The Malayan Trilogy

by Anthony Burgess

  “Well,” said Moneypenny. He sighed. “What do you want to do? You’ve missed the estate launch. That went”—he looked narrowly at his wrist-watch—“an hour ago. You’d better stay the night with me. Although Haynes has got the only spare bed.” He started the engine and wrenched the gear-lever with his teeth clenched, seemingly in hate. “You can toss for it. One of you will have to sleep on the floor.”

  “I slept on the floor last night.”

  “Oh, well, you won’t mind doing it again, then. Our Temple’s a bit more used to gracious living.”

  “Is he a nice chap?”

  “Oh, yes. He talks a lot about phonemes and semantemes and bilabial fricatives. He has a van with recording apparatus in it. He’s a good chap.”

  They came now into Mawas, a decent-sized town for this hulu region: a wide main street and a few shops; a clean police station with pot plants outside; even a cinema. Here the estates—two up-river, one down—could victual themselves with rice, fish and buffalo-meat; here the tappers could make sedately merry on a night off. Moneypenny drove to a wooden shack labelled ‘Department of Aborigines’. This had been translated—in fresher paint—into official Malay: ‘Pejabat Kaum Asli’ (literally, Office of Tribe of Originals) and, in paint hardly dry, into weird cuneiform symbols which were quite unfamiliar to Crabbe.

  “That’s his alphabet,” said Moneypenny. “Temiar Alphabet Mark One. But Mark Three’s already on its way.” He spoke with a kind of gloomy vicarious pride.

  In the cool office sat Temple Haynes. Before him stood three tiny aborigines. On the wall hung a large sheet of glazed rag-paper with pictures on it: men, women, children, horses, pigs, houses, trains, aeroplanes, buffaloes, trees. Temple Haynes pointed at pictures in turn with a stick, inviting the little men to name them. He seemed pleased to see Moneypenny. “I don’t seem to be getting very far with this dialect,” he said. “They keep saying the same thing. They seem to be giving everything the same name.” He read off a weird word from his notebook. “That,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Moneypenny. “That means ‘picture’.”

  “Why do you have more than one picture of each thing?” asked Crabbe.

  “That,” said Temple Haynes, “is for plurals.” He stood up. “I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure.” Moneypenny admitted that he had forgotten Crabbe’s name.

  “Crabbe,” said Crabbe.

  “Crabbe,” said Temple Haynes. “I met a Crabbe in London. Fenella Crabbe, the poet. Are you any relation?”

  “My very distant wife. Soon no longer to be a wife.”

  “I’m genuinely sorry to hear that,” said Temple Haynes. “I think very highly of her work.” The three aborigines looked up at Crabbe reproachfully.

  Temple Haynes seemed pure Mayflower: unemphatic features, clear hazel eyes as sane as Moneypenny’s were mad. He wore no crew-cut: ample light-brown waves were combed neatly from a middle parting. But his sharkskin trousers were American-tailored, delicately moulding his rump as he turned round to put out a non-cancer cigarette. He wore a drip-dry cream shirt and a polka-dot bowtie. A moygashel jacket hung over a chair. “I guess that’s the lot for this morning,” he said to Moneypenny. “Could I have them again at two?” Moneypenny coughed sounds of dismissal. The three little men made vague obeisances and shambled out.

  “Where’s my clerk?” asked Moneypenny. “I’ve letters to write.”

  “He went away,” said Haynes. “About an hour ago. He very kindly yielded the office to me.”

  “If you want lunch,” said Moneypenny, “you can get it at Ang Siow Joo’s. I never eat lunch.” He gave them both a mad look and then sat down at his desk.

  Haynes and Crabbe walked in the heat outside. “I’d read one of her things in a review back home,” said Haynes. “A long poem about Malaya. Very impressive, I thought.”

  “Never read it,” said Crabbe. “Didn’t even know about it.”

  “Really?” Haynes gave Crabbe a swift sincere glance, mildly incredulous. “Then we had this short course at the Anglo-American South-East Asian Society in London. A very useful background course. She gave two lectures. She came with a rather distinguished Malay whose name I’ve forgotten.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” said Crabbe, thinking: ‘What the hell does she know about Malaya, anyway?’ “That would be His Highness the Abang of Dahaga.”

