but smell senses take boys back home.

  Maori laughter echoing across ancient landscape. Maori warrior thinking lasts forever. Bad mistake. Thinking is a changing thing, always growing. But can’t tell a warrior man that, can’t tell him anything. Too strong in what he believes he is.

  Yes, and Maori (universal) man-eyes on untouchable Italian women, so beautiful they take breath away, make him promise death most final for Italian man who sides with German enemy and nestles with such delectable flesh. Maori soldier with English-made bayonet pushing into Italian flesh, same as enemy German flesh, eh Mapu?

  Yeah, all the same, Hemi, like women, eh? Yeah, about the same: soft flesh yielding to irresistible hard object. Cock into cunt, pote into tore. Italian soldier-flesh easily punctured by Sheffield-fired steel rammed by tough Maori hand fighting under New Zealand flag on behalf of Great Britain allied to many countries: war such a great complex agreement of violent, hardly ever noble, chaos.

  Hear it: Maori war cry echoing over vineyard and olive grove landscape. See it: sun-baked picture like paintings like best chosen depictions of themselves. Maori war cry bellows through narrow cobbled village streets of crumbling plaster walls, in tones of age and aesthetic missed by Maori fighterboys, here to fight, not to be sightseeing tourists.

  But some did notice the village fountains, the sitting places in pools of cool shadow, the superior architecture and that mysterious presence of a more complex culture. The scent of creative flowering caught up with the tempered and reforged rage; some of the Maori fighter boys did notice the angles of cut shadow and the contrast between light and its opposite against aged white-stone column and chiselled building edge. None did miss the handsome, skilful, confident kids appearing and reappearing in the up and down of streets like crazy corridors and haphazard maze of cellar doorways and narrow alleyways, this spectacularly, different long way from home.

  Watch the young local boys show off soccer skills in their streets. But this is war. And men, grown-up boys, died. So now watch the change, of all innocence going, at word reaching that these brown-skinned, powerful-legged invaders have wrought death and mayhem to their own because they chose to side with the pushed-back German would-be conquerors of the world. Watch them.

  Watch classical young innocence turn to age-old, glisten-eyed loathing as different brown of skins in khaki uniform, Polynesian feature, march below flowered balconies dripping with colour and washing, below classical architecture and clever wrought-iron railings. Wailing Italian widows and grieving mothers, grandmamas, aunts, sisters and hatred-filled fathers, and old men still young with hatred, and the village cripples and physically forsaken with the worst hatred in this land of terrible beauty, even the mad, the mentally defective, all watch with Gorgonian stare as their Maori murderers dance warrior victory ritual on their streets, slapping muscle-hard chests pounding with murderers’ proud hearts driven by genes of an ancient murderous culture. As if these people have never known murder nor heard their streets echo with the victory cry of other invaders.

  See the hatred dare not speak itself even in its own tongue, as brute brown warriors guzzle back wine like downing Italian blood.

  And now their still-fine surviving bodies lift out of warm home waters blessed by undersoil nature, blessed by copper and brown skin and the muscle of a thousand years’ warrior breeding, the ready eruption of warrior like their natural surroundings. Even in laughter and smile it simmers: the instinct to fight, the inherited memories of felled enemies, strewn murdered bodies like so much storm debris washed up on to a shore. Warriors cleaving open enemy chests, twisting the cleverly designed hook of bone club up under the ribbones to pull apart the heart’s caging, and thereupon tear the heart from its muscle-holding and hold it, with beat left, triumphant to the new dawn sky.

  Men in wet shine and dark sheen glisten, their laughter moves to the changing shed, in deeper shadow there, so now they giggle about a kind of loving — kind of, since it has my mother’s name on it, and my shame is unable to protect nor stop it, their half-whispered utterances, in the back-echo of men’s laughter.

