by Nigel Barley
‘What is cewek?’ I heard myself ask in the quavering tones of a judge asking for a definition of jazz. They both turned and stared at me.
Cewek? They held hands out at chest level as if grasping melons and sketched sinuous curves in the air. Ah, it must be the slang term for women. I wondered what propositions I had agreed to.
We rocketed along in the dark. Hardboard triumphal arches stood by the roadside. Inscriptions announced forty years of freedom. A glow in the sky declared the city, heralded also by a rich sweet smell compounded of human faeces, woodsmoke, badly refined petrol. Fires twinkled in the blackness, railway trucks, burnt-out lorries, shadowy figures picking through heaps of rubbish, the odd desolate shack. Had I been to Indonesia often? No, my first visit. Then, where had I learned to speak? In London. In London, one could learn? Ah, that was good. Yes. Would English cewek like Indonesian men? They would love them. But were they not too small? The best things come in small packages. Wah! That was true. They grinned. Now about this cewek. Where would we go? No, no. Tomorrow. I was tired. Just a hotel. Not too dear.
They were unabashed. More cigarettes. Normally I do not smoke but it is a useful way of making contact. We pulled up at a small hotel. There was a shouted exchange. Full up. Try round the corner. There it was full up too. Try the new place up there. We stopped at a nondescript building with bare bulbs shining on fresh cement. It was cheap. Everything looked bare and stark but clean. We climbed the stairs for several floors. The taxi men came too. We scaled a ladder and emerged on the roof. Here was a little wooden hut, a hard bed, a fan. It would do. The taxi men beamed. See, they had brought me to a good place. More cigarettes, handshakes.
The hotel was run by students from Manado, Chinese-looking Christians who had strong but ill-defined links of kinship with the owner. To some, as in the West, the term ‘student’ was a euphemism for dissolute idling. But not to Piet.
Scarcely had I got through the door, before he came to seek me out. I had made the mistake of describing myself in the register as a teacher.
‘I am a student,’ he announced with deep pride.
‘In what subject?’
‘Filsafat.’ In Indonesian, philosophy is a suety subject. ‘I have read Aristotle and Sartre and John Stuart Mill. I will discuss my thesis with you. It is called “The Dilemma of Man in a Post-Existentialist World”.’
‘Er. Perhaps I should eat first. Where should I go?’
I was directed to another place where young men cooked noodles in a converted garage while taking turns on a typewriter.
‘You must forgive us. We are students of journalism but we only have one typewriter.’
They typed and fried and chattered in the fierce heat of Java, using the dialect of their native Borneo. They could understand me but not I them. As a last resort, they typed messages to me in Indonesian.
It was an odd area, extremely warm and human after Singapore. Middle-class and very poor housing stood side by side. Off the roads were alleyways in which seethed the life not of a city but a village. Children were ruthlessly scrubbed, food prepared, a living precariously made. People waved and smiled at a stranger, though such figures were not rare, scared their children by offering to give them to him, laughed at their tears. At all hours of the day and night, lines of naked children were marched off to the municipal bathhouse. A sign proclaimed to a disbelieving world, ‘Two children is enough.’ Food-sellers wandered about, a mad woman ran through the streets making faces.
At the sides of the road ran or rather stood open sewers, blocked by garbage. When it rained, they would overflow, but it would not rain for many months. Children sailed boats in them. A man came and fished for frogs that he would eat. In the dark, I plunged into one. The students of journalism were appalled. They thrust soap into my hands, cooing words of comfort.
‘When you leave, we will see you home or the transvestites will get you. They wait for rich Americans outside the hotel. They are very strong.’
But back at the hotel, it was Piet who was waiting. He waved a photocopied article at me. ‘Please, I am having difficulties with Einstein.’ He spoke as if Einstein were a recalcitrant child.
‘It is this sentence in English: “Space is infinite but not without boundaries.” What can it mean?’
