The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  “But it’s true,” said Anne Talbot. “Why don’t you hold me closer? Fenella’s not looking. She’s otherwise occupied.”

  Fenella sat with the Abang.

  “Oh, Anne,” said Crabbe, “for God’s sake don’t start anything.”

  “You can always fabricate a conference in Kuala Lumpur. And I can always visit a friend in Singapore.”

  “No. Please, no.”

  “No,” said the Secretary of the State War Executive Committee, a ginger man with a Lancashire accent, “it’s not finished yet, not by any means. And won’t be for a long time.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Hardman.

  “Ruperet,” came a shrill voice from the dance-floor, “put on your songkok.”

  “These political boys want to think it’s over. It’s one way of getting us out, see. But they’re still there in the jungle, and we can’t get at them. There’s a screen of aborigines all round them, and they’re getting food and weapons and doing fine. And then these independence boys accuse us of faking things. Do you know, we brought them a couple of packs and rifles and even a cap with a star on it—genuine stuff, captured in the jungle—and they said, bold as brass, that we’d bought it at Whiteaway’s.”

  “Too bad.”

  “But there’s food getting through. God knows how, but it’s getting through. The rice ration’s down to nearly damn-all in the kampongs, but we keep finding dumps of grub in the jungles. We’re worried to death and you’d think we’d get a bit of sympathy. Damn it all, it’s their country, not ours …”

  “For fuck’s sake, take your fucking hands off me.”

  “Come on, Kadir, like a good boy. We’ll get some nice black coffee down the road.”

  “I’m not fucking drunk.”

  “Nobody said you were. A bit tired, that’s all. It’s been a long day.”

  “Don’t fucking touch me.”

  “Come on now. Grab his other arm, Kassim.”

  “We could have such a good time in K.L. There’s a nice little hotel where nobody ever goes.”

  “I guess you’re always being told you’re beautiful. I won’t say what the other guys say. I’ll just say that you look like something special to me.”

  “I was given a special piece of information to-night. Our Mr. Crabbe is known to have been prominent Communist.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. But then I say always that beneath every Christian you will find Communist leanings. It is the same sort of faith. But Hindus are always good peoples. We have too many gods to become Communist.”

  “Yes.”

  “But this is to be thought about seriously. It is terrible that the College should be run by prominent Communist.”

  “Terrible.”

  At midnight the party ended. The Sultan was bowed off to his quarters, to the accompaniment of a sketchy version of the State anthem, and the guests sought their cars. At the portals of the Istana the Abang met Crabbe for the first time. He shook his hand warmly, his eyes bright with pity, for Crabbe was doubly to suffer: he was to be robbed of his car, he was to be cuckolded.

  Crabbe and Fenella drove home sulkily. As they neared the kampong, one said to the other:

  “I didn’t see much of you this evening.”

  “Nor I of you.”

  “What was going on anyway?”

  “Exactly. What was going on?”

  “I was just being sociable.”

  “One can take sociability too far. Everybody was looking at the pair of you.”

  “Everybody was looking at the pair of you.”

  “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter.”

  “No. I don’t suppose anything matters.”

  Crabbe slept fitfully that night, the moon on his face, the China Sea in his ears. At four in the morning he awoke, sweating and terrified by the old dream, dream of a ghost he had thought exorcised for good. He was with his first wife in the car on the freezing January road. The skid, the crashed fence, the dive of the whirring car to the icy water of the river, the bubbling, the still body in the passenger-seat, the frantic ascent through fathoms of lead to the cold breath of the living night, the crime which could not be expiated.

  He sat up in bed and smoked a cigarette. The faint noises were attributes of night’s silence—the small clicks of the hunting house-lizards, the power-house drone of the refrigerator, the distant frog-croaks, Fenella’s steady breathing. He looked at her still shape on the neighbour bed, and felt pity. She had given so much to him but could never receive in return the warmth he bestowed even on a casual mistress. It could not be helped: there was just nobody to take the place of the first, the only. And yet he had thought there was a chance, especially when his fear of driving a car again had been banished by another fear—that time when Alladad Khan had been shot in the arm by the ambushing terrorists and there had been nothing for it but to seize the steering-wheel. But the dream had come back and a sinking realisation that Fenella was not to him what she should be, and hearing the sea’s beating now he shuddered at the thought of water closing over his head again, of his being enclosed by the element of another woman.

