Savage Harvest Part 10

Of course, as had been shown by the earliest Dutch efforts to quash headhunting, traditions didn't die so easily. My question about the lack of a jeu in Otsjanep and Pirien was complicated by the fact that whenever I asked it, no one understood what I was asking. There were five jeus in Otsjanep and Pirien, they'd say, and everyone knew who belonged to which jeu, even if there wasn't a traditional building per se. Of course! It wasn't the buildings themselves-the churches, so to speak-that counted.

One day Kokai pointed to a house across from his and said, "That's the jeu." "Oh," I said, "can I see it?" When we went inside, it turned out to be the house of Ber, Pirien's current kepala desa. Otsjanep and Pirien didn't have formal, traditionally built jeus, but that didn't matter in the least.

As it turned out, however, the men of Jisar had convinced the local authorities that a new jeu might foster tourism, and permission had been given to begin construction. A few days after my arrival, Kokai's son-in-law, Bouvier, took me out to look. Pirien consisted of about thirty houses, nine of them plank, along the banks of the Ewta. Although I could see no dividing line, another twenty at the downriver side of the village were technically in Jisar, perhaps a quarter-mile down a rough, three-foot-wide boardwalk.

In a clearing along the riverbank a Stone Age fantasy was rising. Resting atop a foundation thirty-three poles wide, each pole three feet apart, was the framework of a new jeu. From each of the poles in the front row, looking out to the river, gazed a carved face. The floor was already built, a springy layer of narrow, inch-wide poles, and above it stood the framing-a rough rectangular outline to which the walls and roof would be attached. All jeus had a high, pitched roof descending from a central beam that lay across a series of notched support logs, and it was these logs that thirty men at a time were driving into the mud. The men worked fast, singing, chanting, clutching the poles with their arms and driving them downward with their feet, deep into the mud. It reminded me of a hive of bees or an ant farm: with no central "architect," no blueprints, no big pieces of machinery, gangs of men worked in some mysterious harmony, driving logs, hoisting the top beams into place, tying it all together with strips of rattan.

"More! A little more!" voices called, and the men heaved and chanted, until everything lined up perfectly. No nails. No wire. They worked with nothing but a handful of axes and machetes, and though not a single pole was uniform in width or length or was even straight itself, the jeu looked as true as if they were working with levels and power tools.

DURING THE HEAT of the day, almost no one moved except the children, but toward late afternoon the village sprang to life, and the next evening I found a different scene altogether. The jeu had no walls, no roof, but the Asmat couldn't help themselves. It was the first jeu rising in years, and the feasting and celebrating had begun and would continue until it was finished.

I walked over alone, trailed by the thirty or so children who followed me everywhere, constantly laughing at me. Men sat and lay throughout the unfinished structure, and a circle of men with drums was in the center. They called out to me, waved me over, and an old man at the head of the circle moved aside and patted the floor, motioning me to sit next to him. "We will be finished in two weeks," he said, "after the Bupati [the district governor] comes from Agats. We must cover the walls with gabagaba and the roof with atap [palm fronds] on the day he is here."

Then, until the sun set, and for many afternoons after, I became lost in tribal reverie. A fire burned on a lump of mud. The glow of the light, the jungle soft green, the air hot and moist and still, the river flowing, always flowing by like grains of sand dripping through an hourgla.s.s, the sun a blazing yellow circle to the west. The men were decked out, claiming their history, dripping with dogs' teeth and the tusks of boars around their arms, c.o.c.katoo feathers sprouting from their hair and fur headbands, their faces painted-some ochre, some black-ca.s.sowary bone daggers through rattan bracelets around their biceps. The older men sported pig bones or sh.e.l.ls in their septums. Sauer, the old man I sat next to, was the kepala perang of Jisar, with the cla.s.sic Asmat high cheekbones and physique of raw muscle and bone and black skin, smeared with war paint.

In the Asmat creation myth, Fumeripitsj drummed the Asmat to life from his carvings, and Sauer and his jeu mates began drumming themselves into existence, reconst.i.tuting themselves as what they were, how they saw themselves. Months before, when I'd contacted an American woman who was closely involved with Asmat art and the Crozier order and told her about my project, her response had been cold. Not more about primitive headhunters and cannibals, she'd said. "That's so been done. It's the past. There are so many problems there, real problems, and the Asmat need to be seen as they are today, suffering from AIDS, poverty, the lack of access to education and health care."

