Embedded with the Penan

 Marty Rempel

Excerpt from chapter 13 of The Last Grain of Rice

Embedded with the Penan

Ernest Masters left Basil, Switzerland and his life as medical student to live in the wilds of Kalimantan, in Borneo.  At this point he has been with the nomadic Penan tribe for almost three years. He stays for six, until hostilities with lumbering companies break the tranquility.  During this time he has been adopted into the tribe as one of their own.  He speaks the language, knows their ways and has taken a partner.  This section describes a small part of his life with Lian, his partner, and their close and simple life in the interior of Borneo.

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It was during the wet season when the rivers swelled and the cicadas screamed into the dusk that Lian sat beside him one evening, close enough for their knees to touch.  She said nothing, only silently placed her hand, warm, and sure on his.  That was all.  Certain things are universal. From then on they walked the trails together, shared the night fire, and in time, the woven walls of a home they built with their own hands.

Their romance was not the rush of city romance but the slow, steady merging of two lives shaped by the same forest.  She taught him the story songs, those sung to newborns and children, the chants to ward of evil.  In turn he told her stories of far away places where the trees grew in rows and water came in pipes.  She laughed at the absurdity of it all.  They grew together.

Ernest would struggle to explain, never justify, his relationship to outsiders. What was it that bound them together with such power?  Words like love or partnership seem too small, too trivial.  It was more like the joining of two rivers when tributaries come together to make something greater, something stronger.  Different in course, origin and direction, but indistinguishable once joined.

Nights in the forest were never silent. Even when the wind was silent in the canopy there was the rustle of creatures unseen in the leaves, in the undergrowth. The soft lap of water against the shoreline as it gently erodes the bank, the far off whoop of a hornbill.  Yet, when Ernest lay next to Lian, the noise receded to insignificance, to a distant hum, as if the forest itself was respecting the small circle of warmth they made.

Her hair smelled faintly of woodsmoke and the crushed aromatic leaves she used to wash it in the clear cold river. When she spoke in the dark, her voice was low and unhurried, each word resonated with the weight of the world he was still learning to understand.  She was his guide and he the eager follower.  Sometimes she would place his hand over hers while she described the constellations as her people knew them not as mere points of light, but the stories that surrounded them strung out across the sky.

The forest parted into a small clearing, Lian stopped short, her dark eyes widening.  Above the canopy, the sky was a brilliant wash of blue, almost too powerful for the Penan eyes so accustomed to the forest’s darkness.  Across the blue a faint white scar, a contrail drifted in the high air.  She shaded her brow with one hand frowning while at the same time pointing upward for Ernest’s benefit.

“Ernest“ she whispered, “what spirit is that?” The sky burns and there is smoke, there is no fire.  I have seen this before.  In her own language she queried the everyday mysteries of the mundane in Ernest’s.

Ernest followed her gaze and her outstretched arm.  A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, yet he thought at the same time how strange this must look to her.  How would he explain this to Lian?

He had grown accustomed to the forest’s silence being broken by the ever present cicadas, hornbills, the buzz of dragonflies.  Here, this thin white line in the upper atmosphere so far removed from the canopy and yet so near seemed like a blasphemy against stillness and nature itself.

Finally he spoke, “Lian, that is not a spirit.  It is a machine, an airplane.  A very big one.”

With some understanding, while tilting her head, she responded, “Like the little bird-plane used by the missionaries?  The metal long boat with long wings like the Tree Swift or the Hornbill?”

“Yes, something like that,” Ernest replied with a smile. “But this one, It’s different.  It’s much larger.  The missionary plane can carry 4 or five people at one time if you squeeze in close.  This one high in the sky, again Ernest pointed to the contrail visible far above them.  He paused as he thought of a way to explain the impossible to Lian in her jungle based world.  This one carries hundreds.  Men, women and children.  All sitting together inside a shell of metal flying faster than any falcon any bird you can imagine. 

Lena blinked in disbelief, her lips parted as if ready to speak.  She thought for a moment longer then said, “Hundreds? In the sky? More than our village? They could fall?

Ernest crouched, scooping a stick from the ground.  He drew a rough outline of a fish in the dirt.  “Think of a giant fish, sealed tight so no water enters.  People sit inside, dry and safe, even as it swims deep.  An airplane is something like that but instead of moving through the water, it moves through the air.  The long white smoke you see is its tail and marks its passing.  They are sitting in comfortable chairs in rows, eating warm dinners, some are sleeping, some are staring out of little windows watching clouds below them. While they do this they are carried cross the world.  Its like a flying longhouse.  

They stood together as the tiny dot of a plane disappeared into the distance and the contrail shifted its position as it drifted across the sky.  Each lost in their own thoughts of two different worlds, so close and so far apart.

They learned each other’s silences.  When she wanted closeness, she would lean against him as they squatted by the fire.  When he sought her, it was enough to reach out across the woven mat in the night, fingers brushing until she intertwined them, tightly. There was no need for grand declarations or gestures of any kind, only the quiet certainty of presence, of two lives that had chosen to intertwine.

When the rains came heavy and they were forced to sped more time in their shelter, at times for days, they moved around each other in eloquence as if their bodies were in constant conversation and communion.  He working at mending and repairing tools and weapons.  She at weaving rattan, there they would spend their day in contentment and laughter, sharing stories and the kind of closeness that made the damp walls and dripping roof vanish from their thoughts.

In time Ernest realized he no longer thought of Lian as someone he loved in the forest.  She was the forest to him. Wild and gentle, whole, complete and pure, mysterious and sustaining unending in her depth.  He had never in his life felt this way.  Not even close.  In her eyes, he saw his own reflection, not as a visitor or an outsider, but as a simple man who had finally found his place in the world.   

And so as the days and months moved forward and on into years Ernest the hunter, the story teller was embedded into the village life with Lian.  He wore loin cloth.  He carried a rattan pack, a parang at his side with all of the embellishments of a Penan.  He spoke their language. The only thing that stood him apart were his height and his eye glasses.  He was otherwise Penan.