Getting Stoned with Savages (24 page)

The bastard, I thought. Now why would someone do that?

The months passed, and they were happy months. Here and there, we had our worries. Lukas’s doctor was a Hare Krishna, and during the exams, the baby would take an inordinate interest in the poster of Lord Krishna. This will require close watching, I thought.

“You should massage the skull,” the doctor told us, “to make it nice and round.”

This we declined to do. Indians, apparently, prized round skulls, just as the Malekulans once favored elongated heads. As far as we could tell, Lukas’s head was perfect as it was. And if he grew up to have a Winnebago head like his father, I was sure he’d get used to it.

By the time Lukas had passed his sixth month, we had come to conclude that Anna had the strength of Atlas. It is one thing to spend your day traipsing about with a seven-pound baby. It is altogether different when he is twenty pounds. Indeed, I myself grew weary after an hour. Sensing that he was sound asleep on my aching shoulder, I’d gently lay him in his crib, and the moment he touched the sheet, he’d let me know in that voluble way babies have that he didn’t think this was a good idea. In a Fijian household, of course, there would be an endless supply of well-rested arms to take turns carrying a slumbering child. But we didn’t quite live in a Fijian household. Thoughtlessly, we had failed to bring a village of cousins and aunties of our own to the South Pacific.

Lukas soon adjusted to the two worlds he inhabited. Eventually, we had our way of doing things while Anna had hers. We’d try to teach him Western ways, to become independent, while Anna coddled him island-style. “Babies shouldn’t cry,” she said, swooping him into her arms. Meanwhile, stopwatch in hand, Sylvia and I would stand just outside his door and spend long, wrenching minutes listening to him cry until, finally, he learned that not only could he nap in his crib; he could even sleep soundly through the night. Anna, however, insisted that he snooze on her shoulder. When we fed him pureed mango, he sat in a high chair. When Anna fed him, he sat in her lap. Anna sang Fijian lullabies. Concerned about what “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” might do to his psyche, I moved on to the ABC song.

We had come to believe that nothing was more revered in Fiji than a baby. I had begun to refer to him as our little
ratu,
or chief, and when, one evening, we were invited to attend a party at the neighbor’s house, I looked forward to introducing our ratu to the other ratus who gathered there each evening to drink kava. In Fiji, kava is pounded, rather than ground, as it is in Vanuatu, and in the afternoons, throughout Suva, the air carried the
clang-clang
of kava being prepared. That night, while the kava was being pounded, a fleet of high-end SUVs arrived at the neighbor’s house to deposit some of Fiji’s highest-ranking chiefs. Our neighbor was a commoner, but as the owner of the country’s largest shipping company, he was wealthy and clearly well connected.

With Lukas in my arms, I ambled next door.

“Come,” said our jovial neighbor. “The ladies are inside. And the boys are over there, watching the game.” He gestured to what appeared to be a shed. “I’ll introduce you to the boys, and you can have a few shells.”

Social occasions in Fiji, we found, often had a time-warp feel to them. The 1960s had never happened here; the men would gather around the kava bowl, and women were expected to cluster among themselves and talk about whatever it is that women talk about—casserole recipes, presumably.

“Do you want me to take the baby?” Sylvia asked.

“No, it’s all right. I’ll take him to meet the boys.”

Inside the shed, the chiefs were gathered around a television. A rugby game was on. New Zealand versus Australia.

“A shell?” offered a rotund man in a formal sulu.

“Thank you,” I said, taking the proffered kava. Lukas immediately reached for it. “Not until you’re at least two years old.”

“This is Ratu V,” said my neighbor. “And that is Ratu I, and Ratu S, and Ratu T, and, of course, Ratu L.”

A lot of ratus. I recognized a few of them. They were ministers in the caretaker government. I had, apparently, stumbled across the proverbial backroom. There was a lot of power in this room. If I were a Fijian commoner, I would have been trembling. One wrong word, an inopportune gesture, and I could shame my family’s name forever. But I wasn’t a Fijian commoner. I was just a regular commoner.

