Empire of the East (9 page)

We arrived at the moment when some of the younger men were beaching a number of heavy canoes. This, everywhere, is a communal effort in which all spare man-power in the village is called into action. The primitive communism of fishermen is an unescapable fact of life. Nobody can own the sea, from which it follows that the property-owning qualifications of the fishermen are scant. In this case they would have amounted to little more than a house, a boat and tackle. Once again the world over, fishermen behave in roughly the same way. What little money they have, they squander. They are addicted to gambling; inclined to throw their money away. The gods they worship in secret are not those of the peasants settled upon their hard-won and closely guarded plots, located in this case only a few hundred yards away. After a big catch the fishermen buy new clothes for all their womenfolk. No fisherman ever became rich. They leave nothing to their descendants when they go.

The stilted houses on the shore at Teungoh spoke of these propensities. They were neat, orderly and uncluttered compared with the cheerful squalor of the peasant hutments built along the edge of a black ditch at the furthest point of the village from the sea. There a shop sold bicycle tyres, biscuits, powdered milk and paper kites, and besides such necessities plastic and china ornaments, including smirking Disney animals, put on display in peasant houses as symbols of wealth. The fisherfolk would have none of this. There was nothing in the sparse dwellings, with their carefully tonsured thatch and split-bamboo walls, that served no purpose — pots and pans, a sack of rice, pets, fishing gear, a coffer to hold festival clothing — the tools of existence, and no more.

A man of standing suddenly appeared among the group, and the others drew away. The headman, as we took him to be, was in his late forties; eyes creased from scanning far horizons, a patrician expression that rejected the promptings of chicanery, a conclusive and instantly fading smile following all his pronouncements. With a sweeping gesture he invited me into his house, and since he spoke only the Acehnese dialect, Andy was called upon to do his best with a translation. It was a tricky business, for difficulties arose not only from differences of language, but of minds. ‘They are speaking always like words of a song,’ Andy said.

The man spoke of the Acehnese fisherman’s life. The calling, he said, was a hereditary one, and nobody could be accepted into it without being born into a fishing clan. In the village of Beuloh, marriage partners were sought only among the sons and daughters of other villages. It was fortunate — he laughed — that weddings did not happen too often, because they were expensive affairs that could land the family in debt for up to a year. Funerals, too, were expensive, involving the burning of boats, which the government had now banned as being backward and contrary to the national culture. In the household the woman handled all the financial business, but in no circumstances was allowed to enter a boat, and could be divorced if she did so. The village was as close to being self-sufficient as any village could be. They even possessed a part-time cobbler who made the shoes, and a dozen men working together could build a house in ten days. To be able to take the measure of the outside world, however, every man was obliged to visit the town of Tapaktuan, forty miles away. In this way curiosity was cured, and it was an experience, the headman said, with another of his short decisive laughs, that few wished to repeat.

According to the headman, matters of health were the only aspects of their existence calling for the intervention of an outsider. A healer travelled up and down the coast, despite governmental prohibition, to look after their physical well being, and a dentist from Medan turned up every few months to take care of their teeth. The headman said this man was so good at his job that, having removed a few teeth, where necessary for cosmetic reasons, he would cement in the artificial replacements, leaving the patient ‘looking like a politician’.

For this genial conversation we sat together along the edge of a platform in the village’s largest room, which, the headman told us, was used as a council chamber by the notables when affairs of importance had to be discussed. At this point most of the platform space was taken up by a woman weaving on a loom. When we showed interest in the design, the headman waved us away with a gesture of impatience. A pointless whim, he said. Something to use up time. Custom did not permit a woman to wear a garment she had woven for herself. It would have to be given away. While these discussions went on, beautiful, grave-faced, silent children wandered in and out. Occasionally averting its eyes, a child would risk a quick, shy fingering of my clothing. Strong on protocol, as usual, Andy told us that custom did not allow the fishermen to smile in the presence of a guest.

