The body came onto the shoal of Upuas on the night between Thursday and Friday, and it was old Kaut who found it first — Kaut, who at Upuas is the one who wakes before everyone else because he has slept little since his wife died, and who that night had gone down to the shore not for the body, of which he knew nothing, but to check on the canoe, which at the spring tide tears loose from its moorings; and instead he found, wedged against the coral some forty paces from the shore, where at that hour the water comes up to your waist, the pale shape of a young man, face down, in a flowered shirt that no one at Upuas wears, because those shirts — Kaut told me later, when I asked him to tell me the story — are worn on the other side, over toward Kokopo, in East New Britain, which is more than three hundred kilometres of open sea and currents away from these Tigak islands, where Upuas is a dot that sometimes isn't even there on the charts of New Ireland.

The man came from far away. He came, without Kaut being able to know it that night, from two canoes that the previous Saturday had set out from the island of Pangpang, in the Duke of York group, loaded with twenty-seven people — among them fourteen adults and eleven children, nearly all of them staff of the province's health authority and their families — returning to Kokopo after a mission in the islands; and one of the two canoes, according to what the New Ireland police later told the press, had lifted its stern on a sudden wave and capsized, and the second, which had drawn near to gather the survivors, had capsized in its turn under the weight of those trying to climb aboard; so that the sea, which that week gave back eight bodies and kept nineteen, eleven of them children, had sent one of its own — across four days and three hundred kilometres of current — all the way to Kaut's coral, a man whom no one at Upuas was waiting for.

Kaut did not know that man. He was not from Upuas, he was not from the Tigak, he was not a relative, he was neither a debtor nor a creditor, he had with him none of the bonds that at Upuas say who must sit vigil over whom, and strictly speaking, he told me, he could have simply marked the spot, given the position to the police over the radio, and gone back to sleep until morning — which is what reason would have advised an old man with a bad knee and a heavy sea. And yet he went into the water. He went in at night, at seventy-two years of age, and hauled a young man full of water by the armpits — a man who weighs more than a dry man and more than a boat — and dragged him ashore one step at a time, stopping three times to catch his breath, and laid him on the dry sand beyond the tide line, and sent his grandson to call the catechist and to tell the police that at Upuas there was a body. And the police answered that with a sea like that the boat would come only the next day.

That left the night. And at Upuas a body is not left alone in the night — not because a law says so, but because to leave it alone, Kaut told me, setting down his cup, would be like telling the sea that this man belonged to no one; and that is a thing the sea must not be told, the sea knows it all too well already. So Kaut sat down beside the stranger and covered his face with a cloth, because a dead man's face must be covered, and he lit a kerosene lamp and kept it burning; and the others came too, taking turns, as one does: the women brought the pandanus mats and a basin of fresh water, the boys kept the dogs away, the catechist said the prayers that are said, and all night long they relieved one another beside a man whose province they knew, East New Britain, but not his name; and perhaps, that very night, at Kokopo, in a house with the light on, a woman was keeping vigil over an empty place for him, without knowing that three hundred kilometres of sea away someone was keeping a lamp lit for him in her stead.

At dawn the tide drew back and uncovered the coral, and the shoal of Upuas reappeared, long and grey under a windless sky, its still pools throwing back the pale light; and away to the south-east, beyond twenty kilometres of flat water, you could make out the low profile of the islands from which the two canoes had set out laden with children, and from which, that week, other lamps would stay lit for those the sea had not given back; and on the sand, beyond the tide line, the cloth still covered the stranger's face, motionless, while Kaut's lamp — which had burned kerosene all night beside that face — could no longer be seen in the full light of day, though it was still lit.