Island of Demons (24 page)

Walter frowned. “As you would expect, there's some disagreement but most people say it first goes off to Heaven or Hell and then comes back. If it was good in this life, it may go up in caste, if bad it may come back as an animal, but those are only theoretical positions. Most people are neither that bad nor that good. In practice, you return as a new member of your own family. After the birth of a baby, you go along to your local diviner and find out who it is that's come back.”

“And Heaven,” I asked. “What's that like?”

He looked astonished. “Heaven? But it's just like Bali, just like this – what else? – exactly like this. Only, in Heaven, of course, there are no Dutchmen.”

***

“So Badog has gone for good then?”

At the forest-giant table, through a magnifying glass, Walter was examining the huge, red dragonflies in a killing jar converted from one made originally for the preservation of fruit.

“Oh yes. This was just a temporary thing for him.” He removed one with long tongs, pinned it to a sheet, crucified it. Later, he would paint it and send the picture to the botanical garden at Bogor. “He has spread his wings. From somewhere he found money to pay for the ceremony. From somewhere, he found money for another field. So he and Ayu are growing rice and making more Balinese – things good in themselves, as I am sure you will agree.” I had little doubt that Walter was that “somewhere”.

“So you have just Resem and Oleg now?”

He looked shifty, held the lens up to his face, became, himself, a sea creature glimpsed in the depths. “Oh no. Now we have also Alit, Badog's cousin.” He tonged out another specimen, saw that it had lost a wing, discarded its imperfection. “Would you like to meet him?” He turned and called through the doorway for tea. After a few minutes of saucepan noise he came, smiling and traytinkling. Very tall for a Balinese, broad-shouldered, the face of a happy angel but with a slight moustache that gave his upper lip a derisory curl and made him look unshaven therefore seedy, therefore slightly … soiled. Alit means “small”. We were introduced. Giggling, he engaged in the unfamiliar gesture of handshaking. His long-fingered touch was warm and velvety. I slumped over the table.

“You know, to tell you the truth Walter, I'd rather hoped he might be ugly. It would make coming here more restful.”

Walter frowned. “What on earth for? To be surrounded by beauty lifts me. Anyway, it is hard work to find an ugly Balinese. Yes, we have Oleg but that was mere chance, ugliness is something he has discovered for himself and grown into and you, yourself, have done very well with Putu at the palace, a very plain man.” He surgically skewered a calopteryx water-nymph with a long pin. “I expect you will have a hang to sketch him. As Badog's cousin, Badog naturally explained the nature of his duties to him.” Sex was simply unproblematic for Walter. He had always found it easily, bestowed it with grace, enjoyed it rather as one might this cup of tea, without fear or passion. To him it was not the fall of the Roman Empire or the humiliation of sin or self-degradation or even the strutting measure of one's worth in the world. It was just sex. I determined that I would not sketch Alit. Since coming to the Indies I had been like a boy in a pastry shop with eyes agog, greedy mouth and hands permanently sticky. That was not what life was for. I changed the subject.

“Where is Conrad?”

Walter sighed and lay down his lens. “Conrad has gone to take Rosa and Miguel to Pulaki, over in the West. Rosa became over-excited on hearing the news of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on the wireless. Apparently it is the beginning of Armageddon, a new world war.” He made the sceptical face that was his habitual response to politics. “When I told her I had no idea where Manchuria even was she accused me of burying my head in the sand. So I suggested she should go and bury hers. The sand in Pulaki is volcanic and black and the hot waters are healing. They go by outrigger from Bedugul and camp on the beach. It is Conrad's allfavourite place. There are tigers there. Like many young men, he likes to shoot things. I went there before with a visitor who shot things but he got carried away and shot the canoe, several times, and so we fell out in both senses.” He lay down the lens with a sigh and pushed the clutter away. “What the hell. Shall we go? We could drive there and join them. It would be a nice outing for Alit.”

As I was passing through the door, on my way home to collect my overnight survival kit, something caught my eye, fixed above the opening. “What's this? A new painting?” When had he done this? When Walter was at a painting the whole of Ubud knew about it. It was an act that required groans and lamentation and involved and defiled the whole community like a woman giving birth to twins.