I understood her point, but it was as fanciful as my own, as full of Western ideals and preconceptions. If I saw them through her eyes, I'd see them as poverty-stricken victims in rags, covered in ringworm, subject to exploitation from Indonesia. Which they are. The Asmat are a people who live in palm shacks in the outback on the outermost fringes of human civilization without plumbing or electricity, dressed in our castaway and holey T-s.h.i.+rts and tattered gym shorts, substantially illiterate, with little future in a dynamic and technological global economy.

I didn't see them that way, though, and, watching them come to life, I saw that they didn't feel that way either. My American contact wanted them to be victims, requiring our help and our pity, but their dignity and pride and sense of self lay in what they had been, and still were in their own minds: warriors. Former headhunters deeply enmeshed in a rich spirit world. Take that away and they were but victims dwelling in a ghetto swamp. Though they were now Catholics and often crossed themselves before meals, and though they ducked away from directly answering questions about killing and cannibalism, what was taking place before me-and in every story and song I would hear over the next weeks-revealed the Asmat as they saw themselves.

They drummed sitting down, and they drummed standing up, two hundred beats a minute, and they sang, and men danced and children danced, and sweat poured from their bodies, and other men blew eerie, aching-sounding horns, and the floor of the jeu pulsated. They moved to the ground between riverbank and jeu, and more men appeared, and women too, some topless in gra.s.s skirts, bouncing and shaking, knees flapping in and out, and they danced with weapons, with bows and arrows and spears, and the sun dipped lower, and smoke curled around the sweating bodies, and in their sameness each was dressed a little differently, and they howled and bellowed and hooted, a wild free-for-all of unadulterated joy and abandon, of culture that stretched back beyond memory.

I welled up in tears. It was powerful and beautiful and unfiltered; it was pure and rich and of the earth and the river and the mud. Huge clouds dangled from the sky, and one young man with ochre stripes across his face and blazing orange gym shorts, clutching a spear, went wilder than everyone else, kicking his legs up high, fluttering his hands, shouting, "Wha! Wha! Woooweee!" The people followed the drummers in rows back and forth in front of the jeu, and just before the sun dipped below the tangled green horizon, giant birds appeared, birds that weren't birds at all, but bats. Giant fruit bats the size of eagles, hundreds of them, thousands, rising from their resting places near the sea and flying a few hundred feet overhead in a single direction-away from the sun, toward the east. They flew not like bats but like birds, each flying alone, two wingbeats a second, slowly, steadily, and I thought of Hitchc.o.c.k or the monkeys flying in The Wizard of Oz. They looked purposeful; they didn't glide or soar, they were just pulsing wings and bulbous bat bodies, two tiny feet trailing behind.

The drumming and singing and dancing continued for the next two weeks, until the big day when government officials were to come and the men would finish the jeu by installing the roof and lighting the family hearths that lined the jeu's back wall. My Indonesian was growing stronger, and I was beginning to understand more. It helped that Kokai was getting used to speaking slowly and simply with me. The pattern of the days began to unfold. The house and the village woke at dawn. Though there was a primary school, the teacher hadn't been there for two months. Children played all day, chasing each other, fighting, climbing trees over the river and plunging in. The boys made small bows and arrows, caught snakes and mice; together boys and girls built small forts out of scrub and sent the girls off to collect wood, and then they'd build a fire. The teenagers chased each other, swam, plaited each other's hair, played vicious games of soccer in a foot of thick mud on the "field" by the schoolhouse. Just after sunrise, women paddled their canoes to the sea, where they fished or shrimped or chopped wood for the kitchen fires all day.