We wrestled with it for half an hour. Only then did he reveal that he had a dictionary, kept with the fridge, the telephone and everything else of value, under his bed. On top of it was a constantly rotating mixture of cousins tangled up like pullovers in a Harrods sale. They drifted in. They slept. They drifted out. They emerged scratching at all hours. Only Piet’s constant watchfulness prevented the importation of cewek.
‘If my uncle found women here, he would drive us all out on to the street. Just like that. He is a good man.’
‘Yes I can see that.’
Up on the roof there was a slight breeze, welcome in the deadening heat. But the mosquitoes were already whining at the windows. It was time to batten down the hatches and sleep.
I was woken abruptly at 4.30 a.m. by someone shouting in my ear. A fire? No. Someone was announcing with excitement that it was four-thirty West-Indonesian time. They appeared to be using a loudspeaker.
I bleared through the window. The minaret of a mosque reared up a hundred feet away. The muzzles of twin loudspeakers poked at me menacingly. With a loud crackling another muezzin contested the airspace, then another. By the time prayers started seriously at five o’clock, I was the personal focus of five amplified mosques, each bawling out a different part of the message as if marking me out as in special need of salvation. The whole hut shook with their piety. At the end of prayers, the noise would normally have subsided but this was Friday and the airwaves were given over to stern messages concerning obedience to parents and the holy word.
From the roof, the whole quarter could be seen going determinedly about its business like Londoners in an air raid. Across the street, the manager of a shirt-making sweatshop waved and pointed to his rabbits – a new speculation. Children were already abroad, hunting pigeons and playing football. One, looking like a skinned rabbit himself in a ferocious haircut, was being dragged protesting to the mosque by his father. He grinned up at me.
‘Why don’t you come too?’
‘Maybe tomorrow.’
The man who sold satay was sharpening knives with relish like a mass murderer. It was a scene of ordinary people making a difficult living.
There was a polite coughing behind. It was Piet, still wet from a shower, but clutching a large book. Of course, he was a Christian and would not be going to the mosque.
‘It will be hours before anywhere is open,’ he said. ‘We can sit down and read my thesis together.’
It was at least an hour before I was felt to have demonstrated enough rapt attention to what turned out to be a work of great learning weighed down with the dead hand of obsessive, scholastic classification. It was hard to know what to say.
‘Very thorough.’
Piet was well pleased.
‘Don’t worry. We will have plenty of time to discuss it again later. This version does not have all the additions.’
At the bottom of the stairs, he had posted a new list of regulations. It appeared that it was no longer allowed to bring loaded rifles into the bedrooms. He had also tried hard to forbid the importation of cewek unless evidence of matrimony was produced. However, the slippery English terminology for this difficult area had evaded him. It read, ‘It is forbidden to enter women except via their husbands.’
It was a day for visiting museums and making contacts with the academic community. That night I would catch the overnight bus for Surabaya at the eastern end of Java and meet the ship that would take me to Sulawesi.
Everyone I had ever met had spoken of the deft pickpockets of Jakarta. Indonesians, it seemed, almost took a perverse pride in the skill of their thieves, the way that the English do in the sheer nastiness of their football hooligans or the nerve of the Great Train Robbers. As a
result of constant warnings, I had purchased a sort of bizarre cummerbund that could contain money and the documents that conferred official existence. I put it on for the first time and sallied forth, bathed in sweat and colonially paunched.
The day was spent in fruitless journeyings around the town, in buses, taxis, on foot and in the three-wheeler bajai that is powered by a lawnmower motor in terminal distress. At all official venues, I was treated with enormous deference and required to sign a visitors’ book. Should I request to see anyone specific, however, it appeared that he or she had not yet arrived or had already left or was at a meeting. Their return, however, was imminent – but unsure. One lady I had been urged to contact was reported with great firmness to have just left her office. I subsequently discovered that she had been in Australia for two years. I changed tactics and tried phoning people before I arrived. This was the moment to envy those Singapore telephones that clicked and hummed and put you through every time. I joined a queue outside a phone box occupied by a man of gigantic girth who devoted himself to the sort of leisurely gossip that is typical of those in occupation. The sun shone hotly. The traffic roared poisonously. A policeman appeared from an office nearby and grinned at me. I grinned back and wiped my brow in comic overstatement. He nodded at the man in the booth and made mouthing gestures with his hands. I nodded back. He beckoned me over.
