The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  When the bell of the trishaw-man could be heard from below, ringing forlornly through the passionate rain, Ibrahim made his decision. He went over to the drinkcupboard and emptied the contents of the phial into the sherry. The colour of the sherry was unchanged, the smell—he sniffed the heady, vinous vapour—the same. Perhaps it was really quite harmless, after all. Besides, thought Ibrahim, the Prophet had forbidden strong drink, and if anything happened to a person who drank strong drink that was perhaps a just punishment. Anyway, he had fulfilled his part of the bargain. Perhaps Allah would reward him for his fidelity to promises, perhaps Allah would ensure that his wife died of fever or of Communists.

  Ibrahim felt clean and virtuous. There was only one thing he had to do now. He took a piece of paper from the desk-drawer and a pencil from the desk-top. He began to write, in laborious Romanised Malay, his farewell message.

  Tuan. And now what? Saya sudah lepas kerja. … True. He had left the job. Sebab saya di-janji kerja yang lebeh baik. He had been offered a better job. Saya tidak mahu gaji sabagai kerja di-buat oleh saya bulan ini. He did not want any wages for this month. He had taken his wages in kind. He felt again virtuous and great-hearted because he had given his services and not received any money for them; also he felt deliciously ill-used. He poised the pencil over his scrawl. The trishaw bell rang impatiently through the dismal rain. There seemed nothing further to say. He added Yang benar, Ibrahim bin Mohammed Salleh—yours truly, and, as an afterthought, yang ma’afkan—who forgives you.

  Then, in purity of heart, he took his goods to the door of the flat. It was still raining hard. He wrapped round his shoulders the plastic raincoat of his late mistress and, in a mist of quiet virtue, went out to the trishaw and the beginning of his new life.

  11

  “IT’S NO GOOD,” said Nabby Adams. “It’s no good even starting to look at them vehicles to-day. I’d never get finished, so there’s not much point in getting started. It was the rain and what-not. We’d have managed to get here early if it hadn’t been for that rain and Mrs. Crabbe not feeling so good and that puncture. We’ll have to stay the night. They can put us up in the police station. There’s a nice little lock-up there.”

  “I must get back,” said Crabbe. “I’m working tomorrow.”

  They were sitting in a kedai on the single street of Gila, acting, it seemed, a sort of play for the entire population of the town and the nearest kampong. Their audience was uncritical and appreciative. Tiny smiling people squatted in rows before their wall-side table, and behind the squatters were others on chairs, and behind those the latecomers who had to stand. The play, after its opening scene, in which Nabby Adams had cracked his head smartly on a hanging oil-lamp, must seem to lack action, thought Crabbe. But the townsfolk and their neighbour villagers had little entertainment in their lives and, presumably, they had to be thankful for a brown man with a gun and a huge liverish rumbling man and a pale wet schoolmaster in sweaty whites and a rather tatty golden-haired goddess. Also there was no lack of sound off-stage. Cough, the dog, was shut up in the car yelling and whining, answered loudly by her own canine audience.

  Primitive drama being primarily religious, small brown smiling matrons kept bringing their infants to Fenella to be touched and blessed. Half-naked orang darat, their blowpipes sleeping at their sides, smoked strong local shag wrapped in dried leaves and watched and listened.

  “I don’t see how you can,” said Nabby Adams. “You won’t drive and I need him here to translate for me.”

  “It’s not a question of ‘won’t drive’,” said Crabbe bitterly and with heat. “There’s just something in me that won’t let me.”

  “I don’t fancy sleeping in a prison,” said Fenella. “We ought to get back. Oh, why can’t you drive, Victor?”

  “Why do you need him here to translate for you?” said Crabbe nastily. “Why don’t you speak the bloody language yourself? You’ve been here long enough.”

  “Why don’t you drive a bloody car yourself?” asked Nabby Adams.

  “That’s a different thing.”

  “Why is it?”

  “Hush, hush,” said Fenella. “Please don’t quarrel.”

  The audience, pleased with the rough and rapid passage of irritable language, smiled to each other. At the back some newcomers were being given a résumé of the plot.

