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| DAYAK CARVED: HEAD HUNTING HUMAN TROPHY HAND CARVED HUMAN BONE |
"As a gift to ethnographer Mai Thanh Sơn, the Outlook English Club and other English-speaking friends." - Vinh Quyen.
***
Gloomy. Gloomy like he knew it would be. This time of year, the fog was neither thick nor thin, and completely still. The attire of passersby on the streets were still mostly shades of grey and black, and brick walls were still a gamut of dark elegant colors with the exception of the bars and clubs. So, he was surprised to see he was still surprised by Tokyo, just like the first day he arrived as a PhD student six years ago.
“How could six years have gone by so fast?” he wondered.
He began to contemplate the changes that take place in a person’s life over that length of time—more specifically, his own life—when Ayumi called out his name and walked quickly toward him.
He was also surprised when he realized he still paid attention to the near-sighted tortoise shell glasses she wore. When he used to sit across from her in the library every day, he had always noticed them. The right screw had been replaced sometime before she became his professor; it was much bigger than the left one, though she hadn’t known until he brought it up. She’d taken out her mirror, squinted a little, then let out an “oh” in pleasant surprise. She’d laughed brightly as she explained that her mother had fixed them herself.
Attention to an artifact’s every microscopic detail and a salary of three thousand dollars a month couldn’t persuade her to throw out a pair of perfectly usable glasses. He’d gently shaken his head and smiled as he thought how sweet she was, even her mother who he’d never met. After that, he had also become a kind of ill-fitting screw to her.
The walk from the arrival gate to the parking lot was just long enough for them to catch up after having lost touch over the years.
Ayumi said how happy she had been when the school assigned her to work with him in investigating the Dayak people of Kalimantan. Then, with a cautious sidelong glance, she quickly changed the subject and asked about him instead.
“Thank you, Ayumi, everything’s fine,” he replied just as cautiously, refraining from politely asking about her family.
After a moment of silence, he said, “As soon as I received the invitation, I knew it was you who had nominated me. We might be the only two people here who know I study ancient Vietnamese culture.”
When the car passed through the main gate of the university, he told Ayumi he had wanted to visit her mother first and give her a gift: a kimono made from Ha Dong silk.
Ayumi’s eyelashes fluttered, but she continued to follow the road into campus, winding through groves of ancient pines and clusters of stones painstakingly arranged like installation art.
“I’m sorry,” Ayumi said. “I have to take you straight to the committee meeting. It’s the last one before we leave. After that, we’ll stop by my mom’s house. When she heard you were coming, she got very excited and invited you to dinner tonight.”
“So, will you be eating with us, or at home with your husband?” He realized his mistake as soon as he’d asked.
“Of course I’ll be there,” Ayumi replied.
She explained that from her house to the airport took nearly two hours, so tonight she would stay with her mother. That way, she’d have more time the next morning. The committee would be on the earliest flight to Jakarta and transfer to Kalimantan the same day.
She added that he’d be sleeping at the university’s guest house, which was actually rather convenient.
At that moment, he didn’t care about the schedule. A current of warmth was rising inside him: dinner with Ayumi and her mother on the same day he arrived in Tokyo was more than he could have hoped for.
Disguising his feelings, he returned to the matter of work, “Ayumi, the invitation mentioned it briefly, but I’d like to know more about my role in this project.”
“Our study of the Dayak is nearly complete,” Ayumi said. “We’re just waiting for the last piece of the puzzle: uncovering their origin. You are our means accomplishing this.”
He had, in fact, read up on the Dayak. One of the features of this community was that until now, they still held onto their primitive way of life, within which existed traits similar to those of the ancient Vietnamese, such as feather headdresses, tattooing, claiming descent from a dragon, and worshipping an image resembling the ‘Lac’ bird … Nevertheless, finding the connection—if any existed—between the ancestors of the Dayak and the ancient Vietnamese would not be an easy task.
During their three days trekking through the jungle, he noticed Ayumi looked happy and younger than her age of nearly forty. Her two colleagues also said the same.
“Thanks. Perhaps it’s been so long since I’ve really immersed myself in nature,” she guessed.
These traces of youth brought back his student past once more, and there were times when he had wanted to cross that needed distance they kept between them, like yesterday for instance.
By seven a.m., their guide had still not shown up, so Ayumi and he split from the group, who stayed behind to record the village’s spring boat racing festival, to continue deeper into the jungle where the locals preserved a number of dragon and bird relics. Ayumi needed him to confirm whether the sacred bird of the Dayak was also the ‘Lac’ bird found on Dong Son era bronze drums.
At nine a.m., they came to a rope bridge spanning a chasm. According to the map, it was nearly twenty meters long. He crossed first carrying both of their backpacks. When he reached the other side, he signaled to Ayumi that the bridge was safe. But when she had gone just halfway, she froze, shaking as she looked down at the rushing river below crashing over large slabs of rock and tossing up white spray with a ferocious roar.
He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted, “Ayumi! Look into my eyes, just look into my eyes and go!”