“Nice to meet you. And this is Lukas,” I said, raising the baby. He warbled and drooled his acknowledgments. “He’s my ratu.”

Silence. Cold, hard glares. The chiefs regarded me with undisguised hostility. Lukas drooled some more.

I had apparently made a faux pas. I hadn’t meant to cause offense. Come on, guys, I thought, it was just a little joke. Lighten up. But they didn’t lighten up. No doubt, if this had happened in the past, they’d be sharpening their cannibal forks. Instead, they turned their attention back to the game. The ratus had homes in Australia and New Zealand, and they followed the game with interest. The kava was generously dished out. But not to me.

Well, I thought as I slipped back outside with Lukas. It was true what I said. “You are my chief,” I said to him.

He grunted magnanimously.

When I told Anna about the encounter, she laughed mirthfully.

“Ratu Lukas,” she chuckled, taking the baby. “I do not think you will be drinking kava with the ratus again.”

O
NE MORNING, I FOUND MYSELF IN THE OFFICES OF
Consort Shipping. Our house had become a temporary refuge for Sylvia’s colleagues from around the Pacific. FSPI was holding its annual meeting in Suva, and for a week or so we found ourselves surrounded by people we had known since we first arrived in the South Pacific years ago. Work and family life blended easily on the islands, and it was heartening to watch the country director of FSP Kiribati give us news about our old dogs on Tarawa—still alive!—while Lukas dozed contentedly in her arms. Since our house was spilling over with people, and the little ratu’s feet rarely touched the ground as he was passed around like a giggly talisman, I thought I’d spend a few days exploring some other corner of Fiji, and so I bought a ferry ticket to Savusavu on the island of Vanua Levu.

It occurred to me, as I made my arrangements for the fourteen-hour ferry voyage, that my aversion to flying on small aircraft had reached pathological proportions. Nevertheless, if there was a way to get to where I wanted to go without having to leave the Earth’s surface, then I would choose that rather than fly. Even a raft would do.

“And how old is the boat?” I asked the ticket agent. I had seen some of the ferries that plied the waters of Fiji, shepherding people to the outer islands.

“Only nine years old,” she said brightly.

As I soon discovered, she meant that it had been in Fiji for only nine years.
The Spirit of Fiji
was at least forty years old. “Be there at 10
A.M.
sharp,” the ticket agent had told me. The morning of our departure, I boarded the ship in industrial Walu Bay, and as I walked across the steel deck I noticed that the ship was deeply corroded. The paint peeled. Mechanics emerged from below deck carrying rusty machine parts, which they studied with considerable interest. Belching trucks rumbled aboard.

I handed my ticket to someone I presumed was a ship employee; no one was wearing a uniform. “First class,” he said. He took a stamp, dipped it in ink, and stamped my forearm. FIRST CLASS, it said. This pleased me enormously. It was my first time traveling anywhere first class, and the stamp on my arm made it seem extra special. First class entitled me to a berth in a four-bunk cabin, an indulgence that cost $10 more than a standard fare. The lower classes, those not graced with stamps on their arms, were consigned to the deck. I found my cabin, deposited my backpack, and read the notice informing me that breakfast would be served between eight and nine, lunch from noon to one, tea from four to five, and dinner between seven and eight.
Very civilized,
I thought. As far as I could tell, I was the only passenger with a first-class stamp.

I spent a few minutes getting lost deep within the bowels of the boat. There were signs on the walls, but alas, they were in Greek. There was even a map of the Greek Isles. Eventually, I emerged on the upper deck and mingled among the commoners. Most of the passengers had settled on the benches and were busy eating their lunches. Soon the water below was marked with a confetti of plastic bags and wrappers.

We were due to leave imminently, and I found a perch from which to watch the event. Two hours later, I was still there, watching the mechanics hammer away at a greasy machine part. The boat hadn’t moved. I should have known, of course. Even after nearly four years in the South Pacific, I still maintained an optimistic faith in schedules. But nothing leaves on time in the South Pacific, and when the
Spirit of Fiji
finally departed, three hours behind schedule, I realized that this would be a very long day, and suddenly I understood the appeal of flying.

