CHAPTER NINETEEN #2
She smiled, though her eyes were sad, and said something I didn’t understand. Sali took the baby and I walked out of the hut in a regrettable daze, hands still covered in blood and afterbirth.
I stumbled down the steps of the hut, barely registering Jahnu and another Hundi male, whom I assumed belonged to Daliah by the way he scrambled through the door I had just exited.
The pressure in my chest constricted my airway, and I sipped at the air.
The pain twisted and squeezed until I felt the familiar tachycardic thrum of my heartbeat.
I’d fought it all throughout nursing school, the mounting stress and anxiety finding its outlet in physical form just like it did now.
I was encouraged to take up boxing or running as a way to alleviate the stress, which is why I’d installed a heavy-bag in my apartment.
I needed something to hit.
I pounded my chest, hoping it would restart my erratic heartbeat.
I wanted to scream, but didn’t want to wake the village.
I wanted to run, but didn’t know where to go.
I leaned my hand against a palm tree, ground my teeth against the tears in my throat, and punched the hardened fronds with all my strength.
The hit vibrated from my fingers to my shoulder and I let out an anguished gulp.
I hit it again until I felt my knuckles open and my hand go numb.
“Sid-de-nee!” Jahnu’s voice and touch snapped me back to the present. He gripped my arm, pulled me away from the tree, and looked at me as if I’d grown horns.
“What has happened?” he demanded.
“I couldn’t save her.”
“Daliah?”
“No, the baby.”
“But we heard the cries.”
“One cry. One cry…not two.”
“And Daliah?”
“She is fine, but the other baby…I…I tried.”
“Then you have done all you can.”
“It wasn’t enough,” I shook my head, trying to dispel the tears.
He took me by my injured hand, inspecting it under the light of the moon.
“You cannot save everyone.”
“Then what’s the fucking point?” I cried, irrational.
Jahnu dropped my hand and pulled me to him. “You cannot think yourself so powerful to control who lives and dies,” he said into my hair. “That is for the Lord alone…come.”
I let him lead me down the hill toward the sound of the trickling brook that wound its way around the village. He gently dipped my hand in the cold water which made me hiss in pain.
It was foolish to hit the tree, I knew, and dipped my head in shame at Jahnu’s ‘tsking as he examined it. My knuckles were sliced and my fingers felt jammed.
“Why?” he held up my hand.
“I don’t know! Sometimes it’s better to feel the pain on the outside.”
He nodded his head like he knew what I meant and said, “Let us hope you have not broken it.”
He mended me, pulling clumps of algae from the river and placing them on my broken skin like a salve.
He tore pieces of fern from the bank and wrapped them around my hand like a bandage.
His hands were quick and gentle and I felt myself relaxing in his proximity as we sat facing each other. The erratic beat of my heart slowed.
“You helped bring a healthy child into the world and saved the mother in the process…what you have done is enough. It is more than many here can say.”
I wanted to disagree with him. I should’ve been able to save her, but then I remembered Jahnu’s mother had died during his own birth, and I let my reply die on my tongue. If Daliah had better care, access to real doctors, delivered in a hospital—could she now be holding two babies instead of one?
It all felt so strange trying to view life through his eyes. It was a clash of my modernized, western perspective against the Stone Age, and as close as I was to him right now, I also felt a million miles away. I wanted to understand.
“Why do you fight so hard against progress that could help your tribe? Could help save lives?”
He was quiet, gathering his thoughts before he said, “It is different here from where you come. Here, we do not hide away from death. It is the natural part of life. Here, death is not feared.”
“What is feared here?”
“Bondage…loss of freedom.”
A smirk escaped from my nose. “Freedom is a paradox.” I heard the cynicism in my voice.
Jahnu flashed his eyes to me, “What do you mean, paradox?”
“Like a contradiction…or…something that’s puzzling.”
“How is freedom puzzling?”
“Because we all want the freedom to choose how to live our lives, but we aren’t free from the consequences of our choices, no matter what they are.”
“So we are slaves to our choices,” he said thoughtfully.
“Yes, slaves.”
“Like the man whose tears made the Sepik river…do you know that story?”
