—Lavie Tidhar

* * * *

Lavie Tidhar i bin stap long Vanuatu long Vanua Lava Aelan long 2007. Long Taem ia, hemi raetem sam stori blong laef blong ples ia, olsem stori ia, nem blong hem “Hao nao blong mekem ol pepa eroplen.” Lavie i talem Interzone tankyu tumas blong putum stori ia long magazin blong yu. Hemi gat hop se bae yufala i laekem stori ia! Ahu!

* * * *

The distance from Sola to the island of Ureparapara is approximately three hours by boat with an outboard motor, assuming the sea is calm. When waves rise as high as houses and the rain lashes your body and face like a story-book pirate’s whip it can take a little longer.

* * * *

The name for the old sailor’s whip is a Cat o’ Nine Tails. There is no equivalent word in Bislama.

* * * *

A long time ago Ureparapara was a volcano. One day it erupted, and the force of the explosion tore a great chunk in the walls of the crater and let the sea through. Water flooded in, killing the fire, forming a beautiful and isolated harbour named—by Captain Bligh as he was cast adrift from the Bounty—Divers Bay.

* * * *

In the local language the name of the place is Lehalorop. But we’re the ones who make the maps.

* * * *

These are the items of advanced technology currently present on Ureparapara: 1 x MP3 Player, no longer working, held by Mr William William of the village store in Lehali; 1 x Tele-radio, present in the small clinic in Lehali; 1 x telephone, present in the Anglican church in Divers Bay, the other side of the island from Lehali; 5-10 x DVD Players + TV sets, held by various families on the island, powered occasionally by use of a private generator for the benefit of watching Hollywood movies; 3 x wide metal pipes for smoking the white of the coconut until it becomes copra, at which point it is packed into bags and left until the ship arrives (every six months) and exchanged for candles, matches and tinned fish; 10 x mincers, not for beef, of which there is almost none, but for kava, the local root that—when cut, ground, and mixed with water—produces a dank, brown, smelly liquid that leaves the mouth numb and induces relaxation.

* * * *

Q: If one village has a tele-radio, and the other has a phone, how do they communicate?

A: They don’t.

* * * *

Sola lies on the eastern side of the island of Vanua Lava, a small, sleepy town that serves as the administrative centre for the Banks and Torres islands, a remote and inaccessible province of the Republic of Vanuatu. There used to be electricity, but the Assistant Mechanic blew up the town’s generator some time ago and now there isn’t. There is a Market House, serving indifferent food, the money earned used for the fund to send the church choir to the Solomon Islands next spring; there is a bank which doubles up as the post office; there is a clinic without a doctor; there is an airport where the small Air Vanuatu plane lands three times a week. There are plenty of kava bars.

We sit in Cool Breeze and the only light is the glowing tips of our Peter Jackson cigarettes and a candle in a glass jar. “It’s a question of technology,” Jimmy Morgan says. He is talking about Ureparapara. “Lehali and Divers Bay can’t communicate with each other. Each village wants the piece of technology the other village has.”

We greet this with silence. The sun had already set, and there is no moon. The Milky Way is hidden behind clouds. It’s a long way back to the base in the dark, and it looks like it’s going to rain.

“I think I have malaria,” Sam Friedman says, and we greet that, too, in silence. Ben Tucker gets up and pays for another round of shells. “Research,” he says, unnecessarily.

* * * *

Q: What is the most important technology brought by the Waetman to Vanuatu?

Father Barnabas, Anglican Church, Lehali (68): The word of Our Saviour, Jesus Christ.

* * * *

Abortions are illegal.

* * * *

When I first arrived in Vanuatu I asked my instructor, a pale blond man from England, what the word for homosexual was. He answered with surprising savagery that he didn’t know but that it was probably something like wan man I mekem fakfak widem narafala man.

* * * *

The words for a homosexual in Bislama are: man blong man, fifti-fifti, hafhaf, pede, pufta. (Crowley’s A New Bislama Dictionary, 2nd Edition, 2003)

* * * *

Homosexuality is illegal.

* * * *

There are four of us in the small base in Sola. Jimmy Morgan, who works on renewable energy and currently focuses on copra oil generators; Sam Friedman, a geneticist working on producing a tree with self-fermenting coconuts; and Ben Tucker, working on what he calls Kava Pop and the rest of us call Sickly Cola: how to make kava taste good while retaining its effect, so that it could be bottled and sold commercially to the export market. I’m not a scientist, I just run the shop.

