I’d like to share an excerpt of The Ghost Road by Pat Barker with you. The Ghost Road is the third volume of a trilogy that follows the fortunes of shell-shocked British army officers towards the end of the First World War. The other books in the trilogy are Regeneration and The Eye in the Door. This trilogy, I can safely say, is one of the best pieces of literary works I‘ve ever read.
The Ghost Road is set at the end of World War I in 1918. As the psychologist William Rivers takes on new shell shock cases, he remembers his research trip to Eddystone island in Melanesia years before. One ritual of the locals of Eddystone island was head-hunting, a pursuit which had been abolished by a British colonial administration. „The contrast between the primitives’ deeply considered approach to death and the pointless killing (of the First World War) indulged in by supposedly more civilized people is only hinted at, but it gives the book, particularly in its deeply eloquent concluding pages, enormous resonance.“ cites Publisher‘s Weekly.
The excerpt I’ve chosen deals with the death of an elderly resident, Mbuko, of Eddystone island, and offers insights into the dying process and into what it means to die.
The characters mentioned are:
William Rivers, psychologist
Arthur Maurice Hocart, fellow explorer
Njiru, priest-healer in Eddystone island
Mbuko, elderly resident of Eddystone island
Rhinambesi, oldest resident of Eddystone island
„Mbuko was dying of a disease caused by the spirits of Kita, and had no more than a few hours to live.
Kita, Njiru explained, causes a man to waste away ‘till he too small all bone he got no meat‘. Certainly Mbuko could not have been more emaciated. He looked more like an anatomical drawing than that a man, exept for the persistent flutter of his heart under the stretched skin. He lay on the raised wooden platform that was used for sleeping, though nobody else now slept in the hut. Njiru said they were afraid. Outside, bright sunshine, people coming and going. Now and then a neighbour would look in to see if he were still alive. ‘Soon,‘ the people sitting round would say, indifferently, shaking their heads. Some were obviously amused or repelled by his plight. ‘Rakiana‘ was the word one heard over and over again. Rakiana. Thin.
Even Njiru who, within the framework of his culture, was a compassionate man (and we can none of us claim more, Rivers thought), seemed to feel, not indifference or contempt exactly, but that Mbuko had become merely a problem to be solved. Njiru looked across the barely breathing heap of bones at Rivers and said, ‘Mate‘.
‘Mate‘ in all the dictionaries was translated as ‘dead‘.
‘No mate,‘ Rivers said, breathing deeply and pointing to Mbuko‘s chest.
There and then, across the dying man, he received a tutorial, not unlike those he remembered from his student days in Bart‘s. Mate did not mean dead, it designated a state of which death was the appropriate outcome. Mbuko was mate because he was critically ill. Rinambesi, though quite disgustingly healthy, still with a keen eye for the girls, was also mate because he‘d lived to an age when if he wasn‘t dead he damn well ought to be. The term for actual death, the moment when the sagena – here Njiru breathed in, slapping his belly in the region of the diaphragm – the ‘something he stop long belly‘ departed, was mate ndapu. In pidgin, ‘die finish‘. Was the sagena the same as the soul? Rivers wanted to know. ‘Of course it wasn‘t,‘ Njiru snapped, nostrils flaring with impatience. Oh God, it was Bart‘s all over again. Heaven help the unsuspecting public when we let you loose on them. The problem with Mbuko, Njiru pressed on, as with all those who fell into the power of Kita, was that he couldn‘t die. He seemed to be making a very creditable stab at it, Rivers thought rebelliously. Kita could ‘make him small‘, but not kill him. ‘Kita pausia,‘ Njiru said, stroking Mbuko. ‘Kita loves him?‘ Rivers suggested. No, Njiru would know the word. Kita was nursing him.
Njiru hung malanjari leaves from the gable end of the hut where the scare ghost shivered in the draught, and began chanting the prayer of exorcism. His shadow came and went across the dying man‘s face. At one point Rivers got cramp in his legs and tried to stand up, but the people on either side of him pulled him down. He must not walk under the malanjari leaves, they said, or he would waste away and become like Mbuko.
Hocart came into the hut, edging round the walls, keeping well clear of the malanjari leaves, until he reached Rivers. Now that all eyes were focused on Njiru, Rivers could take Mbuko‘s pulse. He shook his head. ‘Not long.‘
Scattered all round were bits of calico and bark cloth streaked with mucus, with here and there a great splash of red where Mbuko had haemorrhaged. Now gobs of phlegm rose into his mouth and he lacked the strength even to spit them out. Rivers found a fresh piece of cloth, moistened it with his own saliva, and cleaned the dying man‘s mouth. His tongue came out and flicked across his dry lips. Then a rattle in the throat, a lift and flare of the ribcage, and it was over. One of the women wailed briefly, but the wail faltered into silence, and she put a hand over her mouth as if embarrassed.
Rivers automatically reached out to close the eyes, then stopped himself. Mbuko‘s body was bound into a sitting position by bands of calico passed round his neck and under his knees. He was tied to a pole, and two men carried him out into the open air. Rivers and Hocart followed the little group down the path to the beach.
The body was propped up, still in a sitting position, in the stern of a canoe, his shield and axe were placed beside him, and he was quickly paddled out to sea. Rivers waited until the canoe was a shadow on the glittering waters of the bay, then went back to the hut and gathered together the stained cloths, which he buried at a safe distance from the village. As he scraped dry earth over the heap of rags, he felt an intense craving to scrub his arms up to the elbow in boiled water. That would have to wait till he got back to the tent. For the moment he contented himself with wiping his palms several times hard on the seat of his trousers.
He went back to the beach, where a disgruntled Hocart lingered by the waterline. They had both been hoping that this death would shed light on the cult of the skull. Instead…
‘They don‘t keep the skull,‘ Hocart said.
As they watched, the paddlers in the canoe tipped the corpse unceremoniously over the side, where it sank beneath the water with scarcely a splash.
River shook his head. ‘I‘m afraid what we need is a proper death.‘”
Source: The Ghost Road, Pat Barker, Penguin Books, 1995
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