Both Sides of the Moon Read Free Page B

found that warrior glory does not provide, except with what he can’t feed a family on. Not even pride. For the second time in their history, they learned the lesson that warrior man is worthless in a modern world. Confused at being inside so flush with warrior pride; frustrated that such uplifted sense of self could not be valid, carries no weight. Just as they were the first time, when the white man arrived in hisgrowing numbers that could no longer be argued with.
    But warrior men had music. They gave it and they took it. Of songs in foreign language so easily learnt by easy-flowing Maori tongues. Italian songs the best, so suited to passionate, volatile, musical, young Maori men fighting in that country. They laugh that if Maori men were born Italian they would run the Mafia. Maori men better suited to simple life, simple solutions, love and violence dispensed and despatched with simple passion and intuitive understanding of justice. And if no justice then bad luck, boy. Don’t mess with a Maori. It’s what they say. And laugh about in their mateship togetherness. Here in their thermal baths breaking out in Italian love songs.
    Imagine: Maori men in steaming mineral water under stars singing love odes to Italian women twelve thousand miles away, having war-murdered their male kith and kin.
    A voice cries out, Remember that time? And time stands still then; only the stirring of re-positioning bodies in the concrete tubs, big powerful arms out of the water rested on tub edge, settling back for time to be turned back. This listener in his next-door pool, the river gurgling below us, the stars glassed over by morning blue, my eyes glassed over by pretending not to be listening too hard; the landscape in choked cry. A voice stifling its own choking and changing the story he was about to tell. Too sad. Too sad. Life is for the living.
    They remember the little Italian village where they killed the mayor’s pet pig. Feels just like yesterday that they solemnly carried the pig carcass under a blanket on a stretcher, and the heartfelt villagers took off their hats and lowered heads in respect to this assumed killed Maori soldier.
    We consigned that beast to our God of food with barely a squeal, eh boys? Like night action against Jerry. He departs this mortal coil without right of even a last cry. That’s what they get when they go to war with a Maori. (And I, the spy-child in witness to this, wondering what it made of them that otherwise should not have been. Maori village boys, wholly unsophisticated, marching war boots over Italian soil in town-to-town, village-to-village battle with the German army. Maori boys discovering their genetic sophisticated understanding of war. Maori boys becoming big hero boys in thearena of war.) But Maori boys, still boys at heart, clear of the village and free to fall over themselves with laughter.
    1941/2 Italian pork cooked in a Maori hangi earth oven of olive firewood heating Italian stones to be covered by Italian soil, cooking three hours tender in the ground. So far from Maori homeland , but smell senses take boys back home.
    Maori laughter echoing across ancient landscape. Maori warrior thinking lasts forever. Bad mistake. Thinking is a changing thing, always growing. But can’t tell a warrior man that, can’t tell him anything. Too strong in what he believes he is.
    Yes, and Maori (universal) man-eyes on untouchable Italian women, so beautiful they take breath away, make him promise death most final for Italian man who sides with German enemy and nestles with such delectable flesh. Maori soldier with English-made bayonet pushing into Italian flesh, same as enemy German flesh, eh Mapu?
    Yeah, all the same, Hemi, like women, eh? Yeah, about the same: soft flesh yielding to irresistible hard object. Cock into cunt, pote into tore. Italian soldier-flesh easily punctured by Sheffield-fired steel rammed by tough Maori hand fighting under New Zealand flag on behalf of Great Britain allied