“And in case of dispute?”
“In true socialism there is no dispute between the government and the party.”
Where had he heard that? He said these words with all the conviction I had put into a similar phrase: vlast truda, the rule of labor. Had I not written a verse and recited it on the occasion of my group’s promotion from Pioneers to Comsomol, the All-Union Lenin Communist League of Youth?
But I had been only sixteen. “And in dispute?”
“You may mediate among yourselves,” he said. “Have you no experience of mediation in your Soviet Union?” He could not have noticed my smile, for he was shielding his eyes from the sun, searching the horizon as we sailed. “‘Twas the mishes that done it. Before their comin’, before the whites and their poison of sin, on these islands was makers of war-fleets, brawlers true, and men. Men, damn it! And so they shall be again. We’ll make our Soviet state right here!” He turned to me there on the deck. “You’ll see no behine mako on my isle, lad, no whores and no booze. When there was natural pearls in that lagoon, they’d go down dead drunk and come up plain dead. But more than that, it ate their gut. They can’t hold it as you and I, Grisha, and they’ve more to be sorrowful for. Ah, they was beautiful women and brawling men then. To look into the face of Seventh Man you can see them as they were, though now for moroseness you can’t do better than he. Just keep him off the juice, lad. For yourself I’ve packed a demi-john below, but be careful drinkin’ there alone. Do no man to quaff to his own beat, and ‘twill make you sad as them. There! D’you see?”
From the deck, I barely saw the speck. It was easy to understand why Tranck had chosen this spot; for beyond the mail steamer on the fortnightly run to Ha-o two hundred miles to the east, not even a captain completely lost would deem it worth the stop. Low and flat, it seemed to melt into the sea itself, and only when we were just on top, riding through the break in the inner reef in the ship’s boat, could it be seen for what it was.
Tranck was as excited as a boy. “Sure we could blast a passage through the coral to the lagoon. But if we did, there’d be no end of captains sloggin’ rum, tradin’ trinkets for pearl, buyin’ the women with snips of cloth and payin’ off their husbands in booze. ‘Tis the history of these seas, lad, and I’ve seen it almost from the first. Seventh Man, his father made regular practice of eatin’ his enemies down to the toe. Look around and you’ll find heaps of skulls hidden away. But now… hell, lad, they don’t bother no more hardly with the tapus, much less tattooin’—that was an art! — or their dyin’ tongue. Language fattens with use, Grisha, and theirs years back was bone.”
This discourse I had heard many times, many nights. Tranck had long since become used to ordering his world according to his views. But the man I saw step ashore at the tiny rock quay was hardly the sharp trader of Papeete, dealer in spirits, copra-grower, initiator of the culture of pearl, nor Marxist either. It was as father, a worried parent, that he now appeared, and while a few Atu-Hivans had drifted down to see him in, he ignored us all and caressed the girl, hugging and squeezing her, peering into her eyes that were a copy of his own, leaf green, shameless with soft longing as would any Russian mother be for her own son. As shameless as myself, for when I lifted my eyes from this scene I saw not the store, the spire of a plank church, outriggers strung out in a line along the beach, a paint-peeling cutter half at anchor, half submerged in the violet lagoon, but my own mother’s home — her poor artifacts and memories, my father’s picture in its tin frame, the first and last I knew of him, for he had died during the Civil War in Ordzhonikidze’s Eleventh Red Army fighting General Denikin’s Whites. Even as I shook hands with Tranck’s trader Goetz and the oddly pale chief in his filthy pareu, Seventh Man, my heart’s eyes were elsewhere.
“Grisha!”
I turned to Tranck, and then followed his gaze. From down the shallow hill which rose from the beach came two figures dressed alike — black coats, wing collars, knotted ties, and upon their heads black felt hats such as I had never seen. “The bloody mishes’ve come back,” he said. “I’ll have no sky-pilots on my sand!” He seemed about to explode. “Malachites,” he said at last, apparently able to tell one sect from the next on sight, and then turned back to me and changed his tone; now it was as soft and formal, as one moment before it had been brittle with hate. “Pleased I am, Grisha, to present to you my daughter, the finest maiden of the Marquesas, whose mother I loved with a passion, lad. You may take her and love her, but never abuse her. For if you do, I shall have your heart in my hand and wring it dry.”
The girl was young, perhaps sixteen, but fully grown and plump in the manner of these seas. Yet there was something about her — beyond her green eyes and the absolute stillness in which she stood — that bespoke a life shattered somehow. Perhaps I recognized in her too the sadness of exile. Lust and compassion battled within me, and then, as I blushed and she turned away, the stronger won. Her name was At Peace. Me they were to call Pupinay, which means leprous as well as fair.
Of that day and of the next, a Sunday, when Tranck sailed, I remember hardly anything at all. I felt as abandoned as when my mother had told me as a child that my father was dead in the bloody see-saw of Reds and Whites. But then I’d had the emotionalism of the Russian personality within which to withdraw — the opportunity to act the man and comfort my shrieking mother, to vow silent revenge against Denikin’s White Guards, to spin out my days in the most unsettled and unsettling of times. In the Russia of those days, to be an orphan was as much honor as loss. It was on Atu-Hiva that I felt bereaved. For companion and guide I had only Goetz, who insisted upon affixing to me my rank: mixed homage, for it was the schooner captain who first despoiled these seas.
“You are not the first white man they have seen, Captain Zabrodny,” he said that first evening. He had a larder stocked with Patzenhoffer, and we knocked back several bottles apiece. “In Hamburg I never considered myself being something special — a white. But for them, color means a great deal. I have seen the child of Marquesan mother and white father fall ill at being called a kanaque within a group of whites. You must go to Papeete to see truly how they have been shamed. Are you interested, captain, in the theory of race?”
“But why do they not return my greetings and avert their eyes?” I told him how at daybreak I had followed a sweet smell to where two bakers were mixing coconut milk and flour, and wrapping that in palm leaves to bake over a mild fire. All the while I stood there I was ignored, as though my own being were so separate from theirs that I scarcely existed at all.
“They are not used to you.”
But this did not satisfy. I had seen them do the same with Goetz, and he had been on this island for years. Tranck had brought him out from Papeete, where the German’s company had sent him as an experienced man in goods and finance to wring a settlement from a recalcitrant account. Goetz acquitted himself well and built the debtor’s existing stocks into a carefully managed inventory, riding out in chartered schooners to those islands far off the sea roads which the larger traders barely touched, where any bangle, any swatch of cloth, was worth a fortune in copra and the occasional pearl. It was on these smaller atolls, which the French administration in Papeete was hard put to watch, that the law of the rehu, the limited diving season, was ignored, and the pearls had given out, though the rare find might still buy the treadle sewing machine of which every Marquesan woman dreamed. With it she could sew the clothes her mother had never needed to catch or hold a man. The missionaries had forbidden nudity and paved the way for the traders’ wares; with the legs all but covered, tattooing was stopped, the production of tapa, the ingenious beaten bark cloth of the South Seas, forgotten. Those flowery pareus Gauguin had captured were spun in New England mills from Virginian cotton, stitched together in the Marquesas on Singer’s machines that were bought for fortunes in the pearls which adorned the windows of New York shops, Parisienne throats. Though I might have seen Goetz as nothing more than a rank capitalist who had run from Germany clutching hopes he would return with wealth, Tranck had told me enough to turn any loathing to the same pity I felt for myself. We were exiles both. Every franc Goetz put away went for the support of his aged parents in Hamburg. It was hardly conceivable that he would return to see them with enough saved to justify his flight.