The Caprices

by Sabina Murray

  Bouman went to stand at the door. The orange sun was sinking fast behind the topmost brushes of the palms. There was a soothing hush hush of waves, out of sight from where he stood. A bird excited by the final moments of the day let forth a rattling cackle, beat the warm air with its wings, then followed the sinking sun into the jungle. If his wife had still been alive, she would have stood on the doorstep and started yelling. One call from her and the entire household would have leaped to attention, come running across the swept dirt of the compound. The very chickens would have cackled to life. That gnarled pony tied to the post would have raised his head in respectful attention, but Bouman could only transfer his weight from one bare foot to the other, adjust the waist of his baggy pants, and hope that someone would notice him so forlorn and bereft of tea.

  He smelled chicken curry. Bouman looked to the cooking shack and was surprised to see Katrina exit. She was wearing her new white kabeya, the one embroidered in a floral motif, which had been very costly; she was hurrying through the compound’s center with such speed that she lost her slipper and had to go back for it.

  “Katrina!” called Bouman.

  She stopped, stunned, and seemingly guilty. “Father?”

  “Where is my tea?”

  Katrina put her slipper on and turned back in the direction of the cooking shack.

  “What is this nonsense?” he called again.

  “Father, we have a visitor.”

  “A visitor?”

  “He’s on the veranda. I’ll bring the tea there.”

  Bouman raised his eyebrows in resignation. He hadn’t heard anyone on the veranda but now on reentering the living room he could hear the low voice of Aya, the housekeeper, chattering away. He peeked out the door and sure enough, seated at the table—on which someone had set a large stinking bunch of frangipani—was a young native in brilliantly pressed colonial whites. Bouman looked at his own bare feet and baggy batik pants with some amusement. His European shirt, made from coarse local cotton, was frayed at the collar. Bouman felt a certain pride in all of this, especially the way that it would annoy Katrina, the way her immaculate dress was annoying him. Aya was squatting on the floor next to the visitor’s ankles. Her elbows rested on her knees and she absently swatted the air in front of her face for mosquitoes.

  When Aya noticed Bouman she jumped up straight.

  “Tea,” she said, embarrassed.

  “Oh, forget the tea,” said Bouman. “Gin now and some limeade for our visitor.”

  “Mr. Bouman . . .” The visitor was now standing, his hands clasped behind his back, his head at a respectful incline.

  “Yes, I am Bouman. And you?”

  “I am Tan Lumbantobing. I deeply appreciate your hospitality.”

  “I can take no credit for that,” said Bouman. “But I am not so rude as to deny that the hospitality of my daughter and my housekeeper is correct and admirable.” Bouman smiled. He was actually relieved at his guest, better than a European planter, who would be eager for fresh sympathy over disease and sullen workers. “You will not mind if I call you Tan?”

  The young man smiled.

  “Are you a visitor or a customer?”

  “That depends on what you’re selling.”

  “You are looking for weapons and gunpowder.” Bouman shook his head. “Excuse my frankness, but I am an old man and don’t want to die not having spoken my mind.” Bouman was just forty-five, but felt a great deal older. The sun had creased his skin and the army had calcified his joints, which made him seem old at first but, on closer look, permanent.

  The drinks arrived and Bouman poured himself a glass of gin. Tan was smiling at his hands in subtle, respectful silence.

  “I would offer you gin, but I suspect your religion forbids it. If you care to help yourself, go right ahead.”

  Tan took the glass of limeade. He sipped and nodded at Bouman. “This is very refreshing,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Bouman, “refreshing. I prefer my beverages steeped and aged—pickled berries,” he said, raising the gin, “or dead leaves soaked in hot water.”

  Katrina appeared at the door with the tea. She set it down on the table and wiped her hands on her skirt. She was flushed and distracted.

  “Sit down, for heaven’s sake. Have some tea. Have some gin, if you like.” Katrina did not move. She looked from the guest, back over to her father, then at her hands. She was paralyzed with embarrassment.

  “Where’s the food?” said Bouman to his daughter.

  “It will be ready soon,” Katrina whispered.

