BIRDS OF THE SUN

RIKA FIRST HEARD OF THE MOUNTAIN IN the flat country of her birth. It was a November day when Leonard, visiting Leiden from Oxford, told her the story of the old woman who carried the sun and the moon in her string bag. They were walking back to the house on the canal after Leonard had given a lecture at the museum. He was a house guest, the first since her mother had died, and to welcome him, her father had let her open the curtains of the old dining room, let in the fresh air. That was Leonard’s first gift, freeing Rika from the tight corner of the kitchen where she and her father had been cramped for a long, bleak year. She had much to thank Leonard for, and she went with him to the museum, where her father was curator and host to his lecture. She sat at the back and while Leonard spoke of the value of ethnographic film, her mind drifted. It was a habit she’d learned while her mother was ill, letting the drift take her elsewhere, into another world, of blue water and blue skies. Sun. She often dreamed of sun. Did Leonard ever think it odd, she asked him after the lecture, that so many of the things in the museum, the masks and carvings he was speaking of, had come from places in the sun, yet were marooned here in the gloom? They were walking along the canal and a soft rain was falling. Leonard took her arm as they crossed a bridge.

In Papua, he told her, deep in the ancestor past, an old woman had carried the sun and the moon in her string bag. Each morning, she climbed the great mountain in the dark, and when she reached the top she took the sun from her bag and hung it in the sky. Its light fell in glorious rays, shining through the trees, so that her daughters could see the abundance of the world around them. Amazed at its beauty, they painted all that they saw in its clear, bright light. They painted leaves and fruit and spider webs, the bones of river fish and the markings of caterpillars. And they painted the mountain with its many peaks. When they were tired and had worked enough for one day, the old woman climbed back to the peak of the mountain, took the sun down from the sky, returned it to her string bag, and in its place hung the moon. Then her daughters could rest, and she could rest with them.

Though Rika was schooled in Holland, that land of reason, there was a part of her that believed that a place which bred such people, such imagination, must be a place of redemption. So when, on a later visit, Leonard said he was going there, to that very mountain, to film its people who still painted the world around them, she said, yes, she’d marry him and go too.