Island of Demons (11 page)

Then there were the animals. Cats, dogs, canaries are all well enough but Walter had never outgrown that stage where a little boy keeps frogs in his pockets and beetles in jam jars. Any receptacle placed on the dining table had to be carefully examined before being opened. There were stinging fish in the pond and baby crocodiles and a deer with a broken leg that cried pitifully night and day. His snakes – admittedly non-poisonous – favoured the darker corners of the bathrooms for their afternoon siestas. Worst by far were two snarling monkeys with great green teeth that consorted freely with their wild, loutish brothers, fifty of whom lived in a tree in the garden. Since my simian encounter in Columbo, I bore them instant ill will. Monkeys are far too close to humans to be endearing. They moved at pleasure between the house and the wild and made hay with everything that was not locked away. They smashed the china so that, for two weeks, we drank from tins and ate off enamel plates, and that only after having climbed on the roof to retrieve the spoons and forks. Positive as ever, Walter used the windfall of fresh material to tile one of the bathrooms in a mosaic made from the fragments. They licked the paint off one of my Italian canvases which loosened their bowels. (“Ha ha, moved by your art” – Walter) so that they fouled my bed and pillows. They tore up my few Balinese sketchings (“At least it was nothing important. Something they might have drawn themselves” – Walter) and drank a bottle of ink that they then vomited back up over my wardrobe (“What a pity it was
black
ink, so formal” – Walter). I could not persuade him that this was anything but funny. He leaped childishly around on the furniture, arms pendulous, screaming monkey noises back at them – Ooh ooh aah – until they all became hysterical. I suppose it was evidence that he would have made a wonderful father but I wanted to slap him and could not. It was, after all, his furniture. There was constantly some Balinese at the door trying to sell him some new, inconvenient, more dangerous, even more insanitary companion, captured in the fields or woods. He began to speak dreamily of the tigers that lived in the great western forest and his absolute need for one.

Then there was the sheer expense of being Walter's guest. He gave you everything he possessed: lodging, food, drink, laundry, transport, service. He placed at your disposal all his knowledge of Bali and his contacts from the lowest to the highest and money was never mentioned – except to point out that he didn't actually have any, not a sou, no coins, no notes, anywhere in the house. By that time, it had been established that you were in a kind of fraternal, primitive joint economy and to try to segregate his needs from your own would be to betray the friendship given so trustingly. The boys would ask what you wanted for dinner and, when you answered, they would hold out their hands and say “One ringgit maybe enough”. Bagus had been sent back to Buleleng as an economy measure but the free use of Walter's car was at least as expensive and certainly more unpredictable. Petrol had to be brought by pony, at great cost, from Denpasar and, once the tank was filled, Walter always had household commissions in all directions that rapidly drained it again. The boys brought the laundry and Walter bewailed the fact that – though they were very good and faithful boys – he had no money to pay their wages. They turned their good and faithful brown eyes on you in disappointment and, before you knew what you were doing, you were patting their cheeks in compassion and bearing the costs of the entire household. It was an economy of frank enticement. And it was not just me. As I walked around the little town, people would ask, “You stay with Tuan Walter?” and when I assented, they would press eggs and chickens and little presents of rice into my hands – refusing all payment. “Tell him from Ketut in the market” or “From Wayan at the temple”.

Walter chuckled. “They call them
titipan
.”

“Tittypans?”

“
Titipan
, something given by A to B so that he may pass it on to C. Up here we're all in the
titipan
business. A telegram came through the post office the other day from the bank in Batavia, asking when they might expect a deposit and making threats. In a small town, people hear these things.”

I was appalled. “Walter, how can you live like that?” He shrugged and looked suddenly serious.

“In villages there is what the Javanese call
gotong-royong
. People help each other, exchange things without money. While I have never been rich, I think I should have been rather good at it. Towards the end of the Great War, I happened to be in Russia and to get back to Germany, I had to walk across quite a lot of it, through the Russian lines, across no-man's land and then through the German lines. I think many people tried to shoot me, some by accident, others deliberately. When I arrived, they arrested me as a spy and offered to shoot me more formally the next day before an invited audience. I was twenty-two years old and I worried about it all night, after all, I didn't have a thing to wear. I don't think I shall ever be truly afraid again, certainly not of debt collectors.”