  Alladad Khan, seated upstage, gave a lengthy speech. Nabby Adams gave one back. Finally he said, in English, “He says he’ll take you back and then get here himself again to-morrow morning. Although that’s going to be a bloody nuisance.”

  “Why is it?” asked Crabbe.

  “What am I going to do, stuck out here on my own?”

  “You’ve got the dog.”

  “She’s got no money. He has.”

  “Here’s ten dollars,” said Crabbe.

  But Nabby Adams was not to be lonely after all. A new character entered, accompanied by little men wearing clothes and wrist-watches. He was brown and nearly bald and he greeted Nabby Adams in the English of a Cockney Jew.

  “Hallo, chum. Still hitting it hard, eh?”

  “It’s Ranjit Singh,” said Nabby Adams. “He looks after these here Sakais. Get a chair,” he invited.

  “You mustn’t call them Sakais, chum. They don’t like it.” Ranjit Singh, now that his name had been announced, looked strangely beardless to the Crabbes. The clean shave and the naked bald head had a Black Mass quality. Ranjit Singh exhibited his apostasy to the whole world. His wife was a Eurasian Catholic, his children were at a convent school, he himself, abandoning the faith of the Sikhs, had become a devout agnostic. He held the post of Assistant Protector of Aborigines, and his task was to win the little men over to the true cause and to enlist their specialist jungle-skills in the fight against the terrorists. In fact they were incapable of being corrupted ideologically by the Communists, but they responded strongly to the more intelligible and sensible corruptions with which they were bribed and rewarded out of Government funds. They liked wrist-watches and Player’s cigarettes; their wives took quickly to lipstick and brassieres. The ineluctable process which Crabbe was implementing in the class-room was spreading even to the core of the snaky, leechy jungle. The three little men found chairs, accepted beer and joined the play. The introduction of local talent did not, however, please the audience. They wanted the exotic and mythical. Murmurings and spittings of betel juice began to spread through the assembly. Still, they waited. Perhaps the play would end as it had begun—with the big man’s cracking his head again and the awful rumble of unintelligible words.

  Ranjit Singh now took the desecrated host in the form of a cigarette. As the beer went round and the light thickened and the oil-lamp was lit, Crabbe saw the beginnings of a session burgeoning. He said:

  “We must think about going, you know. It’s a long way back.”

  “Going?” said Ranjit Singh. ‘You’ve got to stay and see the dancing, chum.”

  “Dancing?” said Fenella.

  “Oh, just a bit of a hop,” said Ranjit Singh. “A bit of a party, really, because I’ve just got back here from Timah. Any excuse for a party. We’ll have to get through a bit of jungle, though. On foot. A car’s no good.”

  Fenella’s first flush of Golden Bough enthusiasm was mitigated somewhat by this. But, still, aboriginal dancing. … The monograph droned on: ‘The culture-pattern of the orang darat is necessarily limited. The jungle houses them and feeds them and provides them with an anthropomorphic pantheon of the kind which is familiar to us from our observations of primitive life in the Congo, the Amazon and other centres where a rudimentary civilisation seems to have been arrested at what may be termed the “Bamboo Level”. Morality is simple, government patriarchal, and the practice of the arts confined to primitive and unhandy ornamentation of weapons and cooking utensils. … In the dance, however, the orang darat has achieved a considerable standard of rhythmic complexity and a high order of agility. …’

  One of the orang darat asked Fenella in
courteous Malay if she would like some more beer. She came to, startled, and refused with equal courtesy.

  “We must get back,” said Crabbe.

  “But, darling,” said Fenella, “we must see the dances, we must. We can travel all night, after all.”

  “And Alladad Khan?”

  “He can get back here by mid-morning. He won’t mind.”

  The play came to an end. The characters took their bows. Nabby Adams cracked his head again on the hanging lamp. The audience was pleased and, gently, began to go home, chattering with animation, discussing, comparing. …

  “We ought to have taken the bloody hat round,” said Nabby Adams.