Women did everything. They washed the tattered clothes in the muddy river and made all the food, a never-ending diet of sago pancakes and sago b.a.l.l.s, of rice and ramen and small fish and tiny, krill-like shrimp, which they wrapped in palm leaves and baked on the fire. Mostly the food and wood in Kokai's house came from other family members in other houses. I never saw a green vegetable or fruit, save for coconuts. If the men weren't drumming or singing or carving, they did nothing, except occasionally helping their wives cut down sago in the jungle. They were warriors with no war to fight. In the old days, if they hadn't been fighting, they would have been hunting or protecting the women, but that was no longer necessary, and during my time there I never saw anyone hunt-though they must have, for there was a never-ending supply of ca.s.sowary bones and feathers and cuscus fur and c.o.c.katoo feathers in the village. To bathe they jumped in the river, fully clothed; no one used soap. The river repelled me. It was brown with muddy silt, and at high tide it flooded the villages and their outhouses-and the whole village of Otsjanep lay upriver. But it was that or nothing. One day, just as I was about to jump in, a log of s.h.i.+t floated by.

Kokai's son-in-law often escorted me wherever I went, and I was never sure if it was because he wanted to hang out or if he was being tasked to do so. He was young, handsome, and probably in his twenties. He could read and write-he'd been to primary school. Once I asked him how old he was. He thought for a long time and then said, "Fifteen."

At any time of day or night, there was always a child screaming and a song wafting over the mud and breeze, intermingling with the omnipresent smoke and smell of s.h.i.+t. Kokai's daughter and nieces and extended family, always coming and going from one house to another, sang beautifully, sweetly-even Kokai's sister, a rail-thin, nearly toothless old woman with a gravelly voice who lived next door, sang well. Listening to these human sounds, I realized that back home so much of every conversation or experience takes place over headsets or telephones, over computer screens or televisions, through email or SMS message. Much of our experience is prerecorded, heavily produced, often divorced from the immediate source. The West is a place of all these overlapping and competing realities. But everything in Asmat is immediate, present, touchable, live. If you want music, you have to create it. If you want to talk to someone, you have to find that person. If you want a story, someone has to tell it and you have to be next to the person creating it.

Everything in Asmat is raw, that constant emotional intensity of joy or sadness, of fighting or hugging, and everyone is so close, knows their place, is so connected, to family, neighborhood, jeu, village. I'd been thinking a lot about my obsession with what I'd called the primitive, the thing that had driven me to Asmat and Michael's story in the first place. Part of it was simple romance-the romance of the jungle and open fires, of drumming and spears and bows and arrows and dogs' teeth necklaces. But it was also the hope of seeing something, understanding something, about myself, and the recognition of what was lacking in my own life, a yearning for something. My father's family were Orthodox Jews, a people who always saw themselves as separate from mainstream America. Yet whatever greater connection to that community my grandparents and aunts and uncles might have felt, my father had rebelled, had rejected it all, had declared himself an atheist to my grandmother at the age of seventeen. Then he'd married my mother, a WASP, and she herself was a quiet reader and lover of books, not much of a joiner. Neither liked to watch or play sports; we didn't go to church; we lived in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood that was filled with enormous families-the Murrays next door had eleven children, the Hagues around the corner twelve, the Hannapels across the street six, the Vieths a few blocks away sixteen. We were nothing like them. My parents had even told my sister and me, from the beginning, that there was no such thing as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. I'd grown up with no tribe, no belief, no ritual, belonging to nothing, never able to surrender to a larger group.

In Asmat behavior I recognized a truth. I had always longed for more connection, even as I'd fled from it, and in Pirien, despite its strangeness, I never felt lonely. In love I had little balance, either keeping intimacy at bay, people at a distance, or tipping wildly in the other direction, falling crazy in consuming love, wanting everything all the time, wanting to consume the other, to eat them up. I felt like I understood the Asmat's dualism, their lack of balance, and I recognized that sometimes I was but a step away from it myself, at least metaphorically. What I called primitiveness wasn't really about living in a house or a hut, or dancing wildly in a nightclub or under the moon in a swamp by an open fire, but about your consciousness, your sense of self. Kokai and his family, all of the Asmat in Pirien, were connected to each other and their village in a way I could barely fathom, and there was a huge part of me that wanted to be like them. Their unfiltered, immediate experience of life appealed to my own primitiveness, even as I couldn't quite throw off my inhibitions and join them completely.

Tobias Schneebaum had felt the same longing, had been driven to Asmat for many of the same reasons. "Throughout my life," he wrote, "I have been searching for a way to connect with other human beings. Suddenly, I find myself in a forest among the Asmat, living in their world, where I lose my insecurities and am content."

