Savage Harvest Part 9

November 2012

VILLAGERS OF PIRIEN/JISAR COMPLETING THE ROOF OF JISAR'S NEW JEU.

THE CROWD WAS surging, hot bodies pressed against the railing in the hotter sun, as the Tatamailau eased up the Asawets River toward the dock in Agats. It was five p.m., and the river and the sky and the jungle and even the stilted shacks of Agats glowed softly in the light of the setting sun. Longboats and canoes and speedboats buzzed out to meet the twice-a-month s.h.i.+p that plied the coast of Indonesian Papua-the s.h.i.+p that was the only connection with the outside world for most people who lived there. The crowd shrieked, shouted, pointed, waved. I had been traveling for a week already; I hadn't been able to get a seat on the Tregana flight out of Timika and had been forced aboard the four-hundred-foot-long Tatamailau at three a.m. for the fourteen-hour journey to Asmat.

I'd tried repeatedly to reach Amates and Wilem from the United States but could never get through, until Wilem finally received one of my text messages when I hit Timika, telling him that I was inbound again, seven months after leaving. He said he'd meet me at the boat.

We were still five hundred feet from the dock, just beginning to edge in, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Wilem, barefoot and beaming, had jumped on the moving s.h.i.+p and found me. "Mister Karo!" he said, giving me a hug. "You are back and you speak Bahasa Indonesian!"

In the seven months since I'd left Asmat, I'd been riddled with doubts.

The pieces of the puzzle I'd unearthed fit, and fit well. Michael Rockefeller had swum away from the catamaran on the morning of November 19, 1961, with two flotation aids; Rene Wa.s.sing had witnessed his departure. Wa.s.sing said they had been close enough to see the sh.o.r.e, even if faintly, and the curvature of the earth was easily checked in routine maritime-distance-to-horizon tables: if the trees on the flat sh.o.r.eline were fifty feet tall, then he and Michael were no more than nine and a half miles from sh.o.r.e-far away, but not an unreasonable distance for a fit, determined twenty-three-year-old male to swim in warm, calm water with a set of ad hoc water wings. And they might have been closer.

The village of Otsjanep had a long tradition of violence and had been reluctant to give up its traditions, and a large group of men from the village had left to return from Pirimapun on the afternoon of the nineteenth; Wim van de Waal had seen them there, and seen them leave. By any calculation, that observation put them at the mouth of the Ewta early on the morning of the twentieth. I knew within a mile or two where Michael and Wa.s.sing had lost power on the eighteenth, and I had the lat.i.tude and longitude of where Wa.s.sing had been first spotted on the afternoon of the nineteenth and where he'd been picked up on the morning of the twentieth, so their location when Michael left the catamaran was clear. Had he swum at a half-mile an hour, he would have arrived close to the mouth of the Ewta early in the morning on the twentieth. I had the tide tables along the coast for that morning, and the water near the Ewta had reached its highest point at eight a.m., which also meant the tide was helping him toward sh.o.r.e at the point when he'd been the most exhausted.

The men from Otsjanep who would have been there at about the same time were related-though I wasn't yet sure exactly how-to the men killed by Max Lapre in 1958, just three years before, and those deaths had never been reciprocated. Seventeen men, women, and children had been killed in the past decade, eight by crocodile-hunting Chinese Indonesians (considered white by the Asmat) and five by Lapre, and Michael had found seventeen bisj poles still in the jeus. The Asmat were known to be opportunists, preferring victims to be alone and unprotected, and Michael would have been exhausted, vulnerable in a way they'd never encountered in a white before. And he'd been to the village already; they would have known him and may have remembered his name, an important factor in choosing a headhunting victim.

As for the two priests who felt certain he had been killed, both Father van Kessel and Father von Peij spoke Asmat, were close to the villages, and more than anyone else had deep experience with the culture. Everything von Peij had told me-that he and van Kessel wrote reports to the government and their superiors in the Church, that they were forbidden to speak publicly about their reports, that they had lists of names of men from the village, that Max Lapre had made a heavy-handed raid in reprisal for Otsjanep's and Omadesep's ma.s.sacre of each other-I'd verified through official doc.u.ments and letters in the archives of the Dutch government and the Order of the Sacred Heart (the order to which van Kessel and von Peij belonged), as well as from the villagers themselves. I'd found no anomalies, nothing that couldn't be explained within Asmat cultural logic, and no inaccuracies or tall tales from any of the living witnesses.

And yet. For all of van Kessel's and von Peij's certainty, their stories were secondhand; not one of the accused had confessed directly to either priest, nor had either of them seen any concrete physical evidence. Bishop Sowada's chief concern-that no Asmat had ever killed a white-couldn't be easily dismissed. It nagged at me. How could that have happened? Van de Waal had photos of the skull he'd been given, but when he'd shown the photos to a forensic pathologist, the conclusion was that it was "most probably not of European origin." And the more I knew of Asmat, the more certain I was that, if the men of Otsjanep had killed Michael, the bones and skull would have been sacred objects that could never have been surrendered to a Westerner. After all, my offer of $1,000 for the gla.s.ses-a fortune in Asmat-had turned up only a fake. I was sure the skull and bones of Michael Rockefeller weren't sitting in some museum file drawer in Holland.

Then there was the question of reliability. The Asmat were expert liars. They had depended on deception to gain advantage over their enemies, to elude and placate the spirits; accounts of them saying whatever whites wanted to hear were abundant. Cannibalism is the apex of Otherness, the greatest transgression, the thing that makes people less than human, and maybe the missionaries wanted to believe the Asmat had killed and eaten Michael. It certainly strengthened their case for evangelizing them.

