Island of Demons (40 page)

Was that true? He scooped one up and put it, Balinese-style, behind one ear and a white, not night-scented, cockatoo fluttered down and settled on his swimming head. It was their party trick. Walter dived underwater and the cockatoo, instead of flying off, clutched harder and followed him under, emerging coughing and gargling, like a drowning old man, when he resurfaced. Vicki's “bathing hose” were a tight black one-piece, at that time in the height of fashion and she swam with firm, efficient movements.

“I can never see swimming costumes without thinking of the tarts who worked across the street from the magazine in Berlin,” she laughed between strokes. “It was forbidden to them to walk the streets, so they used to spend all day cleaning the tall windows with old lacy knickers, wearing only swimming costumes, to attract the attention of men below. That way, it wasn't strictly against the law and the
Schupos
left them alone. If anyone seemed particularly interested, the girl would accidentally drop the knickers onto the street and the kind gentleman would raise his hat, pick them up and bring them back. People always assumed they must be very clean girls because they had such wonderfully clean windows.”

Clean! That reminded me. I was not entirely happy about the pool. If the new toilet discharged into the river, then it did so upstream from where we were. Consequently, we were bathing in its effluent.

“Walter,” I said. “That new toilet. Does it flow into the river?”

He looked, as it seemed to me, shifty. “Of course not, Bonnetchen.” He gestured vaguely. “It's piped away. Over there somewhere. Behind those trees.” I was not convinced. That would have required a lot of expensive pipework. I did not recall ever seeing so much pipework on site. “But you are well aware that the rivers are always the most convenient places to shit unless there is a pig stye to hand and there is always someone upstream, even here. But you are right, Balinese decency demands that men should be upstream of women and not the other way round”. He turned to Vicki:“You must remember, dear lady, if you are ever obliged to use a pig stye to check that it is empty. Sometimes the swine are so enthusiastic for your present that they gobble it down before you have quite parted company with it. Nasty injuries have been suffered.”

“In Darmstadt,” Vicki trod water, “they still do not have mains drainage. When I lived there, the municipality delivered this great bucket thing once a week, ‘the can', and horrible little leather-clad dwarves used to take the full one away, slopping it all down the stairs. God, those were bad times. There was no coal and it was so cold.” She shivered despite the tropical heat. “If you had any sense, the only time you ever left the house was to go to Aunt Dorothy's.”

Walter looked puzzled. “You had an Aunt Dorothy there?”

She laughed. “An Austrian expression,
Dummkopf
. The biggest pawnshop in Wien is on the Dorotheenstrasse. So, when you needed to pawn something, you simply said you were going to see Aunt Dorothy. Of course, the can was never big enough and large families were reduced to the most appalling straits. Even friends would come round for a cup of tea at the end of the week, having held themselves all day, and pretending they just wanted a pee, dump a hundredweight of turds in your can and fill it up. There were fights over it. People even killed each other. Luckily, most of the city was starving which meant less in, less out.”

“Thank you Vicki, lovely subject for a painting.”

She laughed. “Walter, you've never told me where you learnt to paint.”

He ducked down till the water flowed around his shoulders. “Mostly, I taught myself from books – Gaugin, Rousseau, Klee. The only real instruction I had was from Oskar Kokoschka when I was at Hellerau. Do you know him?” She did not. I did. Palsied hysterical strokes, wobbly landscapes painted through steam, a lunatic. He should never be allowed near young people.

“A great original artist. But what most attracted me to him was his character. You know he had an affair with Alma Mahler when he was little more than a schoolboy? Alma Mater he used to call her – she was very much older than him. It ended in tragedy of course and he went into the army and got wounded and had some sort of breakdown and had this full-sized mannikin made of her, precise in every detail – yes that one too – and he went around with it and spoke to it, lit its cigarettes and even took it to the opera. It was sort of his Bonnetchen.” He fired me a smile to take the sting out of the joke. “The police were always after him for obscenity or something and finally he tired of being professor and resigned by leaving a note with the janitor and he just disappeared. I sometimes think I will do that too.”