25.

December 2012

ME WITH KOKAI (STANDING BEHIND ME, IN A BASEBALL CAP) AND HIS FAMILY, IN PIRIEN.

AS THE SECOND WEEK melted into the third, it was time to start asking questions. I was comfortable in the village, and the village seemed comfortable with me. I was welcome, and expected, in the drumming at the rising jeu in Jisar. Men, and even women, greeted me on my daily walks along the boardwalk, and I no longer attracted a crowd of onlookers for my daily bath in the river. I had made three trips in a small boat owned by one of Kokai's nephews to Basim, an hour away, which had a few stores where I'd continually supplied the household with rice and ramen, tobacco and sugar, even lollipops and a soccer ball for the kids. I was feeding a family of fifty-we'd already been through ninety pounds of rice-and the more I bought, the faster it disappeared throughout Kokai's fiefdom of Ufin. Within a family there was no private property; everything belonged to everyone and everything was shared, and the more important you were the more you were expected to give.

Ideas were beginning to form in my mind about Michael, about what could have happened, and how and why.

Kokai and I spoke more and more in the early mornings over our coffee and cigarettes, amid smoke and the tromping of children's feet and their shrieks and cries. He often spoke of himself in the third person. "My grandfather and my father told me the history of Asmat, the history of the village. Songs, so many songs. Songs of the jeu, songs of sago, songs of paddling, songs about birds and fish and about bisj. Kokai listened. Always listened and watched." Kokai's father, it turned out, was Fom, one of the men named by van Kessel as having taken one of Michael's ribs. If Fom had partic.i.p.ated in the killing of Michael, Kokai knew it. I had no doubt.

Kokai told me how hard it had been to find a new wife. He hadn't had any luck in the village of Pirien, where the women were afraid of him, he said, maybe because he was so old. He had found Maria in Basim, but it had taken a great deal of sago and sugar and dogs' teeth necklaces to convince the men in the jeu to acquiesce. "They made Kokai wait and wait and wait," he said.

He told me how boys' septums were pierced by a sharp piece of bamboo as they lay on the ground, and how the hole was gradually widened over time. Change shadowed every story. No one pierced their septums anymore, and Kokai refused to join any of the drumming and singing. Instead, he would put on his feathers and cuscus headband and sit singing to himself and rocking back and forth for hours.

Kami is my love You are my beloved After your death you give me only memories For my pride.

Kami is my love And I long for you For everything.

And Kami my wife You are my first wife Why did you die this time?

I need you.

But now you're not living with me.

It's a long time I live alone Without you in my life.

I love you forever.

But my life is forever because I am your beloved.

Forever in my life.

"I am sad," he said. "In the past we had feasts for weeks and weeks. Gathering sago, gathering fish, and I would give and give and give, tobacco and sugar and sago and fish, and we would drum and sing for weeks, months. But now I sit and cry. I feel sad and tears stream down my face. I spread mud along my forehead and my hairline, and I cry and remember. Today I sing for my first daughter; she is dead and buried there," he said, pointing toward a grave behind the house.

Bis is my wife You are a beautiful wife Now where have you gone?

Are you looking for sago?

Or are you looking for fish?

Why have you not come home?

Here, I am waiting for you.

Crying for you.

Because you're my wife, my beautiful wife.

I am your husband crying for you Forever.

And I will cry until I die.

Because you have made my life so difficult And I cry, cry forever And die for you.

I told Kokai I had some old photographs. Would he like to see them?

"Yes!" he said emphatically.

I brought them out, a stack of fifty or so photocopies of black-and-white shots Michael Rockefeller had taken during his trip to Otsjanep in the summer of 1961. We were sitting on the ash-covered floor, by the door to the kitchen. By the time I'd handed them to him the s.p.a.ce was crowded, the women and children rus.h.i.+ng over, and almost instantly men appeared from all over the village, including Kokai's brother. Each photo had a few accompanying words of description-the place and sometimes a jeu were identified, but the men in them were almost all unnamed. They were naked, proud, smiling, their hair in long ringlets, and the sh.e.l.ls of triton hung on the abdomen of some-the sign of a great headhunter. Other photos showed men drumming naked in jeus, or elaborate bisj poles, both on the floor of the jeu and erected on scaffolding outside it.

