The Mountain
About the Book
‘A wonderful achievement. It is moving and panoramic. It takes us into the heart of our near neighbour Papua New Guinea in a way that’s never been done before, through the point of view of the founders of independence, their friends and lovers. At the same time, it’s a sweeping story of love and friendship, of hope and regret, and of the generational loyalties we inherit, as well as the ones we create for ourselves. The Mountain is a novel as intricate and powerful as the bark-cloth paintings at its heart’
ANNA FUNDER
‘It’s a joy to encounter a novel so dense with ideas … And to travel this journey with such a rich array of characters, each trying to find their own place within this unfolding political landscape, is a wonderful thing … The Mountain is an epic novel, sweeping in its reach and sumptuous in its realisation. It can only enhance Modjeska’s already formidable reputation’
CANBERRA TIMES
‘A rich and moving literary achievement … The Mountain is about many things – love, work, motherhood, loss, independence, art, seeing … The best kind of novel, one that entertains, educates and leaves the readers in no doubt about the skill of its author’
GOLD COAST BULLETIN
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Prologue
Book One: 1968–73
Birds of the Sun
Our Ground
The Hearts of White-skinned Men
The Mountain
Hohola
Jiwu’s Curse
The Decisive Moment
Book Two: 2005–6
Hapkas
The Jericho Road
Ancestor Gift
The Face of the Day
The Massy Green
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Drusilla Modjeska
Praise for The Mountain
Copyright Notice
Loved the book?
PROLOGUE
LUNCH WITH JERICHO, 2005
FROM HIS TABLE ON THE TERRACE OF THE MUSEUM, JERICHO SEES Martha coming through the crowds on the Quay. She’s walking fast and takes off her dark glasses to scan the tables. Her hair is short, well cut. The odd thing is that she looks like Rika. Rika’s clothes are more expensive, of course, but Martha has the same style and form. Well, there was a time when they were friends. Like sisters, Leonard said. For thirty years they haven’t spoken, and still they look the same.
Martha spots him at a table towards the end of the terrace, and waves. He’s chosen a good position, under a heater, with a view across the water to the Opera House. It’s June, the beginning of winter in Sydney, and out of the sun the air is chill.
‘How good you look,’ Martha says as they embrace, and Jericho sees the pleasure in her face. When he first came down from the mountain to Rika, barely five years old, she was the other mother. Rika and Martha. They were younger then than he is now, and he thinks again of how it must have been for them, in a country that wasn’t theirs, suddenly presented with a small child to raise.
‘So, Jericho,’ Martha says when they’re settled at the table with the menus. ‘You’re going back.’
He nods, a quizzical expression that says, Yes, he’s going back, but he’s not at all sure.
‘A big decision.’
‘It’s thirty years now,’ he says. ‘A good round number.’ Not much of an answer, but it’s a start.
‘Thirty years,’ Martha says. ‘I suppose it is.’ Thirty years since independence. She remembers the celebrations, the dancing and the music. And the rain, the mud. Independence. What a fine word that is, and something stirs in a dark region of her memory, something sad and raw. She doesn’t expect the raw, not after all this time.
‘I’ve got leave from the gallery,’ Jericho says. ‘A year away from London.’ He makes a face that says, Help! A year! Will I last that long? ‘Did you know,’ he says, ‘that they’ve closed the airstrip on the mountain? I’ll have to walk in.’
‘Where from?’
‘The road that goes up to Kokoda. I’ve looked it up on the map. There’s a side road part of the way, but it’s still a long walk just to get to the river.’ The river at the base of the mountain.
Martha knows that road. Dust when it’s dry, cut by flooding gullies when it’s wet. ‘How fit are you?’ she asks. He’s not tall, but his legs are well muscled. Legs born for a mountain that is steep and ridged, with many peaks.
