Both Sides of the Moon Read Free Page A

is some place even without imagination.
    The shed, like the houses, is being rotted by its surroundings; the timbers are giving, the wooden hardness is surrendering a little more each day to the unceasing attack from soft of water and sting of sulphur. My own thoughts attack the life here, telling how it has a certain rotting to it, pays not enough mind to the wider world, which yet presents itself for the taking from every foreign tourist. Like ships being waved away when they could be laden with treasures. I look at them, my related villagers, and think of their history: it is too singular to be a means of adaption to the modern. I feel like a heretic, that my thinking betrays these who make up half my existence. I feel the person not of his times. But a yearning to be of them.
    I am Maori in this place by dint of my Uncle Henry being my mother’s respected brother. My own brothers and home are a half hour walk away. I have always been drawn to this place. I wish Warren had been. But, with his responsibilities … The arrangement has become that I move between my two worlds, my two homes, as if no one really misses me so much that any makes stronger claim to me. But for which I am glad. I have to be, or what point in being not one nor the other?
    Wai means water. Wera means hot. Waiwera is situated on the outskirts of Two Lakes sited about the middle of the North Island, of the two islands that make up New Zealand, south of the Equator in the Pacific (this is for the tourists, you understand, who haven’t read the brochures). I don’t know about the rest of the country, let alone the world, only that it feels part of a universal state. The world is right where you happen to be, is it not, it cannot be any other?
    Listen, I need ears to tell that I understand the world is but the private perception of each individual child and man and woman, but that it could be broadened. My father knows, so we his children know, that humans, all of life, are star dust. But these people don’t.That they emerged out of the celestial ferment. They are not conscious that we were billions of years in the womb of space before we became this. Look, we’re right here and they don’t know, they don’t think of it like that, that we are where the Earth’s thin crust has cracks that let the fiery inner core of our beginnings manifest. They’re a simple people who only care that they are alive and well enough to continue as what they were yesterday. They would laugh at my struggling mind-torment with everything and them. Laugh, and then scorn me.
    I am here when the former war men come to bathe, feet on the reminder war-march on the silica home surface; they were warriors once, in their hundred-years-ago-and-beyond ancestral past, then their 1940s World War II duration. Now they’re Waiwera contented, war-sated feet marching to this their peace-stationing place to relive the scenes of war sweet war, memory stained in blood, minds etched in battle happiness. But they talk about rugby a lot. The whole country does. But the Maori more; it’s where Maori man best flourishes, on the rugby field — and when chance comes along, on war fields. They say it themselves: A Maori is warrior before anything . A thousand years’ history has been lived in the making of them (us?). Physicality is like moving in a dream to them.
    Old young men come to soak old war wounds, soak in war memories. They hardly ever talk about killed brothers and cousins and village mates; only brief emotional mentions, let grief stay deep within man, be the engraved name on the bronze plaque on the Archway of Remembrance. Ae, better to speak of slain enemies, good to speak of killed Germans, but even some of them admired. Once they came round to seeing Maori fighter men’s fighting superiority.
    They remember the good times of their long, five- and six-year duration, on Greek soil, Tunisian, Libyan, Egyptian, even in German prison camps. But it ended and they came home and