She grinned. “I can only use this line once, so I shall use it now. If you did, I suppose it would mean you were suffering from … Waltschmerz.” We groaned, Walter laughed and splashed her in outrage. I, memorable of the possibility of effluent, forbore.

“Your book,” I urged. “What will become of it? I mean, how will it end?”

She looked suddenly serious. “With the mass suicide, the
puputan
, the Balinese walking into the machine guns, dressed in all their finery. Death is always the only really convincing ending for a book. In this case, it is also the outside world breaking in, the end of the closure that allowed the Balinese to go on being themselves.”

“Sometimes,” said Walter, leaning back Moses-like into the bullrushes, “I wish I could build a big, high wall around Bali and keep it just as it is. No electricity and cars, no grubby blouses, especially no corrugated iron. Then I realise that God gave Man free will just so that he could make all the wrong decisions and maybe I should not try to be more than God. Leave that to the Dutch – like Bonnetchen.” Before I could object, Vicki leapt in saucily.

“You mean you would build, not a wall, Walterl, but just a fence, a fence that you can sit on right alongside Rudi”.
Then
I splashed her.

In
A Tale from Bali
, that was the result of all this, the story is introduced by a selfless Dutch medical man, Dr Fabius, – her acknowledgement to Walter – with a whole rigmarole about this being her retelling of his yellowed version, found in a trunk, of the life story of an ordinary illiterate Balinese. The multiple layering is an unblushing theft from Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
. As Vicki always said with her bright smile, “Ideas are free!” The names are all plucked from the household and environs, Alit, Oka (the Covarrubiases' landlord). The handsome, dancing, juvenile lead, Raka, I suspect, owes more than a small debt to our abused friend and Walter's favourite, Rawa, whom she naturally saw perform. Dull, downtrodden, unimaginative Pak, through whose deeply conventional and constipated mouth Bali speaks its truths, alone seems to have no obvious model. There is no mention of me, of course, but the book does explore love in its many forms, a discussion to which I may claim to have contributed in some small measure. When I later came to read it, I found it quite thrilling, totally professional, packed with Walter's rehydrated researches, a thoroughly good piece of knitting, yet bathed in an oddly relaxed homoerotic warmth, which was, I suppose, but an honest reflection of her actual experience in Bali. Or perhaps it was just effluent.

12

“Walter, I'm simply dying for a Baboon's Arse,” Margaret Mead gasped, wiping her brow. They were exhausted after a day of mountain trekking, being in the midst of Walter's tour-cum-assault course. I liked it when she used words like that. With her New England vowels and her first husband having been a preacher, she always sounded as if she were speaking from a pulpit and we savoured the contradiction. Walter nodded and rewound the phonograph. It was playing something syncopated and irritating that the McPhees had brought back from Europe.

“And you shall have one! I rather thought that might be the case, so I have some cooling in the river. The boys will fetch one up.” A Baboon's Arse, I should explain, was a cocktail survival from Noel's visit – tinned grapefruit juice, cold jasmine tea, whisky and a shot of grenadine to give the appropriate glowing red. At least, that was the canonical formula, though, as with all cocktails, the contents of a particular batch depended on what happened to be at the back of the kitchen cupboard. In the unlikely event of polite society, it was referred to by its academic-sounding alternative title, a BA.

I had returned from a swift visit to Holland to sort out family affairs, following the death of my father. It had left me with my own cocktail of poisonous emotions – pain from all the things that touched me and guilt about the many that did not. With Margaret's arrival, it was as if the scouts and light skirmishers of anthropology had been suddenly augmented with heavy armour. I always saw Margaret as a kind of tank, smashing down all opposition and when she turned to talk to you, it was as if a grey metal turret were swivelling and bringing some great gun to bear. She often wore that peevish expression on her face that professional women have. She was in her mid-thirties, dumpy, big-chinned, with a pudding-basin hairstyle and dressed, as I always remember her, in one of those ghastly, wrapover frocks she wore on fieldwork, based on a hospital smock but with two great flat pockets in the front that she used to carry notebooks like tombstones. She always claimed they were conceived out of simple practicality – easy to wash, immune to the fluctuations of girth that fieldwork provoked – but it was clear that she yearned to have some ritual mark of her fieldwork condition, like a surgeon's gown and mask, with which she could enter the sacerdotal sphere and bring her rare specialist expertise to bear upon a comatose, but grateful subject. Or maybe she just saw herself as gravid with knowledge. Those notebooks were a form of intimidation that she used on her human as well as her anthropological contacts, whipping them out to note down any remark, no matter how trivially made, that she felt required further consideration and rebuttal. Weeks later, she might suddenly come up and say, anent an observation long forgotten, “What you said about the weather is wrong for the following seven reasons” and reel them off. The fact that she was usually right, made this no more endearing. She and Jane McPhee had clearly been trained in the same school. I had once come across the two of them in Walter's sitting room, having an everyday conversation and both taking notes.