Supplies and communications were the fishermen’s current problem. They themselves lived on the less prestigious varieties of fish, but lobsters and crayfish, much in demand in the town, were picked up by the bus and taken in to Tapaktuan. Now, as a result of the emergency, the buses had ceased to come. One had been attacked, or so it was said, the headman didn’t know where or when, and some said the driver had been shot. Rumours were flying about. Everyone said something different. Here in the village they had begun to run out of the little luxuries of life, sugar for example, and betel-nut. Life could be hard in a place like this when kerosene was in short supply, but they had found a way round the problem by burning fish oil.

I risked a question. ‘Do you ever see anything of the freedom fighters?’

It was a subject which embarrassed Andy and I noticed that in translation he preferred the official government title for protesters of all kinds: ‘security disturbance gangs’.

The headman thought about this, eyes narrowed. For the first time I noticed the small worry beads he fiddled with in the fingers of the right hand. ‘We live here by the sea,’ he said, ‘sometimes the wind troubles us, no more than that.’

‘They’re not in these parts?’

‘They are in the hills. I hear stories and I forget them as soon as I can. If they have friends here, I cannot say. Now I have told you everything I know.’

There was nothing in any of the books about Tapaktuan, yet a tiny circle on the map showed that what until recently must have been a fishing village like Beuloh and the rest had enlarged into a sizeable town. This was confirmed on its outskirts by the presence of a police station sited in a spacious rose garden outside which motorists were being stopped for contributions to a police charity.

In situations such as this Andy was invaluable. The complexities of Indonesian protocol had been extended to road-users, with a code of correct conduct applicable not only to other drivers but pedestrians. Possibly from motives of prestige, many villages went in for unnecessarily complicated road systems, and in these cases we depended on Andy to enquire the way. At first whoever sat next to the window had wound it down to allow him to call to the nearest pedestrian, but Andy assured us that in Indonesia this was discourteous. It was correct to stop the car, get out and approach the passerby, introduce oneself, say a few words about the journey, and only then put the necessary questions. Any encounter with the police was a more delicate matter, and there were rules for dealing with this, too. In this event you slowed to less than a walking pace but kept moving unless actually stopped. If it was a request for money, you listened, smiled, nodded, and if you dared produced an excuse. In this case Andy said, ‘My friends are foreigners. They are going to change money and will return.’ The policeman seemed unhappy, but there was no order to stop, so Gawaine accelerated briskly away.

After the harmonious, undemanding presence of the fishing villages, Tapaktuan came almost as a shock. Lake Toba, fifty miles away across the mountains, was currently the greatest tourist lodestar in Sumatra. It was comfortably outside the borders of Aceh, the climate was splendid, the views in all directions magnificent, and cheap domestic labour was available for the many rich citizens of Medan who had built themselves villas by the lake. Andy, having worked with his water-sports firm on the lake, was surprised to find that most of them soon got tired of life there, and of the Batak people who were their neighbours, who resented the presence of city folk. About four years earlier work had started on shortening and improving the rudimentary road linking Toba with the coast, provoking a stampede of Toba-resident capitalists down to Tapaktuan to put their money into land, and be first with a holiday home before this place, too, was spoilt. It was a process that was well advanced. Lulabah, Teungoh and Tantanoh, under the constraints of poverty, were beautiful. Tapaktuan, now rich, was on its way to ugliness and there was a smell of corruption about it. Coming into the town we looked down on rows of brash new villas, set among freshly planted palms in a wasteland of fresh concrete. The villas had high walls topped with glass, and in each case the view through decorative iron gates was of a garden with a summer house made of painted concrete logs. There were many guard dogs about on leads, and when we stopped so Andy could jump out to ask for a hotel, an elegant lady passed dragging a woolly Alsatian of the kind much fancied in Indonesia, whose efforts to lift his leg she frustrated with whisks of a palm frond carried for that purpose. Although devoid of traffic, Tapaktuan had a one-way system that sent us all round the town in our search for the hotel to which we had been directed. It was full of notices warning of motoring offences, and requests not to park, and a squad car prowled in this emptiness, in the direction of which we nodded and smiled with what affability we could muster.