The ship glided through the break in the reef, near a Chinese fishing boat that had missed the entrance and lay hull up on the reef shelf. Beyond the reef, there was a swell running, and the flat-bottomed ship rolled with each wave. We were traveling at approximately two miles per hour. I could swim faster, I thought. We passed the headlands of Viti Levu and threaded our way through the Lomaiviti archipelago toward Koro Island. In the distance, I could see the hazy contours of Wakaya Island, the destination of choice for movie stars and millionaires. The morning newspaper had informed us that Tom Cruise was presently frolicking on its beaches. I felt a camaraderie with Tom. We both traveled first class.

We moved over deep water, a wine-dark blue dappled by the sun. Behind us was the cragged eastern shore of Viti Levu. In the distance, the offshore islands reflected an alluring languor. A frigate bird swept low above the waves of the Koro Sea. If there was a more enchanting scene anywhere in the world, I could not imagine it. In gloomy Suva, with its fetid air and belching buses, paradise was a punch line. But here, on the glimmering water, I again understood the allure of Fiji. Paradise was a place that could be seen only from a distance, but it pleased me knowing that we lived so close to it.

The hours passed. Most of the other passengers had brought their own food and drink. I set off to see what I could find. Not quite thinking ahead, I had brought only a small bottle of water and a banana, which I had long ago finished. I checked the first-class lounge, prepared and even looking forward to waving my forearm about. I hadn’t really expected an afternoon tea service. Indeed, what I had expected to find was the ship’s crew snoring on the benches, which was precisely what I did find. Disappointed that no one had asked to see my stamp, I moved on to the general café. It was shuttered.

Now I was thirsty. I had had enough experience with waterborne intestinal parasites to make me wary of drinking the ship’s water. The last thing I wanted to experience was belly-belly in Savusavu. This wasn’t a Carnival cruise. This was a third-world interisland ferry. There wasn’t a tourist aboard other than myself, and it seemed unlikely that the ship’s water supply was any cleaner than that found flowing through the pipes in Suva. Still, I noticed that every half hour or so, a crewman carried a bucket of water up to the ship’s bridge.

“They are drinking kava,” a fellow passenger noted.

Oceans of it, apparently. As the sun set over the Koro Sea the kava was replenished bucket by bucket. If the crew was using the ship’s water for kava, I figured, it might be drinkable. The captain, I noticed, hadn’t withered away. Indeed, he was the most corpulent man I had ever seen in Fiji. He wore a red T-shirt, splotched with grease and oil, that strained to cover his enormous gut. A little belly-belly would probably do him some good. Nevertheless, though I was feeling parched, I resisted the temptation to drink the ship’s water. I had just emerged from a bout of dengue fever—what fun that was—and was looking forward to a few weeks of health.

Shortly before midnight, we neared Koro Island. This should be interesting, I thought. There was no electricity on Koro. The only light available was offered by the stars. It was an extremely compact harbor, and the ship was very large. The captain and crew had spent the previous seven hours drinking buckets of kava. If it were me at the helm, I have no doubt we would have soon become one with the reef. In any event, the captain gave a few curt orders, and the ship turned around and brought its rump toward the pier in an admirable display of seamanship. They might not look like seamen, I thought. And they might all be stoned on kava. But they knew what they were doing. A few more trucks rumbled aboard, and soon we were cruising again through the darkness.

Two
A.M.
passed. Most of the passengers were asleep on the benches. Though I was exhausted, I couldn’t sleep. I had tried to retire to my first-class bunk, but with every roll of the boat there followed a discordant creaking of metal grinding on metal. It was the kind of noise that I tend to fixate on, and after a half hour, I was reduced to a state of frothing insensibility. Resigned, I sat on the deck and watched the slow drift of stars moving over the sea. Seventeen hours on a ferry was beginning to feel very much like seventeen hours on a ferry. Indeed, I was beginning to check my watch an awful lot, wishing the time forward: 3:02…3:06…3:09. Finally, at 4
A.M.
—there’s that time again—we arrived at Savusavu, and the silence of the night was disturbed by the sound of a dozen trucks turning over their engines, sending forth a foul cloud of exhaust that hovered above us in the still air.