  Bouman took a mouthful of gin and closed his eyes. He smiled. “She is a quiet girl,” he said to Tan, “but good. She is nothing like her mother, who was wild and, in my opinion, better. I find it hard to believe that there was something that could kill that woman, but there was. And now she is dead ten years.”

  “You are lucky to have a daughter to care for you,” said Tan.

  “Yes. Yes, I am.” Bouman drank again. “And you, where is your family?”

  “My father is in Aceh. My brother is also on a buying expedition. He has gone to the west.”

  “How are you traveling?”

  “By prahu.”

  “I saw none.”

  “My brother has taken the boat with him. I do not mean to tax your hospitality, but your housekeeper told me that I could stay in a room in the manager’s quarters. It is only for one week.”

  “You are welcome to stay as long as you like.” Bouman did not care what Tan did with his time. “You are from Aceh?”

  The young man nodded.

  “A relative of the raja?”

  “Yes.”

  “I trust he is alive and well?”

  “Alive, but not well.”

  Even better, thought Bouman. “Did he speak of me?”

  “Only to say that during the war, you had been on opposite sides, but if there was one Dutchman in Sumatra who could give me a straight answer, it was you.”

  “I was on the side of pepper. That’s what we fought for in Aceh. Many lives were wasted, uselessly, on both sides. I will not have the stuff on my table.”

  “Pepper?”

  “Pepper and war, so if we must talk of arms, we will do so after we eat.” Bouman spun his glass on the table.

  “You lost your fingers in Aceh?” asked Tan.

  Bouman raised his right hand. The thumb was solid and his fore- and middle fingers had survived the war, but the other two were sheared right off. The shadow of Bouman’s altered hand fell across Katrina’s face. “During the war, but not because of it. A bull elephant frightened by the conflict entered camp. Some were trampled and in the effort to kill it, a stray bullet took off my fingers.”

  “I am sorry that you lost your fingers.”

  “Oh, I still have them, and later, if I’ve had enough of this stuff”—Bouman raised his glass—“I will show them to you.”

  Katrina looked shyly at her father. She had an overbite and when she was uncomfortable, struggled to get her mouth closed over her teeth. Despite this, she was pretty. Bouman thought she had taken the best physical traits of her mother, the gentle brow, the broad cheeks, the unblemished skin that glowed in the sun. From him, she had inherited horsy European teeth—at odds with her small jaws—and social awkwardness. At seventeen she looked more womanly than her full-blooded native peers. She also lacked their guile and awareness. Bouman noticed sadly that Tan had taken a few cautious glances in Katrina’s direction and that her burning cheeks and anxiety had been noticed and seen as encouragement.

  During dinner Katrina cowered behind the floral arrangement. When Tan thought Bouman so involved with his food that he was not being watched, he slid the flowers slightly to the left with the tip of his knife to take a better look at the girl. She was concentrating on her food, taking the tiniest bites. When she saw Tan watching her, she met his eyes frankly and nervously. It was not he who rattled her, it was her father. Bouman ate fast, without conversation, and loudly. To k
eep up Tan choked down the chicken and bitter squash, which was spicy and good, only clearing his throat with water. The entire meal took ten minutes. Katrina was not even halfway through her food when the men stood up together and went to stand by the railing to smoke, or in the case of Tan, to pinch a little betel nut, as was his custom after dinner.

  “I sent her to Batavia for school,” said Bouman, smoke pouring out the corners of his mouth. The two men stood now on the edge of the veranda and a bright moon hit the water and the trees, lighting everything with a pleasing, silver glow. “When she chooses to speak, she can speak in Dutch and French.” He smiled at his daughter, who had overcome her shyness enough to smile back. “She came back with a taste for embroidered cloth and now wants me to buy her a piano. I can no longer eat with the simple smell of meat. Now I must be menaced at the table by bouquets of these tough, native flowers whose cheap perfume makes the food taste like shampoo.”

  “Women like pretty things,” said Tan. Bouman took in Tan’s soulful eyes and long-fingered, elegant hands. His hair had a sheen to it. Bouman laughed.