  He got up, unable to seek sleep again, frightened of re-entering that dream again, and left the bedroom. In the lounge he poured himself some whisky and sipped it very slowly. On the table, he noticed, was a poem that Fenella had started. The manuscript was much scarred with fastidious alterations, searchings for the right word and rhythm. He read it, pitying.

  Land where the birds have no song, the flowers

  No scent, and time no movement; here

  The rhythms of northern earth are frozen, the hours

  Set like ice-cubes; the running of the year

  Is stopped and comma’d only by the moon’s feasts,

  And the sun is Allah, never an avatar;

  In sight of that constant eye life crumbles, wastes

  To the contented champing patterns of the beasts

  Which live in day’s denomination. Far

  The life of years and works that yet a day’s

  Flight can restore …

  It was not a very good poem—confused, the rhythms crude. Poor Fenella. But the fact of her unhappiness was very much to be taken into account, and certainly she would never be happy here in the East. It was not her fault. She belonged to the North, the world of spring and autumn and the cultures that spring out of a weakening and strengthening sun—winter sables over bare shoulders that would glow in central heating, books by the fire and myths out of the fire. She wanted to go home, but not without him. Twice he had suggested that she go back to London, to wait till the end of the tour and long leave together. But what after that? He proposed to come back, work for Malaya till retirement, or for as long as Malaya would let him. And, unable to give her much love, he at least should give her part of what she wanted—to be with him, living somewhere where she could have her libraries and music and ballet and conversation about art, for it did not matter much to him where he lived. Except that he felt his place now was in Malaya, his duty to show Malaya those aspects of the West which were not wholly evil, to prepare Malaya for the taking over of the dangerous Western engine.

  He went back to bed and dozed till the dawn came—the mass-produced invariable tropical dawn, greeted by no bird-chorus, a dawn assignable to all months in this land of no seasons. The kampong folk would now be eating cold rice and the fishermen would be tramping down to the beach. And in the kitchen Ah Wing would happily be putting the kettle on and gathering the materials for another gargantuan breakfast. She was right about the day’s denomination, the single cubes of time—the porridge, then the kippers, then the bacon and eggs, then the routine of work: the champing pattern of the beast that occasionally looked up at the moon. Right or wrong, it was his way; since that January night he had lost the desire for more complex and civilised patterns.

  9

  THE ABANG, OF course, was aware that his days were numbered. He did not repine. He and his forebears had had their f
ill of power, possessions, women. Money was salted away in Australia, there were rubber and tin shares, a fleet of cars, jewels, precious stones, heirlooms of all kinds. Whatever happened, the Abang and his numerous progeny would never starve. It might be necessary for him to spend a glamorous exile in Cannes or Monaco or Capri, places which he had not yet seen, but he had a rough idea of what the West was like, and he had visions of new kinds of power, perhaps being lifted—like certain other royal sons of the Prophet—to heights of Occidental myth through marriage with Hollywood film-stars. He saw himself, in a smart suit and a songkok, bowed into the opulent suites of Ritzes and Waldorfs and baring, under dark glasses, a hairy chest to a milder sun by a snakeless sea. He saw himself entering the Casino, he heard the hush of respect for exiled royalty.