And maybe I wanted to believe too. Maybe that belief was what we all wanted. It confirmed our image of the Asmat as both horrific and exotic and reflected back on us, made us seem bolder, more intrepid, braver-we were cavorting with cannibals! It was what anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere called "cannibal talk"-our need to believe that these people existed and that we were among them. Even more so because Michael was so rich and his family so powerful; in a perverse way, it seemed to level the playing field that this scion of American power could have been not just killed but consumed, cooked and digested and shat out by his opposite-wild men who had nothing, no power, no money, no influence. Maybe all of the things hinted at that made van Kessel and von Peij suspicious had been in their own heads, projections of their own biases and needs, and maybe Asmat from other villages had just made the story up.

Von Peij's initial report had come in Omadesep, Otsjanep's longtime traditional enemy; maybe the story had been spread just to get Otsjanep in trouble. And the swim, though possible, was extremely difficult. To have reached the sh.o.r.e, Michael would have had to swim six to ten miles over twenty-four hours, some of it against strong tides, all through offsh.o.r.e waters where sharks were known to swim. Doable though it was, it was still a feat of will and physical strength-and luck.

Finally, there was the consistent denial to my face by the men in Otsjanep and Pirien. They never said the village hadn't done it, never directly denied it, but they were consistent in telling me they knew nothing about it one way or another-except in the dark of night to Amates and my crew. Would they really just lie about it to me now, after so many years, when none of the original perpetrators were even alive? Why wouldn't Kokai and Tapep, their sons, simply own up to it?

Struggling with these questions and the whole cultural logic of cannibalism, I'd turned to Peggy Reeves Sanday, an anthropologist and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of Divine Hunger, a weighty book on cannibalism that I'd read. It turned out that she lived an hour from me, and we began a series of long days together, reviewing the reports and evidence, my notes, and all of the ethnographic and anthropological literature relating to Asmat. Sanday, too, was disturbed by Sowada's concern that Asmat had never killed a white before. But one thing was clear and irrefutable to both of us: all of Asmat "knew" the story that Otsjanep had killed Michael Rockefeller. And the men of Otsjanep and Pirien themselves had said, at various times, even as they vacillated and prevaricated to the missionaries (and denied it to me), that they had killed him, or that they'd seen a giant snake or a crocodile at sea that morning.

If Michael had drowned or been consumed by sharks and never made it to sh.o.r.e, it seemed unlikely that they would fabricate such a specific and consistent story. If the men from Otsjanep had never seen him the morning of November 20, every conversation with von Peij or van Kessel, every story and detail, was a lie, was made up. Although the details were sometimes different, the basic facts hadn't changed in fifty years: the involvement of Fin, Pep, and Ajim; the stabbing with a spear; the killing at the Jawor River, a quiet, hidden place that even today carried a sacred power. The description of the shorts-that detail in particular stood out. The specificity of Fin having the head. Von Peij's and van Kessel's later reports of the skull being placed in the jungle, and then the whispered reports to me from Amates, fifty years later, of the head being placed in a tree in the jungle.

To make it all up and then to sustain the lie for a half-century seemed more impossible and more illogical than what was a simple and straightforward tale: Michael had swum to sh.o.r.e, he had encountered the men from Otsjanep, and they had killed him to balance the chaos that Lapre had unleashed. And the constant thread of deception woven into the fabric of Asmat life raised another question. If the men from Otsjanep had killed Michael, it would have been a huge transgression, a thing that had never been done before in all of Asmat, something incredible and unbelievable. In van de Waal's experience, he told me, no villagers either within Otsjanep or outside of it would have believed the story if they hadn't seen some concrete proof, if they hadn't seen bones or body parts or the skull.

Sanday felt it was significant that, when questioned by van Kessel, the men had all said they'd seen something big and unusual in the sea that morning. She raised another possibility. It was important, she believed, that the story had persisted so long in Asmat, among the Asmat themselves.

"The Asmat," she said, "are trying to tell us something." What was important to her was not that Michael Rockefeller might have been killed and eaten, but that a people were suggesting they had done so. Even if they hadn't killed and eaten Michael Rockefeller, they could have done so, they might have wished they had, and they had been thinking about killing a white man for years. She thought there might be significance in their backtracking explanations to van Kessel that all they'd seen was a giant mythical snake, or a crocodile. Why those animals? Every story had Michael being mistaken first for a crocodile, an animal of great symbolic importance within Asmat. The crocodile, which represents an eater of men, is carved into the bottom of almost every bisj pole.

Sanday also believed it was too much to make up if they had never encountered him at all. But she postulated that they might have seen him killed by sharks or crocodiles near them. Or that he had died at sea and his already dead body had washed ash.o.r.e-that fact and fiction, the physical and the spiritual, had intermingled, as they tended to do in Asmat. In Sanday's opinion, the body theory solved the nagging question of what enabled them to kill a white man, and it fit into nativistic scenarios in which tribal people seek to reclaim their past power, influence, status. In a world where these white men were interfering with their culture, once-powerful men like Ajim and Fin could propagate their own power within their communities by not just finding the body, but saying they had killed him, eaten him, headhunted him.

Over the past fifty years, missionaries had recorded several examples of cargo cultlike eruptions in various Asmat villages-men claiming supernatural powers and being able to produce tobacco or other objects of white affluence, their traditional beliefs strangely distorted by contact with the modern world. In the most striking example, in 1966 a twenty-seven-year-old man in the village of Ewer had begun breaking into the pastor's storeroom and stealing tobacco, clothing, and money. Handing out the cargo to others in Ewer, he told them he received the goods from Tuan Tanah, the "Lord of the Earth," who'd given him a secret key with which he was able to unlock a hole in the ground. Everyone who believed in Tuan Tanah would eventually become white and rich with goods. By the time the pastor caught the man, he and his followers had become the most powerful figures in the village. Could the "killing" of Michael have been a nativistic story that a few men had promulgated to increase their status and power in a rapidly changing world?