I shook my head, and Jahnu began to tell me the tale of the Mighty Sepik River, a child’s story passed around to the tribes in the Sepik highland regions.
“Before there was land, there was only water, and in the water a giant crocodile. The crocodile had been alive for a very long time, so long she didn’t remember how old she was.
Her skin had become hard as rock, like the mountains.
She didn’t move very often, and when she did, it shook the ground like the earthquakes.
“During her life, her droppings became the earth around the sea.
She laid an egg, and the egg became a man.
The crocodile carried the man around on her back and together they traveled everywhere.
And so it happened that the man decided he did not want to be carried around any longer.
The man thought he should seek a life for himself.
He wanted to be free. So one night he waited for the crocodile to fall asleep and with one blow he killed the crocodile with a large stone.
But when he looked at the dead crocodile, man did not feel free.
He felt terrible guilt and was so sorry he burst into tears.
“Day after day he cried, and week after week. Soon the tears he cried became a muddy puddle at his feet. Then it became a tiny stream and the stream grew larger as the man continued to cry. It eventually became a mighty river—the Sepik River. And so the man was free of the crocodile, his creator, but he was not free from his guilt.”
I was quiet, letting the story settle around us.
“From the beginning of time, man has tried to escape what he thinks enslaves him…when really…it is that very thing that gives him life and freedom.”
“Is that why you fight so hard against the outside world, because you think it will enslave you?”
“Does it not?” he asked, sharply. “Better a slave to the natural law, then a slave of someone else.”
We were quiet for a bit as I grasped the truth of his story. Hadn’t I felt that very thing being here with the Hundi?
Working the ground and laboring for survival could feel like a kind of bondage, depending on your perspective.
But I had found a sense of freedom within the natural law of nature, and it was a liberation from inside me.
Not a freedom to do whatever I wanted, which is what most people think when they talk about freedom.
This was a freedom that produced a need for hard work and a dependency on others for survival.
Far from the demands of my free country at home, I began to realize true freedom demands personal discipline and responsibility.
Freedom really was a paradox.
“What you see here…” he said, rising from the ground, distracting me from my thoughts.
He looked out over the small river. “Behind what you see has meaning, and that meaning has value. The value beyond what we do is our tradition and our tradition is how we live. It is who we are. If we change, who will we be, then?”
“I admit, I’ve been overwhelmed by the goodness of your tribe.
But what if you could become more than who you are?
Have you ever considered that? What if you could become more?
” I rose and stood behind him. I couldn’t imagine losing this tribe to something as ridiculous as war.
“Fighting it is not always the answer. Progress and change are inevitable…I mean, why stay the same when the very act may be what kills your tribe in the process?”
“Does change not also kill my tribe?” He whirled toward me, our faces inches apart.
“Has the progress of Makia not been the reason this conflict started? If we do not hold to the sacred values of our ancestors, what do we become? If we do hold them, we face a world bent on punishing us until we give in, or die in the process. Either way, we perish!” His fiery eyes seared me.
“I would rather die fighting than die by giving in.”
“But do you know who suffers the most during a war?” His anger wounded my pride, igniting my own.
“It’s the women and the children!” I matched his outrage.
“Have you thought about the collateral damage this conflict is causing? You may be a slave to your choices, but your choices affect more than just yourself! You say you don’t fear death here. Well, maybe you should!”
“You are an infuriating woman!” he said through clenched teeth.
“Well, you are an infuriating man!”
I watched his eyes search me and land on my lips.
He leaned forward as if to kiss me and I hitched my breath, excitement and fear roiling inside me.
I could feel his longing—knew it matched my own—and I wanted to lose myself in a blind desire the passionate moment offered, but he only whispered softly, “This is an impossible situation.” I could feel his breath on my lips.
I didn’t know what situation he was referring to. The conflict between the tribes, my disruptive presence here in his village, or the attraction we felt for one another.
I wanted him to kiss me, and the thought felt strange in my mind. I knew if I made any movement toward him, I would be lost in his impossibly thick lips and blazing passion. But he broke our trance and stepped away from me.
“Come,” he said over his shoulder. “I will find you a place to sleep ’til morning.”