  “And men,” he said, “care only for drink, and barring that, war.” Here Bouman gazed knowingly at his guest.

  “I don’t need to darken this evening with business,” said Tan. “I am enjoying your hospitality and I can wait until tomorrow.”

  “Why,” said Bouman suddenly, his face gripped in a smile, “why do you think that I have weapons?”

  Tan nodded a few times and turned to his host, who was now only inches from his face. “I know that you have supplied hunters with weapons. They have come out of the jungle with elephant, rhinoceros, tiger, boar. They have taken their heads mounted back to Europe. And you have supplied the cartridges to this end.”

  “No more hunters for me,” said Bouman.

  Tan was poised to speak, but then changed his mind. He raised his limeade in a quick, silent toast.

  “What were you going to say?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Be frank with me. It is the only way to get what you want.”

  “I don’t intend to be disrespectful.”

  “Of course not.”

  “You are the supervisor of the trading post.”

  “Ah. And you would like to speak to the owner?”

  Both Tan and Bouman looked up the coast, where a mere two hundred feet away there was another house, much like Bouman’s, only this one was still and dark. “Peter Versteegh is on a hunt,” Bouman said.

  “When did he leave?”

  “Five years ago.”

  “When do you expect him back?”

  “I don’t,” said Bouman. “He was foolishly hunting with a stout businessman from Marseille, someone he knew from the trade. They were hunting orangutan. I suspect the Batak got them, that Versteegh’s bony head is gracing a chieftain’s mantel as is that Frenchman’s. He had a very plump head and impressive mustaches. Even I could see the value in collecting a head like that . . .”

  “Father!”

  “Ah. She speaks. I’m sorry to offend.” Bouman laughed. “Go get some sweets for our guest. I’m sure we have something.”

  Bouman waved Katrina off. She reluctantly pushed away from the table and the chair legs ground loudly across the floor. Bouman saw her look at Tan with complete frustration and Tan smiled back.

  “The Frenchman,” whispered Bouman as Katrina left, “had little appreciation for life. He shot an ape and brought it in. It was a female, lactating. He’d lost the infant and didn’t seem to care. I went out looking for the baby. I went out for hours, all night, with a lantern. Call me sentimental, but I know what it’s like when a child loses the mother.”

  “Do you really think the Batak killed them?”

  “You know better than I do their beliefs, that the ancestors come back as animals—elephant, tiger, and orangutan. Even death is not permanent. I saw little value to the lives of Versteegh and this Frenchman. His name, I remember, was Guillotte. Yes. And they are dead.”

  “But you say they are still hunting?”

  “I wrote to Guillotte’s family saying that I doubted he would return. And as for Versteegh, his native wife is still living in the house. Why would I write to his cousins in Holland? They would come and sell this and where would I go? And why should they have this place? You cannot put the value of our little house, our compound, and small business into guilders. Besides, is it not a romantic thought that the Dutchman and Frenchman are wandering through the heart of Sumatra chasing an elusive ape who stays always two steps ahead?”

  “A pretty myth,” said Tan. “You are romantic, from another time. You forget that it is 1922, that the ways of the ancestors, yours and mine, have long been buried with them. I don’t mourn that. Change is good.”

  “Change?” said Bouman sadly. Katrina appeared in the doorway with a plate. She had picked more blossoms and arranged these in with the rice cakes and wafers. “If I could make this evening last indefinitely, I would do it.”

  The prahu returned six days later. Bouman had convinced Tan that he had no weapons for sale. Bouman had a half-dozen rifles and countless boxes of cartridges, but Tan was unwilling to name his enemy and rampaging bull elephants were no longer the problem they’d been twenty years earlier. Bouman decided to give the boy a good deal on some bolts of cotton. He’d thrown in a few pairs of embroidered slippers for the boy’s relatives, offered gin and tobacco, which had not been of interest, and an immense cooking pot (for boiling missionaries, Bouman had joked), which Tan had thought would be useful. Bouman was just coming out of the warehouse when he saw Tan running down the steps of the house. A figure appeared in the doorway immediately afterward, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. Tan stopped and turned, then he ran back up the stairs and embraced her. In his shock, Bouman wanted to believe that the woman was Aya, who, gnarled as she was, could offer occasional sexual gratification. But no. It was Katrina and a cold chill slowly took over Bouman’s heart.

