Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [99]
Sylvia and I had decided it was time to stop looking for paradise. It would always be just out of reach, a shimmering mirage on the horizon. There was only one place where one might find paradise: home. We didn’t quite know where home was, but we thought we’d look for it in America.
“Are we crazy?” Sylvia asked.
“Very possibly,” I said.
Our friends in the U.S. certainly thought so. America had embarked on an endless war, and the world had begun to turn its back on it. The U.S. was a different place now, we were told. Well, we thought. So was Fiji. The villages were being emptied of men, lured by the dollars to be found working for U.S. military contractors in Kuwait and Iraq. More than a few had already returned to Fiji in body bags. It struck me as just a trifle presumptuous to start a war and then hire villagers from Fiji to fight it. Escapism, clearly, was futile. Who could know where the world was headed? The best we could do, we figured, was to ensure that Lukas had as many nationalities as he could, so that, no matter what, he’d always have a place to go. Within his first year alone, he had acquired Dutch, Canadian, and American passports. Should events warrant, he could pick up a Fijian one too. It made us feel like good parents, knowing that if the world went to hell, he’d have options.
In the meantime, however, we thought it might be nice to raise him in the same hemisphere as the rest of his family. Clearly, our priorities had changed. Distressed to see pictures of her grandson wearing nothing more than a diaper and a tank top, my mother had begun to send packages of fluffy baby garb from Ralph Lauren. Someone in her family was going to wear Polo, and Lukas was her last hope. It seemed cruel to deny her, and moving to a climate where we could fulfill my mother’s sartorial preferences seemed like the right thing to do. Sylvia and I were hardwired for change, for hopping on airplanes every two years and beginning anew. But this was going to be a different kind of change, and this time it would take us away from Oceania.
In Fiji, as in Vanuatu, we were expatriates. This is different from being a mere foreigner. When we’d lived in Kiribati, the islanders regarded us as curiosities—a little peculiar, perhaps, often in need of guidance, and certainly foreign. But it wasn’t long before we were seen as locals. We ate the same fish, sang the same songs—or at least the one song we knew the words to—and exchanged the same parasites. We experienced the island much as the I-Kiribati did. Partly, of course, this was because there was no other way to experience it. The isolation was absolute, the deprivation universal. Living on an atoll was like living on a boat. It didn’t matter if you were rich or poor, native or foreign. You rolled with the same waves.
The expatriate life was different, however. It could certainly be seductive. Our dollars went far in Fiji, and on many weekends we still found ourselves at lushly landscaped island resorts, where we’d linger in the warm shallows of the South Pacific as Lukas splashed gleefully about. We could afford a car, a nice house with a view, though not, apparently, a backyard, and when we needed to see a doctor, we went to the same doctors who attended to the ratus. But living as an expatriate can warp you. Every Friday, I picked up a week’s worth of International Herald Tribunes from Bill, an American expatriate who had lived in Fiji for twenty years. He was an accountant for an international aid organization, and while there was no shortage of accountants in Fiji, he had managed to linger on with an expat’s tax-free salary and benefits. Most afternoons, he could be found on the golf course, his membership charged to a child-nutrition program. The IHT, which was obscenely expensive