The women and girls giggled and twittered at the nakedness, but Kokai became silent. Reverent. He stared and stared, held the photos up to the light, as if gazing through a doorway to a past that was long gone, that he must have pictured in his memory but that he hadn't seen in a half-century.

"Hmmm," he mumbled, tracing the lines of the men with his long fingernail. Then he began naming people. Dombai, with heavy eyebrows and a flas.h.i.+ng smile and a pig's bone in his nose, named in van Kessel's original report, the former kepala perang of Pirien, the man who had been cuckolded, the father of Ber, who lived fifty feet away. (Kokai called Ber "my brother," though exactly how they were related I could never quite untangle; both of their parents were different, and they lived in different clans within the village.) Tatsji, one of the Omadesep and Otsjanep go-betweens and one of the men who had reported to von Peij that Michael had been killed. The chief from Omadesep, Faniptas, who had started it all by convincing the men from Otsjanep to accompany him to Wagin in 1957. Mighty he looked: in his late forties or early fifties, naked and tall and thickly muscled, his hair lengthened with sago fibers to his shoulders, covered with dogs' teeth and boar tusks and dangling sh.e.l.ls and ornaments, wearing a thick rattan bracelet to protect his left wrist from the bowstring. Kokai pointed out Jane and Bese, also named in van Kessel's report. Kokai knew which jeu was which, and he knew the jeu to which every man he recognized belonged.

I asked him about Faniptas. "After the trip to Wagin," Kokai said, "he gave one of his daughters to Dombai to make peace." Faniptas and his men had murdered six from Otsjanep, and the men from Otsjanep had ma.s.sacred dozens of men from Omadesep, but balance had been restored. The Asmat had not needed Max Lapre or his government. They had done it themselves, and I thought of Father Vince Cole's words: despite (or perhaps because of) their constant warfare, the Asmat had always created some connection, some strategy, that left open avenues of communication, that cemented relations.h.i.+ps and kept them from all being annihilated.

"And what about these bisj poles?" I said. "Why are they still in the jeu?"

"The bisj festival was not finished."

"Who were the poles for?"

"I don't know," he said.

Word swept through Pirien and Jisar quickly. Over the next few days, amid the drumming and singing in the jeu, and in Ber's house in Pirien itself, where the men of Pirien had also begun drumming and singing in celebration of Jisar and a new idea-that they, too, would build a new jeu-the men wanted to see the photos.

They identified six of the fifteen men named by van Kessel and von Peij as having parts of Michael's skeleton, which confirmed that the men named by both priests had, in fact, met him. Which meant that if Michael had made it to sh.o.r.e, he had encountered men who knew him, knew his name. I asked again and again about the bisj poles, and always the answer was the same: the bisj festival wasn't finished, and they didn't know who the poles had been made for. That was possible; it was fifty years ago. But it seemed unlikely. They remembered everything, knew hundreds of songs by heart, knew their family lineages back generations, knew how to carve a drum or a spear or construct a one-hundred-foot-long, thirty-foot-high longhouse without a nail or a drawing.

One afternoon I walked to Otsjanep. Pirien was spread down one side of the river, only a couple of houses deep; Otsjanep, much more spread out, lay on both sides of the Ewta. Pirien had grown used to me. Every house I pa.s.sed had men and women and children sitting on its front porch, and everyone waved, said "good afternoon" or "good evening" to me. But Otsjanep was silent, the people staring. Near the river I encountered an old man with one eye sitting on the boardwalk. I sat down with him, brought out some tobacco. His name was Petrus. A few other men sat down with us. I told them I was living with Kokai in Pirien. They nodded, said little. I left a few minutes later.

I returned the next afternoon with the photos. The village boardwalks were deserted. In the afternoon heat, it was as still as still could be, the only trace of movement and sound coming from a few children following me. I decided to head back. I was nearly at the village edge when the boys caught up to me. They grabbed me, pointed to a man a few hundred yards away. "He wants to talk to you." I turned around, walked back, found Petrus coming toward me. "Do you like sago?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Come to my house."

