by Nigel Barley
I took my luggage and went, planning to go straight on to the bus. One of the actors was extremely friendly and invited me backstage to see the others putting on their makeup. They waved a cheery greeting and giggled as they slapped pale skin cream over each other. In one corner was one of the players of female parts, carefully painting his face. Wayang orang is extremely demanding physically, the actors imitate the stiff stylized movements of puppets. Some were standing on their heads, others exercising like athletes tuning up. A small orchestra tinkled and crashed off to one side. Eager to be polite, I complimented the female impersonator on the quality of his impersonation. In the security of the all-male changing room, I remarked how particularly convincing the breasts were.
A hush fell upon the room. The actor blushed a furious red.
‘That,’ said one man quietly, ‘is my wife you are talking to.’ I stammered excuses and fled to the other side of the stage, vowing to strangle Piet the next time I met him. I felt awful, the worst sort of crass and clumsy Westerner. I could not concentrate on the play and was glad when it was time to go.
The bus was air-conditioned and had tinted glass. On the other side of the glass, the cousins waved a tearful farewell. They had come to see me off. Beside me sat a Frenchman, one of the stern ascetic kind, a believer in reason and the scourge of self-denial. He had come to write a paper on Indonesian clinics. He was very boring.
The glass robbed the colours of all their stridency, reducing them to the tired, grey gloom of a winter’s day in England. The coldness of the air reinforced the notion, so that it seemed absurd to look outside and see banana stalls and dust rather than the greasy rain of a European motorway.
We had been presented on entry with a little box containing flavoured milk and a brightly coloured cake of pink, yellow and green. The Frenchman rejected his.
‘The colours are surely poisonous.’
The seats were designed for Asian legs and two Westerners entered only with difficulty into the space provided.
There was a time when anthropologists explained virtually everything, from the Russian Revolution to the frequency of divorce, with reference to child-bearing practices. Of course, this style was more popular in America than Britain where it was treated as a typically American unnecessary ingenuity. As a student, I had been encouraged to mock the rage induced by swaddling or the insecurity attributed to harsh toilet training. Somehow, one felt, Indonesians had read all those books and believed them.
From a very early age, children are comforted with a heavy, inert, cylindrical pillow known as a Dutch wife. If children are fractious or fretful, they are draped around such a pillow and encouraged to hug it until they fall asleep. Young men, especially, are expected to snuggle up to such chaste bedfellows until marriage. Presumably, spouses then sleep tightly intertwined as pillow substitutes. The result is that Indonesians with nothing to hug are as pipe-smokers with nothing in their mouths, restless and inattentive. On the streets, one sees them talking, and while talking they embrace lamp-posts, the corners of brick walls, the wings of their cars, each other. They are left with a definite need to hug.
As soon as the bus was under way, passengers began to intertwine and fall asleep. Like the pile of cousins, or a basket of puppies, they wrapped their legs round each other and settled heads on each others’ chests. Apparent strangers negotiated licences to hug in the interests of sleep. The Frenchman and I sat stonily apart, watchful lest our knees touch.
It would have been difficult to sleep anyway. The driver set off with a vengeance, holding firmly to the centre of the road, overtaking on blind corners and forcing oncoming traffic off the road. Occasionally, he would meet a kindred spirit, an oncoming truck driver who had adopted a similar policy. They would rush towards each other at breakneck speed and only at the last moment recognize their affinity in a wild and giddy swerve.
A television screen displayed a locally produced film. The audience loved it and a certificate confirmed that it had been adjudged suitable for Muslims. I found it acutely painful, recalling, as it did, recent events.
It was an extraordinary comic tale dealing in the fortunes of a household whose venerable head sheltered numerous servants of low instincts, a bevy of nubile trainee nurses and – inevitably – a transvestite boxer-cum-ladies’-maid. The plot centred on the unassigned pregnancy of one of the female servants with a secondary complication that, through linguistic confusion, it was the transvestite who was generally held to be expecting a child.