‘Use my phone,’ he invited.
I made several calls and offered to pay but was waved away.
‘Happy to meet you. Welcome to Jakarta.’
The first telephone calls in a foreign tongue are a daunting business. Incomprehension threatens the tenuous process of understanding from all directions. If people whisper or shout, have funny accents or talk fast, if they cough or a truck goes past, the whole edifice crashes down. The phone call has special conventions. Almost all over the world, people open a call with ‘hallo’ or the nearest equivalent permitted by their phonetic system. Often, however, it is not a greeting as in English, but merely a sort of call-sign and you have to immediately go into a proper greeting or be considered rude. When telephones were new and baffling in England and etiquette was still at a formative stage, opinions were divided as to whether a call should begin with ‘hallo’ or ‘ahoy’. Now it is ‘hallo’ everywhere. But it is disconcerting to be half-way through a call and suddenly realize you have no idea of the conventions for ending one. Should you ‘wish to hear someone again’? Should you leave them with a cheery ‘till we meet again’ when you have never indeed met? My first conversations dragged on infinitely, limping far beyond the point at which they should have been killed off. At last, I learned the word da, ‘goodbye’, ‘finished’.
How to address people is difficult. To bring themselves in line with the age of broadcasting, Indonesians have had to invent a new word for ‘you’ that cuts through all the problems of relative age, status and respect that govern the choice of how to address someone you can actually see. When I tried it on the phone, however, everyone laughed at me.
It was time to sort out my bus ticket. Piet disentangled two of the cousins from the pile and charged them with securing me passage. A new notice announced an increase in the price of the rooms.
‘Not for you, however,’ said Piet. ‘You are a friend.’
One of the many nice things about Indonesians is their inability to cope with abstract, formal relationships. In all but the biggest hotels, it is virtually inevitable that you end up eating in the kitchen, explaining your troubles. In a week, you are a member of the family and their concerns are your concerns. In a culture that traditionally largely lacks family names, first names are the normal form of address and ways of getting round all the ‘you/I’ problems. It is even awkward talking to someone whose first name you do not know since, when talking to Piet, you tend to say not, ‘Are you busy today?’ but, ‘Is Piet busy today?’ Contacts swiftly become soaked in a warm wash of emotion.
In a foreign culture, one rapidly regresses to a childhood state of dependence. It is shaming not to be able to cross the road unaided. But I just couldn’t do it. The problem lay not, as is often the case, with the switch from left to right. Indonesians drive on the left. It is rather that street-crossing techniques are totally different. In England you wait for a gap and then simply cross. In Jakarta, there are no gaps. You step out and enter into negotiation with oncoming drivers. They slow down just enough to let you dash across their path and immediately speed up again afterwards. You know which will let you pass and which will not – at least local people do. For the foreigner, street-crossing is squealing brakes, hair’s-breadth escapes and much confusion. The two cousins led me across the heart of the city in serene calm as if there were no traffic at all, pointing out objects of interest on the way.
‘Here you may buy ice-cream but it will make you ill. All these statues were put up by Sukarno, the founding father of Indonesian independence. We have dirty names for them all. Here is the department store.’
We entered a stumpy tower block whose top was sheathed in tarpaulin, like a present to some giant child who had lost interest half-way through the unwrapping process. It was staffed almost entirely by schoolchildren in clean uniforms. The shelves displayed goods that had been spread out to fill as much space as possible. The schoolchildren leapt eagerly upon the few customers and lovingly wrapped everything, even pencils. Buying anything involved at least three separate stages. It reminded me of something. Ah yes. Russia!
