Chapter 3
REN LUKEM YU, REN I KAM
AFTERWARDS, it was hard to explain what had happened. Kal’s memory felt scrubbed and raw as if washed by heavy rain. Sharp moments of pain appeared, but seemed disconnected from an internal narrative, from any sort of cause-and-effect linkage. What had happened, the way it was told, later, in the nakamal, when the adults, the elders all gathered under the great banyan tree, was this:
Kal and Vira had climbed the cliff and had stopped at the top, and looked out to sea.
From this high, the village below seemed like a deserted ants’ nest, with only a few, sluggish figures wandering slowly across the shady parts as if befuddled by the heat. From up here, the land below went on, sloped down until it became white sand, then poured out into a calm blue ocean that reached out across the world and disappeared, eternal, on the horizon. From here, too, you could see far, out to the large islands of Nouvelle Ambrym and Northern Efate, and even further: there, a small shape on the horizon, was the island of Pentecost, and even further, Kal imagined he could see the chain of the Tusk like a string of pearls stretched until it broke. They were all Earth names, old names, kastom names. But this, Kal thought, was not Earth. This was Heven. It was a new world, his world, and he would not bow down to kastom.
He wanted—desired—to fly. And flying had been forbidden by kastom.
‘Come on, Kal!’ Vira said, but not harshly. For a moment he felt her hand, resting lightly on his shoulder, and closed his eyes, willing the two of them to stay that way, if only for a little while longer. ‘I think it’s ready,’ Vira announced. Her hand was no longer on his shoulder. Her voice came from a distance, sounding hollow. He turned and smiled at her; she was standing at the entrance to the cave.
He turned back and looked for one moment longer over the view. There, below, were the islands, small specks of dust in the distance. There was the great sea, planet-wide and ancient, yet familiar, comfortable like a blanket.
He raised his head. There—they were almost level with him, or so he fancied. The giant ancient clouds moved in the sky, almost imperceptibly—dark and bright woven into each other, shifting, changing, but slowly, so slowly. They looked asleep, restful. For a fleeting moment, he thought about the man he had seen when he was younger. A man the colour of the sky. He opened his lungs and sucked in a deep breath. ‘I’m ready,’ he said, turning, and ran to help Vira with the kite.
How it happened, then, no one was certain, and least of all Kal. As to the why, that question did not even arise. Kal and Vira had broken kastom; not, as they had perhaps thought, old Earth kastom, but kastom of this world, a kastom of Heven, and made such for a reason.
They had dared to fly.
The kite was not large enough for two. Light wood and cloth, it was a glider, a moth, a toy enlarged to kid-size. They tossed stones for it, and Kal had lost.
Vira held on to one side of the kite, its canoe-shaped body. Her eyes flashed. Kal held the other side. Together, they ran.
As they neared the edge of the cliff Vira hopped onto the seat. Kal pushed. For a sickening moment the kite tottered on the edge of the cliff …
Then it took flight.
Kal watched. The kite flew straight, flew true. Vira, perhaps terrified, perhaps ecstatic, held onto the beams that fastened to and controlled the slight wings. Below, sleepy folks perhaps looked up to the sky and saw something amazing, a flying girl.
Then, close by, lighting flashed, so close as it hit that earth flew, and fragments of stone shot through the air and hit Kal. He touched his hand to his cheek and it was wet, though there had been no rain. Later, much later, though the doctor had done her best, a scar remained there.
Thunder came second. It rolled over the cliff, a slow deep sound that Kal felt in his bones. Above his head the clouds darkened. The sun disappeared. The sea, now agitated, crashed with growing force against the shore.
Vira, the Hilda Lini, flesh and bones and wood and glue and nails and cloth, animate and inanimate made into one thing, flew through strange, calm air. For a moment, Kal thought Vira had turned her head back, was looking at him. She was too far away (though still so close! he thought. She had barely made it to the border of land and sea) for him to see her face. He raised his arms, and was suddenly reminded again of the man he had seen, the man who came from the bush. The man who could speak to clouds.
Afterwards, he remembered the silence. There was the lightning, and then thunder, and then a strange, solemn quiet, the sound of solitude before it is broken. His heart was beating in his chest like an outboard engine struggling against muddy water. He was not afraid before, but now the silence scared him, and he didn’t know why.
The wind, on this everyone agreed, seemed to have come out of nowhere. In the scientific language one could speak of high and low pressure, of localised weather systems, of abrupt barometric changes and freak conditions; but in all other respects, everyone agreed, it was the anger-wind of clouds.
It hit the kite in mid-flight, the way a bat may hit a ball, and then again, and again. The kite dived, swooned, rose and fell. Kal could do nothing but watch.
The kite was higher now, the winds that tossed it kicking it up, until it seemed to over-reach even the clouds. Vira was a tiny freckle on its face, holding on to a thing that, for a short time, seemed to have become a part of her and was now breaking beneath her, as useless as a discarded toy.
The kite broke in mid-air.
The winds, abruptly, stopped.
The kite fell, pieces of it like motes of dust falling down. Kal cried, though he didn’t know he was doing it. Beside the falling wreckage, distinct from it, a small figure, plunging down into raging grey ocean. Vira and the kite fell, both broken.
They dropped down through still, clear air. When they hit the waves, heavy rain began to fall.
Kal tasted salt, as if the spray of the waves had somehow reached him, high and alone on the cliff. From somewhere outside himself words came. ‘Ren lukem yu’—the words those of an old, old song—’ren i kam.’
The rain looked at you, Vira, he thought, numb. And the rain came.
He stood on top of the cliff and watched her body disappear in the waves.