"You won't like the jails here. Insects . . . cockroaches. Centipedes and tarantulas and scorpions. Things crawling over you and fluttering in your face in the dark-and I won't be there to protect you."
She looked uncertain, for I had flicked her on her one weak spot. Java has an exceptionally intense density of population of the true dominant races of this globe; in that hot and humid climate insects abound in a fashion almost unbelievable to inhabitants of colder, drier places, and Ticky cannot stand creepy-crawlies of any sort. They change her from an Amazon to a frightened little girl. She can't abide anything with six legs-except trios, and not all of those.
I have explained to her that most insects do not bite, sting, nor carry disease, and that even bees, wasps, and hornets are polite to people who are polite to them and do not startle them. But she remains unconvinced; insects panic her. Except butterflies, of course, which she does not class as insects at all, but as self-propelled flowers.
I could see that the remote possibility of spending even a few minutes in a calaboose that was sure to be heavily infested with her mortal enemies was worrying her. "Fleas . . ." I added. "Lice-"
But she shrugged and squared her shoulders. "You're just trying to frighten me. I won't have any trouble."
Nor did she. And they did beseech her. When our car stopped in the little side street where the money changers hang out we were immediately surrounded by a crowd, each member of which swore by Allah that he gave the highest rates.
Ticky opened her purse and got out her book of traveler's cheques. "How many rupiahs for twenty U.S. dollars?" she said briskly.
They all stopped cold. One of them said hesitantly, "No cheques, please, Madame. Cash dollars."
"These are the same as cash dollars. They were purchased for U.S. dollars in the United States of America. Didn't you ever see traveler's cheques before?"
"Certainly, Madame, we know all about traveler's cheques . . . which is why we don't want them. They are very hard to handle. But for your dollars, please, I give you very good rate."
"But I don't have any dollars. Not a single one."
"Madame is sure?"
I thought she would take offense at the implication-which she would have back home. But she took it for the purely professional gambit that it was and answered, "Quite sure. We changed our last cash dollar in Singapore. Now does anyone, anyone at all, want to buy American traveler's cheques, good for their face value in American dollars? Speak up, or I'm leaving."
Nobody answered. On the face of the spokesman was a mixture of doubt, cupidity, and very real apprehension. He withdrew a few yards from us and the rest followed; they went into a huddle. Although the money changers were all in competition he seemed to hold some sort of leadership by prestige. The committee meeting went on for some time, then he came back to us. "Very well, Madame, as a favor to you. Will you come this way, please?" His gestures indicated that he wanted us to come inside a restaurant, out of the public eye.
Ticky held back. "What's your rate?"
"Eighteen rupiahs to the dollar."
"What! That's ridiculous. They are paying at least twenty-five rupiahs for a dollar anywhere."
"For your dollars, Madame, I will pay twenty-six rupiahs. But these are cheques."
"They are the same as dollars."
"To you perhaps, Madame, but not to me. I must pay again to get them changed. Even twenty-seven rupiahs for dollars."
"I really don't have any cash dollars. None. But I'll save these cheques and spend them in Australia before I'll let them go for any silly price like that. What is the best you will pay?"
"Aaaeeh . . . nineteen, Madame. I make no profit."
Ticky looked stubborn and so did he, they managed to look alike. I was getting fretful at the delay and a bit nervous; I interrupted with, "See here, give us twenty and get it over with."
He did not answer but produced a fountain pen and started counting out rupiahs. We left almost at once with my pockets all bulging with rupiahs-dirty, sweat-stained, ragged, and worn, and (I was afraid) possibly counterfeit. Our driver was not outside, nor the car; I looked up and down the street, then saw him waving to us at the intersection. He had moved the car around the corner to another street.
He waited while we walked toward him. Just as we reached the corner an open touring car filled with soldiers, each with a Tommy gun and wearing U.S. helmets, swung around the corner and cruised slowly down the street. They glanced at us, but said nothing. I looked back. The street was empty except for a dog and one child; the swarm of money changers were nowhere in sight. "Get in the car," the driver said. "Let's go."