The cousins were astonished. ‘How did you know? It was built for us by the Russians when communists were thought to be a good thing.’
We pressed on and bought a bus ticket from a brisk, efficient woman in a spotless office. It was next to a canal clogged with garbage and sewage. We had to step over a dead cat to gain entry.
The cousins conducted me back, holding my hand across roads. Had I seen the fair of Indonesian products? No. It sounded grim. Then, they would take me.
We trekked off through the dust and traffic smoke to the enormous park. As we passed a police station next to a telephone box, a policeman waved. The cousins were awed.
‘He knows you? Why does he make his hands like a mouth?’
The fair was intended to make people realize how many good things were made in Indonesia so that it was unnecessary to import them. To the English, all this has a rather flat, familiar ‘Buy British’ flavour. Stalls on every side displayed every kind of shoes, rice-steamers, furniture, clove cigarettes. A gallery showed very nasty modern carvings from Irian Jaya under the heading, ‘Traditional Indonesian Culture’. Yet people seemed to be having rather more fun than one would have expected from any comparable, pious Western event. Food and drink were being consumed with gusto. A pop festival was in full swing, made more enjoyable by the total failure of the microphones. Wide-eyed children were being hauled around in large wooden trays pulled by tractors. Everywhere, there were models and plans. Indonesians obviously do very good models and plans. A whole fantasy-world of building and development blossomed under perspex cases.
In the streets, young men sold Garuda-bird hats of cardboard and tinsel with dyed feathers of purple and green. I chose an unornamented form. The feathers recalled too closely Bugis Street. The effect was quite striking. Two wings of gold and red spread out over the forehead of the wearer. From the centre, reared the hawkish head of a fierce bird, beak parted for the killing of snakes and other undesirables. A venerable Indonesian gentleman who sported similar headgear rushed up and challenged me to a mock cock-fight. It was all very silly and great fun.
As we walked away, we were accosted by a child, very pretty, almost angelic with melting brown eyes and hedgehog-bristling hair. It displayed perfect dentition and pointed at the hat.
‘Give me that hat?’ It was hard to refuse. I really had intended it for Piet. The child, however, spoiled its chances. ‘Give me money.’ Immediately, hearts were hardened. The cousins tutted.
‘This is my hat,’ I said firmly. ‘I have bought it for a friend.’ The
melting eyes became garnets. The child scowled in concentration and pronounced in perfect English.
‘Mister old pig.’ It ran off making a gesture that the cousins declined to interpret.
It is very hard to think ill of the beautiful and many Indonesians are very beautiful indeed. The initial problem of working there is the opposite of Africa. There, one has to overcome an initial negative valuation, a culture that seems disagreeable in most essentials. The quality of one’s ethnography is assessed by the degree to which one manages to overcome such value judgements – ‘cultural prejudice’, as they are called. Indonesia, thus far, had presented such a fair face, such warm friendliness that it was hard to look behind that for the blemishes that were surely there. Talking to West Africans is always a struggle. You are aware the whole time that you are fighting for understanding, building a bridge between two worlds, subjecting everything to a secondary interpretation. Indonesians, however, seemed to be ‘just people’. Interpretation was still below the level of awareness and therefore not available to inspection – a dangerous situation.
There are some events so embarrassing that even years later they may pop into your mind in a lift, in the street, when you are trying to get to sleep, and make you wince or even groan out loud. Jakarta was the scene of one of these.
Before the bus left, I worked out that I would just have time to go to the theatre. Indonesian television is very bad, possibly the worst in the world. One of the benefits of this is that traditional theatre is still flourishing. In many towns of Java, traditional puppet-plays, music and dance still draw large audiences. I had heard of a wayang orang troupe, a form of theatre, based, like the puppet-theatre, upon the ancient Hindu texts but with the parts played by human actors. Piet had urged me to go.
‘It is fascinating. Especially good are the women, but they are all played by men. You would never know.’