I grabbed my backpack and walked the short distance toward the town. It is often described as sleepy, and it was good and asleep now. I hadn’t made any advance arrangement for a hotel, which now struck me as a regrettable oversight. Savusavu at 4
A.M.
was a dim and quiet place where nothing stirred except for a few dogs. I picked up a rock and trudged on. I had almost resigned myself to simply holding out until dawn, when I came across a sign pointing me toward the Hot Springs Hotel. I followed the road up a hillside, pleased to see that, if all went well, I might soon be able to put an end to this day.

Suddenly, two dogs bounded out of the trees.
Well, fuck,
I thought, my heart pounding. Ever since we’d lived in Kiribati, I had become utterly terrified of island dogs. They are either wild animals, left to their own devices to find sustenance, or they have been trained as guard dogs. Neither type amused me. I stopped moving and dropped my backpack, poised to throw my rock. The dogs were about thirty feet away. They too stopped. I stomped my feet. “Skat! Get out of here!” I hissed. Off they ran. Apparently, they had learned to fear people. Thank goodness for that, I thought.

The hotel lobby was open to the elements. I was pleased to see a light on.

“Bula,” said the sleepy guard, using the Fijian word for “hello.”

“Bula,” I said. “Do you have any water bottles here?”

They did not. A few moments later, I found myself in my hotel room, drinking from a flow of rusty tap water.

SAVUSAVU.
It pleases me just to say the word.
Savusavu.
For a while, I had considered going to Taveuni, the garden isle of Fiji. There was a boat going there too. I had been to Taveuni before, when we traveled through Fiji on our return home from Kiribati to the U.S., and I had liked it very much. The main town on Taveuni is Somosomo. It was a close call, but Somosomo wasn’t quite as evocative as Savusavu.

There was another reason for going to Savusavu. Many of the Fijians on Vanua Levu had supported the coup, and I wanted to ask them, you know, what was up with that. It was difficult to get a sense of what had driven the coup in Suva. Fijians and Indians lived separate lives in the capital, but they lived these separate lives together, harmoniously ignoring each other, more or less. The Fijians played rugby, the Indians cricket. The Fijians worked in government. The Indians were the shopkeepers. The Fijians celebrated the queen’s birthday. The Indians lit candles for Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. Even though they had been sharing the islands for more than a hundred years in roughly equal numbers, intermarriage between Fijians and Indians was a striking rarity. In a way, Suva reminded me of Washington, where blacks and whites occupied the same geography, walked the same streets, shopped at the same stores, then went home to lives that had nothing to do with each other. In our Suva neighborhood, in the evenings, the Indians who lived below us gathered around a small set of drums and sang Hindu chants. The Fijians who lived above us settled around the kava bowl. And in the mornings, we all wished each other a good day.

Sylvia and I often went for early-morning walks along the seawall in Suva. It was the only place in town where one could have some confidence of walking without being assaulted by dogs. Some mornings we ran into Sitiveni Rabuka on his morning constitution, bedecked in a shimmering track suit. He had led Fiji for a decade following the first coup, after he overthrew the first predominantly Indian elected government. A little farther on, we often encountered Mahendra Chaudhry, the Indian prime minister of Fiji until George Speight and his followers attacked the parliament. That they could share the same seawall for their morning ambulation, I thought, was rather extraordinary and spoke well of Suva. Indeed, most Fijians in Suva voted for the Labor Party, Chaudhry’s Indian-led party. On the western coast of Viti Levu, the sunny side, and up into the Mamanuca and Yasawa islands, there was little support for the coup among indigenous Fijians. So how could it happen? How could a democratically elected government be overthrown on an island where support for the coup was negligible?