Then there was the matter of my first night in the house by the river. We dined by candlelight,
à deux
, in the beautiful cool of a tropical evening, looking down on the shimmering little river. It was a simple enough meal: local chicken – a gift of “Nyoman at the crossroads” – rice and a vegetable dish made of wild fern shoots, washed down with river-cooled beer and deftly served by Walter's smiling boys. The Balinese way of eating is for each person to go off with his banana leaf of food and eat alone. It is a fineable offence to talk to a man who is eating, so meals were always served in silence, the boys shocked and amused by the phenomenon of Western table conversation. There was some sort of a sweet, made from
marquisa
fruit from the garden, a new, palate-tingling taste and the table we sat at, three meters long, was a piece of eternity, the polished trunk of a huge forest giant, split lengthways and resting on massive supports. That table was always covered with work in process – diagrams of dances, a Balinese dictionary, collections of folktales or altar decorations – hobbies that had been set on the back burner or newly called back to life. That day, we talked mostly of Walter. I confess, I felt an insatiable curiosity.

“Walter,” I remarked boldly, sipping coffee, “you have a strange accent, what is it?”

He smiled and swiftly intoned a potted history of his life, as he must have with so many visitors before.

“I grew up in Moscow. My father was German consul there but my first language was Russian. So when I speak German it is with a Russian accent and, when I speak English, a German accent. When I did something wrong, my father would beat me in German with a meter rule and then my mother would comfort me in Russian with soft hands. I suppose it left me with a deep suspicion of the fatherland and the metric system but a deep love of Mother Russia. During the Great War, as an enemy alien, I was interned in a camp in the Urals but I managed to turn the guards into my friends so that I painted and gave concerts and made a little extra money with piano lessons and had really a wonderful time, running wild in the mountains and learning some of the local languages and living with the peasants and writing down their music. Wait …” He threw down his napkin as if tired of words, took my hand and led me up the little staircase to the music room, where the piano stood gleaming on its own plinth, a sort of stage. A full moon shone down melodramatically through the open doorway, a natural milky spotlight, and he milked it for effect, stretching his interlaced fingers and – I swear – flicking out the back of a non-existent tailcoat as he sat down. He began to stroke the keys, slowly and sensually, coaxing forth a dark, wild melody with deep runs and trills and a curious limping rhythm that somehow summoned the loping creatures of the night. I crept across to stand, transfixed, at the end of the keyboard. As he played he stared up at the huge moon, the same moon they have in the Urals. I have no idea how long it lasted. It seemed to be contained in a time of its own. His music grew faster and he bent over the keys and the pounding hands conjured up black pine forests and the howl of wolves in stark silhouette, leading to a crescendo of muted violence that then faded to a crystal tinkling swept away by the sound of the dry-season tropical river outside. He deliberately broke the mood with a cheap, cheery chord and turned towards me grinning. “Based on a couple of old tartar tunes the peasants play on the violin at their barn dances. I forget the rest.”

I was beside myself with the romance of it all. A shooting star rocketed across the sky and showered down the perfume of frangipani blossom in the garden trees.

“You play beautifully,” I gasped. “Did you have lessons?”

“Not really. Just a little, first with Rachmanninov, then from Arthur Schnabel. And now, Rudi …” he yawned and fluttered blond lashes. He had called me Rudi. “… it is late. I'm afraid all the boys have gone to bed. It doesn't seem troubleworth disturbing them to make one up for you does it? Why not just share with me, like the Balinese do? Less fuss everywhere?”