I followed him to a traditional palm-and-gabagaba structure entered by climbing up a notched log. Smoke rose from two fireplaces. It was dark, full of languis.h.i.+ng bodies and their acrid sweet smell, babies latched on to drooping b.r.e.a.s.t.s. We sat cross-legged, I handed out some tobacco, and we smoked, sweat rolling off my forehead. A woman brought two rolls of sago. It was warm, gummy and dry and slightly nutty, hard to get down. I took the photos out of my knapsack, and somehow the word went out. Men, women, and children streamed in from all directions. Crack! There were so many crowding into the house that the floor broke, s.h.i.+fted, dropped three inches under me. "Sorry! So sorry!" I said.

"Tidak apa apa!" Petrus said, laughing, pulling me away. "Never mind!"

We went outside, and a hundred people cl.u.s.tered around, the pages flying away in a sea of hands and pressing bodies. An old man edged in and was fixated on one of the photos of the bisj poles, tracing his fingers over them. "He carved that pole," someone said.

"You carved that?" I said.

He looked at me. It was crazy. There was so much jostling, so many people, I could barely stand my ground. I tried to stay close to him, tried to keep track of the photos so I wouldn't lose them. I pushed closer to him. It wasn't an ideal time, but I had to ask.

"Which pole did you carve? Who was it for?"

He looked at me again. Caught my eyes for the briefest moment. Turned, pushed through, walked away, and disappeared. I couldn't follow him-everyone had the photos and I was caught in the bodies.

There was that wall again, that doorway that wouldn't open, that I couldn't get through, still. I just couldn't believe that the men, especially the old ones, could know so much, could so readily identify men and jeus in fifty-year-old photos-even men from Omadesep, a different village-and know nothing about the bisj poles themselves. But whatever they knew, they wouldn't say. None of them.

OTHER PIECES WERE falling into place. As we sat smoking, my chest feeling like I'd soon need a lung transplant, I asked Kokai and Ber about the men killed by Lapre. I wanted to know exactly who they were, what their positions in the village had been, and how they'd been related to the men named as having taken body parts of Michael. Their answers were remarkable. Foretsjbai had been kepala perang of Kajerpis. Osom was kepala perang of Otsjanep. Akon the kepala perang of Bakyer, and Samut the kepala perang of Jisar. Of the five people Lapre had shot, four had been the most important men in the village, the heads of four out of the five jeus. Either he'd targeted them or they had been out front, the most visible and perhaps threatening-to him at least. He had killed, in effect, the president, the vice president, the speaker of the house, and the president pro tempore of the Senate. It was hard for me to fathom how the village must have felt. Many of the strongest, most able warriors of one of the strongest, most traditional villages in all of Asmat, killed in an instant. By an outsider no less.

And the men who had taken their places? Fin replaced Osom as the head of the Otsjanep jeu. Ajim and Pep replaced Akon; Kokai said (and Amates later agreed) that it wasn't uncommon for two men to hold the position if both were powerful. Not only that, but Pep had married Osom's widow. Sauer, the kepala perang of Jisar, who I sat next to nearly every day, had replaced Samut. And Jane, one of the men named by van Kessel as having one of Michael's tibia? He was married to Samut's sister, and Samut had been married to Jane's sister. Dombai was already kepala perang of Pirien, the only jeu from which Lapre had killed no one-and the jeu that van Kessel and von Peij reported had been against Michael's killing.

Not every death could be avenged, not every death could have a full bisj ceremony. A bisj required months of feasting and carving, during which the carvers could not hunt or go into the jungle to collect sago. To support a bisj festival required power, influence, the ability to organize men and inspire them and take leaders.h.i.+p, and then, ultimately, to plan and lead an attack. The kepala perangs were the most powerful men in the village, and the men who took their places were related to them and would have had the power and the drive and charisma (tes) to respond. Even more, they had an obligation to do so; their whole standing as men desirable to women and as leaders who commanded the respect of others depended on it.

Yet they were rendered impotent by their inability to respond. It must have been a festering wound that wouldn't, couldn't heal. Even starker: in the six years before Michael arrived in Otsjanep, seventeen people had been murdered. Eight by the crocodile hunters, four by Omadesep, and five by Lapre. Michael had reported finding seventeen bisj poles in the jeus, seven of which he'd "bought" and only three of which had been delivered. Perhaps one of those three had been satisfied by the killing of Sanpai in September 1961, a partial revenge against Lapre by taking one of the men from Atsj who'd accompanied him. Taken together with the political and sacred positions of the men killed by Lapre and their relations.h.i.+p to the men at the mouth of the Ewta the morning Michael swam to sh.o.r.e, the motive for Michael's killing felt increasingly solid.