‘I’ve been training at the gym,’ he says. ‘And at weekends I walk for hours. London’s so flat, it’s probably been a complete waste of time.’ He laughs. ‘At Easter I went to Wales with Leonard. We did a lot of walking, but nothing compared to the mountain. His advice is not to think about it too much and when the time comes to just do it!’
‘I don’t know about that,’ Martha says. She never went up, but everyone who did came back without an ounce of fat, and Jericho doesn’t look as if he has much to spare. He’s lean, small-boned, with the soft, coppery skin of his Papuan mother and the long face of his English father. The black curls of his hair are as thick as they were when he was a child.
The food arrives. Small portions on large plates. They should have crossed the road at the back of the museum and gone to a café. She knows he’s been with the curators all morning, as his gallery in London is borrowing from their holdings for a show in two years’ time. Even so.
‘How’s Rika?’ she asks. It’s a question she can’t not ask, and fears will take her where she doesn’t want to go.
‘She’s in New York.’
‘I know. But that’s about all I know.’
Jericho takes a photo from the satchel of papers he has with him. ‘I’m taking it up to the mountain,’ he says. ‘To show them.’
As he hands it across, Martha feels a sharp stab of betrayal. Rika is standing against a white wall beside the ground-spider bark-cloth. Its many legs stretch above her, white on a dark background, long and thin, like the rays of the moon.
‘So she still has it.’ Martha keeps her voice even, not letting him see how angry she is. Rika keeps the cloth, lets herself be photographed beside it, and yet for thirty years has ignored letters, closing off the past as if it can be banished by the force of her refusal. ‘When was it taken?’ she asks.
‘Recently. For an exhibition.’
‘Does she talk to you about what happened?’
‘No. Never.’ He shakes his head, sighs. ‘Leonard tells me what he knows, but he wasn’t there for most of it. And she won’t talk about any of it. Nothing.’
He thinks of the row they had before he left London. Not a row exactly, Rika is too controlled for that. Better if it had been. She said she’d never interfere with him returning, but it didn’t mean she should dredge up a past long gone.
‘She gives me access to the archive,’ he says. ‘It’s all there, all the photos, but she won’t tell me what they mean. She seems to think they’re enough on their own. But they’re not.’
Martha hears the frustration in his voice and she leans across, puts her hand on his. ‘What is it you want to know?’
‘Everything. What burst you all apart.’
‘It’s thirty years ago,’ Martha says. Her heart feels tight. There’s a part of her that wants to say to Jericho, Let us bear the burden of the past, it should not be yours. He may be thirty-six and think of himself as getting old, but she knows he’s too young to realise how fast the rest will go, the accelerating decades, and she wants to say to him, Don’t look back. Be brave, go up there, do what you must, but when you leave, be sure you’re poised for the future. Then she thinks of her own departure, remembers the faces of her Papuan friends. It’s all very well for you guys. You can leave. That’s the least that was said. She should remember, betrayal cuts many ways.
She sits there, silent, looking at Jericho, remembering. The gift child, they called him on the mountain.
A waiter comes, clears their plates. They smile at him, turn their faces into those of people enjoying the pleasures of Sydney. Over at the Quay, ferries are easing in and out; the life of the city goes on, as it does, every day. The man sprayed silver continues to stand like a statue, the jugglers continue to juggle, and the didgeridoo plays to the tourists.
Martha looks at Jericho and understands it will be a hard return.
BOOK ONE
1968–73
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
…
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
In this strangest of theatres?