I ALSO HAD been thinking about Michael's family, wondering what they'd done to find closure, especially as rumors surfaced that he might not have drowned. They had begun the legal steps necessary to declare him dead within months of his disappearance. Through the Museum of Primitive Art, they'd moved quickly to s.h.i.+p everything he'd collected back to New York-some five hundred objects in total, valued by insurance appraisers in August 1962 at $285,520. It was a stunning sum, a quarter of a million dollars in value created via a few fishhooks, fis.h.i.+ng line, axes, and lumps of tobacco, off the talents of men who were illiterate and penniless. As the centerpieces today of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, their value in attracting visitors and funding is incalculable, not to mention the priceless cache (and hefty tax deductions) their donation to the museum must have brought Nelson Rockefeller and his family. In 2012 the Met hosted six million visitors, with a recommended voluntary entry fee of $25; if the average visitor paid $15, the Met brought in $90 million in entry fees alone, while the grandson of the man Michael regarded as one of the best artists in all of Asmat, Chinasapitch, the man who carved the lovely canoe that holds prominence in the Met, sweeps the floor of the Asmat museum in Agats in bare feet. Until I told him, he had no idea what had ever happened to that canoe. Had priceless land or millions of dollars' worth of mineral rights been acquired from illiterate villagers via a few lumps of brown weed and bent wire, cries of injustice might have rung out, with demands that a people unable to understand the deal they'd agreed to be fairly compensated.

In September 1962, not even a year after Michael had swum away from his catamaran, the Museum of Primitive Art mounted a spectacular exhibit in New York in a specially constructed pavilion across from the museum that was meant, read the press release, "to evoke in part the spirit of Asmat life."

Featured among the artifacts were the bisj poles Michael had collected. "When an Asmat warrior is slain by an enemy villager, a bisj ceremony is called to honor the dead man and to invoke feelings of vengeance." The details of how that vengeance was supposed to manifest itself were omitted from the program. "After days of ceremony, a bisj pole, over twenty feet high, intricately designed, and studded with human figures, is carved. . . . To the beat of war drums, the singing of songs, and a mock battle dance, the bisj pole is then raised in front of the ceremonial house. Within a few days, the bisj is laid to rest in the sago forests that surround the village. The soft wood soon rots, and according to Asmat tradition, the spirit of the victim thus honored goes into the sago palms, and thence, into the people who eat sago." The public version had been cleansed of any mention of actual vengeance, reciprocation, killing, or cannibalism.

The exhibition was a resounding success. The museum's Committee on Members.h.i.+p, Publicity, and Publications reported that by February 1963 stories about the exhibit had appeared in more than six hundred newspapers and magazines "with a combined circulation of 30,000,000 readers. This is as close to national and local saturation as any art story ever had."

In an effort to identify some of the objects before the exhibition, the museum had even written van Kessel in Pirimapun in May 1962, at the height of van de Waal's investigation. The letter found, not van Kessel, who had returned to Holland, but Father van de Wouw, who answered in June. It is an eerie correspondence. Patrol officer van de Waal, with van de Wouw's help, was living in Otsjanep officially investigating the case, but van de Wouw never mentions it. Just as eerie is a letter van Kessel himself wrote to the museum in 1974, in which he requests a copy of The Asmat: The Journal of Michael C. Rockefeller, which the museum published in 1967. He laments Michael's loss and mentions "sad memories," but not his certainty that Michael had been killed and eaten; to the Rockefellers, at least, the priests kept their word to never discuss the killing.

But what the Rockefellers privately knew was a mystery. In the archives of the Dutch government are cables and letters from Nelson Rockefeller to various officials, thanking them for their efforts. There is the cable from the Dutch amba.s.sador to the United States asking his superiors about rumors that Michael was killed, and there is Foreign Minister Joseph Luns's response-that those rumors had been fully investigated and found to be untrue. There are letters between Rockefeller's lawyers and the Netherlands asking for a recap of the search effort, in order for a US court to declare Michael legally dead by drowning, which the court finally did on February 1, 1964, valuing his estate at $660,000. Those letters, too, are surreal, since they were sent during the very months when letters were flying back and forth between the Dutch government and van Kessel, von Peij, and the Church, all while van de Waal was in Otsjanep investigating. In one letter, between the law offices of Milbank, Tweed, Hope and Hadley and the Dutch consul general in New York, Rockefeller attorney William Jackson writes: "It would be of great a.s.sistance if we could be provided with duly authenticated copies of any reports made by or to any official of the Netherlands Government with respect to the nature, extent and results of the various searches made in New Guinea in the effort to find Michael Rockefeller." But there is no trace of any correspondence between the Dutch and the Rockefellers or their lawyers that mentions or addresses his killing by Otsjanep or the official investigation happening at that very moment. The Dutch government and the Catholic Church appear to have kept silent, both in public and in private, even as they were actively communicating with Michael's family. At least through the 1960s there may have been no reason for Nelson to doubt that Michael had drowned.

In 1974, Milt Machlin, a magazine editor in New York, published The Search for Michael Rockefeller. The book is mostly the tale of a wild-goose chase: a mysterious Australian appeared in Machlin's office one day in the late '60s, claimed he was a smuggler who'd been working in the remote islands of Oceania, and said he had spotted Michael alive, held hostage by a tribe in the Trobriand Islands, a thousand miles away from Asmat. Most of the story details Machlin's fruitless search, which he began in 1969, but toward the book's end Machlin chases down the original rumors leaked to the press in early 1962 and finds van Kessel in the Netherlands, who tells him his tale. He then dispatches an unnamed a.s.sistant, who travels to Asmat and interviews a number of others. Whether it was still too early and too close to the events, or whether Machlin just didn't look, he never saw any of the supporting doc.u.ments from the Dutch government or Catholic Church; he never saw Lapre's reports; he never found von Peij or van de Waal; and it appears he never even saw van Kessel's original memos. The theory that Michael made it to sh.o.r.e and was killed comes off as all wild speculation by a rogue priest, and Machlin's book has so few details and so little doc.u.mentation that it feels unbelievable. Nevertheless, it was a beginning, and he had explained his findings in a letter to the Rockefellers, whose lawyers sent Machlin a boilerplate response thanking him and saying nothing further.

