-Part 3-
He took the rucksack in my hand and threw it on board. "Go on."
I stepped into the swaying boat, thanked him, and entered the cabin. I had no plan to engage in a conversation with the mad professor, but he knocked on the wooden door. I ignored him and took out a book from my bag. A few days before the expedition, I had found a fiction book about an entomologist studying ants in the Amazon jungle. I had thought it was a good book to ready myself for the environment of the jungle. I thought wrong.
He tapped my shoulder with something. "Here. Eat this. You're Japanese." He grinned.
I looked at it from the corner of my eye. The food from the toothless man. "Breakfast isn't Japanese specific. I don't need it." I swallowed my saliva and took out my cigarette instead.
"Can you not smoke?"
"Then I'll smoke outside." I left my book in the cabin and stepped outside.
Several wooden crates were stacked on my right. They were the rations for our five-day journey to the village we were heading to—dry foods, water, gasoline, and research tools.
Professor Smit stood next to me and inhaled deep.
"I thought you hated the smell of cigarettes," I said.
"I said not to smoke. Never said I hated it. My father is big on cigars. He smokes his Upmann like Winston Churchill."
"Then why did you even care to ask me not to smoke?" I couldn't help but feel annoyed.
"You should at least fill your stomach with food before you fill it with the toxins. You could get gastritis, you know." He put the banana leaf-wrapped food on his palm and offered it to me. I didn't know what it was, but it filled his whole palm, and his palm was massive for a short man like him.
I was still in a bad mood, so I just stared at it while swallowing my saliva.
"But..." he unwrapped the leaf, "maybe the fish knows how to appreciate hunger more than you." He slanted his palm above the river.
I grabbed the food. "I'll eat it. I'm sure the wild fish can survive on their own." Then I sat on one of the sturdy crates.
"Acho que não." [I don't think so.] He laughed when he pointed to a caiman that was swooping up a fish as big as me.
I cringed from the blood flowing through the caiman's teeth. I butted the cigarette in my portable ashtray and ate the dry tapioca bread. It didn't have any distinctive taste, but it did satisfy my hunger.
Professor Smit sat next to me, offering me a water bottle. "Listen. I didn't know what precipitated the episode, but I'm sorry that I made you cry at the airport."
"It's okay. It wasn't your fault. I... wasn't like this before. After the accident, things changed." I swallowed the dry food. "Sorry I'm such a crybaby."
He chuckled. "It's not your fault either. I used to cry a lot too."
"Everyone cries as a child."
"Who said anything about a child?" he said, shoving a wide dead leaf that just swirled into the boat with his leg. "You see, when my brother, Alex, got married three years ago, I cried every day for two weeks straight."
"You did? Why?" Then I realized it sounded stupid to ask that. Of course it was because he loved him. I had sacrificed so much for my brother because I loved him too.
"Because I love my brother very much?" He smiled, and a tinge of pink colored his cheeks. "We are nineteen years apart. He's like a father to me. More than my father has ever been." He drank from the same bottle he gave me earlier. "But truth be told, it was because I hate the woman he got married to." He stood up.
"Is it okay to ask why?" I scanned the dark clouds. Three big blue birds cawed as they flew away between the heavy treetops.
"Just because. I don't trust women much."
"That's all? Isn't it unfair to her?" I asked.
He hummed. "Wouldn't you just... hate someone who takes away the person you love?" he asked, scratching his nostrils.
That hit home. Goosebumps ran through my arms. I had lost my brother too, but it was God who took him away. And I hated Him for that.
I looked to my left when lightning flashed above us while kneading the tattoo on my neck. Thunder boomed threateningly behind the dark clouds. God must be angry with me for having this grudge against Him. But He too took away the people I loved. If I didn't blame Him, who should I blame for what had happened to me?
There was only one person to blame if not God. Me. And I couldn't live with the guilt.
"Yes, I know that feeling, Professor Smit. Very well."
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