Elizabeth Bishop,
‘Questions of Travel’, 1956
BIRDS OF THE SUN
RIKA FIRST HEARD OF THE MOUNTAIN IN the flat country of her birth. It was a November day when Leonard, visiting Leiden from Oxford, told her the story of the old woman who carried the sun and the moon in her string bag. They were walking back to the house on the canal after Leonard had given a lecture at the museum. He was a house guest, the first since her mother had died, and to welcome him, her father had let her open the curtains of the old dining room, let in the fresh air. That was Leonard’s first gift, freeing Rika from the tight corner of the kitchen where she and her father had been cramped for a long, bleak year. She had much to thank Leonard for, and she went with him to the museum, where her father was curator and host to his lecture. She sat at the back and while Leonard spoke of the value of ethnographic film, her mind drifted. It was a habit she’d learned while her mother was ill, letting the drift take her elsewhere, into another world, of blue water and blue skies. Sun. She often dreamed of sun. Did Leonard ever think it odd, she asked him after the lecture, that so many of the things in the museum, the masks and carvings he was speaking of, had come from places in the sun, yet were marooned here in the gloom? They were walking along the canal and a soft rain was falling. Leonard took her arm as they crossed a bridge.
In Papua, he told her, deep in the ancestor past, an old woman had carried the sun and the moon in her string bag. Each morning, she climbed the great mountain in the dark, and when she reached the top she took the sun from her bag and hung it in the sky. Its light fell in glorious rays, shining through the trees, so that her daughters could see the abundance of the world around them. Amazed at its beauty, they painted all that they saw in its clear, bright light. They painted leaves and fruit and spider webs, the bones of river fish and the markings of caterpillars. And they painted the mountain with its many peaks. When they were tired and had worked enough for one day, the old woman climbed back to the peak of the mountain, took the sun down from the sky, returned it to her string bag, and in its place hung the moon. Then her daughters could rest, and she could rest with them.
Though Rika was schooled in Holland, that land of reason, there was a part of her that believed that a place which bred such people, such imagination, must be a place of redemption. So when, on a later visit, Leonard said he was going there, to that very mountain, to film its people who still painted the world around them, she said, yes, she’d marry him and go too.
In fact, marrying Leonard had meant a year in Oxford, which in terms of sun wasn’t an improvement, but the year had passed and now, at last, here they were in Papua, at the end of a long journey. But instead of a mountain covered in rainforest and inhabited by artists, they were in a dry valley outside an awkward house in a row of awkward houses, expected to climb the steps and into a party of people gathered in welcome. Red-faced men were calling out from the veranda with beer bottles in their hands. They were wearing beige shorts, garments Rika had never before seen on grown men. The women, all but the youngest, were dressed in the slacks of Australian fashion. Slacks, in this heat. Rika was in an indigo shift, and her fringe fell over her eyes as she looked down at her own pale legs. Leonard put an encouraging hand on her shoulder and again she hesitated, turning to look into the dark.
It was a still night. The moon, just past the full, gave the hills a silvery quality. She’d seen them from the plane; they’d looked like waves coming into shore. Behind them lay the dark bulk of mountains; beyond that, on the other side of the island – Leonard had shown her on the map – was the mountain she’d come to think of as theirs.
From the plane she’d also seen villages curved along beaches, canoes pulled up on the sand; blue water, blue skies, just as she’d imagined. Beside the houses were trees with spreading branches, and along a sandy track a line of trees with flame-red leaves. Leaves or petals, she didn’t know – she’d never seen such a tree, even in the Botanical Gardens at Leiden.
‘It looks like paradise down there,’ she said to Leonard.
‘But not Port Moresby, I’m told,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘I hope you won’t be disappointed.’
By the time they landed, clouds had come in over the mountains, the sky had lost its blue and hung low and heavy. When they’d crossed the tarmac to the hangar that served as a terminal, Rika was streaming with moisture. All around her people jostled, selling watermelon and carved masks, touting for business, calling out in singing voices. While Leonard lit his pipe and watched for the trunk with his film equipment, she waded into the crowd, pushing past the Australians who’d been on the plane and were now standing in groups, mopping their foreheads and calling across to the porters. She went on, into the colour and the smells, into this strange world where even air and trees had changed their nature. She lifted her camera to a tall woman with tattoo lines radiating across her face, a cigarette tucked into the bush of her hair. Rika smiled. The woman did not. She held Rika’s gaze until she’d returned the Leica to her basket. The woman nodded, a ghost of a smile, and turned into the crowd.