“We’re losers,” Jimmy Morgan says, not without satisfaction, “but at least here we’re out of harm’s way. I mean, imagine if they put us on some weapons R&D. I mean, at least Sam is only trying to make coconut cocktails come out of a coconut—which is a laudable goal, Sam, laudable—if they let him design a weapon we’d have exploding coconuts being dropped out of planes and then where would we be?”

The base is funded jointly by the European Union and AusAid and, like most of their projects, it’s something of a joke. The base’s official name is The Vanuatu South Pacific Research and Development Station, and the money comes from the Scientific Development Initiative Fund for South Pacific Countries, the SDIF-SPC. The base is situated in a small area on the point-end of Sola, close to Karepuak—the small island of Pakea is just out of sight behind the hill—comprising three semi-permanent buildings which are a mix of concrete flooring and bamboo walls, two brick buildings, and an open shed we sometimes use to get drunk in, when we can get drinks shipped over from Santo. The locals call the base the Coconut Plantation. So far, Jimmy’s copra generators might work if anyone locally bothered to produce copra, which they don’t. Before, the whole place was a plantation run by the French. Now when a coconut falls it remains down, unless someone passing by had a sudden desire to eat it. Sam’s self-fermenting coconuts seem to be an unrealised dream, though he has the best funding. Most of his budget goes on somewhat exotic drinks, and we stack up the bottles afterwards in a pyramid behind Ben’s lab, which doubles up as an unofficial nakamal, or kava-bar.

“How are you doing with that local girl?” Jimmy asks Sam Friedman. “What’s her name again? Joy Anne? Joy Lynne?”

“Fuck off,” Sam says. The smoke curls around the bald dome of his head. The truth is that the girl he likes, who lives on the neighbouring island, Mota Lava, has her eyes on the son of the village chief, and no eyes at all as far as balding geneticists are concerned. “And you?” Jimmy says, turning to me with a smirk, “How is your love life these days?”

* * * *

The distance from Sola to the island of Ureparapara is approximately three hours by boat with an outboard motor, assuming the sea is calm. The trip costs twenty-four thousand vatu. There is no airstrip and there are no boats. There are three cruise ships a year, which come mainly for the reef islands nearby but stop over for a few hours in Divers Bay, when the locals arrange a kastom dance, then sell carvings to the tourists. There are two cargo ships a year, owned by a Chinese man in Santo. The ships arrive and buy copra. The islanders then pay that money back for goods—kerosene and cooking oil and rice—at a premium. Then the ship leaves.

When I arrive in Lehali for the first time it is low tide, and the boat stops beside the reef and I climb out and step onto the stones. Small living things, half flower, half tentacles, wave under my foot. Ahead the mountains rise sharply, the former volcano walls a sheer, exhausting climb, and I wonder, as I always do afterwards, what they hide behind them.

It’s there, at Lehali, with the sea a fine grey mirror and the kids waving from the village on high, that I first see him.

* * * *

“Ol tomato blong yu oli olsem wanem?” Clifton asks. Cool Breeze is his nakamal. “The tomatoes are good,” I say. Vanua Lava is an island of rain, rain, rain. Everything grows. “Tomatoes,” Jimmy Morgan says, and he burps. “What’s the bloody point?”

We line up for another shell of kava. It’s getting late, even by island standards, but the kava in the bucket isn’t finished yet and no one wants to go home. We drink wan wan, and then there is a chorus of spitting and Ben Tucker says, as he always does, “This stuff tastes like shit.”

“So make it taste better,” Sam says, as he always does, and Ben grins around a new cigarette and says, “I might just do that.”

I planted tomatoes all around the base. Then cucumbers. Then onions, then carrots, then parsley and basil and sage. The truth is that we mostly eat what they cook at the Market House, and that’s fish in weak coconut sauce, rice and yams, and a weak white coffee with Sunshine powder for milk. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, someone kills a pig.

“You ever taste cat?” Clifton asks. Jimmy burps again. “You have to skin it first, then wash it in solwota. Then you boil it until the meat is done, and then you milk coconut antap and cook it a bit longer. Best thing you’ll ever taste.”

Jimmy grins and points at me and says, “He doesn’t eat pussy.”

* * * *

That first night on Lehali, I ask where I can swim, which also means to shower, or to wash, in Bislama. He is with me then, the son of the pastor, born in the Solomons, grown in the Banks, his naked torso dark cocoa in the half-full moon; a fisherman’s body, taut like a fishing line. Two paths fork out into the bush. His name is Michelangelo. He points. “This one is for the women. This one is for the men.”

He leads me along the trail. The moon casts a half-light. There are mosquitoes, but for once I don’t notice them.