Early the next morning a man named John dropped in for a visit. I'd met him on my second night in Pirien, and he seemed different from the others in the village. The Asmat asked me nothing about who I was or what America was like other than how long I was staying and whether I would return. But in the darkness on Kokai's front porch, John had peppered me with questions: What city I was from. Whether it was night in America right now. What the weather was like. What I did for work. All the normal questions that people, anywhere in the world, always asked. And then he'd asked me the strangest thing of all, for an Asmat: would I like to come over to his house for dinner the next evening?

Which I'd done, and everything about it was different from everything else in Pirien. He lived in a claptrap wooden frame house that sat alone in the no-man's-land between Otsjanep and Pirien. It was spotless inside, as was his outhouse. A few photos hung on the walls; a longboat with an outboard engine floated in the creek out front. His wife greeted me openly, with a big smile, and he lined up his three children and they looked me in the eye and shook my hand. They cuddled the puppies tumbling around the house instead of kicking them. For dinner, John's wife served eggs and green vegetables, grown in a garden behind the house. They had a pig in a wooden pen on the side porch. I could easily understand John's Indonesian. And craziest of all, John had a generator the size of a car engine that powered not only a few electric lightbulbs but a TV hooked up to a satellite dish.

The explanation turned out to be simple: John and his wife weren't Asmat. They were Bofun Digul people, and John's father had come to Pirien as the catechist in the early 1970s. John had been born in Pirien, had grown up there, but the contrast between him and the other villagers was shocking. Every few weeks he worked for a logging company, which brought him astounding riches (relative to everyone else in the village), and without fifty family members surrounding him, whatever he earned stayed with him. He watched the BBC and CNN; he ate vegetables; he acted curious. I often dropped in at his house to chat.

This morning he and Kokai and I were talking, and somehow I asked Kokai about the first time he'd seen white people. His response was strange, something about "tourists."

"No," I said, "long before tourists-maybe the first pastor or policeman who came here long ago, when you were a boy."

He and John started speaking quickly to each other, and I couldn't keep up. I heard the words "tourist" and "Pep" and "Dombai," the word "mati"-dead-and then "Rockefeller." I froze. I was sure Kokai was telling the story of Michael Rockefeller. Finally! I didn't want to interject, to tell him to slow down, I was afraid he might clam up. He was speaking more to John than to me, and I just wanted it to roll out. Kokai pantomimed shooting an arrow, and I heard the word "polisi," and he was talking about helicopters coming in and people running into the jungle to hide-Kokai in his dynamic storytelling was a boy hiding behind a tree, the jungle, peering out into the sky in fear. Not for the first time I imagined how frightening and otherworldly those throbbing, powerful machines in the sky must have seemed. Without missing a beat, he segued into the next part of the story, an event that I knew about but had never connected before to Michael. From the helicopter and hiding in the jungle, Kokai talked about the cholera epidemic that swept through all of Asmat and hit Otsjanep particularly hard. "Dead, dead," Kokai said, repeatedly placing one hand over the other, a demonstration of the bodies piling up on top of each other. "So many dead. Bensin," the Indonesian word for gasoline.

It was true. When cholera hit Asmat in October and November 1962, a year after Michael's disappearance, the dead of Otsjanep were still laid out to decompose on raised platforms in the center of the village. Only when the flesh was gone could the skull be removed from the body to be preserved and decorated and made an object of veneration. It's hard to imagine the smell, the flies, the gruesomeness of a single body rotting openly in the tropical sun, and cholera was killing dozens. If so many bodies rotting in the village wasn't awful in itself, being near dozens of rotting cholera victims was suicidal. Cholera produces violent and unstoppable diarrhea, and victims essentially starve to death. Van de Wouw's photos are heartrending-men, women, children who were nothing but skin and bones, lying naked and ashen, hooked to jury-rigged IV bottles. By early November 1962, more than seventy men, women, and children were dead in Otsjanep, rotting on platforms. "Now and then you could see dogs walking around with parts of a foot or hand which-after sufficient rotting-fell off the platforms," wrote van de Wouw. "Some of the corpses were more or less entirely eaten by dogs that were able to climb on the platforms via stumps and shrubs. Because more and more people died, the corpse platforms had become very slovenly." Van de Wouw's description of what happened next is worth quoting in its entirety.