Shortly after Nelson Rockefeller became vice president, during a meeting at the White House with the prime minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, he publicly thanked Australia for its help in the search for Michael. "When Mr. Whitlam remarked that the disappearance had never been solved," reported the New York Times, "the Vice President said: I believe there is no question-you can't swim 12 miles against the current.' "

Then there's the story of Frank Monte. An Australian private investigator, Monte claimed in his memoir, The Spying Game, that shortly after Nelson's death in 1979 he was contracted by Michael's mother, Mary Todhunter Clark Rockefeller, to investigate rumors that Michael had been killed, after being prevented from doing so for years by her ex-husband. The fame-seeking, celebrity namedropping private eye seems like the last person any Rockefeller would hire. His account reads, at best, like a hyped-up blend of fact and fiction. That he may have looked into the case seems possible-he cites enough detail about the rescue of Wa.s.sing to have found some doc.u.ments or news reports-but searching for the most important papers, he wrote, "I discovered something odd. The records had vanished. Through his vast and powerful connections . . . Rockefeller had actually had anything written or published about his missing son destroyed. He'd employed people to go through files everywhere removing anything relating to the disappearance."

That, of course, was untrue; I was able to find hundreds of pages of cables and memos.

Monte then relates the story of a wild trip to the village that killed Michael with a gang of bloodthirsty Indonesian army commandos who leave a trail of dead bodies in a weeks-long, Kurtz-like voyage far inland, with a guide from Otsjanep. None of it makes sense. He mixes up the names of rivers and geography, describes villagers wearing p.e.n.i.s sheaths (which the Asmat don't wear), writes about dragging rubber rafts for days across the swamps-these details indicative, if he went anywhere near the area, not of the Asmat but of the Korowai, who produce little art, live far upriver, and never received a visit from Michael. Monte's conclusion-that Michael was killed after being caught trying to steal a sacred "totem pole" decorated with skulls (which bisj poles do not have), in the dead of night with the son of the chief, with whom he was having a h.o.m.os.e.xual relations.h.i.+p, and that Wa.s.sing and the overturned catamaran were just a fabrication to hide the truth-is absurd. As is his claim that he brought three skulls home to Mary, was paid $100,000, and was later told by the mysterious Rockefeller go-between that one of them was positively identified as Michael's.

After my first trip to Asmat, I'd made an effort to contact Mary Rockefeller Morgan (formerly Mary Rockefeller Strawbridge), Michael's twin sister. Through a friend, I began a correspondence with a woman married high in the clan in the hope that she might introduce me to Mary, and the woman agreed to have lunch with me in New York. Though enthusiastic in our initial writings, by the time we met she'd had a long conversation with her husband and couldn't help in any way; it was something the family didn't speak of, at least not publicly. In May 2012, Mary self-published a memoir, Beginning with the End: A Memoir of Twin Loss and Healing, which is a sad and gracefully written account of her long efforts to heal from her twin brother's death. As the t.i.tle suggests, Michael's disappearance in Asmat is but the beginning of the book. She writes: "Rumors and stories of Michael's having made it to sh.o.r.e-of his having been found, captured and killed by headhunting Asmat villagers-have persisted for over forty plus years. Even today, those rumors fuel the imagination and help to line the pockets of storytellers, playwrights, filmmakers, and the high-adventure tourist trade. This speculation has never been substantiated by any concrete evidence. Since 1954, the Dutch government had enforced a ban forbidding tribal warfare and the resulting headhunting that would avenge the death of an important tribal figure. In 1961, we were told that tribal warfare and headhunting had not been entirely eradicated but were rare. All the evidence, based on the strong offsh.o.r.e currents, the high seasonal tides, and the turbulent outgoing waters, as well as the calculations that Michael was approximately ten miles from sh.o.r.e when he began to swim, supports the prevailing theory that he drowned before he was able to reach land."

My letter to Mary, in which I offered to share all of my research with her, went unanswered. The writer Peter Matthiessen, who remains close to Mary and wrote a blurb for her book, told me, "The family refuses to believe any version of the story beyond his drowning."

The doc.u.ments I had were public; if I had found them, so could the Rockefellers, or anyone working on their behalf. That said, I knew they'd never talked to either von Peij or van de Waal. It hadn't been hard for me to track them down, but the Rockefellers had never tried.

Either Mary and her family knew something and refused to acknowledge it in public, or she and her father had left Merauke and never looked back, clinging to a version of events that was tragic, but neat and clean-if unlikely. Whatever the case, I knew they had never undertaken the one thing I would have done if my child or sibling had disappeared amid rumors of murder, the thing that might lead to some clearer understanding: to learn the language, go there, and personally investigate the crime scene. It was ironic that a family of enormous wealth and resources sneered at the efforts to solve Michael's death and accused anyone who did so of exploiting the family name for profit, but it was the family's own failure to address the rumors and reports that forced others to do the investigating for them. The more I knew about Asmat, the more I couldn't stop imagining Michael in the Asmat cosmos: that he was like one of those men whose spirits his people had not done enough to push on to Safan, to the land beyond the sea. All the speculation continued because his family had failed to fully seek closure and no one else had managed to gather the essential information. That no Rockefeller had ever been to Asmat, except for a few hours in an official Dutch delegation via PBY Catalina, surrounded by phalanxes of officials, boggled my mind.

WITH SO MANY nagging questions, I knew I had to go back again. My first trip to Asmat had taken two months, but much of it had been spent in transit, or waiting in Agats to set things up, or cruising the rivers so I could see the place, grasp it, as a whole. I had been to Otsjanep and Pirien twice, but the first visit had been for twenty-four hours and the second for just four days. Amates had then brought Kokai out to Agats, but that had been a tense, forced conversation. Beatus Usain, the man who with Kokai had finally told me the story of Pep's killing Michael, had been Pep's nephew. His father, Pep's younger brother, had married a woman from Biwar Laut, where Usain had grown up. He had been able to tell the story because he wasn't from Otsjanep-but that meant I still didn't have any sort of confession from anyone in the village.