A stop for food. The passengers untwined and descended. The food was simple and moderately wholesome but the real urgency was the lavatories. The bus was equipped with its own facilities but these had been barricaded by the minimum five suitcases per person that were stacked in the aisle. Once we were in, we could only leave by some enormous act of communal will.
For a Westerner, public excretion is a complex task, though involving only basic equipment – a central hole flanked by two skid pads. As in the Soviet Union, there is no paper, but unlike that country, water is conveniently provided. The basic design seems unsympathetic to the trouser-wearer. Indonesians, as might be expected, manage very well but Westerners usually emerge looking as if they have encountered a water-throwing practical joker.
Public urination for the male is equally unhandy, involving major technicalities of modesty and cleanliness. Only the left hand may be used, but only the right hand may enter water for cleansing. I was pleased to note that the Frenchman ended up looking as if he had been hosed down.
The passengers climbed back on board and wrapped themselves around each other again. The Frenchman and I resumed our pose of soldiers at attention. We drove in total darkness through some of the most beautiful scenery in the world.
According to the dictionary, travel is etymologically connected to Old French travail, ‘grief, ‘hardship’. It was at Surabaya that language reasserted its hold on reality. I had pictured my stay as a simple matter of stepping from bus to boat and sailing away into the rising sun. It was not to be.
The driver had left an hour late, yet arrived in Surabaya an hour early. We descended into a shadowy dawn, a chill in the air that presaged a blistering hot day. The man at the bus station was welcoming. It was too early to go to the city. I could leave my luggage here. Would I like a shower? Only later did I discover the depth of his kindness. There was a drought in the city. The public water-supply had been discontinued. Water had to be bought expensively from dealers with tankers. Had I known, I would have been less prodigal with the contents of his tank. It was the usual arrangement where a cement room contained a tank of water that you simply poured over your head. Over the radio came a sermon wherein I recognized the words for ‘greed’ and ‘lust’. I had not learnt the other vices yet.
As usual, there was an Indonesian happy to take up the brown man’s burden and look after me. He was a gaunt, ascetic man who spoke in whispers. Since I was not a Muslim, perhaps I would like him to take me to a church? Then perhaps I would like to eat? After that he fell silent and it was impossible to coax words from him. We ate in a silence that grew increasingly oppressive. He refused all my attempts to pay and proudly drew out some papers that he laid on the table. They were brochures describing English plastic light switches. He had almost trained as an engineer during the revolution but at that time there was so much politics and so little money. Then the English army had come and destroyed the city and he had ended up as an electrician instead. Japanese switches were cheaper than the English but English were better. The dam was breached. Speech flowed from him in torrents – a craftsman talking about a lifetime in his trade, speaking with pride and involvement. He told me of the problems of domestic wiring in enormous detail and in return wished to hear of this wonder ‘central heating’. It was only with difficulty that I disengaged myself. He pursued me into the street. Please, what colours were wires in England? Three pin plugs or two pin, which were better? I embarked in a trishaw and was pedalled off at speed, sweat beginning to t
ickle around the detachable paunch in the rising heat. He stood in the road and waved his brochures in farewell.
When I tried to catch a bus to the harbour, I was taken in charge by another man, an Ambonese of dark Melanesian appearance – fuzzy hair, a nose of almost Irish meatiness; I immediately started thinking of him as Pak Ambon. I began to feel like a baton in a relay race. The harbour? It was difficult, a place of thieves. He had better come with me.
The shipping office was the closest I had so far come to ethnography as remembered in Africa. It was crowded with shifty-looking characters herded about by police. But these were not police as I had met them till now. They were big, hard-looking men with drawn truncheons and tight mouths, wearing steel helmets stamped with the insignia of the military. They pounced on people demanding papers. For the first time I smelt fear, that heavy scent that hangs around government offices in Africa.