I don’t notice a rock in the dark, and I stumble. “Here,” he says. He reaches out to me. “Hold my hand.”

He walks me down to the river. It is quiet. There are no people. I undress, knowing he is watching me, then step into the water. It is cool, good against my skin.

I am clumsy in the dark. He steadies me.

We wash.

* * * *

“I’m writing a science fiction story about us,” Sam Friedman says. “It has no aliens in it, no commercial space travel, no telepathy.”

“You’re a fucking alien,” Jimmy Morgan says.

“I can tell you how the story ends,” Sam says, ignoring him.

I say, “How?”

“One night,” Sam says, and the candle makes his eyes twinkle, “one night we get drunk and mix up all the experiments together. Ben uses my self-fermenting coconuts for his kava-pop experiment. Jimmy hooks up a generator to power things up—”

“It’s not that simple—” Jimmy starts.

“And then,” Sam says, again ignoring him, “the whole thing explodes. It’s a huge fireball. It makes a crater the size of Sola. But we all survive anyway, I’m not quite sure how yet.”

“Hiding under our beds?” Ben Tucker says, and Sam smiles and says, “Maybe. Anyway, it turns out that all this time, while everyone thought we were wasting time and EU money, we were sitting on a revolutionary new fuel, made with kava and coconuts, and you can power rockets with it. Vanuatu launches a space programme, and the story ends with the first Ni-Vanuatu astronaut looking at the Earth from space and trying to find his home island, which is naturally this one.”

“Wan Ni Vanuatu man we hemi go long spes?” Clifton says. He has been listening. “Wanem nem blong stori olsem hemia?”

“Science fiction,” Sam says. “It’s a Western form of popular literature that—”

Clifton shakes his head slowly. “Kava is finished,” he says, and blows out the candle.

* * * *

But I believed in telepathy. When I next arrive in Ureparapara he is there, on the shore, watching me as I stumble over the rocks to the land. His smile has a missing tooth, but it is whole all the same. Later, we sit on a low wooden bench in the shade and eat grapefruit, and watch the sea below. It is a ritual we follow, afterwards. And we sit like this, olsem hemia, semak, when he tells me he is sick.

“Wan boy Solomon,” he says, and he shrugs, perhaps as if he is apologising, perhaps as if it has little significance. “Mi mitim hem long Santo.”

He did not tell me he had gone to Santo. I put down the fruit. My stomach feels hollow and warm, as if it has tides and solwota inside. I say, “Wanem sik?”

“Mi no save,” he says. And then, into my waiting silence, reluctantly, “Oli telem se hemi wan samting blong immune system blong me.” He has large, perfect eyes when he looks at me. “Hemi wan virus nomo.”

* * * *

Yia 11 assignment, Arep Secondary School, Sola: Write a story about a sick person close to you. How does he feel? How do you feel? Is the sickness socially acceptable where you live? Here in Vanuatu, diseases come and go in waves, travelling across the South Pacific, visiting first one island, then another. Write a story about one such disease. Does it have a cure? How would you feel if the person you loved died, or was about to die?

* * * *

We walk slowly back to the base. There’s a single torch between us, and we step carefully over the stones. Jimmy weaves a drunken path. The snake dance, he calls it. The rest of us are not that much steadier. “A torch,” Ben Tucker says, “now that’s technology you can rely on.”

“When you write science fiction,” I say, and stop, leaving it like a question. Sam says, “Yes?”

“You can make up anything you want, can’t you? Fly to the stars, meet aliens, invent a cure for every disease?”

“I flew to the stars once,” Jimmy says. “You ever try that bell flower they have here? I think it’s called Angel Trump. Man, that stuff will make you talk to aliens.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” Sam says. For a moment he stops, and I do too. The others walk past us. Sam touches my arm. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I say. Then, “Thanks.”

“When are you going back to Parapara?” Sam asks. “I don’t know,” I say. I think, Soon. Then I say it.

He says, “Good,” and we begin walking again. The road is empty and quiet. When we get to the base I check on the tomatoes and then go to sleep.

* * * *

The next day we are all hungover and we just sit under the mango tree and watch the world go by. Ben Tucker disappears inside his lab and returns with a stack of blank white papers. He hands them out as the children watch. I fold mine, once, twice, bend, bend again, fold. An airplane.

“At least we’re doing something useful,” Jimmy says, and he hands his plane to a young boy.

“Aerodynamics, aircraft construction and maintenance...” Sam says, finishing his plane and handing it to a small girl. I finish mine, hand it over, start another one.

Soon there is a fleet of paper aircraft flying everywhere, filling up the skies.