The Pacific Room Page 14

  With a fantastic fanned moustache and deep worried eyes, Carl was a botanist employed by one of the large German trading houses, Godeffroy & Son. This was in the days when the forest met the sea, and people moved around the island more freely by boat. Apart from the steam train that hauled copra to the harbour, the colonial powers had barely left a trace on the mountain’s dark canopy of green.

  Drawn to the forest, Carl was a chronicler of every leaf, which he’d mark in extraordinarily precise German script. Wilhelmina remembers him with a photograph she keeps in her bedroom, at her place beyond the yacht club, a vinetangled house with its own secret garden.

  In this photograph Carl – dwarfed by monster taro leaves on the mountain road – is comically clutching a spear. But what really endears this quaint figure to Wilhelmina is the grass skirt he has carefully wrapped around his trousers, colonising his sturdy German thighs. These thighs he had passed down to her, along with the photo – and, of course, her name, that of his mother back in Münster, who waited patiently for a son who would never return.

  She closes the door. The sun is already beating a path to the mountain glowering softly behind her, the sky teetering towards twilight. Away from the bustle of the main road, Wilhelmina takes the shadowy path along the foreshore. She moves slowly past the tomb of the unknown German soldier, towards the yacht club and its languid flotilla of boats. To her right, the harbour is a darkening wash at her feet.

  Passed along with Carl’s photograph was the story of how he had watched the great storm ebb here on the edge of the harbour. It was March 1889, and boat debris littered the narrow strip of sand at Carl’s feet, the language of their cargo – English, German, American – ridiculously mashed up like a child’s nursery rhyme. In the end, the hurricane had spared no nation.

  She walks on past the graveyard of boats, the white hull of the Nike 2 glowing blue at dusk. Just do it … She turns up the volume on her headphones. Bursting through the twilight, gently ripping it, comes the sound of Dionne’s voice, emptying it out, finding its own horizon line.

  Before his death Carl had drawn up plans for a secret garden. It was to be something modest during the day, almost plain, bordered by ylang-ylang trees and furnished with shrubs with names more beautiful than their unremarkable foliage: the moso‘oi and alii o po, or lord of the night. But in darkness these plants would flower with the most intoxicating of blooms. Their beauty was best appreciated with the eyes closed, beheld by the mind, on a still night with the faintest of breezes. It was to be Carl’s fragrant garden.

  But as Wilhelmina nears the yacht club all she can smell are the fish fingers grilling on the deck out the back, and then, a few steps more, just the sharp brine of the sea.

  Up past the club, and there’s no mistaking her house. Alone on the point, it rears up like some primordial beast, a modest shack made palatial by the vegetation that grows up and around it, surfing its walls and roof. So dense is the tangle that it’s impossible to make out any windows or doors, not even an entry – just a TV antenna that points up into the twilight sky, waving shyly with fala fala vine.

  With each step she visualises not only what is past, but also the semblance of a future, thinking of Carl, but also asking, always asking: What would Teuila do? As if each step will bring her closer to what she desires.

  After dinner and perhaps a movie or two, if the wind isn’t blowing too strongly from the sea, the vines will loosen and the house will open up to the sweet stirrings of Carl’s secret garden. It’s the scent Wilhelmina imagines coming to Teuila as Henry tumbles in through her open window, the air swelling with moso’oi and alii o po, three-dimensional in the darkness. She imagines desire smelling like this.

  And it’s to this fragrant forest that Wilhelmina longs to return.

  Chapter 30

  THE BODY CATCHER

  Just as the rain summons him, so it takes him away. It tricks Teuila into sleep and into thinking that life hasn’t stopped, that she won’t wake up alone under the glare of a naked light bulb, a Miss Tutti Frutti sash pinned limply above her door.

  He came to her in a dream that shifted seamlessly through time. School days hunting geckos along Leififi’s grassy fence. Sweeping across the harbour to the grey HMNZS Resolution. The ship was anchored and empty – a maze of fluoro-lit corridors down which she ran, wrapped in a length of boa, shedding pink feathers in her wake. At the centre of the maze was Henry, standing on the mess hall stage in his ill-fitting wedding suit. Singing.