Pak Ambon regarded these happenings dispassionately and spat. ‘The real army are all right. But these people …’
In defiance of the office hours prominently displayed, all the ticket-offices were shut. A police sergeant banged on his counter with the truncheon and beckoned me over. I was required to explain my business and show my passport. However, it suddenly seemed that I was not being harassed, as I had imagined, but helped. To my huge embarrassment, I was led through a side door to the office of a man who issued tickets. A few minutes later, I re-emerged sheepishly with a valid ticket. The bad news was that there was no ship to Sulawesi for four days. The crowd regarded me without resentment. Pak Ambon reappeared at my side.
‘It would be normal to put a thousand rupiahs in the hand of the sergeant. They don’t make enough to live on.’
I folded a note in my hand.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said. There was the briefest flicker around the sergeant’s mouth, but the note disappeared with the speed and grace of a fish darting off into deep water.
‘You are welcome.’
I turned to thank Pak Ambon but he was not to be easily dismissed.
‘I cannot leave you until I know you are in a proper hotel. You are a fellow Christian.’
It is always slightly shocking to be in a country where Christianity is regarded as a serious religion and not a mere euphemism for godlessness.
Pak Ambon now revealed himself to have been a sailor in his youth. He did a quick round of the old salts present. A hotel? Clean? Not too dear? Soon we were heading back to town in search of a hotel called the Bamboo Den, a nice oriental name. Apparently, it combined a hotel and a language school. Those who could not pay their bills worked it off in teaching irregular verbs. Preferable to washing dishes any time.
It was a vision of hell. Hot, dirty, full of cockroaches so confident of tenure that they sat on the walls and sneered at passers-by.
Pak Ambon waved us away and embarked on a round of hotels. All were wildly expensive. I did not wish to stay at any of these places but knew that I would not be abandoned until I settled. Pak Ambon offered a solution. There was, he volunteered, a place near where he lived. It was admittedly a little far from the centre, indeed it was on the beach, but simple and clean. The only company would be plain fishermen. It sounded excellent. We embarked on the back of a truck-like bus and rattled off in a cloud of blue smoke.
The more sophisticated passengers alighted one by one and were replaced by toothless crones who hugged baskets of fish and schoolchildren who giggled shyly. Houses gave way to rice-fields and glimpses of sand. Suddenly, there were no other cars, just motorbikes driven by young men – each with a girl riding side-saddle on the back. They waved and grinned as they passed us. As always, I began to construct a vision of the hotel I wanted, a place of noble simplicity, standing on the beach, serving simple food to the crash of waves on golden sand.
The hotel was Indonesian Disneyland, a huge structure of garish colours comprising shooting galleries, roundabouts, large, decaying plaster models of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. You could buy ice-cream and popcorn. In the midst of it all lay a Chinese hotel, a chain of stifling-hot boxes. It was clearly designed for casual sex. I may have been the only person to ever rent a room for a whole day. But Pak Ambon and I both knew our assumed burdens of responsibility and gratitude were so great that I would spend the night here. It was not inopportune that a fever had begun to burn behind my eyes. I would have to get to bed at all costs. We parted with vague promises to meet again. In the room an ancient air-conditioner exuded bad breath and dripped water. Comments on the charms of the local women had been written on the mattress in biro. Puzzling over some of the terms, I fell asleep.
I awoke to find a twelve-year-old Melanesian girl standing over me and laughing. A hallucination? Unlikely. I said good morning. ‘Good evening,’ I was corrected. Then Pak Ambon entered, leading by the hand a small, dark boy and carrying what looked like a collapsible cake-stand.
‘I have brought you food. My grandchildren did not believe me when I told them about you, so I have brought them to look.’
They looked. They pulled the hair on my arms, admired my big nose and regretted the pertness of their own snouts. We walked on the glutinous mud that constituted the beach and I was unwise enough to mention that I would look for another place to stay tomorrow. Pak Ambon looked depressed.
‘I have failed you. Tomorrow I will come at what time?’ I protested in vain. ‘I cannot abandon you.’
The next day, we tried my guidebook again. It directed us to a hotel that had been demolished years ago. Pak Ambon decided the time had come for firm action. He questioned a soldier guarding a bank. The soldier hugged his sentry-box and gave us an address. I determined to stay there whatever it was like. Fortunately, it was the place I had been looking for, roomy, cool, cheap. There were smiles all round. Pak Ambon refused to let me buy him lunch. He refused to let me pay his bus fare back to his house.