"On November the tenth Gabriel gave a remarkable explanation to all the kepala kampongs. He truly is a gifted speaker. He spoke for at least a half hour and explained to the people that the corpses were sources of new infections and that it was difficult to bury them with such high water. What to do? He left it to the kepalas to come up with a solution. When they weren't able to find a way out, he came up with a proposition from the mighty doctor who lives under the surface of the water.'

"After the kepalas had agreed, all the involved family members were called. It appeared there were two families in which the man, wife and children had died. Furthermore there was a single man whose wife and two children had pa.s.sed away. It was intensely sad to see how devastated this man was.

"In the meanwhile jerry cans with petroleum had arrived from Basiem [sic]. It was agreed upon that the involved family members would take care of sufficient firewood under each platform for tomorrow.

"When Sunday November the tenth came, I had to do the most exceptional Sunday ma.s.s I ever served and will ever serve. While I carried out the holy ceremony, the folks of the village were searching for firewood. This firewood was put under the platforms of the dead. Starting at the back of the village, I ploughed through the mud. But as it turned out the people were scared to death. Compared to their veneration of the dead, this treatment of their deceased was very cruel. It was sufficiently made clear though that only under these exceptional circ.u.mstances this could be done and that it was not going to happen again.

"The male family members were gathered near the corpse platforms and before the petroleum was poured over the corpses, it was asked again if they agreed to this. Every time I was the one who then personally set it on fire. And at every new death platform it was asked again if the family agreed.

"As soon as the firewood was burning well, the rattan that tied the corpse down was chopped loose and the platform and the corpse descended into the fire.

"It took the entire day-because of the mud behind the houses-to discover and burn all the corpse platforms. At the end of the ceremony, the catechists tried to come closer wearing a handkerchief over their noses and mouth. But when they came close, they immediately turned around and went back. The villagers repeatedly made remarks about how strong my stomach had to be. I knew better, but this had to be done so I had to go through with it. When all the platforms were burned and a horrible disgusting smoke and smell was hanging over the village, I jumped into the river as fast as I could, after an enormous yell.

"The catechist repeatedly told me during that day that the villagers wanted to kill me. But soon after everything was done it turned out this wasn't true. In fact, they came to give me arrows, bows, rocks, axes etcetera, because they were convinced that the disease was expelled from Otanep [sic] forever now."

It was a huge moment in Otsjanep's history, a sad and tragic blow, not just the deaths of so many men, women, and children, but the burning of their ancestors. Kokai had moved from one story into the next as if they were part of the same event, and it hit me: what if the cholera had been seen as the spirits' punishment for killing Michael Rockefeller? Even more significant, Australian army helicopters had been dispatched to aid in the cholera fight, which meant that the only two times the Asmat had ever seen helicopters were within days of Michael's death and as more death, faster than they'd ever experienced, swept through their villages.

That evening I went to talk to John. I asked him to tell me what Kokai had told him. He seemed nervous and told me that Kokai had merely told the same old story-that Michael had come to the village, had left, was returning when his boat capsized and he swam away and disappeared, and then cholera came. The names Pep and Dombai, the shooting of the arrow-he wouldn't explain. "They are afraid," he said.

I WAS FINALLY beginning to be convinced, especially because of the positions of the men killed by Lapre and their relation to the men van Kessel and von Peij named as having killed Michael. I'd been all along the coast and had never seen a shark or crocodile; the crocs were inland, not along the ocean sh.o.r.e, and certainly not out at sea. Sharks were in deeper water; I'd never heard a single story of a human being attacked by one in Asmat, and their presence was so minimal they rarely figured in Asmat carvings. Sanday's idea that Michael might have made it close to sh.o.r.e only to be attacked by a shark or crocodile, within sight of the men from Otsjanep gathered there, didn't make sense. And if he'd been killed at sea, his body would have drifted and been blown farther south, not come straight inland.