  Hearing the rasp in Crabbe’s voice, Haynes glanced at him again in mild inquiry. “Anyway,” he said, “she’s making a name. And she’s a great help to all of us who are coming out here for the first time.”

  “All of you?” said Crabbe. “All of who?”

  “Various organisations,” said Haynes vaguely. “There’s work to do in South-East Asia.” It was the rather smug voice of the records of Four Quartets, though much younger. “I’m concerned, as you’ll have guessed, with the linguistic angle. Then there’s the angle of inter-racial relations. And there’s method of teacher training, time-and-motion study in industry, behaviour-patterns, statistics, sociological surveys and, of course, demographic studies. A great deal to do. It’ll cost a lot of money, of course, but it’s the best possible investment. We can’t afford to let the Communists get away with it.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Crabbe. “Are we going to have a drink?”

  Temple Haynes smiled indulgently and looked at his wrist-watch—waterproof, self-winding, with the date and the current lunar phase. “What can one drink at this hour of the day?” he asked.

  “Coca-Cola,” growled Crabbe.

  Haynes laughed gaily, but there were no butterflies about. “There’s no need to feel bitter about anything,” he said. “A lot of us contemn the drinking of that beverage as much as you Europeans seem to do. Although I must confess I found Europe full of Coca-Cola signs. No,” he continued, “you mustn’t identify us with the Hollywood or G.I. image. If you wish me to prove my adulthood, I’m quite willing to come and drink gin with you. Not that I really enjoy gin outside of a martini, and you can’t get martinis here.”

  They strolled into Ang Siow Joo’s. It was midday and Crabbe had had no breakfast. He ordered pork rissoles and boiled Chinese cabbage. Haynes’s leather case contained more than notebooks: from it he took thin sheets of rye bread, peanut butter and silver-wrapped Swiss cheese. He ate sparely, lighted a non-cancer cigarette, and amiably watched Crabbe finish his crude meal.

  “This afternoon,” he said, “I must do a little more dialectology. The real job, as you know, is isolating the phonemes, or, rather, discovering what is phonemic and what is allophonic. That is fascinating and very important.” He chattered on, and Crabbe felt lost and boorish and crude. The British, he decided, had been merely gifted amateurs: Singapore had been raised on amateur architecture, amateur town-planning, amateur education, amateur law. Now was the time for the professionals. Thoughts struck him. He said:

  “What are they going to do about music?”

  “Music? That, of course, is not my department. But Lewis and Roget, both from Columbia, are getting permission to initiate a pretty exhaustive survey of South-East Asian music. It will take years, of course, but they hope to produce some kind of definitive treatise, complete with copious recorded examples.”

  “And if you find a promising South-East Asian composer?”

  “I repeat,” said Haynes, “that is not my province. My province is purely linguistic. But,” he smiled, “if such a prodigy is found, I fancy that he’ll be well taken care of with scholarships. I think there’s already a foundation in existence to promote the encouragement of native artistic talent.”

  “Take this boy’s name,” said Crabbe, “now. And his address. Pass them on. Please.”

  “I think you’re more in a position to do that than I,” said Haynes. “After all, it’s not my field. As I told you, I’m a …”

  “I know,” said Crabbe impatiently. “But I may never get the chance. Please take his name, please write to these people.”

  “If you wish.” Haynes
was most good-humoured and accommodating. He wrote in a pocket diary Robert Loo’s name and address. “There,” he smiled; “I’ve got that down.”

  “Thank you,” said Crabbe. He felt relieved: perhaps, in time, all his burdens would be lifted.

  “I think now,” said Haynes, “I’ll take a brief siesta. I have work to do at two. Shall we stroll over to Moneypenny’s house?”