  Every dream ends this way, with Henry just beyond her reach, struggling for the high notes of ‘Greatest Love of All’.

  Teuila wakes in the suspended stillness following rain. At first she wonders if he had come to her like a moetotolo, a sleep crawler who had crept into her bed, for she can still feel his body’s warmth on the sheets. Above her the floral curtains flood with reflected light. But the calmness of the scene teases her, bringing her to a sudden panic.

  She has overslept. Peering out through a crack in the curtains she sees the sun is retreating from the garden already, climbing to the sky-blue banner she had strung up the year before: In the end / My Immaculate Heart / Will Triumph.

  She must hurry.

  Quickly she calls for a taxi. It is Tara, sniffing, who answers.

  ‘Please tell him to come straight away. I don’t care if the soccer game is on. Tell him I will reward him handsomely next week.’

  No wonder the driver – whose beeping horn prompts her to stub out another half-smoked Consulate – is happy to take her the short distance up the hill.

  She lights another cigarette as they begin their climb, the driver’s earring glistening in the evening light.

  Turned down low, Dolly Parton is singing ‘I Believe in Santa Claus’, the lyrics bursting through the dusk like birdsong.

  Dreamily she flicks ash out the window, releasing a trail of little orange sparks.

  ‘Meeting anyone special?’ the driver asks.

  Behind her right ear is a red hibiscus which bobs like a drunken promise in the back of the cab. On the seat next to her is a duty-free bag, its transparent plastic revealing the silver canister of Chivas Regal nestled within.

  ‘Just Klaus,’ she says, staying true to her name, dissembling in the trailing light.

  When they eventually come to a stop along the Road of Loving Hearts, Teuila leans in so close to the driver she can smell the shampoo still drying in his hair.

  With a sigh she whispers into the dark space above his diamond: ‘I’ll give you your Christmas present next week – long and slow.’

  The mountain is darkening. Through the canopy of ifilele overhead she sees the sunshine slowly withdrawing, climbing up the scaly trunks of the trees, draining the forest of colour and light, turning it sepia at her feet.

  She knows she must escape the darkness lest she drown in it. She also knows she must take the shorter of the two tracks, the one straight up to the right, which after nearly a day of rain appears running with mud.

  She tests the track with her heel, feels the sucking of traction, and begins to pull her body up.

  Ahead the shadows of the forest seem murky at first – as unfathomable as the strange shapes she woke to in her bedroom as a child, waiting for cognition to set them right. Then gradually the fala fala vines and ‘ie‘ie sharpen into view. From the corner of her eye she sees a rhinoceros beetle rear up on its miniature legs, ready to pounce.

  She breathes the forest in. She could climb this mountain just by smell, this scent of leaves and earth as deep as the sea.

  Today it’s as if a giant hand is lifting her up – the pull is that strong. Sometimes she will slip back and a branch will snag at her clothing, lashing her, but adrenaline inures her to the sting. Sometimes her balance is lost with the weight of the duty-free bag she is holding and she falls to her knees, blood mixing with mud, but she feels the lightness of rising, the lightness of air.

  Even when climbing the mountain she carries the sensation of seeing it fro
m afar. As a child she was told the story of Vaea’s special power, glimpsed every now and then from the east at dusk. On these occasions the mountain was said to emit a strange pink glow from the place of Tusitala’s tomb, a rosy beacon in the sky. This is the image she carries in her head as she rises up through the mountain.

  With each step she grows more attuned to the cargo she is carrying, the whisky container and its silver saint – her saviour.

  When the sketch had come crashing down at her mother’s house, at first she saw it as an omen, a decisive and logical break with her past. Now she sees it as an opening, the possibility to change. During his time at Vailima, Henry had helped with the framing of its memorabilia, some posters and one or two drawings. It will give her another reason for meeting him at the summit at dusk. To ask his advice and defer to his judgement, to watch him unravel the little drawing with his fingers and see what she sees harboured there in charcoal. Seeking not just the sketch of a stranger, monstrously moustached, but the soul of her ancestor. An imp to be bottled again under glass.