  The way through the jungle was lighted by fire-flies and a couple of electric torches. The orang darat went first, sure-footed. A tiger called, far away, and things scuttled under Fenella’s feet. Leeches dropped on her and, surfeited, fell off again. It was not long, however, before they saw flares and crude huts in a clearing. There were tiny muscular men in trousers and small women, gaping at the apparition of Fenella, wearing brassieres and almost nothing else. The women chattered eagerly together, discussing her, clicking and sliding in a tongue with many words but no inflections.

  It was, to Fenella, a disappointing evening. A toddy jug went round and with it little glutinous rice-cakes. The natives were hospitable. But their dances were nothing more than a happy romp and their songs artless and simple as five-finger exercises. Two drums beat easy rhythms and an old man blew a flute, first with his mouth, then with his nose. It was, except for the toddy, a mere jolly Boy Scout evening. …

  At midnight they saw Nabby Adams and his dog safely bedded down in the lock-up, a beer-bottle filled with already stale toddy safely bedded down beside them. “This will do nicely for my breakfast,” said Nabby Adams. “I’ll try and get her a bit of fish or something.”

  And so the journey back. Fenella went to sleep, stretched on the rear cushions. Alladad Khan and Crabbe, exhilarated by toddy, talked metaphysics in Malay.

  “The question is whether a thing is really there if we are not there to see it.”

  “You could hear it, or smell it.”

  “No, no, I mean … (I wish I could think of the right Malay word.) I mean if we could not be aware of it with our …”

  “Senses?”

  “Yes, our senses. We could not be sure it existed.”

  “So this jungle perhaps exists only in our heads?”

  “Perhaps. And this car. And you only exist in my head, too.”

  “And my wife only exists in my head? And the child?”

  “It is possible.”

  “It would be a big relief,” said Alladad Khan, sighing. Slowly, with skill, he steered through the nine-mile stretch of bad land. The toddy put out its tongue and made long noses at the hidden enemies.

  It was when they were well past danger, but also well away from even the smallest attap homestead, that the car broke down. Alladad Khan poked and pulled and swore in the dark. Fenella awoke.

  “What’s the trouble?”

  “Something’s gone wrong with the engine. Christ knows what. We’ll never get back to-night, not unless we can stop somebody and get help.”

  “But what are we going to do?”

  “We’ll have to sleep here.”

  “Sleep here?” Fenella wailed. Alladad Khan tugged and fiddled at the car’s guts. How he hated engines, how they hated him.

  It was no good. They settled for sleep, after half an hour of waiting for a saviour vehicle to appear on that deserted road. They awoke shortly after the first comfortless doze to find that the rain had started again. They wound up the windows and, in suffocating heat, with the rain pounding with a myriad metallic fists on the car-roof, lay, wooing sleep, Crabbe and Fenella now both on the back seat, slouching in the corners, and Alladad Khan in the front.

  They pretended to each other to be asleep, each wrapped in his few cubic feet of dark, each with his own pounding private rain. They were all obsessed with the world of dark and the world of spinning thundering water. Everything seemed a long way away, bed and home and anything that could be thought about comfortably. But, each separately, the rain and the blackness had absorbed them, and each seemed strange to the other. Once a lorry swished and hurtled past, lighting each one to the other as a hunched mound of silver and black.

  Alladad Khan woke to a strangeness, a lack of noise, after an hour of dreaming. Rain was no longer falling, but the car-floor was flooded. The sky had cleared and the moon shone. Alladad Khan saw that it was near the end of the true, lunar month. Silently he wound down the windows, letting in the strong rank smell of wet grass and trees and earth. Crabbe watched him let the windows down, without speaking or stirring. Fenella was asleep, snoring very faintly. When Alladad Khan seemed asleep again, Crabbe put his arm gently round Fenella’s shoulders and let her sleeping weight fall against him. He was filled with a terrible compassion for her and longed for it to be love. Alladad Khan, quietly awake, watched him. The moon moved imperceptibly towards setting.

  Alladad Khan woke to the far crying of kampong cocks in the dark. That noise had been the farmyard aubade in the Punjab in his dream. He had been a boy again, sleeping in the same bed as his brother. He would wake soon to breakfast and school. He woke to Malaya and a strange bed, strangers breathing rhythmically behind him. He felt completely alone but curiously confident, as though he understood that aloneness was the answer the philosophers had been looking for.