  Royalty. There was the joke, of course. There was not a drop of royal blood in his well-set randy body. Meanwhile, there were true rajas picking up a few dollars a month as school-teachers, tengkus working in shops. Back in the misty reaches of the annals of Dahaga—part history, part legend—some vigorous peasant had obtained a hold over a sultan senile or insane with tertiary syphilis, and the myth had come into being. He himself did not believe in the story of the descent from the fæces of a sacred bull, or in the magical accolade of the Ghost Princess, but he accepted the power of a tradition which could raise earth-red blood above that watery blue which ran in some of the lowliest channels of the State. The rajas and the tengkus bowed with joined hands to one whose very title was a rough kampong shout, for ‘Abang’ was the name one called contemptuously at boy-servants whose real names one did not know. Abang meant ‘elder brother’.

  The Abang had read George Orwell and was struck by the exquisite appropriateness of the title of the Ruler of Oceania. It had amused him for a time to consider sticking posters throughout Dahaga, posters bearing, below the image of his own powerful head, the legend: SI-ABANG MEMANDANG AWAK. But it was doubtful if his Malay subjects would have seen the point. All right, he was watching them. Why was he watching them? Did he admire their beauty, or something? If he was watching them, they could equally well be watching him. Where was all this watching getting anyone? What was there to watch, anyway? But, of course, all his subjects were proles.

  The rule of the Abang, in an age when the techniques existed to lapidify any rule to permanency, was, because of the very rise of a party, doomed. There was this new thing, politics; there were these cries of Merdeka! A new class was arising—small intellectuals, failed B.A.s, frustrated lawyers, teachers with the gift of the gab. Another year, and there would be independence. Sultans would be in an anomalous position, and Abangs would be in no position at all. Centralisation, directives, much paper, a spectacled bureaucracy, but this time not a haughty white face to be seen anywhere in the air-conditioned offices. The British would be pulling out soon and, with them, the last of the feudal rulers.

  It was, in a sense, curious that the end of colonialism meant also the end of a grotesque seigniory in Dahaga. In another sense, it was not. The British were much given to anomalies—anomalies of character, anomalous ethics, constitutional anomalies. But there would be no anomalies in the new régime: there would be a bright white light to sweep away the romantic, Gothic shadows. And then, if the dynamo failed, another dynamo would be imported and there would be a bright red light. There was going to be a dream of order—perhaps, thought the Abang, itself a kind of romanticism, but a romanticism dangerous because self-deceptive—based on a racial mystique, most probably. But the Abang feared the red hordes whose advance parties crouched in the jungle. They had no dream: their feet were firm on the ground, they were driven by a deadly logic.

  There were the people to consider, the ra’ayat, the proles. Their lot would not be improved. The kampong-life, the padi-planting, the fishing, the magic, the superstitious mumbling of the Koran, the poverty—these would continue. And the rulers would be far from them, forging with pain a new language, apt for governmental directives, which the peasant would not understand. Malay hegemony would mean nothing to the real Malay.

  Now, in the twilight of their rule, the Abang began to feel a sort of warmth towards the British. Haughty, white, fat, ugly, by no means sympathique, cold, perhaps avaricious—you could call them all these things, but Malaya would be empty without them. The common enemy was also the common law-giver; coldness could mean justice. It was too late to be friendly, too late to try to learn. But one could at least dislike with sympathy and smile through one’s valedictory jeers.

  Today, he remembered, a white woman was coming to lunch with him. Perhaps she would be the last of the series but, in a sense, the first. Soon he might be living in her world, himself the exile. He would treat her kindly, he would revere her as a symbol, his seduction of her would be civilised, delayed. He would send his best car for her, his politest chauffeur.

  The Abang left his apartments and descended the polished staircase—no hazard for bare feet—and sought, at the back of the Istana, the royal garages. There lay his stud of polished darlings, the belamped streamlined docile monsters of years of collecting. Syces were cleaning them down, whistling. Daimler, Buick, Rolls, Bentley, Jaguar, Austin Princess, Hudson—names like a roll of heroines. Every known breed except an Abelard. That was to come. He had already ascertained that the one recently arrived in the State was in excellent condition, with four brand-new tyres. Curiously enough, it was owned by the husband of the white woman coming to lunch. Well, perhaps this would be his last acquisition. It was somewhat unjust that one man had to be wronged twice, but that was probably symbolic: the Prawns or Shrimps or whatever their ridiculous fishy name was, had to be the last sacrifice, because they were the last in. No new expatriates would come to Dahaga now, except perhaps for Indonesian philologists or theologians, and the Lobsters or Crayfish were a sort of tangible twilight.

