Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [97]
The following evening, after I had spent the afternoon cautiously paddling a rented kayak around Savusavu Bay, I stopped by the Planter’s Club. I had been told that this was where the mixed-race people drank. Outside of Suva, I was learning, Fiji was a remarkably race-obsessed country. There were indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians, of course, and there were kaivalangis like myself, and there were a good number of Fijians with a dollop of Gilbertese or Tongan or Scottish blood coursing through their veins, enough to ensure that they too were barred from owning land. The shape of your nose and the amount of melatonin in your skin determined the course of your life in Fiji.
“This is for members only,” said the security guard outside the appealing wooden archway.
“Oh,” I said. “Well, do you think I can go in anyway?”
“Yes, no problem.”
Inside, I felt as if I had stepped into a honky-tonk tavern somewhere in Kentucky. There was even country music. I had never before been much of a fan of country music, but after my ears had been subject to months of nothing but the harsh warble of Indian pop music, I was ready to line dance with a possum. In a corner, a group of men played darts and drank beer. I sidled up to the bar, next to a couple speaking German. I drank a beer with the hopeful expectation that someone would talk to me, but after one Fiji Bitter passed and I was well on my way through another without anyone’s acknowledging my existence, I went ahead and barged into my neighbor’s conversation.
“Du bist Deutsche?” I said, asking the obvious. When I have to speak German, I simply speak Dutch with a German accent in the hope that my listener will soon catch on that I don’t really speak German, and then we’ll both happily move on to English.
“Fiji is shit,” the woman said after we’d established that her English was better than my German. “A big shit.”
This seemed a little negative to me. I could understand a disparaging comment or two directed toward Suva. But—provided, of course, that one ignored the politics on Vanua Levu, and the recent strife, and the despondent Indians, and the corrupt chiefs—well, Savusavu seemed pretty wunderbar to me.
“Eight years I have lived here. And I have had enough. Enough! I am going back to Germany. Savusavu is a shit. Fiji is a shit.”
“What’s wrong with Savusavu?” I asked.
“Everything. The electricity doesn’t work. The telephones don’t work. And if you don’t have freehold land, then everything is a big shit. I want to build another house. I fill out papers and nothing happens. I fill out more papers and nothing happens. I drink kava with the fucking chief and finally, okay, I can build. And so I hire the Fijians to clear the bush. I give them money. And nothing happens. So I drink more kava with the fucking chief. He says okay, he’ll send the men. And then nothing. Fiji is a big shit. I have had enough.”
And with that she stormed out without so much as an auf Wiedersehen, her mute companion trailing after her. I felt for her. It was a lamentation often expressed by those from northern climes who had moved to the islands expecting palm trees and beaches and strumming ukuleles. All that exists, of course, but it doesn’t take long to become jaded by one’s surroundings, and what remains, then, is nothing more than day-to-day life. She had moved to Savusavu, I suspected, because it offered paradise at a good price. But what she had regarded as paradise—the unspoiled land, the pace of life, the depth of the island culture—was what made day-to-day life so exasperating for her. Plus, she was German.
I moved on to Savusavu’s other drinking establishment. There were only two: the Planter’s Club and the Copra Shed Marina, which was the preserve of the yachties. These were no dilettantes, fluttering their sails on weekends as they stood at the wheel with a rakish captain’s cap on their head and a gin and tonic in their hand. In