  She is beyond tired now but branches haul her with their ropy arms. High up, flying foxes veer from tree to tree, spreading the ‘ie‘ie, thickening the forest.

  I am as naked as a leaf, she thinks, a single lau in an ocean of trees.

  She has always been led by the forest, through a path never clear, found by touch, fumbling, rather than sight.

  ‘When I was six or seven,’ she told Klaus one night at the embassy, alone with Sarah Vaughan playing and a bottle of whisky, ‘I realised I was something more than the other boys and girls in my class. Something separate and floating in between. I realised I had something different in me, which is the fa‘afafine side.’

  Klaus had been glancing at a pile of visa applications but now he looked up, pursing his lips. For him, childhood was a site of practical biology rather than mystery.

  ‘So at primary school, did you wear a girl’s uniform or a boy’s?’

  She could picture it hanging in her mother’s wardrobe like the shed skin of her former self – the navy shorts and starched white shirt embalmed in clear plastic and smelling of camphor. Something never talked about but always felt.

  ‘Sometimes I used to wear girls’ clothing during a fiafia,’ she replied. ‘People in those days knew you were a fa‘afafine but you had to wait for the right time, the right age. Those days were all right for me – I was never forced to be somebody else.’

  ‘And your parents?’

  ‘They were fine. Because I have two older brothers, they never felt they were losing a son, only gaining a longed-for daughter. In our culture it comes as naturally as breathing – opening up to the fa‘afafine side, to the possibility of something more. But Teuila had to wait.’

  Klaus took a sip of his whisky, then asked: ‘When did you know it was the right time?’

  ‘When Henry came to my school – his family had moved across from Savai‘i when I was fourteen or fifteen. He didn’t know it at the time, because he was still too busy chasing geckos, but he allowed me to be something outside of myself – to become the shape of … me.’

  A pale patina of mould had begun to spread itself across the record’s grooves, making Sarah Vaughan’s voice seem furry and faraway.

  ‘Fascinating rhythm,’ Klaus began to sing in deep German baritone. ‘Fa‘afafine, just like a lady.’

  Teuila stared silently into her scotch. The ice had melted, turning it the colour of tea. Her memories were spent.

  A week later, at their next embassy date, he brought along Tusitala’s collected stories, The Body Snatcher and Other Tales, as if he needed the Scottish writer’s words to mediate the meaning of her story.

  Sarah Vaughan’s Night Song was once again playing as he began to read, cupping the book in his large liver-spotted hands.

  As she listened, Teuila’s attention soon moved to the inky drawing on the cover. To her it resembled Tusitala’s tomb, this old picture of a coffin hovering on planks above an open grave. The earth around the grave was freshly dug and crisscrossed with two abandoned shovels.

  Graves to her were like friends, patient keepers of time and memory. She lived with her father’s every day. She couldn’t think of anything more abhorrent than its violation.

  As Klaus continued reading, the words seemed to lie there like the shovels in the picture:

  With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

  Klaus finished reading just as Sarah Vaughan’s voice began fading into silence, and Teuila looked up a little frightened, not knowing what to say. Staring at the book’s cover she wanted to pat down the earth, to let what had been snatched rest in peace.

  Again he prodded her, motioning to the record player, the needle bobbing over the dark shiny disc. ‘Don’t you see? It’s just like that record has two sides, A and B.’

  She then snatched the thing from his hands, seeking out the name of the artist on the back of the book. Her finger traced the fine print along the edge of the picture: ‘Coffin on a Grave (detail) by Caspar David Friedrich, ca. 1836’.

  She thought of her snatched soul then as Caspar – the boy in the starched white shirt and navy shorts. Caspar the friendly ghost.

  Still, she didn’t know how to answer Klaus in words, and they both sat there in silence as the record played itself out.