I awoke with the anxious sense of puzzlement that comes from sleeping in a strange house. I felt a stir of breeze on my naked skin. I had not cleaned my teeth or applied the medication betwen my toes. The river sounds of flowing water and the wind in unknown trees came first, then memory of the night before pulled sleep away like a lifted blanket. I rose on one elbow to see Walter exposed in the terrible vulnerability of dreaming, arranged in one of those implausible sprawled poses favoured by that old fraud Gaugin. From his parted lips came an odd musical sound, not snoring exactly, more like the purring of a great cat. As I watched, he supinated brusquely and stretched in an even more feline manner, batting some imagined vexation from his face with one hand. His fingers fell warm and unheeding against my skinny thigh. I examined the body with forensic detachment, took inventory, as Jacob Vorderman had taught me. It was a good, sound basic design without the narcissistic finish of the athlete, but made for use, compact, strong, bearing no marks of dissipation or old injury, indeed, resolutely boyish. The chest was hairless, muscular, very trim, the stomach flat. Tufts of blond in the armpits and crotch like ermine edging. The genitals I had explored earlier and established their good working order. The legs were hard and slim, tapering away into darkness. It would give years of maintenance-free service and wear well – like solid mahogany furniture with real brass fittings, as opposed to the splitting and cracking of cheap veneer. With time it would even acquire a fine patina of wear that would only enhance its beauty and exude a sense of comfort and solidity and so increase rather than decrease in desirability. It would, I decided, do me very nicely. With shock, I realised that I was in love. I drew up my knees to think about that, horribly aware of my own scrawny form.

Normally, in such matters, I had found that there came a point of conscious choice. You approached the edge of – as it were – an emotional cliff, looked hesitatingly over the brink and made a choice of whether to jump or not. I had always been ruled by prudence and, even in the case of esculent Luigi, had turned back at the last moment from the dizzying view. But here, puzzlingly, I was to be offered no choice. I must have leapt for I had already fallen. So here it was then, that thing so much written and sung and, I supposed, painted about – love – and I sounded my own body and mind with fascination and trepidation. What I felt was a mixture of infinite joy and piercing sadness that curiously involved a mellow pain in my left side, so that I smiled even as tears coursed down my cheeks. Shakily, I climbed out of bed, careful not to wake the sleeping object of all my future affections and wrapped a towel hanging there around my thin waist as I groped for my glasses. The floors were reassuringly solid and cold underfoot, like reason. Somewhere out there, down there, was water.

I eased my way through the door, snagging the towel on one of the particularly bristling figures of folklore it bore in carved relief and fingered and toed my cautious way down a precipitous cement staircase with no bannisters, to regain the living room. Even then, it seemed an absurd architectural metaphor. Wooden masks of heroes and demons, arranged like trophy heads, smirked and snarled from the walls to mark my descent from felicity. The last in the series was a stupid and angry Dutch face, with glasses and moustache surmounting many chins. There was, if my memory served me well, a carafe of water on the table. I moved slowly forward, then tripped and fell, crashed into the corner and sent glass and carafe tumbling to the floor with outstretched, fumbling hand. I crouched and listened, cursing under my breath. In a flash a face appeared at the door, the boy Resem, clutching a lamp.

“
Apa
?” He rubbed his eyes and registered a strange very white white man, scuffling for a towel under the table. With the aplomb of a British butler he made it all right. “Oh. I think is monkey but only Tuan. If Tuan go back to his room I bring coffee.” Then I saw the wheels of his brain slowly turn as he tried to work out where exactly my room was and then his eyes traced my guilty route, in reverse, back up the stairs and he grinned. “Oh. I bring for Tuan Walter also.” Before I could say anything, he was gone. I knew the boys all slept in a great bed back there, entangled like pullovers in a draw – the Western bed a luxury that some Balinese adored and some disdained for a traditional, hard, woven mat, to them more comfortable. I heard whispering offstage followed by a belly laugh, more whispering and another laugh, the sort provoked by a Charlie Chaplin pratfall. They all knew then. I crept back, in shame, up the stairs.

Walter was already up and dripping water from wet hair, unselfconsciously naked. As I entered, he turned, smiled, dragged his fingers through his hair and knotted a towel into a sarong. Ready to go.

“Breakfast,” he said with energy. “Downstairs. Take your time, Bonnetchen. Then I'll show you Bali.” He ruffled my own hair in manly affection and pounded off down the stairs, intercepting Resem on the way. Greetings, giggles. I sighed like a shopgirl – he had called me Bonnetchen – as he rampaged through the house like a force of nature, stirring it into life, evoking happy shouts, screams of laughter and the rattle of pans. As if at his command, the sun rose in magnificence above the trees to reveal the valley slathered in a fog of whipped cream. A dragonfly as big as my hand perched on the windowsill and pumped up its red filigree wings in preparation for another day. This was how I wanted life to be.