With her, was her husband, the British anthropologist, Gregory Bateson, freshly acquired in marriage in Singapore – without, one hopes, the deployment of the fieldwork smock. They had planned to marry in Batavia but the Dutch had frigidly disapproved of her two divorces and refused, seeing themselves as sticking Dutch fingers in a dyke that held back a wave of American immorality. They had done the same to Charlie just before, robbing us of another visit from him and his latest child bride. Margaret was a dumpy five-footer, Greg a lanky six foot five. Together, they looked like a comedy double act. He was big-boned and featured, when he sat, all knees and feet, with a resonant voice and hair like an irrelevance and seemed more in awe than in love, for Margaret was a woman of firm opinions in all matters, whereas Greg was possessed of the greater gift of doubt.

“What will you have, Greg?”

“A beer, no … maybe a whisky.”

“Make that well watered.” This from Margaret. The McPhees, I noted, like myself, were simply offered small Arses without the option. Jane was all agog at the presence of academic eminence, willingly submitting to direction, hanging on Margaret's every word, trying not to curtsey. Greg sighed and said nothing but made a face as of a man suffering a twinge of toothache.

“So, then,” Margaret summed up, “it seems, Walter – would you turn down that music? People can't hear me talk …” He, too, made the tooth-gnashing grimace that he had learned from the grinling gibbons but meekly crouched and complied, then spoiled the effect by returning to his chair with a knuckle-dragging monkey walk “… that we have a choice as far as fieldwork location goes. We can set up shop in a town in on one of the big, fancy kingdoms with all the ritual and music and architecture and craftsmen and have a nice house and easy communications and supplies. Or, we can pick a highland area, somewhere like Bayung Gede we saw today, and be cold and hungry and get sick and work on natives who wear rags and are despised and maybe unfriendly and we'd have no way of getting in and out.” Walter grinned thinly and did a monkey shrug, as if to say he had not made it that way but that's the way it was. She exchanged swift glances with Greg. “Well, I think as anthropologists there's no contest. We naturally go for the second. It sounds like paradise.”

“But why?” To me it seemed crazy.

“Scientific anthropology is not meant to be easy,” Margaret said with relish and made her chin even larger. “It's like the way they taught me back in Sunday school. In the field, the toughest option is probably the right one, the crude not the cute, the steep and rugged pathway not the green pastures that some go for.” She looked meaningfully at Walter. “We want an unspoiled location, no schools, missions, tourists with as much pre-Hindu data as possible. The great thing is to avoid distracting events. What we want is not events but pure structure so that we can study the configuration of their culture and how it interacts with their personality.” She looked around, seeing the devil of green pastures in Walter's furniture and cute paintings, looking for his concealed and distracting events. “What about a secretary?”

“I have a man for you: Made Kaler.” Jesus. How many Kalers were there? Nyoman Kaler's brother? No wait. Balinese names did not work that way. “Kaler” was a common enough name anyway. He ticked off qualifications on his fingers. “He's been to secondary school in Surabaya, speaks and writes Dutch, Malay and Balinese with even a bit of English . He's really bright and reliable. The only problem will be getting him to stay in some hellhole when, like all Balinese with an education, he'd expect to move to town and buy a pair of long trousers and a chiming clock. You'll have to pay him well.”