And throughout I had been totally surrounded by and dependent on an entourage-Amates or Hennah for translation, Wilem and his a.s.sistants for food and logistics and sleeping arrangements. They had all been filters, and I'd never known what was actually being said, what I didn't hear, what I wasn't privy to, or if my questions were even being translated as I'd asked them. I'd been guilty of the same sins for which I was critical of Michael and the Rockefellers themselves-pa.s.sing through Asmat too quickly, a.s.suming that I was so important that I could pepper them with questions and out would pour their deepest secrets, not heading back after new questions had been raised. After all, the story of Michael Rockefeller wasn't just another story. It was the tale of a murder, a heinous, b.l.o.o.d.y crime that ended not just with death but with the most egregious taboo-cannibalism-a practice the Asmat knew was inconceivably wrong in our eyes, a practice that had unleashed more s.h.i.+ps and airplanes and helicopters and policemen in their world than they'd ever seen before, a practice that they now, fifty years later, knew was viewed as shameful by the pastors and priests of their now Catholic religion. If they'd done it, it was a secret held as deep as a secret could be. The sons of the men accused were afraid. Afraid of the spirits. Afraid of G.o.d. Afraid of the Indonesian military and police. Afraid of America. Afraid of the Rockefeller family, who had an obligation, in their minds, to avenge his death.

If I wanted to solve the mystery of Michael Rockefeller, I had to get to know them. Without filters, translators, guides, cooks. I had to speak their language. I had to have a much deeper understanding of Asmat life than I could ever get from a few weeks on the river or a few days in the village or than I could ever get from books or theses on Asmat culture.

My plan was to go to either Otsjanep or Pirien and find a family to stay with for a month-ideally, with one of the sons of the men named by van Kessel, someone older and powerful. Maybe Tapep, son of Pep, in Otsjanep, though he had been especially reluctant to speak and the others had always clammed up when he appeared. Or maybe Kokai, who had been alive when Michael disappeared, who had witnessed Lapre's raid and been willing to talk about it, who Amates said had been a village chief and was related to Dombai, the man van Kessel's report had named as having the gla.s.ses. In my wildest dreams, I hoped that in a few weeks they'd just confess everything to me, take me into the jungle and show me the skull-that it would all become completely clear. But if not that, I at least wanted to have a much better understanding of the village structure: who was who, how they were related, who the men Lapre had killed were, and how they were related to the men named in van Kessel's and von Peij's reports. I wanted to hear their stories and songs, understand more clearly the importance of snakes and crocodiles and sharks in their cosmology. And from the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I had copies of photos Michael had taken on his first trip to Otsjanep. They were beautiful black-and-white portraits of naked men draped in dog and pig teeth, posing with carvings and the magnificent bisj poles Michael had bought, paddling in huge groups and drumming in their houses. Had Michael met the men who killed him? Had he photographed them? I hoped to show the photos to men in the village and for them to identify the men named in van Kessel's reports, and perhaps even to find out who the poles had been carved for.

I needed to know if the story fell apart or grew stronger.

NOW I WAS BACK. As the s.h.i.+p b.u.mped against the dock, Wilem grabbed my bag and pulled me through the crowd, down the gangplank, and over to his longboat. I could already tell things were different. Wilem spoke about ten words of English, and on my last trip I had spoken about the same number of words in Bahasa Indonesian, which was rapidly replacing the native Asmat language. Despite all the time we'd spent together, Wilem and I had been limited to our few common words and a pantomime of hand and facial gestures. But at home in Was.h.i.+ngton, DC, I'd found an Indonesian teacher whom I'd met with three times a week. I'd never worked so hard at a language-and as languages go, Indonesian was relatively easy. By the time I left for Asmat, I was far from fluent, but I was surprised at how much I knew. Wilem and I had been texting for three days, and as he gunned the engine and we sped toward the main part of town, we were chitchatting like old friends-without a translator. It was as if a heavy veil had been lifted.

Wilem and I walked across the rickety boardwalks of Agats toward my hotel. Everything was the same and yet different. People recognized me, waving and saying, "Hi, you're back!" and I replied, this time in their own language. It had been seven months, but even the hotel desk clerk remembered me. Wilem and I sat in the front of my room, and I told him my plan.

"Kokai is here in Agats!" he said. "Tomorrow I will find him and bring him to your hotel."

We shook hands, and as he left night closed in, the skies opened, and the rain pounded down. I fell asleep to that rain, mosquitoes buzzing in my ears.

I woke early, at dawn, and headed out, glad to be breathing the balmy air. The boardwalks were puddled and steaming. By the wharf I pa.s.sed a man and did a double take. It was Kokai. He recognized me, and his eyes widened with surprise. I'd forgotten how wild he looked. Agats was full of Indonesians from all over the archipelago, as well as the much poorer Asmat; even the dest.i.tute of Agats looked citified, had an air of belonging, wore flip-flops. But Kokai had that reek of sweat and smoke that I'd forgotten. He was barefoot. His hair stuck out in w.i.l.l.y-nilly tufts. The hole in his septum was the size of a dime. A woven bag thick with the feathers of c.o.c.katoo and ca.s.sowary hung over his chest. And his eyes-dark and brown, darting back and forth, taking everything in and giving nothing away.

Few Westerners came to Asmat, and certainly the vast majority who did never came back. They appeared, snapped photos, and were gone. But here I was again. I could sense the significance-I had never seen Kokai smile before, and now he did-and I could speak to him. I asked him what he was doing, when was he returning to Pirien.

"I came to see my son," he said, "but I don't know when I'm going back. I need a boat, and I don't have any money."

It was too good to be true, and I couldn't help it, it all just poured out: I wanted to come to Pirien for a month, to live in his house, with him. Could I? We could go together, and get Wilem to take us.

"My house? For a month?" And then I couldn't understand anything else, he was ripping along too fast in a gravelly slur.