  The house was round the corner, a little way up the hill. It was filthy and bare, stripped down, like its tenant, to sheer primary function, disdaining all secondary sensation. Thus the bathroom which Crabbe visited showed signs that Moneypenny now regarded even a lavatory as supererogatory. The floors were covered with rugs of peanut-shells. Everything was pared to the human limit: tapioca and taboos. The spare room, which Haynes had taken, was a sweet cool oasis, aseptically clean, swept and scoured by Haynes himself, smelling of insect-repellent, containing neat clusters of bottles on shelves: paludrine, quinine, penicillin ointment, vitamin tablets, toilet requisites of all kinds. But the rest of the house, including Moneypenny’s own room, where Crabbe sought his siesta, was a growling grim annexe to the jungle where Moneypenny spent most of his time, that green monster hotel with water running through.

  Crabbe slept long, not hearing Haynes’s neat, timely departure. He awoke after four, hot, wet and dry-mouthed. There was nothing to drink in the house, not even cold water, for Moneypenny had long sold his refrigerator. But Crabbe remembered that the American, being of a race with as little sense of guilt as history, would not be so selfdenying. Haynes’s van was parked in the shack of a garage, and in it Crabbe found a deep-freeze—powered he knew not how—singing away, in its belly bottles of mineral water, clipped to its lid an opener. He sat and drank, thinking vaguely about Fenella. It was, he felt, not really remarkable that, travelling to the small world up-river, he should already have come into a finger-tip or fingernail contact with her twice. She was making her name known at last, perhaps because free at last of him. But he could not get out of his head the feeling that this reading her last night, hearing about her today, was somehow ominous: it was as though the river and the jungle together were singling him out for attention, approaching him in terms of his own past. Death? Did this mean he was going to die? Absurd. He was fit, despite his small cushions of fat; his digestion was good; his heart, despite occasional palpitations attributable to the heat, to too much tobacco and midday drinking, was sound enough. The up-river journey was safe; he would keep out of the way of the snipers. Above all, he had no wish to die: there was plenty for him to do still, all over the dwindling Colonial Empire. He shrugged away last night’s memory of Mr. Raj’s words in Kuala Hantu, words about his never going home, his complete assimilation to the country. That, of course, could not be, and it would be stupid to give that prophecy an ironic interpretation—leaving his bones up-river, the Englishman’s grave quickly becoming a native shrine to be loaded with supplicatory bananas and flowers. And yet he still felt a desire to postpone his trip to Durian Estate.

  Though less now, he thought, envisaging another day with the sane Haynes and the mad Moneypenny, their clean and dirty worlds. Tomorrow he would take the launch, get the job over, return quickly to the State capital and the stress of his problems there. He drank one more bottle of Haynes’s mineral-water—slightly scented, effervescent, saccharine, with an extravagant claim on the label (‘it excites the pancreas to fresh efforts’) and wondered what he should do now. Then Haynes himself appeared with a plan for his evening.

  Haynes seemed mildly pleased that Crabbe should be crouched in the van among the tape-recorders and cold storage. “Welcome,” he said, “to American territory.” And then: “There’s an event of some interest taking place tonight in one of the villages. A new stage for the native shadow-play has been erected, and there is to be an opening ceremony. I wish that Cunliffe could be here.”

  “Cunliffe?”

  “A friend soon to come to this territory. He majored in anthropology and has already published a treatise on Mexican folk-ceremonies. Perhaps you would accompany me? My knowledge of Malay is slight, and I’d like to take a few notes. Perhaps photographs too.” He beamed modestly at a fine delicate instrument lying on the shelf of the van—a camera with many knobs and calibrations. “I think even the observations of the amateur can be of some use. An amateur present is obviously better than a professional absent.”

  In Moneypenny’s house no dinner was served. Guests had to feed themselves with what few raw materials they could find in their host’s store-cupboard, cooking these laboriously on an oil-burner whose wicks were charred and slow to yield to the match. Crabbe heated a can of soup for himself, Haynes prepared eggs Benedict and had slices of spam with a tinned salad, Moneypenny ate cold boiled tapioca, grumbling in snapped sentences about civilisation.

  “Another week,” he said, “and Barlow should be back from K.L. I can’t stand this sort of life,” he said, sneering at Haynes’s neat plateful, “it’s artificial. I want to get back into the jungle. It’s the only possible life for a man.”