  Do they think I don’t hear each whispered breath and shushing warning that it’s her son out there, the kid in the end pool who’s always here, Henry Te Amo’s nephew, the half-caste, yeah him. (Yes and her. It’s my mother you talk about — of your knowing her, or knowing what she is.)

  Spends half his time at his uncle’s, strange little fulla you don’t know what he’s thinking — no, he’s all right, it’s from his old man, the Pakeha she married — Married? You mean did the vows in church? She’d take on a whole football team. She’d — I have heard every description of her and still they hurt.

  Warrior men of now-lessened respect for being what all men are, talking in laughing voices at that. They’d never dare talk of any of Uncle Henry’s flesh and blood in his presence, not their former sergeant who rose to the rank of captain and came home the village general now after ten, fifteen years of peacetime. He’s a prince amongst men, he’d knock over any man uttering his slut sister’s name like this; only he can call her what she is, let every other man hold his tongue.

  Give a kid a wink in passing after they’ve just finished chuckling about his mother’s most private being (Oh, come on now, don’t kid yourself. You know her by now. Half the town does). A mother should be up there above your eye level, sitting on a cloud smiling down on you, a concept, an actual, above reproach. Not laying on her back with spread-eagled legs with yet another man panting over and in her, and she doing her share of gasping ridiculous lost-animal sounds back. How lost can a woman be when she’s fucking? (So where do sweet little innocent children come from, kid? Only blind Catholics believe a virgin can give birth. Only fools believe every mother is a saint.) But did I have to get the slut?

  The men depart. See you, boy. Watch you don’t turn into a shrivelled-up prune in there. Yeah, see you, men (you mongrels, laughing like that about my mother). But not their fault, they’re only commenting. Must be my fault, better my fault, take away some of her blame, her guilt. It’s only sex. And can’t all be faithful in marriage.

  4

  Sitting there until my hands are what they warned of, shrivelled and old, an elderly kid with heart too damn heavy for his own good.

  I’m about to get out when a real elderly figure shuffles out of the steam playing with golden light shafting down from high over the eastern hill. And to her left the geyser Te Huia, carrying the name of an extinct bird, is playing too. She is my friend, kuia Mereana, this apparition shuffling pink-slippered feet across her landscape. Even though we are from different thinkings, she understands me.

  Time is tattooed in permanent purpleblue stain on her chin and lips, markings of her displaced time: one generation after the one who were warriors thinking their tribal reign ruled forever … till the British put swift end to their presumptions in mid-clash; arrogantly imposed the laws and punishments of anot
her culture, another civilisation on a not-then-very-noble, war-entrenched disarray of tribal savages; gave them central government, to a tribal people who weren’t a race. It is Mereana’s choiceless burden to carry the dignity on behalf of the lost warrior race. But she is in private despair for her people.

  Who’s that? she asks. Oh, it’s you, Jimmy-boy, Henry’s neview, in the same breath. The same squint-eyed enquiry and self-answered question, nephew with a v, like everything is softened out on her inked lips when Maori is her first language.

  In the changing shed getting undressed, coughing her irritation at the change required to converse with me since I am the only one to talk to at this stage. I know she prefers to start her conversational day in her own tongue, speaking of her own more simple, untroubled outlook.

  She comes out of the shed, hardly bothering about a towel to cover her nakedness, slides into her blessed waters and starts to hum in half-tone Maori chanting style. Like she is casting a spell on me. Or giving out warning that we are different of thinking, even though we are friends.

  She gets me to run up and pull out the rag stopper for the channel feeding our bath from the lake. She comments on my skinny white legs and my bum whiter than a boiled sheet. On my frontal return, she looks away as though it is improper to gaze on my pubertal boy’s nakedness. Then says how glad she always is that we can share these waters like this, as God began us.

  She stares out to the pined hills, seeing them in her mind as her parents did with their eyes: a soaring native forest alive with a million edible birds and cultural meaning and signs and spirits and omens and memories, when the trees were centuries-old stalks and men stalked one another in ten centuries of practising unceasing, unquestioning war.