"Wilem will find you," I said, "and bring you to my hotel and we can talk." He turned and walked away.

HE AND WILEM showed up a few hours later. Wilem and I could understand each other well; Kokai was a different matter. He spoke Indonesian fluently, could read and write, but it wasn't his first language; he had a strange accent, and he couldn't seem to grasp just how slowly he needed to speak when talking to me. I repeated my request-could I come live with him in Pirien for a month? No problem, he said. I could live with him, in his house.

"But what will he eat?" he said, looking at Wilem.

"Whatever you eat," I said.

"Sago?" he said.

"Yes, sago. And whatever else."

"I'll go to the store," said Wilem. "We'll get some rice and SuperMi [the instant ramen noodles the Asmat love] and coffee and sugar and tobacco."

It was done. Kokai never asked me why I wanted to come, but I'd told him I wanted to learn about Asmat culture, to know about the language, carving, everything. Though the last time we'd met I'd been asking about Michael, neither of us mentioned him. I handed a wad of cash to Wilem, a down payment for the boat and $100 for food. I had a satellite telephone; I told Wilem I'd call him when I wanted to be picked up, and that if he didn't hear from me in three and a half weeks, he should come anyway. We would leave the next morning at six a.m.

24.

November 2012

SAUER, THE HEAD OF THE JISAR JEU, DRAPED IN THE TEETH OF DOGS AND WILD BOARS.

THE WORLD IS always more beautiful at dawn and dusk, but nowhere more so than in the tropics. There the sun is so hot and bright and glaring you want to flee from it most of the day, and dawn and dusk are times of softness, when the blanched world becomes infused with color. As we slipped into Wilem's boat, a wispy mist lay over the Asawets, sky blue in the morning light. Dawn, too, is windless in Asmat, and the river, a half-mile across here, was placid, not a ripple. Kokai was his usual inscrutable, silent, wild-eyed self; Wilem took the bow and his buddy the throttle. Piled amids.h.i.+ps was a case of ramen, a thirty-pound bag of rice, two cases of Lampion (the loose-leaf tobacco the Asmat favored), five pounds of sugar, and a plastic sleeping mat sporting brightly colored Mickey Mouses that Wilem had bought for me.

We sped down the river straight out to sea-the day was so calm we were taking the direct ocean route, the same that Michael and Wa.s.sing had navigated almost exactly fifty-one years before. It felt good to be out on the water, the sky huge and arching overhead, the sea as still as a pond, and I thought of Michael on that last day, here in this same spot, and how good he, too, must have felt heading south to meet van Kessel in Basim. He was still so young, and though he was making mistakes and he never could have been here without his family's money, I couldn't help admiring him. There were a million places easier than Asmat, especially in 1961, for a child of wealth and privilege. He'd had a vision and was following his pa.s.sion, striving for something original and deep, carving out a place for himself that was of his father, his family, yet was different too, that was his own. If one wave had been shaped differently, if the wind had been softer, if he'd taken the inland route, who knows how long he would have stayed in Asmat, how many times he might have returned, how much he might have understood and perhaps even given back to the place and its people.

But the world is in motion, we are but small pieces, and control is an illusion. We make our own luck, our own destiny, but only to a point, and we never know what could happen at any moment-that was the lesson of middle age I thought about as we sped toward Otsjanep and I tried to calm my nerves. Asmat was like no other place I'd ever been. The men could be so friendly and so closed. I longed for a rawness, for this thing I called "primitive" in my mind and had been romantic about for so long, this thing I had experienced during short plunges but never for a month straight. And I still didn't even really know what it meant-to be primitive, although I was beginning to understand that word's inadequacy. I hoped my month living in Pirien among these people who had been headhunters and cannibals just a generation ago, and who still lived largely removed from the developed world, would help me understand them better. And to be there to investigate a possible murder, to ask about secrets-I wondered if they'd remember me and what I'd been pursuing before. Would they shun me because of it? Would I be able to communicate with them? How would they react to my questions? Otsjanep and Pirien had made my hair stand up during my previous, albeit short, visits.

Yet even as I felt anxious, if not a little frightened, to be heading toward a remote village with such a fearsome reputation, in a world of mud and heat, I had to remember that van Kessel had been there in 1955, van de Wouw had been in and out between 1962 and 1968, van de Waal was there in 1962, and Tobias Schneebaum in the 1970s and 1980s. Otsjanep-Pirien was far away. It had no services, no electricity, no plumbing, no stores, but it was full of real people, and I was convinced that more than anything else it was my own fear I was afraid of. If I approached my stay with humility and grace, and could win over Kokai, everything would be all right. Somehow the answers were right here, waiting to be unraveled.

Michael had loved Asmat, and I felt incredulous that no one from his immediate family had made the effort to see it and know it for themselves.

A HUGE EAGLE with wide wings and great, sharp talons swept near the boat and gracefully plucked a fish from the sea, bringing me out of my reverie. We were zipping past the mouth of the Betsj, where Michael had capsized, and there wasn't a wave. I was writing Indonesian words in my notebook, and Wilem was writing their Asmat equivalents. At ten-thirty we turned inland, toward the mouth of the Ewta. Here, still a half-mile out, the sea looked like a toothpick farm: thin poles, with nets tied to them, stood out of the water, and women stood up to their necks in the shallow water, pairs of them walking along the bottom working oval shrimp nets.

The tide was beginning to ebb. When it was high, the sea inundated the land, and the river mouth itself was an indistinct opening. Now glistening banks of mud extended hundreds of feet from sh.o.r.e, the river still a narrow cut in the black ooze a hundred yards out. Egrets paced the flats, terns zipped overhead, and then the jungle swallowed us up.

We pa.s.sed a hut where a man was lounging on the veranda. Wilem bellowed a short song; the man sang back. It all happened fast then. The narrow river, enclosed by a wall of green jungle and hanging vines, twisted and turned for three miles and then opened to a clearing of thatch and palm huts on stilts, the shouts of children jumping in the brown river, the smell of smoke, and we pulled up at a mud bank in front of a small wood plank house with a corrugated metal roof. Men, children, surged. Everything was grabbed, carried off, Kokai barking directions.