He came and stood behind me. “There is a new dance called Oleg, invented by Nyoman Kaler. It shows the mating of two Balinese bumblebees. You know they have a particular kind of motion?” He swayed from side to side like a seagull in a gale. “Young Sobrat has painted it. I think it shows great promise. I showed them how to use watercolour but they always make a total
gouache
of it.” He waited for laughter. None came. “So now we have not just a member of the household called Oleg. We have a dance and a painting.”

I was not surprised that he liked it. It owed much to his own technique, richly jewelled and coloured, crowded with figures. So. Although it was me that took them labouriously through their exercises, it was Walter's style that they copied and his approbation alone that they sought. Balinese pupils remain fiercely loyal. The relation between a teacher and pupil is so close that a student may not marry his
guru's
daughter. It would be a sort of incest against his spiritual father. I had not, until then, visited the west of the island. It would take us all day to reach it for roads from west to east were always lacking. It was all hotter, drier, emptier than the east, with no refreshment in the winds, the soil thin and baked to hot aridity, the vegetation mostly waxy-leafed scrub whose roots clutched at the earth. Forests here were not to be confused with the mossy, orchid-dotted steambaths nesting in the armpit-like valleys of the other side. For here there was none of the copious water that allowed the Balinese to indulge their taste for irrigation and the whole region had been neglected by the Dutch, themselves a canal-loving people, who had seen in the south Balinese obsession with channelling water a kindred mark of civilisation.

“There is,” commented Walter, “a very fine temple, linked to the monk Niraratha who came from Java in the sixteenth century to a large town that stood here. Worried for their security the head of the town asked for it to be shifted to another state of reality by the saint and so it was. The town exists but is invisible, the people,
gamang
, exist but cannot be seen except by dogs. There are, of course, holy monkeys.”

“No,” I snapped. “No more monkeys.”

We stopped along the way at a market instead, bought green coconuts and little banana-leaf packages of fried rice as a madman made faces and naked children screamed and ran away. Woven mats and great red pots were stacked by the roadside, being offered for sale. Alit was bravely nervous, like all Balinese away from home – this was, after all, a place of magic – and gripped the amulet that hung around his neck. We drove on. It was not until nearly sunset that the road skirted the sea and Alit let out a great cry and then gobbled Balinese hysterically. Walter stopped the car and turned to me in surprise.

“The sea,” he said, oddly moved. “This is the first time Alit has seen the sea. His family had some sort of old feud with the Brahmanas of Sanur so they could not go there. Come on Alit. I will introduce you.” They ran off, like little boys, Alit bending down cautiously at first towards the unquiet water, then paddling in the waves, then running back in delicious, giggling terror as they rushed in for him and collapsed between his toes. They returned, grinning, glowing, Walter yanking resisting socks over wet feet, suddenly tired. “After a certain age, Bonnetchen, there are no new experiences, you become dead, wooden. Everything is old. Even such a magical thing as the sea loses its power to amaze. Your senses are tired and you have to get your excitement from others, younger people, more generous and resonant instruments. You become a vampire, like Nosferatu.”

We drove on. The road became a path, floured with salt and pepper sand, running down to the beach amongst bamboos and other plants of unknown name. There in the distant dusk, gleamed a fire. We parked the car, collected our gear and stumbled through ankle-deep softness down towards the retreating waterline where the sand was firmer underfoot. Alit flirted with the edges of the waves and, as we trudged, the sound of distant music emerged and gelled.

There was a group of about a dozen, gathered round a fire as in emulation of Walter's
kecak
dance. Rosa and Miguel, holding hands and seated on a picnic hamper, the sprawling form of Conrad, the two gnarled sailors that had brought them in their outrigger and a mix of other men from the nearby village. Other boats, blue, red and white, with the long snout of the elephantine sea monster, were drawn up on the sand. The music was from a flute and Jew's harp, a
genggong
, being played by two of the villagers and they flashed recognition to Walter with their eyes while the rest rose and greeted more formally. A container of
brem
, distilled rice spirit, was circulating and promptly offered. Walter took a token pull and passed it to me, doubtless expecting a gratifying coughing fit, forgetting I had been raised on Dutch gin, and made a face at an astonished little boy, sitting on his father's lap, his hand resting on his shoulder in gentle love. When had my own father ever held me like that? I felt suddenly, absurdly tearful and coughed in dissimulation. Remains of roasted fish were lying by the fire and a fresh supply was wrapped in banana leaves and poked into the ashes for us.