  Drizzle began to mewl out of a dark marine sky. He would play chess with the Sultan. The old boy would appreciate it, poor hag-ridden stooge. The Abang walked to the Sultan’s wing. Entering it, he saw in the open office of the A.D.C. the Muslim date. The fasting month was not far off now, and perhaps he had better not covet wives or goods during that time of holy abstinence. The Crabs—it must be Crabs—would have to be cracked open soon. He would send a formal request for the Abelard today, when the Buick went to collect the gold-haired wife.

  The Sultan sat alone, wearing a sports-shirt and an old sarong, biting his nails. He grinned up at his visitor.

  “What news, tuanku? News good?” said the Abang.

  “News good.”

  “Like play chess?”

  “Can.”

  They set out the pieces on the huge board—the elephants, the hajis, the horses, the chief minister towering above the impotent raja. While the rain beat at the windows, above the noise of typing, the song from the kitchens, they played, and the Abang played badly. He was not surprised at being beaten—it was all somehow symbolic. The Sultan grinned triumph when he ranged his second elephant next to his first, cutting off retreat from the Abang’s raja.

  “Sah-mat!”

  “Yes. Raja dead.”

  “Not play well today. Why?”

  “Not know. Will be time to learn. Much time.”

  10

  “TELL ME,” SAID Crabbe, “would you say I was fat?”

  The mosquitoes were biting badly tonight—it was an ankle-slapping evening—and there were flying-ant wings in the whisky glasses.

  Hardman scrutinised jowl and waistline with careful pale eyes. “Not exactly fat. I should imagine you’ve put on a bit of weight since you came here. Of course, at the university you were what I’d call an ascetic type—lean jaw and concave belly. Now, well, neither of us is getting any younger. Can you pull that in?”

  “Oh, yes. Easily.”

  “H’m.”

  Fenella had gone to bed early, fretful, out of sorts. People were always saying this was no climate for a white woman.

  “Why this sudden concern about adiposi
ty?” asked Hardman.

  “Oh, it was something Fenella said. She said all I thought about was my fat guts, and that I didn’t give a damn about her, and that I was becoming hoggish and boorish and thick-skinned. You know the sort of thing—you’re a married man.”

  “I don’t get that from Normah. At least, I don’t think so. She speaks a bit too fast for me at times.”

  “More whisky?”

  “Thanks.”

  In the kampong the drums were beating for a wedding or a funeral. In the kitchen Ah Wing washed up his many platters, singing an endless plainchant. The cicadas triple-tongued—tickity-tickity—and a big beetle clumsily boomed and beat the wall.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind my asking Georges to come here?”

  “Delighted. I’m afraid my French isn’t what it used to be, though.”

  “That hasn’t got fat.”

  “No.” Crabbe drank, brooded a moment, and said, “We had a bit of trouble. Apparently she made some damned silly arrangement about having lunch at the Istana. I wouldn’t let her go. I think I did the right thing.”

  “Oh, yes, you did the right thing.”

  “But then she started saying she never had any fun, that she was stuck out here with nothing to do, surrounded by a lot of half-washed peasants.”

  “They’re a very clean people.”

  “That’s what I said. Anyway, she accused me of carrying on with women, and that she was expected to be the good little stay-at-home, having no fun.”

  “Why the plural?”

  “What plural? Oh, that. It’s something that happened in Kuala Hantu. I’ve been a model of fidelity since.”

  “Yes.” Hardman grinned. “So I’ve noticed.”

  “Look here, I’m a bit worried about this Abang. He sent a car round for her at lunch-time, and I had a hell of a job getting rid of it. I said that mem couldn’t go, she had fever. Strangely enough, she’s developed a touch of it this evening.”