  “How is Barlow?” asked Crabbe.

  “The same as ever. The nice little professional anthropologist, the sort of bloke who likes office-work.”

  “But,” suggested Haynes with scholarly courtesy, “you would surely be the first to admit that the professional anthropologist has his uses. I mean, the fact that he has a terminology, a classificatory system, the fact that he comes with a background of intensive comparative studies. …”

  “Balls,” bawled Moneypenny rudely. “You’ve got to get into the jungle. You’ve got to come face to face with the living reality. There was Barlow at the university reading books and dishing up the books in his essays; there was I actually doing the job. There’s no substitute for actual experience.”

  “I’d venture to disagree,” ventured Haynes. “Training …”

  “You’re just as bad,” snapped Moneypenny. Clearly he had had a boring afternoon in the office. “Making alphabets without knowing a word of the languages.”

  “Really,” protested Haynes with mildness, “I never laid claim to be a linguist. I’m a linguistician, which is rather different. I mean, what I’m after chiefly at the moment is the phonemes. I’ve no wish to be able to speak any of these languages with fluency: a working knowledge is all I aspire to.”

  “Yes,” said Crabbe. “That’s right. It’s a question of what patterns you can make emerge out of your inchoate experiences. For instance …”

  “You,” said Moneypenny, “can shut up. What do you know about it, anyway? Coming up here slumming, laughing your bloody head off at butterflies. When you’re a guest in my house, you’ll behave. Understand?”

  “But …”

  “No buts,” said Moneypenny. “You stick to your Chinese catamites and your black mistresses. Don’t start telling me what to do.”

  “I never said a word …”

  “Well, don’t.” He began to get up from the table. “Just don’t, that’s all.”

  “And I don’t quite like what you said just then,” said Crabbe, with heat. “About black mistresses.”

  “We know what goes on,” said Moneypenny, standing with his plate by the kitchen door. “We may be far from civilisation,” he sneered, “but we know all about you people. We don’t want you, me and the Temiars. Leave us alone, that’s all we ask.” He stomped into the kitchen, rinsed his plate sketchily, returned. “I’m going to bed,” he said. “You can please yourselves what you do.” He entered his bedroom.

  “We will,” said Crabbe, and began to say more, but Haynes plucked his sleeve gently, shaking his head with a faint smile. “Bloody mad,” said Crabbe.

  Crabbe and Haynes drove gently to the village, four miles away, where the wayang kulit ceremony was to be held. “I can’t stay the night there,” said Crabbe. “I just can’t. He’s so obviously cracked. He may get violent.”

  “You can sleep in my room,” said Haynes. “I’ve a li-lo. And the door has a lock
.”

  “Yes. Thanks. After all, it’s only for one night.”

  In the village they received a kind, an urbane, welcome. The headman even brought warm orange crush. And the shadow-play master invited them, with most courteous words, to sit on the stage itself, behind the drummers and pipers, the ox-hide shadow-puppets and the hanging lamp, the large taut cloth on which the silhouettes would be projected, to witness the humble processes by which the age-old heroic drama was enacted.

  “Hindu in origin,” said Crabbe to Haynes. “Hardly a trace of Islam in the whole thing. Take your shoes off,” he said, as they began to mount the steps. “That’s the custom.” In their socks they crouched in the corner of the attap hut, the enclosed heat most oppressive, listening to the oboist skirling away in improvisation, the drummers and gong-players trying out their sticks. The master sat cross-legged, immediately behind the screen, on each side of him the many figures—gods, demons, the comic intermediaries between the supernatural and sublunary worlds—the manipulation of which was his priest-like office.

  “The heat,” gasped Haynes. And from Crabbe’s own forehead sweat dripped or gathered into a kind of meniscus to be scooped off. But the master, cool, brown, entranced, now uttered the word “Om”, identifying himself for the instant with God Himself, calling on many gods and devils to be kind and patient, not to take offence at the crude representation of their acts soon to come, not to be incensed at the ox-hide caricatures of their numinous essences. He offered a delicacy—scorched rice; he abased himself before their greatness. And he remembered the one true religion, invoking the protection of the four archangels of the Koran.