  When Tan entered the warehouse Bouman was sitting at his desk. There was a box of ammunition by his feet. A dozen rifles leaned against the wall. Bouman sat at his desk, his face covered by his hands. Tan could see the man trembling and at first thought that he had been moved to tears, but when Bouman lifted his head, his eyes were clearly fired with anger. Bouman stood up.

  “You were a guest in my house and you have deceived me.”

  “My intentions are honorable.”

  “Who is the judge of that?”

  Tan was silent. “You know my family . . .”

  “That they are rich, powerful—yes, I know that. And I tell you that you will never have my daughter. Take the guns. Leave. Never come back.”

  “She wants to go with me.”

  “What does she know of what she wants? She is seventeen years old.” Bouman picked up a rifle and swung it gracefully to point into Tan’s face. “I am offering you the gun. You take the muzzle or the trigger.”

  Tan was silent.

  “I will kill you. I have killed dozens of men in my time and not once has my sleep been disturbed.”

  Bouman watched the prahu round the promontory and thought with a cautious satisfaction that he would never see the boy again. No doubt, Katrina was in tears and would not speak to him for months. His household was in disorder. Aya would be glaring at him from behind the posts of the house, going about her daily tasks with more than the usual menace; she would be spitting in his food. Bouman shook his head. A stiff breeze stirred the water and the palms dipped and swayed. More than the usual monkey chatter was going on overhead. The birds dipped and swooped with unusual urgency. On the ground Bouman saw the ants coursing fervently in streams. There was the burn of electricity in the air. At the edge of the horizon a beam of lightning flared, leaving the margin a menacing dark purple. Bouman sighed deeply, baring his teeth at the world. He knew he was in for trouble.

  About many things, Bouman had been wrong. He was wrong to think that his father-love could satisfy his daughte
r and wrong to think that he would never see Tan again. By the time the young man returned he was no longer a young man and Bouman had seen so many things—more than twenty years had passed—that he questioned every reality. The very nose in the center of his face was up for debate, as far as he was concerned. But as he squatted and smoked in the burned-out square of earth that had once been his house, he somehow knew that the prahu dipping over the edge of the water, rising up like the sun, bore his old acquaintance, Tan. And Bouman thought, in an uncharacteristically mystical way, that his new clairvoyance meant that his life was drawing to a close.

  Tan had lost the colonial whites and was now wearing the baggy batik trousers of his people, those and a European shirt of coarse cotton, with a belt of ammunition slung from shoulder to hip. There was silver in with the black, but he looked much the same. Bouman got up and threw his cigarette. He cocked his head to one side. Tan hesitated, stopping twenty feet from where Bouman stood. To his surprise, Bouman laughed.

  “I told you not to come back or I would kill you, but it is you who are armed and I have nothing but these two imperfect hands.” Bouman splayed his eight fingers up for inspection.

  “How can it be,” said Tan, “that you have not changed?”

  “A mystery,” Bouman shrugged. “I am wiser now and so I will ask you to dinner, to have some tea with me, because I now know what an enemy looks like.” Bouman laughed again.

  “I thought you were dead,” said Tan. “I myself looked in all the nine camps of Sumatra. I had my people check every Javanese camp, every Dutchman.”

  “Did you not think I might be lost under a different name? And the islands are full of Dutchmen.”

  “Eight-fingered Dutchmen?” said Tan.

  “So thinking I was dead, you came back for my daughter, but it is she who is dead.”

  Tan was silent.

  “That saddens you.”

  “The Japanese killed many.”

  “Many, but not her. I have you to blame for that.”

  “Me?”

  “Katrina died in childbirth.” Bouman closed his eyes. He heard again Katrina’s frightened screams. He remembered Aya’s desperate butchery. “Come. Have tea.” The Dutchman gestured for Tan to follow. “You can send me back to Holland after dinner.”