  It took a few days to find the right ones. And then a few more days to have the words hand-stitched across the metres of waterproof fabric bought from Chan Mow & Co. But Teuila eventually answered Klaus with the sign she erected high above her front garden.

  It was a sky-blue banner strung up between two poles, across which floated cursive script:

  In the end

  My Immaculate Heart

  Will Triumph

  Ahead of her the figure bursts rudely through the foliage, shattering the stillness, sliding and falling, impatient for sea level. He is rough-hewn and ruddy-faced, this stranger dressed in red jogging shorts, this stranger who looks Henry’s age, sliding and falling towards her.

  The track is narrow, just a crack between the leaves, as if the forest has granted them just this tiny threshold for their bodies to pass through.

  Seeing her he stops, loosening the neck of his Michigan Wolverines T-shirt, then pulling up the hem as a fan – revealing the soft white pillow of his belly. She half expects his heart to leap out, so noisy is his breathing, enough for both of them in this small cleft of forest. Quickly the air fills with his smell, like an orange gone mouldy.

  She doesn’t know how to negotiate this sudden brush with maleness, how it can be acknowledged and brought to a satisfactory close.

  She reaches out, tentative, but his eyes drop quickly to her duty-free bag and then to his sneakers, grown huge and clownish by their clods of mud.

  ‘Here,’ she says, giving him her spare hand, more assertive this time, the charm bracelet tinkling in the stillness.

  Only after a moment does he awkwardly accept, snatching at her wrist as if it were merely a branch or a length of vine.

  He clenches tighter as he manouevres around her, slipping slightly in the mud, growing hot in the face, the same red as his shorts.

  She matches his strength, easing him down, setting him into motion again.

  All he can summon is a short grunt as he nudges through to occupy the space below, spilling down into the forest, this American heaven breaker.

  ‘It’s pretty muddy, lady.’

  Chapter 31

  THE ROAD OF LOVING HEARTS

  Lewis’s mind blanches white, a blanket of snow. Alone in the back of the cab, he feels like the old man in the library, quietly uncluttering the world. In the failing light outside, the harbour eventually slips from view.

  On leaving the library, moments before, Lewis was struck by another fleeting glimpse of his brother.
This time the figure formed a bold arabesque, attention-seeking as usual. His brother’s face was flushed with excitement and held only briefly by the glass, trapped then released by the swing of the doors. ‘Look,’ he seemed to say. ‘There is our mountain!’ Framed within the mirrored doors as they settled back into place was Mount Vaea, beckoning with a soft pink glow.

  Turning off the main road, the car begins to shudder as they move tentatively down a bumpy trail of trees. Lewis’s head knocks on the roof of the cab, momentarily slowing his thoughts. The Road of Loving Hearts – he can just make out the sign.

  ‘I’ll get out here,’ he tells the driver, proffering a handful of tala notes.

  Nestling in the shrubbery is a small plaque, and as Lewis stoops to read, he becomes aware of another taxi, also empty, reversing back out to the main road.

  The writing on the plaque is faint and cursive, painted long ago.

  We bear in mind the surprising kindness of Tusitala and his loving care during our tribulation while in prison. We have therefore provided a type of gift that will endure without decay forever – the road we have constructed.

  Listed below are half a dozen chiefly names. Lewis recognises only one: Mata‘afa, the Scottish writer’s friend, who had proclaimed his rebel kingdom in the jungle. The Germans deported him to the Marquesas not long after the painting of the portrait.

  Despite the rain, the road is hard as arrow tips. Cushioned by his Birkenstocks, Lewis takes off in the direction of the departing sun.

  ‘It’s pretty muddy, man.’

  The young man, swimming in sweat, has descended from the right, just as Lewis comes to an abrupt fork in the path. The young man’s clothes are caked in dirt and leaves; his plump face mottled crimson.

  The path he came down ascends steeply through slushy steps and soft spilling banks. Moments before Lewis had briefly thought about turning back, beginning to slip in his sandals, but he considers himself fitter than the slightly overweight American kid suddenly presented before him.