Conrad was lying back and had a great idiotic smile on his face. He was always happiest on a beach. In later times, he would have become one of the laidback but taciturn surfers of Kuta in grossly flowery shorts, or more likely, one of those intrepid giants who rode fat waves straight at the sheer cliffs of Uluwatu. His great hairy chest was a thing of wonder to Balinese, the attribute of a demon rather than a human. This did not preclude a certain success with the ladies – when I was out with him, people of both sexes would ask permission to touch it – but his tastes lay, I gathered, towards the rosy-cheeked-poetic-damsel sort of Dutchwoman. The men laid down their instruments to cheers and applause and smiled modestly.

“Now we have played for you,” one said, “it is now your turn to sing for us.” Such a simple and reasonable proposition caused mayhem amongst the whites.

“The only song I could possibly sing is of a darkeyed beauty from Guadalahara,” proposed Miguel, diffidently.

Rosa, not from Guadalahara and jealous by reflex, pouted. “I could do a number I used to do in the Ziegfield Follies but it's kinda raunchy.”

“At school, as a soprano,” Conrad blushed, “I performed a version of Schubert's Trout but the words I have now forgotten. I could hum though.” Walter looked at me.

“The only songs I know are hymns,” I stammered. “Plain, Protestant hymns. I'm afraid I have no voice, I cannot sing.”

“Wonderful,” Walter headshaking. “You see how far we have allowed ourselves to be distanced from even the simplest social accomplishments? To say you cannot sing, or dance, is meaningless to a Balinese. It is like saying you cannot speak or walk or do not know how to breathe. In such circumstances, there is only one song to sing, that old English tune ‘Old MacDonald had a farm', translated into Malay for our friends here and allowing them to join in with the animal noises.” He gave swift instruction.

“Tuan MacDonal ada kebun, ee-ay-ee-ay-oh,

Dan di kebunnya ada babi …”

It was a fantastic success. Our voices were terrible but the range demanded is not large and, in such circumstances, volume will easily substitute for quality. Walter teased the Balinese mercilessly, hesitating over the choice of animal, pointing suddenly at individuals who had to leap in with the appropriate noise, picking impossible, silent animals such as the tortoise to screams of laughter, reserving pig noises for the little boy. True, local zoological knowledge meant that the inventory of Tuan MacDonald's farm had to include, besides the more conventional domesticated beasts, goats, monkeys and bullfrogs but I have always been very surprised that no new Balinese art form ever emerged based on it as introduced to them that night. They were reduced to hysteria. We all were.

The villagers finally rose, stretched, shouldered their goods and children and strode off into the clicking, head-high bamboo with many warm farewells and a few residual animal calls. Did we not wish to spend the night in their village? No need. But were we not afraid? Here there were wild beasts, birds, worst of all witches. Thank you. Here would be fine. Rosa and Miguel had the tent. Conrad had his rifle. If the worst came to the worst Bonnetchen could sing and frighten anything away. Might we sleep in their boats if need be? Of course but perhaps the village …?

“Tea,” said Walter in the silence of their departure, suddenly a solicitous butler. “Let us all have a cup of tea before bed.” He set a saucepan in the glowing embers and lit a cigarette, even remembered courteously to set a cup for Alit. “Which kind would you like? We have camomile, jasmine or Indian.” He disposed little envelopes pedantically along one knee.

“Indian,” said Miguel, laughing. “Real tea, proper tea.”

Walter twinkled. “Ah no. I think you should have jasmine. More suitable.”

Miguel frowned. “How so? Why not proper tea? The tea I have always drunk at your house.”

“Because, dear Miguel,” he paused for effect, “as you are always pointing out to us, proper tea is theft.”