‘You would do the same for me if I were lost in England,’ he declared. I felt deeply ashamed.
By now, I had begun to recognize the style of the hotels. The front hall was full of good-natured loungers.
‘No. I do not really work here. I come to see my cousin.’
Schoolchildren would drop in on their way to and from school and stare at the television long enough to smoke a cigarette. Everyone smoked, even five-year-olds. At the back, lurked a wizened masseuse. She would seize passers-by and crunch the bones of their hands.
‘Yes, I thought so. Wind has got into your joints. You need a massage badly.’ I never saw her do any business.
It was a cheerful, slovenly sort of an area with disused railway tracks in the middle of the road. In the morning there was a flower-market. In the evening, they sold children’s clothes and plastic buckets. The loungers sat and gossiped. Sometimes they giggled at a huge poster showing a happy Indonesian farmer with a hoe over his shoulder striding towards a better future over the words: ‘Transmigration. A better life awaits you in Irian Jaya.’ It recalled the Australian immigration posters of my own childhood, depicting a man in an undergraduate gown and swimming trunks clutching a diploma. In Irian Jaya, I will. Were the loungers not tempted?
They rolled their eyes. Here was home. They had friends and family. The natives would kill them. Here was better.
In the evening, men changed into sarongs, much cooler in the baking heat. The loungers were firm that I should buy one. I felt I owed them a laugh.
For the Chinese girls in the shop, it was the funniest thing they had heard for months.
‘See. The puttyman (orang putih) is buying a sarong.’ Putih is Indonesian for ‘white’, so puttyman is something of a mishmash of English and Indonesian, perhaps particularly descriptive for the girls at that moment. They giggled.
The loungers were waiting, bright-eyed. They clapped with joy. We got at least an hour’s hysteria out of that sarong, It seemed I did everything wrong. I tried to step into it instead of putting it over my head. It was deliriously short, disclosing hairy shins and boots. The loungers made commo
n cause with me. It was too short for a puttyman. They would make the Chinese take it back. They returned with a longer one in garish shades of orange. I tied it up. It fell down. They tied it for me. It was so tight, I could not sit down. The aged masseuse joined us, together with an old lady from the outer islands on her way to Mecca.
‘I shall die on the pilgrimage. I knew Sukarno. My house is worth seventy-five million rupiahs. How much did you pay for that sarong? What? You were robbed.’
Thereafter, she watched the television in silence, chewing areca-nut expressionlessly as, on the screen, a virtually naked puttywoman rotated and writhed to pop music. It was a night of textiles. My sarong. The television picture was fuzzy (ikat). A patchwork cat wandered in. As a finale, I tried to go upstairs in my sarong and fell flat on my face. They liked that a lot.
* * *
My unreliable guidebook declared that Surabaya had been in the past unjustly neglected by the traveller. It was now a place worthy of more consideration. My guidebook was wrong about that. It is a hot industrial town of cheap modern construction, the old city having been almost totally destroyed by the British at the end of the war. Filling up several days was hard work.
Fortunately, one of the loungers had the solution. We would go to the zoo. Normally, I am wary of Third World zoos, being tender-hearted to animals in the English way. I have visited African zoos where lions were penned up in tiny cages and it was possible to hire a pointed stick to poke them in the eye so they would roar. Sometimes, the animals get their own back. In another African zoo, the trees in the reptile enclosure had been left so long unlopped that the snakes were able to descend directly from them on to the visitors.
Surabaya zoo was by no means bad. There were many fine animals that entertained strong social relations with their keepers.
The architecture implied an odd classification of beasts. The elephants were deemed to be Muslim and dwelt in a sort of concrete mosque. Giraffes, curiously, were Chinese and lived archly in corrugated iron pagodas. Monkeys were deemed Hindu and paced endlessly up and down on tiny stupas. My guide enjoyed all this immensely.