That evening, after our long, unvarying intake of rice, bananas and stale cake, we dined with relief at The Select. The manager told us it was a special evening. A personality from Berastagi was celebrating his birthday. It was also a karaoke evening and he hoped we would join in. The town, he told us, was dry, but in announcing this he succeeded in conferring a privilege, for with a narrowing of one eye and a flickering of the eyelids he indicated that this would not apply in our case, and we were led through a curtain into an inner room in which the writ of Islam did not run.

Most of the tables were already taken, and Indonesian protocol lay heavy on the air. Following Andy’s instructions we exchanged greetings with each table in turn. These were the people from Toba, engaged in ceremonial conversation and tittering very faintly at ceremonial jokes. Our surroundings could have been the corner of a furniture showroom in a London department store, and there was a tendency to the ornate. This was the temple of artifice. What was to be done in a situation where orchids are as common as weeds? The flowers on the table were artificial, yet so subtly contrived that even fingering the plastic petals it was hard to be convinced of their unreality. An unusual-looking palm had been placed in a tub, and even its living model’s tiny defects of leaf and stem had been copied with bewildering fidelity. The room was still festooned, remarkably enough in a Muslim country, with decorations for a Christmas long-since past, featuring gold-sprayed cupids and plastic holly. Behind the curtains the well-heeled old timers from Toba had joined in the choruses of ‘Bright Eyes’ and ‘Down Mexico Way’, and now the celebrations for the important guest started with party-poppers and ‘Happy Birthday to You’.

‘Ep-pi bir-deh di-ya Koentjaraningrat,

Ep-pi bir-deh to you.’

Through the window we looked down on a nightscape of sand and sea. In these latitudes the coming of darkness never quite drops a shutter over details revealed by the day. There may have been a moon somewhere, for the sky was the colour of pewter, and the slow, black waves could be seen moving up the beach, each in turn tossing down a little phosphorescence into the hollow it was about to fill. Rocks were embedded in the sand like pre-historic reptiles, and while we watched we realized that excited juvenile noises came from boys about to hunt land-crabs by torchlight. We had watched them that afternoon before they had been called away, and their game broken up, for a meal perhaps, or for prayers. A promising hole would be enclosed by a circle of sticks or stones some twenty foot in diameter and the boys would retreat, fall in behind a line, and wait until the crab had scrambled across this before giving chase. In a variation of this game, one of the boys released a crab, deemed for this purpose to be his property. If judged to have lost him points by a poor performance in the chase, he would tear one or two legs off and throw it into the sea.

The patrons of The Select were outstandingly gregarious. In between the slow appearance of courses they got up and wandered from table to table practising the art of Indonesian small-talk. Some of them had brought with them paper hats. The men bent over the women’s hands and presented them with stunning forgeries of blooms, artfully concealed until this moment. A woman came up to us who might have been brought here at the end of an immensely protracted Sumatran wedding ceremony, for her face was stark white with powder, and her eyelids blackened with eye-shadow. She held out a pink-cheeked male doll to be admired. ‘Name is Charlie,’ she said. She was followed by a man in a pin-stripe suit and cravat. ‘Good evening, gentlemen. How you are liking this country? I am collector of taxes. This Maria. I am Karim. Please meeting. And you are from England? I am familiar. Manchester United, Buckingham Castle, Trafalgar Road. Seeing you again soon. Bye-bye.’

T-shirts would normally have been excluded from an establishment of this class but at this point a youngster belonging to one of the select families drifted into sight wearing one. ‘Fantasy’, it said, ‘is OK.’ And this about summed it up.

Among Tapaktuan’s minor corruptions was the hotel. The losmen, reported as ‘simple and pleasant’ and which would have suited us well, was closed. Of the two hotels, the one recommended in the book, which was also the cheaper, was down by the sea front. We went there, and although there were no signs of life about the place, we were informed that it was full. The clerk picked up the phone, and made a call to the more expensive hotel, where with a congratulatory smile he informed us he had been able to reserve the only two rooms left in town. They were ‘executive’ rooms we were told on arrival (everything in Tapaktuan was executive, or exclusive: ‘expensive but with every comfort and convenience’). A mania for folksy imitation was responsible for bed-lamps disguised as spotted red toadstools, but these would not switch on, and nothing really worked. It was hard to believe that we were not the only guests. We discovered that both hotels had the same owner.