‘Look at this,’ Gina said, putting a folder on the table. She was wearing library gloves as she unwrapped the tissue and slowly turned the images of tall, intricate carvings: an ancestor figure with arms that morphed into a diving seabird; a man whose nose joined up with his penis. ‘There are times when I love this job,’ she said. ‘When the past takes you in its grasp and shows you its power.’

The past or the place? Rika didn’t know, though everything felt too immediate, too alive to belong to before. The blinds were drawn against the heat, and even if they weren’t, all she’d have seen from the window was the street in front of the Toyota dealer. Yet she knew that these things – she didn’t have a name for them, these beautiful objects – were still being made up rivers, on islands, on mountains. Ask Wana. Ask Milton. Ask anyone.

In another folder were photographs of maro bark-cloth from Dutch New Guinea. Rika put on her library gloves and stood for a long time looking at the dancing beings painted on a flat surface. She thought of the mountain bark-cloth, with the same flat surface, the same exuberance. But those were of mountains and leaves, the fruits of the forest. The maro bark-cloth was of fish and birds, creatures that were neither man nor bird, strange poetic imaginings floating in the large space of the cloth.

‘Miró painted like that,’ Rika said. ‘He must have seen these. Do you think he took them?’

‘He was inspired by them,’ Gina said. She meant it as a joke, a half-joke, but Rika didn’t laugh. She was reading the accompanying notes that these were among the bark-cloth the surrealists had seen in Paris in the 1920s at the start of their love affair with Oceania. Rika read from André Breton of the ‘irresistible need to possess, hardly equalled in any other domain’, and from Paul Eluard praising the ‘disintegration of categories … colours and forms, laughter and tears’. She translated for Gina, who, being Australian, didn’t have French, a monolingual fact that continued to astound her. ‘The bird takes root in the woman, the man in the nest.’

The surrealists, she read, would travel anywhere to find Oceanic art. Travel where? She flipped a few pages. To Rotterdam! Breton meant they’d travel as far from Paris as Rotterdam!

‘Easier than coming here,’ Gina said. ‘None of them got anywhere near.’

‘None?’

‘A dealer, that’s all. If it was a love affair, it was with an idea.’

‘With art,’ Rika said. ‘That can be a love affair, yes?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Gina said. ‘The greatest of love affairs.’ She paused for a moment, looked at Rika, smiled. ‘But not necessarily the best.’

Outside their door, a phone was ringing in another room, typewriters clacked, and beyond the blinds over the window the sun rose in the sky. The room was still, a world unto itself, somewhere else, until Laedi and Martha came clattering up the stairs. They had Wana with them.