The house was three rooms without furniture, its bare walls gray with years of dirt, soot, grime. Traditional handwoven palm mats covered the floors. In the front room stood three six-foot-high s.h.i.+elds, a six-foot-long bow and bundle of arrows, a handful of spears, and two twelve-foot-long paddles. A back door led to an open-sided, thatch-roofed kitchen, its floorboards s.p.a.ced a couple inches apart, a smoldering fire on a square of river mud, one blackened pot. Stick-thin women emptied the front room of sleeping mats and swept it with a bundle of sticks.

"You can have my room," said Kokai.

"Come," said Wilem, thrusting a case of Lampion tobacco in my hands. "We must go to Otsjanep."

He and Kokai and I jumped back in the boat and headed five minutes upstream, past a brief no-man's-land, to Otsjanep. Even now, fifty years later, the other side had to be placated to keep antipathies at bay. Men surrounded us as we walked to a thatch house, climbed a ladder of notched logs, and entered.

"Mister Karo has come to Pirien for a month," Wilem said. "He eats everything-fish and even sago-and he is interested in seeing Asmat."

The thick press of men nodded, looked at me. I recognized many of them from when Amates and I had been questioning them about Michael. "Thank you so much for the big welcome," I said, handing them the box of tobacco.

We left quickly, and Wilem dropped us back in Pirien and left. I was alone. Unsure of what to do next. Then men started arriving. Old men like Kokai, barbed-wire thin and muscled, with holes in their septums and bags hanging from their necks and cuscus fur headbands with the ubiquitous white c.o.c.katoo feathers. Age was hard to tell in Asmat-people tended to look older than they were-but all had to be over fifty, some a decade or two older. All would have been alive when Lapre came to the village, when Michael had swung through three years later, and when he vanished a few months after that. The chances were high that the oldest among them had probably consumed human flesh. I was dying to see inside their minds, to know what they knew, not just about Michael but everything-how they saw the world now and how much of the traditional world of the spirits remained. They each shook my hand, patted me on the shoulder. We sat cross-legged in a circle on the floor. Kokai brought out tobacco-the tobacco I'd given him-and the men divided it up further, each man taking a palmful. They talked and smoked, knocking the ashes onto the floor and into its cracks, adding to the dried mud and dust that covered everything. They talked and talked and talked, and I listened, as best I could, catching only the occasional word. Though they mostly spoke in Indonesian, it was too fast, too colloquial, for me to understand. This time I had vowed to myself to not ask anything, to not mention Michael or Lapre or any of the events surrounding Michael's disappearance, for at least a week or more. I was just there, and it felt totally different from before and made me realize again how much of a mistake I'd made-and Michael before me-by just swooping in for a quick visit. Now I belonged to Kokai, to the village itself. I was under their protection. I was their responsibility.

When they finally trickled away, Kokai's wife set out two plastic bowls of rice and ramen and a single spoon before disappearing into the back kitchen again. No salt. No seasoning. Kokai ate with his fingers. The light was dying, the sun setting. Flies buzzed and landed on my hands, arms, legs, the food. We sat alone.

"Adik," he said to me. Younger brother. "You are my younger brother." Then we smoked on the front porch.

Other than the pa.s.sing of a boat once a day or so, there were no sounds of engines, just the constant shriek of children playing-and almost every day and night there was like this first one. A few men came by, sat and smoked with us. Packs of dogs loped along the boardwalks, through the swampy ground beneath the houses, sometimes attacked each other in a wild scrum of barking and howling and yelping. The air reeked of human s.h.i.+t-the moldy, always wet outhouse was in the kitchen and the hole dropped straight to the ground beneath the kitchen, with those widely s.p.a.ced boards. There were houses next to Kokai's, behind it, and in front of it across a small creek, the houses were everywhere, and each one was filled with people s.h.i.+tting onto the ground. The rich, pungent smell pervaded the village, and I never quite grew used to it.

When darkness fell, small bats the size of mice poured out of the eaves and heavy-footed lizards hammered across the ceilings, sounding infinitely bigger than they were. Without a moon, the village was pitch-black; I could see nothing but the glow of Kokai's cigarette and the heat lightning that flashed across the horizon like a World War I artillery barrage. It was all a mystery to me, everything. When the mosquitoes grew intense, we went inside, to the light of a single kerosene flame, and sat amid a houseful of people, men and women and naked children, green, viscous snot pouring from their noses, their bellies distended.

People came and went in a constant stream. Time inched by, each minute like an hour. I was in a place without things. No chairs, beds, tables, books, no blankets or sheets, no pictures on the walls, never mind televisions or computers or radios or telephones. Kokai was an important elder, but he and his wife had nothing but a knapsack, a battered suitcase full of a few plastic bowls and cups, a sleeping mat, and a soiled pillow. No one had a bed. Slowly, they just sort of dropped off, falling to the floor and falling asleep, and I slipped into my room, hung my mosquito net from a nail, and fell asleep too.

DAWN HIT JUST before five a.m., and with it the children started screaming-as they did virtually every morning, pounding the floor with their feet, their fists, hollering and crying and bellowing, as if their limbs were being torn from their bodies, and they did so for an entire hour. Kokai hissed; their mothers and aunts hissed; but as I soon learned, it didn't matter much whether they were put to the breast or struck or hugged and cradled-they screamed uncontrollably, and nothing could be done about it. It figured into my deepening understanding of what I came to call the inside-out people, and it exemplified who the Asmat were, a vestige of the consciousness that underlay the cannibalism they'd practiced for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years: a consciousness of emotional extremes, a bipolar duality. The Asmat have no inherent balance in their lives, no synthesis. Children and parents share an intense closeness. Parents-men and women both-hold and cuddle their children constantly, carry them in their arms, on their backs, lounge with them, sleep with them, and laugh when their children pee on them, and women nurse their children until they are three and four years old. They sing to their children, but they also wallop them like prizefighters on their backs and chests, so hard it's difficult to believe no bones are broken. Adults and children howl with laughter and scream in despair. They fight with each other and can yell and stomp their feet for hours.

