47 Not The End, Really

“But it isn’t the end, really, is it Tommu?” The voice from the gloom startled and disconcerted me as I disconsolately entered my sitting room. At the end of a week in which I had lost all of the work I had done on the history of the island, an unidentified intruder was the last person I wanted to confront.

Just when it had seemed that I was making good progress, with my interview with Netto completed and written up, things had all gone badly wrong. I had spent a morning with my father and returned to my own house in the afternoon to work on my history of the island – provisionally titled ‘Our Granny’s Will’ – only to find the window at the side of my house banging in the wind, the glass broken, rain soaking into my furniture and the manuscript gone.

My first thought was that the authorities might have heard of my writing through Netto and decided that they should break in and confiscate my papers. I therefore went directly up to his office to discuss it with him. I found him alone and he seemed almost as shocked as I was to learn that the manuscript had disappeared. He was adamant that, if he had thought it a problem, he would not have returned it to me and that there he had told no-one else about it.

“Tommu,” he said, “I’m not entirely sure what Lomu would have made of your book but, as he doesn’t read and he certainly does not know of its existence, the question is purely academic. In any case, I know that he would not act without my advice in a matter of this type.”

My next step was to report the theft to the Guardians. They said that they would send an officer to investigate and, when no one came, I decided to ask my neighbours whether they had seen anything. No one was able to supply any concrete information although an elderly lady across the street was convinced that she had seen someone loitering outside my house the previous week. Unfortunately this turned out to be Bahla who had been looking for me to tell me about his engagement.

After days of futile enquiries, I had had to resign myself to the loss of all my work and to face the fact that it was now unlikely to be recovered. The thought of having to begin again after the weeks of effort I had spent on writing down the results of my researches was soul destroying. I had just decided that this was what I faced and I was feeling entirely dejected as I unlocked my door to be startled by the strange voice from the darkness.

“Who is there?” I called, lighting a match and removing the chimney of my lamp, “What are you doing in my house?”

As the mantle warmed up and light began to fill the room, I could see no one. But looking down at the table, my pile of papers had returned.

“Who are you? What do you want?” I looked around but could see no one.

“Calm down, Tommu,” the voice came from somewhere low down and behind me, “no one is going to hurt you.”

I looked down, to see, sitting on the floor, with his back to the wall next to the door and his legs straight out before him a very old man, suntanned and wrinkled, his white hair a curly mop on the top of his head.

“Who are you? What do you want?” I repeated.

“You don’t recognise me, do you, Tommu?” he replied, “And yet you look much as I remember you.”

“Am I supposed to know you?” there was something vaguely familiar about his voice or rather about his tone, but I could not think where I might have heard it before.

“Yes,” he continued, “it has been a long time. I had heard that you were writing something, so I felt that I needed to take a look at it.”

“You stole my manuscript?”

“One of my associates borrowed it on my behalf. I am sorry if that caused any problems, but you need to understand that we are not welcome visitors to the Village.”

“So who, exactly are you?”

“Tommu, you really do not remember me? Hama Batu? But I suppose that I must have changed more with the years than you. The forest is less kind to the body than this comfortable house of yours.”

“Hama Batu!” I looked more closely at the man sitting on the floor, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t expecting you. How did you get into my house? Are you here to take revenge on me?”

“We come and go. There are many who are prepared to help us,” he looked at me sadly, “and I am here simply to talk.”

What does one do when confronted, unexpectedly, by the world’s most wanted man? The thought of the reward offered for information leading to the arrest of the evil Hama Batu passed through my mind but I instantly discarded it as being irrelevant (and dangerous). I wondered if I should offer him a cup of tea but decided that he might not approve.

“Would you care for something to drink?”

“Thank you,” he answered, “may I have some water, please?”

I fetched a bowl of water and offered him a seat at the table.

“Thank you, no,” he replied, “I am more accustomed to sitting lower down. But let us get down to business. You have written an intriguing document. But there is much that you do not understand. Our Granny’s views have been much distorted by your informants.”

“How could that be?” I looked down at him.

“They try to separate Our Granny from the world. They try to pretend that she is some sort of abstract concept. That is a lie. Our Granny is of this island. She cannot be turned this way and that to suit different people. Our Granny and Morakeewa are one. To destroy the island is to destroy Our Granny and to work against Our Granny is to work against the island.

We have seen those who wish to use the island for their own purposes. They give no thought to the future; they do not consider the Spirit of Morakeewa. For the sake of their own pleasure and indulgence, they simply exhaust what is given to them and then, separated from the purposes of Our Granny and of Morakeewa, they are consumed by their own appetites.

Long ago there was a man who lived in a garden. There were plants and fruit of every sort and each year the seeds of the plants provided what he needed for the next season. For some time, he lived happily. His needs were supplied each year by the abundance of the garden.

One day he thought, each year I leave some fruit unused. It is wasted in the ground. Why should I not eat all of the fruit in its day and so that is what he did. There was no seed for the next year and when the new season came, there was one fruit less. The man did not see this as a problem. All that he needed to do was to eat more of some other fruit.

And so he continued as, one by one, the fruits in his garden were reduced until the garden was no longer as it had been and then the man wished for the fruits that were no more. But it was too late and they were gone.”

I felt uncomfortable, standing and speaking to Hama Batu so I joined him, sitting next to him with my back to the wall.

“Surely, though,” I said “what we have done on our island is the opposite. We have found ways to produce more than would naturally occur. We could produce food for many more people than lived here before we found them.”

“But at what cost! In the forest, we are human. We wake in the morning and we feel the rain on our faces. Each tree is a friend or, perhaps, an enemy. There are a hundred different mushrooms. To live we must eat them. Eat the wrong ones and die. If you do not need to use your ears then they stop listening. If you do not use your eyes, they stop seeing.

A man in a cage is half a man. Who wants to be a pig kept for meat?”

“Are you saying, Hama Batu,” I asked, “that it is not possible to live as a human being in the Village?”

“Who is to say that anything is impossible? I know that a person who can choose how to live can choose to live badly. In the forest it is not possible to remain asleep for the whole of one’s life. In the forest it is necessary to feel; it is necessary to remain awake; it is necessary to decide. In the forest it is necessary to be alive and to adapt to the natural world in which we live.

Is it comfortable? Perhaps not. Is it safe? Almost never.

But it is not sleep. It is life or death.

In the market in the Village is an old woman. She sits on a cage of chickens. Each morning she places a cup of corn into the cage. The chickens eat it. For the chickens, the only thing in their lives is the corn in the morning. They do not need to find their corn. It is provided for them.

Those are the saddest chickens in the world. The cannot fly into the trees. They cannot even spread their wings out. They spend their days doing nothing. They fall into arguments and peck each other and pull each other’s feathers out. I am sure that they each think that it is important which part of the cage they occupy and how much of the corn they eat.

Perhaps, if they were to find the door of the cage open they would be afraid to leave. They would not know where their next cup of corn would come from. They may even think that they are happy because they know nothing else. They do not know the true life of a chicken; of scratching for food, of flying, of laying eggs and becoming broody. And in the end, the old woman reaches into the cage and takes out a chicken. She holds it for an instant and then twists its neck. A coin passes and the chicken is dinner.

You ask me, is it possible for a chicken in that cage to live a good life? Perhaps it is. Perhaps it is not. Perhaps one of the chickens could conclude that the cage was not important and that reality was an idea somewhere else, in which they could be free.

Maybe the chicken can separate itself from its miserable existence and convince itself that the truth is on a higher plane, away from the mud and the pecking and the market and that, in spite of everything, life is really good.

I am sure that the market woman would like the chickens to think that.”