The Dutch Wife (33 page)

Now dinner was served: pieces of roast meat and jugs of honey beer were set on mats. I didn’t eat much, but I found the beer delicious and drank plenty of it. I had an adequate grasp of the various dialects of the region so I was able to converse with the Chief. She was an intelligent and good-natured woman.

Emboldened by the beer (and in spite of the Commissioner’s warning), I asked her about a man I’d seen earlier that day tied to a post in the middle of the village. He’d been smeared with honey and was being attacked by thousands of vicious wasps. She said she was sorry that had been my introduction to the usually very placid lives of the Bizwas. It had always been the Bizwa custom to intermarry their women with men from distant villages. This particular man originally came from a village twenty miles upriver and married one of her subjects. The man had broken one of the major Bizwa taboos:
the taboo against the husband revealing his past life to his wife.
Just yesterday, he had been overheard telling his wife about his life in his home village.

The pair were dragged before the Chief. The husband confessed it was all his fault. He said it took him almost a year to persuade his wife to allow him to break the taboo.

The Chief had no choice in the matter. The man was sentenced to be smeared with honey and tied to the stake. Some nests of the most vicious jungle wasps were set nearby. It would take several days before their stings paralyzed him completely and he died.

His wife was pregnant, but because she was a native of this village, an even more terrible fate was reserved for her. This very night, she would be driven out of the village into the jungle when darkness fell. As everone knew, the jungle was infested with night-demons.

I asked the Chief why the taboo existed. She believed it must have some spiritual root, hidden in antiquity. That it was sound common sense, as well as the tribe’s tradition, was good enough for her. She was astonished when I told her that, in the society I came from, complete disclosure between married couples was regarded as vital. She doubted such a society could prosper.

Just before nightfall, the feast ended and farewells were made. As with most of these tribes, the Bizwas don’t allow strangers to stay in the village overnight for fear of contamination. We, accordingly, went down to the river and boarded the Government launch. Darkness had just fallen and the crewman was about to start the engine when I asked him to stop. He and the Commissioner and I listened. The usual night sounds were stilled, and we could hear quite plainly from the nearby jungle the fearful shrieks of a woman.

WELL, GENTLE READER,
as you are by now aware,
this
is the book about the Vanderlindens. I thought writing it would get them out of my system—like getting rid of Guinea Worms, I suppose. But it didn’t work, and I’m glad of that. Just the other morning I was sitting out in the back yard with my coffee. I heard a noise and looked up, half expecting to see Thomas Vanderlinden at the gap in the hedge with a question ready for me: “Have you by any chance read . . .?” Of course, there was no longer any hedge—or any Thomas. But I realized then how much I miss him. He always enjoyed hearing about my dreams. And that’s the way I remember him now—like a dream, delightful and dangerous, as all the best dreams are.