That was the first evening. On the second, I heard a muted singing and made my way to the missionaries’ church.
Beneath a roof of corrugated tin sat ten women and three men — the number was to grow — their voices raised in an ancient chant that was at once transcendent in lyric as earthbound in form, the awkward mix of the missionaries’ hymn with their old chants. It was hardly a blend. The moans of physical longing or the call to war saw no meeting place with any upwards urge. When I entered, they rapidly dispersed, leaving me standing at the back, facing the two Malachites. The name of one was William Lloyd; his partner Lloyd something else. I would keep them apart in my head only by thinking just one seemed to have a tongue. The other never said a word. Both were farmers from the American west, honest and raw, volunteers who had come out to this furthest place as part of a tithe.
“We don’t have no regular preachers, you see,” William Lloyd said to me. “We’re not them Mormons, what pays folks to take up the cloth. They’d like as not pay for souls.”
What must they have thought of me? That first day when, like frigate birds, they had appeared to Tranck’s gaze and fearlessly displayed a carefully folded letter, replete with wax seal — their permis from Monsieur l’Inspecteur des Établissements Français de l’Océanie — they had asked me straight out what my business was to be. Like all clerics, they regarded where they stood as ground made holy at least by that, as perhaps it was, for their presence on Atu-Hiva was as voluntary as mine was forced.
I could not suppress the secularist rage drilled into me as a child, and in which I still believed. “To bring socialism to Atu-Hiva, Mr. Tranck has brought me,” I said, and immediately saw that in their eyes I had grown horns, a spade beard. Was William Lloyd peering behind me for evidence of a tail? If so, this he managed to conceal. “We are all God’s children, Mr. Zabrodny. We must all get along.”
“Except with the Mormons?”
“The Mormons ain’t rational in their religion,” he said, fingering the black knot of his tie. “You take a kanaque, scare the Catholicism out of him, clothe his naked body and what you got? A Mormon. But we of the Malachite Church of the Latter Day Saints give full value straight off. We got the direct line. When the French clamped down the Mormons turned tail, but we come back. We give a good accounting and that’s why we’re liked, Mr. Zabrodny. Good business pays off. We got two new members this week, paying dues.” I suppose he caught my look. “All the poor folks has got is coconuts, of course, but we believe the Lord understands and has taken from those that has sinned and given to us that has not. You wait and see. These islands will soon be cleansed.”
So Tranck was not alone in his hopes. “And then?”
“And then there’ll be electric light, and automobiles, and proper roads.” The missionary’s eyes moved beyond me.
A kanaque stood in the doorway. I had been seeing him from my first moments on the atoll, though never this close. He was huge, with arms big around as my own thigh. In his hand he held a heavy stick, on his face a hard and unsatisfied look. His name was Tepia a Tevu — Turtle Eggs — and on Atu-Hiva he kept the peace. Tranck had bade him watch, and this he did, pursuing me with a literalness impressive as his bulk and that great stick.
“Turtle Eggs?” Goetz said that night. “He is just to stop the drink. They’ll drink, these kanaques, and then they are not worth…” He finished pouring out the bottle of Patzenhoffer his Marquesan “wife” had brought. “Once, you know, they owned these seas, sharing them only with the wind and rain. But now by disease and misfortune they have been diminished, and by religions which do not suit their simple needs. The best died in battle, captain, or of grief. We can let them drown in alcohol, of course, but how sad to slap them with the one insult past pain. Captain, these are barely men. We must build them up.”
“I thought Mr. Tranck brought me here for that, not you.”
“These are Mr. Tranck’s wishes, Captain Zabrodny. Mr. Tranck knows best what must be for his atoll.”
“His?” I said. “There flies the tricolore night and day, from your very roof…”
Goetz waved his hand.
“And of Seventh Man — is he not chief?”
“Monsieur le chef?” Saying that he said all. It was the appellation the French used for their cooks.
“Herr Goetz, how long have you been here?”
“Seven years. Nine in these seas.”
“Do you then not know the meaning of the term dictatorship of the proletariat? Are you familiar with the works of Karl Marx? Of Lenin?”
“The papers rarely reach this far, captain,” he said. “But I have some idea of what you and Tranck are about.”
“And do you, knowing the kanaka, think we shall succeed?”
Goetz paused. “Here nothing will succeed,” he said.
Yet his pessimism gave me hope. And that night, as the wind whistled through the ill-fitting wood slats of my shack, I poured myself a first long drink from Tranck’s demi-john and resolved the next morning to set to work. But no sooner was I abed on the thin pallet I had built up on the dirt floor did the door open slowly. I heard a light footstep cross within. Reaching under the pile of my clothes, I drew out the service pistol which had come to be my most treasured possession. Even now, so far away, often do I waken in a nighttime sweat thinking that in a moment of anguish or fear I might have killed At Peace.
Perhaps it would have been better for her if I had: with her green eyes and dark skin, she was more than kanaka, and something less. The combination made her frightening somehow, ghostlike: in her, too, the memory of a better past lived on.
That night was an introduction for me to a passion I had never considered to exist. Like others of my age, I had been indoctrinated in a sexual, as well as a political, dogma. Moscow and Leningrad women, even in the highest circles in which I traveled, were hardly sensual creatures at all. Softness in a woman had become counter-revolutionary two decades before, and our poverty was dire. But the Atu-Hivans were poorer than we. Here beauty was not accident, but practice — as moderation might be, or political vigilance. Only once before had it occurred to me that a woman might have sexual feelings other than those attendant in the simple bartering of her soul. Now the romantico-socialist babblings we had practiced upon the objects of our desire became suddenly as inexplicable as some foolish and exhausted tradition. In reality, this was the case. In matters of love the ancien regime lived on, endlessly modified by the political truth of the day. In that Russia under Stalin, the Russia I had fled to arrive in a paradise of endless sensuality, only one woman had embodied for me the highest ideal of what a woman — as woman — might be, and I had met her only twice, both times at official functions. She was not the soft odalisque of Atu-Hiva, but she was real, and it disturbed me that it was she I thought of while I made love to and was made love to by At Peace. Her name was Nadezhda Alleluyeva, and she had had the bad fortune to have married the wrong man. She was Stalin’s wife.