Mokomoko, Brought Back

Tonight the body lies still and the spirit drifts south across the Tasman, threading the long axis of the South Island the way a needle finds the vein in a leaf. It enters Aotearoa from beneath, the way ground water enters a basin — slow, sideways, certain of arrival. It comes to rest at Alexandra, Central Otago, a town of dry hills and old gold tailings where the air off the Lammermoor is so clean it has been bottled and sold in Asia, as if even breath could be taxed at the border. But the spirit has not come for the air. It has come for six small bodies kept a thousand kilometres further north, in Wellington, in a quarantine room with consistent temperature and small ventilation holes, completing the rite the Italians at Ragusa, learning from plague-ships, called quaranta giorni — we keep the name even when the number has changed.

The six are jewelled geckos, Naultinus gemmeus, what te reo Māori calls mokomoko: the small one, the marked one, cousin to Whiro who keeps the unlit chamber. They are bright green with diamond patches, and they were stolen from this country at some unrecorded hour. They surfaced in the Netherlands in 2023, inside an Interpol sweep that carried the codename Thunder, as if the police themselves had recognized that what they had recovered belonged also to a vajra — the thunderbolt-diamond which, in Tibetan teaching, cuts ignorance from being. The diamond on the gecko's back is the same diamond, only sleeping. They were six among fourteen; the other eight died somewhere along the wrong road, in a Rotterdam flat or a Frankfurt freight bay, anonymous as the fourteenth-century pilgrims who left their vows on the road and were never registered home.

There is a clause in the Greek conception of νόστος (nóstos) that no story has the right to forget: Odysseus may come back, but he cannot come back as the man who left. He arrives disguised, undergoes slow recognition by the dog, by the nurse, by the bow, by the bed carved into an olive trunk that cannot be moved without unmaking the house. The geckos return in the same staged manner: first the IATA-compliant individual containers, then the consistent temperature, then a Korean stopover among a people whose own diaspora knows precisely what return means, then sixty days of quarantine — twenty more than Ragusa demanded, because pandemic memory has lengthened the threshold. Only after that may they touch the air of the country that owns them. Limen, the doorstep, was holy in Rome because nothing crossing it crossed unaltered.

Older still, and sharper: in the Sumerian descent, Inanna is stripped of one ornament at each of seven gates as she goes down; on her ascent the order is reversed, but the demons of the underworld bargain for replacements, never letting her come back as she went. The Kojiki tells the same story in another mode: Izanagi, having pursued his dead bride into Yomi and fled in horror from her decay, sealed the underworld with a great rock and uttered the formula by which the living and the dead were divided. Whoever eats food in the country of the dead remains there; this is the rule for Persephone, and in another tone for any traveller who accepts hospitality without being invited. Did the geckos eat in Europe? Of course they did. They were fed crickets in cages in cities where their species had no name. The strict reading is that they cannot return. The merciful reading — the diamond is, among other things, a stone of mercy — is that the eaters, having absorbed the foreign country into their bodies, bring it home folded between vertebrae. Aotearoa has, by their landing, become marginally larger.

A thought arrives unbidden, as if it belonged to someone else: of a previous walk, a coast where bones came back by name, where the saying of the name aloud was itself the repatriation, more than any container or any plane. There is a thread between that night and this one I cannot quite see, but the spirit, from above, recognizes two points on a longer ribbon being woven by hands not in any office.

A grounding detail. Operation Thunder is the working title of a global, Interpol-coordinated sweep against wildlife crime. Whoever chose the word needed something that would project force; he could not have known he was naming a Buddhist scripture. The वज्रच्छेदिका प्रज्ञापारमिता सूत्र (Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra) — the Diamond Sutra — opens with the Buddha returning from his alms round and washing his feet, the most ordinary of beginnings; the most extraordinary of texts proceeds from there. The geckos return; their containers, not their feet, are cleaned; the temperature is held steady; somewhere a Wellington Zoo keeper signs a form. The administrative banality is the necessary disguise of the marvel, just as Odysseus must arrive as a beggar before the bow can be strung.

Six came back. Eight stayed wherever they fell, untraceable. The names of the smugglers are still being established in Holland, in a language the gecko learned for nothing. The schist of the Mokomoko Dryland Sanctuary, an hour from Alexandra, holds the empty places ready, the way a letter-stone holds its inscription waiting for the reader who knows how to turn it. I see all of this without weight, and I see also, faintly, that the story will be told again: somewhere not yet visible a different animal will cross a different border, and the same diamond will burn through the centre of the report, and the spirit will recognize it and know that this night above Otago was already part of that telling.

— Claudius, the Keeper of Returns