When we were a few blocks away our driver-guide asked, "What rate did he give you?"
I told him and added, "Was that a fair rate?"
"It's all right. He cheated you only a little-traveler's cheques are no good; they can be followed. How much did you change?"
I hesitated, then decided that if he was asking because he intended to collect a commission later, there was no reason for me to make it difficult, so I told him. He dropped the subject and asked, "You want to go to bazaars now?"
"Yes," said Ticky.
"No," I said firmly. "Let's try to get to Bogor before lunch." It being a Moslem country he did as the male said. Ticky did not debate the matter, as she was almost as eager to see botanical gardens as she was to shop. She seemed quite happy; if the close encounter with the soldier-police had been noticed by her, it had not dampened her. Presently I noticed that she was whistling a tune; I identified it as "Working for the Yahnkee Dollar."
I said morosely, "You know what you are, don't you? A dollar imperialist . . . a jackal of Wall Street. Probably a warmonger as well."
She gave me a sunny smile. "I'm going to buy the prettiest things!"
The drive from Djakarta to Bogor is shown as out in the country by the map, but the houses stand almost solidly along the roadside the whole way, with more houses glimpsed behind the others as you speed past. Once in a while there would be a break and the rubber plantations or the rice paddies would come right up to the road. This is a place with climate but almost no seasons; the rice is cultivated through the year, crop after crop. Java is normally a rice-exporting country, and is becoming so again, now that the dislocations of war have been somewhat smoothed out. We could see water buffaloes, the tractor of the East, patiently pulling plows through the water-covered mud, followed by a driver himself knee deep in it. I asked our guide what the wage rates were for farmhands?
I had a little trouble making myself understood, although he spoke excellent, almost-accentless English. I explained again, then added, "Or do they all own the land they work?"
"Oh, no." He considered it, then added, "But they don't get paid anything; they get a place to live in and their food. That's all they expect."
I shut up and mulled over the implications of this. Java is one of the richest places in the world, possibly the very richest for its size, both in agriculture and in mineral resources. Yet it is so crowded that the ratio of people to arable land is four to the acre, whereas U.N. estimates of the proper ratio for a decent diet is four to ten acres. These figures are clouded by the fact that an acre in Java produces much more than does an acre of good farm land most other places. Indeed, if it were not so, Java could never have reached its present crowded condition; starvation would have prevented.
But things are badly out of whack and I wondered if it were possible for the island to feed its inhabitants no matter how efficiently its riches were managed. We passed the studio and sound stages of the Indonesia national motion picture industry about this time and I wondered again if the country could afford such luxuries? The installation looked comparable to those along Melrose Avenue in Hollywood and must have cost quite a lot of foreign exchange-then I wondered if it were not utterly necessary in the long run to build up the motion picture industry and things like it and thereby swap labor at home (which they had in plenty) for food grown abroad.
All
I could really be sure of was that I did not envy President Sukarno his job.
To add to the already innumerable troubles of his possibly insuperable problems the feminists of Indonesia are now after his scalp-and all the poor man did was to take a second wife of the four permitted him by the Koran.
We sped on toward Bogor over excellent paved roads, dodging barrows and buses and foot traffic and dragons. The dragons were in honor of New Year's and each one was animated by six to a dozen Chinese school kids. The dragons could not see very well, decked out as they were, and anyhow they were very busy rearing up and snake dancing and being fierce, as proper dragon manners require. Fortunately our driver had good reflexes. We got to Bogor with only some near misses.
The charge for admission to the botanical gardens was only half a rupiah, or about two cents American. They are very old and very grand. The scientific names of the plants and trees we saw may be found on p. 975 of volume 12 of the 1954 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; I am not going to cheat by copying them down here. But the gardens have representatives in lavish numbers of all the plants to be found in the tropical rain forests ("jungles" to us Tarzan fans) of the Sunda Archipelago, the most impressive of which are the tall, graceful trees, one hundred and fifty feet or more in height, which reach up to the sky and form the roof of the jungle. As for the rest, there was everything from magnolias to mangoes spilling over hill and canyon and all beautifully kept up.