Still shaking, Ayumi took a few steps—slowly at first—then faster and faster until she plunged headlong into his arms at the final step and collapsed. Entrusting her exhausted body to him, she closed her eyes tight. He dropped their backpacks to the ground, and as he held Ayumi close, he felt her hot panting breaths and perspiration against his face. He leaned over, tempted to kiss her exposed lips, like the first time he had kissed her between two rows of books in the library years ago. But instead he held back, and whispered reassuringly in her ear like she was a child as he lifted her up, “You did good.”
Ayumi opened her eyes meeting his gaze, then thanked him in a different sounding voice as she left his embrace.
Her tone of voice and that look in her eyes behind her near-sighted glasses worried him. Was that a genuine “thank you,” or a sign of hidden resentment?
Ayumi and he had one thing in common: their self-respect to the point of constraint. Despite her love for him when they had first met, she couldn’t so easily turn her back on the man she had agreed to marry one year before, and with whom she was planning a traditional Shinto wedding. But until now, she had not told him the wedding was cancelled because she revealed these feelings to her fiancé.
At the same time, he couldn’t get past his own similar complex, particularly the difference between their living and work situations. He’d end up the submissive one in the relationship no matter where they lived, whether at home, or here, or in another country altogether. He was naturally a conservative man who always put himself in the other person’s shoes when deciding what to do, and who never made waves in other peoples’ lives. In other words, he could never have helped Ayumi reach such a decision by fighting for her, or even cheating with her; rather, he had quietly withdrawn in an air of defeat …
After more than half a day on the road, they had still not found the ancient village of Batula as planned. Noticing Ayumi was starting to get tired, he looked up: the sky was quickly becoming grey. He looked down at his watch: three p.m.
“We’d better head back to camp. Tomorrow, we can continue with the guide,” he said.
When they got back to the bridge, black clouds swooped low overhead and the jungle fell into darkness.
The rain beat down upon them while the sky boomed and cracked threateningly.
The bridge swayed back and forth like a hammock in the sky.
Although they wore raincoats, they were both soaking wet and doubted if they could get back. Shivering, Ayumi pulled out her phone to call the group, but there was no signal. The storm became stronger with each passing moment, so he took her by the hand and ran toward shelter at the foot of the mountain.
He chose a corner of the cave away from the wind, gathered some wood scattered about, and lit a fire to warm them and dry their clothes. When they had finished their food, it was pitch dark outside. The thunder and lightning had stopped, but the rain persisted. He was surprised to find that as he and Ayumi sat clutching their knees and staring into the fire, they had nothing to say to each other; more exactly, they were holding themselves back from saying the things they wanted to say, though it was too late and improper to say them anyway.
The fire slowly died down, then finally burned out. He thought about whether, in its last moments, the flame had risen with the blue smoke, or had shrunk into nothing, burying itself in the embers? The embers turned into ash, then slowly cooled. Ayumi slid closer to him and said, “We’re living the primitive life of the Dayak, which may also have been that of the Vietnamese.”
They both laughed, lightening their otherwise helpless situation, then sank back into silence.
Suddenly, Ayumi tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the ceiling.
He looked up and saw a row of spotted lights along the wall about three or four meters off the ground. Thinking they were the glowing eyes of animals in the dark, he took his flashlight from his bag and shined it up to scare them. Ayumi shrieked and buried her face in his chest.
Startled, he quickly turned off the light and wrapped his arms around her. They’d realized the lights were actually the quartz-crystal eyes of human skulls arranged side-by-side around the edge of the cave.
A second later, Ayumi had regained her composure, though she remained seated against him. She took the flashlight from his hand and shined it on the skulls.
“Turns out this is a Dayak cave where their head hunting trophies are kept,” she said, then asked, “Do the K’tu people of Central Vietnam also practice head hunting, like I once read in the diary of Le Pichon?”
He nodded, then added, “The K’tu refer to it as ‘blood hunting,’ ‘beheading,’ or ‘seasonal war.’ They extract the blood and offer it to the gods. Since the beginning, this practice has been considered both spiritual and valiant. Blood hunters don’t travel in groups or kill unnoticed with bow and arrow. Instead, they ambush a member of another clan in a deserted place, introducing themselves by a long-held tradition: ‘This is my name; my village is this; the season for worshipping God is upon us, so I ask for your blood.’ The one being attacked replies in kind: ‘This is my name; my village is this; I have a beautiful wife waiting at home by the hearth and a child waiting beneath the peach blossom tree. I want to see the sun rise in the morning and set in the evening, so I will not give you my blood.’ Then, they unsheath their weapons and fight to the death. Later, though, this honorable exchange was only found in legends …”
When the story ended, there was silence again.
The rain had stopped and the clear sky was full of shimmering stars.
Ayumi moved away from him, and was now gazing out of the cave.
“Do you know what I would say if a Dayak asked me for my blood?” she asked with her back still turned to him.
He stared at Ayumi from behind, astonished.
Hearing no reply, she continued, “I would say, ‘My name is Ayumi; I’m from Japan, and I’m healing an unresolved love. I will not give you my blood.’”