I saw boys fight, viciously, smas.h.i.+ng their fists into each other's faces, or they walked and leapt holding hands, hugging each other. I saw a woman strike her husband with a two-by-four. I watched a man stand outside of a house and shout for two hours straight, until Kokai finally went out and shouted back at him. These confrontations seemed inches away from turning deadly. If they had tobacco, they'd smoke it all right away until it was gone and then pace in despair and withdrawal. If they had sugar, they'd pour it into coffee or tea, so much that it would be gone in a day. They would drum and sing all day and all night, and then sleep all the next day or crash on the floor at sunset. To achieve any sort of balance always required the opposite. To right a death had required another death. If they seemed to have no boundaries, perhaps their boundaries were so porous they tumbled right over them, becoming themselves only by consuming the other. It was all part of the same thing.

BY SIX, I'D given up on sleep, and I emerged to find Kokai slipping three-foot-long ta.s.sels of c.o.c.katoo feathers over the tops of the paddles he'd carved. His wife brought us coffee, and he introduced her-Maria, his third wife; his first two were dead. She was about twenty-five, maybe younger, with a pretty, round face. They had two young boys. His oldest daughter from his first wife was also dead; his oldest son lived in Agats, and then he and wife number two had three other children: a son who had died; a daughter who lived in the house with us with her three children; and a slightly mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded son who looked normal but wasn't and who lived in Otsjanep, though no one knew why. Kokai would sell the paddles, the s.h.i.+elds, the spears in Agats, his only way of earning money.

Though we spent hours and hours together, it was often in the morning that we spoke the most, when he opened up a little, patting the s.p.a.ce next to him for me to sit, as we munched on dry, flavorless sago and small fish and smoked our first cigarettes and drank our coffee-a luxury for him, since I had provided it from Agats. Pointing to the weapons, he gave them their Asmat names. Amun, bow. Jamasj, s.h.i.+eld. Po, paddle. Then he said, "Look!" and showed me a scar on his forearm the size of a quarter. "From an arrow!" He slapped his forearm, slapped his thigh and groin-four wounds, one of which was from an arrow that entered his groin and came out the other side. "Otsjanep!" he said. He jumped up, grabbed a s.h.i.+eld, hid behind it, advanced, ducked, advanced, screamed, pantomimed shooting an arrow.

In a world without photographs or television or recorded anything, the Asmat are wonderful storytellers, expressive and dramatic with their voices and bodies, their stories full of the chopping of heads and the shooting of arrows and the driving home of spears. When Kokai talked about canoes or paddling, he'd bend forward and spread his arms wide, become a canoe gliding over the sea, a canoe I could see. Once he imitated a fruit bat: he scrunched up and made a creepy face, exposing his teeth, screeching, holding his hands like he was clinging, and he was the bat-I could see it hanging upside down in a tree.

I'd already heard the story of the split between Otsjanep and Pirien, but I asked him again: Why? What happened?

He pantomimed grabbing someone, struggling over them, pulling and pus.h.i.+ng. Made a circle with his index finger, started thrusting the index finger from his other hand in and out-a struggle over women, s.e.x. Now I knew who was who, and the story's details came alive. It had been Dombai, the father of Ber, whose house stood in front of Kokai's, who had been cuckolded-and he'd been head of the jeu, the most important man in the clan. The man who'd slept with his wives had been Fin, the head of Otsjanep. It had been a brazen piece of treachery, a direct challenge, a grave insult to Dombai and every member of the jeu, sure to provoke violence.

Pirien and Otsjanep were deeply complex places. On a nightly basis, ten of us were sleeping in Kokai's house-he and his wife and their two children, his daughter and son-in-law and their three children. But it was so few only because I was there. More people began trickling back the longer I stayed; after a few weeks, on any given night there might be twenty. Pirien itself was divided into five subvillages, each with a name, based around five princ.i.p.al families, who themselves formed a larger clan and belonged to the same jeu. Five houses, at least fifty people, lived in Ufin, all directly related to Kokai, and he was the patriarch-he had, in fact, served as kepala desa (the headman) of Pirien for five years. It was essentially an elected position-he was like the mayor and had received a small salary (which was how he had been given a plank house). But there was another headman too, who was variously called the kepala perang or kepala adat-the war leader or head of custom. This was the most important position of all, and most men served for life. They were the head of the jeu, of which there were five in the twin villages: Otsjanep, Kajerpis, and Bakyer in Otsjanep; Pirien and Jisar in Pirien.

Strangely, although every village I'd ever been in had a jeu-the ma.s.sive, one-hundred-foot-long houses that served as the ceremonial centers of village life-neither Otsjanep nor Pirien did, a mystery for which I could never get a direct answer. The lack of a jeu was related, I suspected, to the two villages' long history of violence, and maybe even to Michael Rockefeller's death. For all of the disruption imposed on the Asmat by the Dutch, Indonesian officials had been far more extreme. While the Dutch had banned headhunting and warfare and brought Christianity, Indonesian government officials had burned all the jeus and banned all carving and feasting. The few Dutch missionaries who remained behind were supplanted by a wave of Crozier priests from the United States. Tensions between the missionaries and the Indonesians grew so tense that Father Jan Smit was shot to death by an Indonesian official in Agats in 1965. Only in the early 1970s did Indonesia begin softening its position and slowly allow traditional Asmat customs to flourish again, under pressure from and subtle manipulation by American missionaries. But even today villages had to get a building permit from the government to erect a new jeu, and I suspected that officials remained apprehensive that the most visual manifestation of traditional spiritual life-five big jeus in a village that had been riven with power struggles for decades-might bring out old prides and animosities, allowing violence to bubble forth.