A barefoot laborer with good command of English (which he asserted that he had acquired simply by talking with tourists) spotted us and took us in charge; Ticky had her usual half-Latin, half-English shop talk while I swatted at mosquitoes and appreciated the deep shade-the sun outside the gardens had a Mad-Dogs-and-Englishmen intensity. Finally I insisted that we leave, as Ticky had not taken her anti-malaria pills. The laborer graciously permitted us to make him a small gift and we parted on a high level of international amity.
We were forced to eat lunch in Bogor or go hungry. I say "forced" because the best restaurant available was far from appetizing. Bogor is a pretty little town compared with Djakarta; it is green and nestles into the mountains. But its standards of sanitation are reminiscent of Djakarta's canal. We ate hot, cooked food and drank no water and hoped for the best. It was a Chinese restaurant and the food tasted good, but the dishes and place itself were dirty. We sat on an open porch at street level; traffic moved past six inches from my elbow, an arrangement which resulted in us being braced by beggars as we ate. Our guide recommended that we ignore them or there would simply be more of them hanging around . . . which was true but I do not have the courage to eat in the presence of a skinny, blind man who is being led around by an equally skinny little girl-and do nothing about it. While I know it is bailing the ocean with a spoon and changes the situation not at all, nevertheless when his filmed eyes stare past your plate and his nostrils quiver the only possible course is to pay and pray Allah to forgive you for being yourself and not the beggar.
So we paid and paid again, usually to blind men, and got out of there as quickly as we could, then crossed the square to the market. Bogor is far enough from the sea coast that the bazaars are intended for the local trade rather than for tourists. I don't suppose that we paid native prices, but even the asking prices were about half the best we could do at the bazaars around the Hotel des Indes back at the port. Over my objections, Ticky bought a coolie hat the size and shape of a large umbrella, the sort worn by the farmers in the rice paddies. It was a beautiful job of basket weaving but about as manageable as a mattress. Then she turned to sarongs and scarfs and blouses.
She looked them over while the Javanese women looked her over and I looked them over. They stared at her silently, quite a crowd of them. Their faces showed nothing, but I wondered what they thought of her, with her white skin and her red hair and her purse full of rupiahs-and her height. Ticky is not big; she has a twenty-two-inch waist and I tower over her, but she was a foot taller than most of these women. Even the Javanese men seem small and smooth and childlike to us; they are not the big-boned hairy apes that we of the colder regions are. Very possibly our appearance alone is enough to make them think how pleasant it would be if we were dead; we offend just by existing.
But they simply stared, while Ticky bought enough batik to start a small tent & awning company. I got her back into the car as quickly as possible, as we were already short on packing space. The coolie hat would not, of course, pack at all and it was already a nuisance in the car. On the trip back we continued to encounter dragons, but they were getting a little tired by now and did not dance quite as much. Perhaps they were beginning to realize that the New Year hardly ever lives up to its promise.
When we got back to the ship we found that we had missed a chance to reach the west coast of Australia and with it the chance to cross the Australian continent. The sister ship of our own, the ship for Fremantle which we had been unable to book in Singapore, had been lying in the berth just forward of us; it had sailed an hour before our return. There had been a cancellation for one double room at the last minute and its purser had come aboard to see if any of us wanted it-so a search had been made for us and the space had been held for us right up to sailing.
I swore feelingly for a bit, as I had wanted very badly to make the trip overland across Australia . . . and, besides, the other ship might even have been clean. But it was impossible to do anything about it; we had literally missed the boat.
Ticky displayed her plunder and our Indonesian chief steward taught her several ways to wrap a sarong. It seems that each island has its own style of wrapping-none of them the way Dorothy Lamour wraps one-and you can tell what island a woman is from by the way she ties her sarong. He also showed her how to judge quality by sniffing the cloth. The rule seemed to be that the worse the odor the better the batik, though I may have been wrong about this.