  The last awakening was in the grey spreading light. An inquiring Chinese face was peering in at the driver’s window, talking, asking. Alladad Khan geared his fumbling brain to the right language. He saw, dimly, a saloon car parked across the road.

  “Need help?”

  “How far from Tongkat?”

  “Nearly ten miles. I am going there.”

  “Could you ask the garage to send …?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Crabbe and his wife groaned and yawned, hair tangled, eyelids gummed, dirty and exhausted. What a day this was going to be, thought Crabbe. He would never be there in time, and this was the day of the Governors’ meeting, the lunch with the Sultan, the School Sports. They would telephone the flat and Ibrahim would say that Tuan had not yet returned. He had no excuse. It had been foolish to suppose that they ever could get back in time. At best, he would arrive when the Sports were nearly finished. A six-hour journey from Tongkat to Kuala Hantu. The work of putting the car right. At very best, he would arrive in the middle of the Sports.

  He got out of the car and stretched in the morning that already gathered its heat together. It did not matter. He was too old to worry about things like that. But he was also too old to be nagged by Boothby, too old to permit himself the luxury of smashing Boothby’s face in. It was best to conform, best not to cause trouble. And to-day he was sure that there was something that only he could do. He was sure that there was going to be trouble and that only he could handle that trouble.

  Alladad Khan was looking sadly into the car-engine, saying something about an oil leak, about engines seizing up. Fenella combed her hair dismally, tried to put her face to rights. It was full day already.

  They stamped around, smoking, waiting for the breakdown service of the garage. It was an hour before the cheerful Chinese mechanics arrived to tow them into Tongkat. In Tongkat they were told that the leak could be remedied in about an hour and a half.

  “We’ll have to get a taxi,” said Crabbe.

  “A taxi? All the way?” Fenella was indignant. “If you’re not back, you’re not back, that’s all. Ring them up now, tell them you’ve had a breakdown. Tell them they can expect you when they see you.”

  There was a public telephone in the small post office. After much delay Crabbe got through to the School office. He heard the voice of a peon. The Chief Clerk had not yet arrived.

  “Yes?”

  “Tell them I’m stranded in Tongkat.”

  “Yes.”

  “The car’s
broken down.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m trying to get back as quickly as I can. Tell them that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that quite clear?”

  “Yes.”

  Crabbe went back to the kedai where Fenella was drinking black coffee and staring at the bilious pink cakes. “Well, I’ve done all I can do,” he said. Alladad Khan twisted his moustache, aware of his wet, creased uniform and filthy boots. He said nothing, basking in a curious and unreasonable content.

  It was ten o’clock before they were able to leave Tongkat. The car, holding its oil now, sped on in sunlight. Fenella lay at the back, trying to doze away her headache. Alladad Khan and Crabbe spoke metaphysics at the front.

  “It is hard to say these things in a language like Malay. But this man Plato believed that all things on earth were a mere copy of a chontoh dalam shurga, a heavenly pattern.”

  “So there is one motor-engine in the mind of God, and all others on earth try to imitate it.”

  “Yes, something like that.”

  “And this motor-engine of God’s never breaks down?”

  “Oh, no, it cannot. It is perfect.”

  “I see.” Alladad Khan drove on past another rubber estate. “But of what use is a motor-engine to God?”

  “God knows.”

  “That is true. God knoweth best.”

  Secure and relaxed, they rolled on. “YOU ARE NOW ENTERING A WHITE AREA.” “YOU ARE NOW LEAVING A WHITE AREA.” “Obviously,” said Alladad Khan, “the Communists must be able to read English. They are gentlemen and will keep on the right side of the notice.”

  At two o’clock they ate sateh and drank beer in a cheerless kampong where the people were hostile and spat. Crabbe thought, ‘Now the Sports are starting; now perhaps the trouble is starting too. And I, being away from the trouble, will undoubtedly be associated with the trouble.’