South of Taihape there were vistas of endless hills, like broken bones hidden under green baize. In places the road sliced through lumps of land leaving cuts exposed in the air. They were being corroded; gangrene had set in. Subsoil had fallen and dried. Yellow dust came up and powdered the windscreen. I wondered how long it would take for the bush to grow back and the hills to get firm roots again. A feeling of violation welded the past to the present, of extinct life forms feeding on extinction for revenge. The same negative presence was seething in the vacancy of human places as in the spaces where the forest had been and where the excavators had amputated whole sections of hills. I remembered driving from Cape Turnagain years before and feeling the threat of the emptiness getting at places inside myself. Even here where there were buildings, roads, and farms, they appeared furtive, as though not properly seen or not meant to be closely looked at for long; made in haste, unrepented. People spoke of the land being settled; in fact it had been unsettled. And now, absolutely.
The windscreen wipers cleared the view, made it hard. Suddenly I was startled by swarms of darting flecks in the air, swirling in the wake of the land rover. Thistledown. Like butterflies. Billions of seeds. For the rest of the way down to the plain there were these clouds of floating white specks. The weeds were on the move, not wasting time; it would be all theirs.
We detoured to Palmerston North. Apirana fired grenades, and we climbed to the top of a tall insurance building to scan the horizon with binoculars. There was a whitish heat haze, and no sound or sign of life. Descending, we ate what would have been lunch under the shade of a tree in the square. A white marble statue of a Maori chief stared from a dead rose garden at reflections in shop windows. Apirana walked around.
‘Why would they build a statue to a Maori?’ he said. He peered at the inscription. ‘Oh, yes. Might’ve guessed. For his loyalty in the Maori Wars. You know what that means?’
I said nothing. He shook his head.
‘Means he fought against the Maori.’
‘It was a long time ago,’ I said.
‘Not so long.’ He pointed. ‘It says, “I have done my duty. Do you likewise.” Well, well. How about that?’
I could tell he was trying to irritate me. We were both a bit on edge from the heat and the weariness of the drive through the vacant towns. Yet something about the words of the inscription seemed to goad him.
‘Who decides all this?’ he asked, tapping the letters with his knuckles. ‘They do. The ones who win. The ones who get the land in the end. He just backed a winner, that’s all.’
He came back and flung himself down in the shade. I wasn’t going to fight the Maori Wars with him. I could never understand this obsession with the importance of the ownership of land. Your people might have scratched around for a few generations on the top ten centimetres of a land two hundred million years old which had another four hundred million to go. In what impertinent sense of the word could you claim you ‘owned’ that piece of geology? By burial rights? Surely that would reverse the titles of claim and claimant? Nor had I ever sympathised with the idea that we Europeans had corrupted the noble savages. They were from the start devious, aggressive, and self-important, much like the rest of humanity. Western liberalism had now made them sanctimonious as well. I drank some wine. Even in the shade I felt choked with the heat.
‘Well, you’ve got it all now,’ I said.
‘All what?’
‘The land. You can have it back. All yours.’
He sat up and gave me a look of withering contempt. For a moment I almost felt alarmed.
‘Oh,’ he said, slowly, with heavy sarcasm, ‘thank you.’
‘I can’t see it makes any difference,’ I said, wanting to dismiss the subject, ‘if it’s what you’ve always wanted.’
He knitted his large hands together, fingers clasped, and held them up in front of him in a manner which seemed, fleetingly, to be too dramatic and theatrical.
‘Tangata whenua.’ He pulled his hands apart. ‘The people…and the land. Go together.’ One hand dropped and the other withered its fingers like a dead plant. ‘Without the people, it’s nothing.’
I sat through the silence that followed, looking away, mad at myself for getting involved in a useless argument on his territory, on his terms, all uphill against his natural assumption of the moral heights; and mad at him for, in spite of all that, making me seem to be talking down to him, to be trivial and boneheaded. Then I realised that in a curious way I was merely an audience for him, that he was creating a performance of some kind, slightly overstated in its gestures and verbal mannerisms, and not completely within his control. He waved his hands towards the statue.
‘All that, duty, and loyalty. To what? He gives everything away, for what?’
‘The British Empire, I suppose.’
‘Yes. And where’s that now, eh?’
He tensed and leaned forward. I could tell that his agitation, the great tension working in the muscles of his face and body, had very little to do with any provocation I might have given him. It stemmed from some much more powerful disturbance inside his own experience. It was packed behind his eyes.
‘I joined the army,’ he said, ‘because…’ and here he paused, lost concentration, then regained it; ‘anyhow, I joined. They talk a lot about your duty and what it means, and they have…an oath of loyalty and you sign all these papers, of course, you never think, I mean, what the whole…What they want is to, to just scrub you out, and put someone else there with a gun and they want to be sure that person they’ve made will do what they say and press the trigger when they give the word. That’s it. That’s what it means. They have to count on that. And it works. But it’s not you. And you don’t want all these bastards coming out with this bullshit about loyalty when it’s all over, and shoving these bullshit memorials up in every fucken’ town because it’s all just—’
He stopped. His face was glistening with sweat. After a pause he sat back and wiped his face with the back of his left hand. I gave him what I hoped was an expression suggesting sympathy. The tension lessened.
Deliberately coarsening his voice, thickening a Maori accent, he turned and shouted across the dead roses at the statue: ‘Hey, chief! You an’ me, the big suckers, eh boy?’
The journey to Wellington would take two or three hours; we cleared up and prepared to leave. I threw the empty wine bottle into the rose garden. Apirana stared.
‘I do everything like they’re going to come back tomorrow,’ he said; ‘I thought, if I don’t it might muck things up. It’d mean I didn’t really believe that.’
I repressed the impulse to laugh. He was being faithful to a system that had cheated him, in the hope that his fidelity would somehow charm it back.
‘I told a lie back there,’ I said. ‘I only paid out cheques on the first day. I’ve stolen everything else.’ He gaped at me. ‘I thought, when they come back, they’ll understand, they’ll make allowances.’
‘For you, maybe,’ he replied flatly. I saw his meaning. I’d misjudged him. He laughed. ‘You look honest. Could’ve fooled me.’
‘Nobody did a very good job on me, either,’ I said. ‘I’ve no sense of duty at all.’
He grinned and picked up the bottle to carry it back to the land rover.
‘Hey. I might be your conscience,’ he said. Although jocular, this sounded just a little odd. I felt the need to dispel the sensation.