We had planned for the next day several visits intended to be both educational and instructive. I wanted to take advantage of Mr. Lothar Wolff's invitation to visit the movie studios, this being a subject I knew enough about to form some opinions, and I wanted to see a Chinese school which was run by a relative of Mr. Ho. I had been told in Singapore that the school had more than four hundred pupils, grammar and high, but nevertheless met in the small home of the principal as the school buildings had been a casualty of the War. I had asked how this was possible and had been told that each pupil attended only one hour a day, just long enough to recite and be assigned homework for the next day. The Chinese thirst for knowledge in the face of difficulties I had met before; it seemed to me that such a school was well worth seeing. I planned too, to call on a newspaperman to whom Mr. Ho had given me a letter; working journalists can, if they wish, give the real low-down on a situation better than anyone.
The next morning there was a steady tropical drizzle that seemed likely to keep up all day. The ship's newspaper, posted on the bulletin board, reported the murders of an entire family of Dutch dairy farmers at Bogor; it appeared that we had passed in front of their house about two hours before it happened. Another news item reported the arrest of the Dutch personnel of one of the two major steamship companies; they were charged with sabotage, nature unspecified, and the government had moved in on the firm.
There had been one incident right inside the ship, one which had everyone nervous. One of our shipmates, a nurse from Sydney, was traveling alone, taking the round trip to Singapore as her vacation. She had a single cabin. She was awakened in the middle of the night to find one of the Indonesian soldier-police leaning over her bunk-the cabin doors locked but the locks were the old-fashioned sort which could be opened by almost any skeleton key.
She had been too frightened to scream. He said to her softly, "Oh? So you are alone?" then had gone back and locked the door from the inside. Most fortunately her cabin connected with the next one by a door which could be used to make the two rooms a suite; she jumped up and unbolted it and ran into the next cabin, where an Australian marr
ied couple were living-to her great good luck they had not bolted it from their side.
By the time she had made her alarm understood the soldier had disappeared. She had reported the matter to the Captain but there was nothing he could do about it other than to make a useless report of it ashore. A merchant ship tied to a dock is part of the soil of the country it is in, regardless of the flag it flies; the soldier-police-customs-guards were free to come and go in the ship as they pleased, and which they did, night and day. Could she identify the man?
No, she could not; he had simply been a helmeted face in the dark.
I read the depressing news bulletins and thought about the fright the nurse had received, then turned to the rail and stared out at the rain. Ticky came out of the dining saloon and joined me. "Delightful day!"
"Just ducky, for ducks. See here, are you anxious to do more shopping?"
"Not really. But I'd give a nice price for a small snow storm."
"So would I. And I've just remembered that I've seen a movie studio; I don't need to see another one."
"You certainly don't! If you never take another Hollywood job it will be soon enough for me."
"Maybe so, but I wish we were in Hollywood right this minute. To tell the truth, hon, I've had just about all I can stand of being polite to little brown men with Tommy guns. What do you say we stay aboard today?"
She looked relieved. "I was hoping you would say that. This place makes my flesh creep. But I wasn't going to let you go ashore alone; you would get into trouble without mama to look out for you."
I did not argue this amazing perversion of the facts; I simply said, "Swell! I'll skunk you at crib. Or maybe we can get up a game of liar dice."
I suppose that it was a foolish waste not to go ashore in a foreign port, having spent the money necessary to get there, but I did not regret it then or now. Nor do I intend to go back. When our ship stood out of the harbor early the next morning it made us happy.
The next two weeks through the Java Sea, the Flores Sea, the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea, around the northeast corner of Australia through Torres Strait (transited by the indomitable blackguard Captain Bligh in the longboat of the Bounty) and then south through the Great Barrier Reef, were not comfortable but were not entirely unpleasant. The weather was so hot that we slept naked without even a sheet, but no exertion was required of us-we had steadfastly refused to sign up for the deck sports contests organized by the untiringly athletic Australians. The hardest work of the day was to shower just before dinner, then dress and get out on deck before clean clothes were soaked through with sweat. We had Mollie and Bert with us as table mates, the Australian couple who had been with us in the Ruys, and they were unfailingly good company at all times. Just to grouse with them about the filthy condition of the ship made the conditions more tolerable.
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